Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Ideology and US strategic doctrine
The extent to which ideas or ideology actually determine foreign policy is
hotly contested, but there are two reasons for taking US thinking on inter-
national affairs very seriously; first, the power of the US makes it more
likely that such ideas will be put into practice than is usually the case, and,
second, the unique constitutional arrangement for dealing with interna-
tional relations in the US give ideas particular purchase. The US Senate must
ratify all treaties by a two-thirds majority and approve ambassadorial and
other senior appointments, and the US House of Representatives has the
power to undermine foreign policy initiatives of which it disapproves via its
control of the budget – the same is true, technically, in the UK, but the
US President does not have the effective control of the House of his British
counterpart. And since, ultimately, Senators and Congressmen and women
rely on the voters to keep them in office, their support for foreign policy
doctrines will partly be a function of how well the President and his aides
articulate the ideas that lie behind particular policies. Strategic doctrine in
the US is not simply a matter of rationalizing practice – it may actually
US Hegemony and World Order
237

---

determine what happens in the world. It actually matters what ideas the US
administration holds, and how successful they are in selling these ideas to
the US public. One should not overstate this point; it is worth noting that it
was the allegedly ‘multilateralist’ administration of President Bill Clinton
that rejected the Kyoto Accords on the environment and the Rome Treaty to
establish an International Criminal Court – in both cases the Administration
might have preferred to act differently, but the hostility of overwhelming
majorities in the Senate made ratification impossible. Clinton signed the
Rome Treaty at the last moment, largely to allow US lawyers to continue to
be involved in the establishment of the ICC, but he explicitly said that he
would not have sent it to the Senate for ratification, and later in 2001
President Bush ‘unsigned’ it, whatever that means. In a similar vein, the
diplomacy of the ‘unilateralist’ administration of President George W. Bush
in 2004 has largely been focused on persuading the UN to ‘multilateralize’
the situation in Iraq. Ideas do matter, but we should expect continuity as
well as change – new Presidents are rarely capable of looking at the world
afresh.
As suggested above, one popular classification of US policy is in terms of
multilateralism versus unilateralism – but this is altogether too crude since
most states desire to act unilaterally if they can, while even the most powerful
are sometimes obliged to act multilaterally. A better classification is offered
by Walter Russell Mead, when he classifies US thinking about international
relations into four categories: Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and
Wilsonian (Mead 2002). Hamiltonians (named for Alexander Hamilton,
noted co-author of the Federalist Papers and first US Secretary of the
Treasury) are mercantilists and close to being traditional realists in their
approach to power. Jeffersonians (named for President Thomas Jefferson)
share the common view that the US is a ‘city on a hill’, a beacon to the rest
of the world, but they seek to promote US values by commercial intercourse
and the promotion of ideas rather than by the kind of active involvement in
great power politics with which Hamiltonians are comfortable. Jacksonians
(named, rather inappropriately for the populist President Andrew Jackson)
are closest to what we normally think of as isolationists – they seek to avoid
involvement in world affairs as far as possible, although it should be noted
that when US territory or US citizens are attacked they respond with right-
eous fury, demanding total war and unconditional surrender. Wilsonians we
have already met in Chapter 2 – they believe that US values such as democ-
racy and the rule of law are universally applicable and seek actively to pro-
mote them in the world, in the process challenging the old rules of European
statecraft.
These tendencies can be seen in one mixture or another in most American
doctrines, but there is a good case for saying that, nowadays, the most pow-
erful of these strands is Wilsonian – however, modern Wilsonians come in
238
Understanding International Relations

---

two varieties, to some extent mirroring the unilateralist/multilateralist
divide noted above. Max Boot has helpfully distinguished between ‘soft
Wilsonians’ and ‘hard Wilsonians’ (Boot 2002). The former, also known as
multilateralists, are perhaps closer to the original President Wilson in so far
as they wish to promote US values peacefully via international institutions,
acknowledging in the process that the requirements of multilateralism
involve adapting to the interests of others and making commitments that
restrain the US as well as its allies (Nye 2002; Ikenberry 2001). Hard
Wilsonians promote much the same values, but are less convinced by the
need to form alliances – if the US has the power to act alone it should do so,
and coalitions of the willing, where the mission determines the members of
the coalition rather than the other way around, which is the case with per-
manent alliances, are their preferred mode of cooperation. Hard Wilsonians
are sometimes described as neoconservatives or, familiarly, ‘neocons’; this is
a little confusing since their ideas are hardly conservative at all, in any
normal meaning of the term. Indeed, many of the neocons, including Paul
Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, are former Democrats who cut their teeth in
opposition to the détente policies of Henry Kissinger in the 1970s – Kissinger
was, and is, a genuine conservative, a realist diplomatist who remains
anathema to the neoconservatives.
These ideas rarely influence foreign policy in pristine form – any actual
strategic doctrine will be based on a mixture of influences. President Bill
Clinton’s administration was guided by a mix of Jeffersonian and (soft)
Wilsonian thinking. When President George W. Bush came into office, his
instincts seem to have been Jacksonian and Hamiltonian – his foreign policy
adviser, Condoleezza Rice, wrote a Foreign Affairs article explicitly calling
for a foreign policy based on US interests narrowly defined, rather than the
promotion of US values. However, when the US was attacked on 9/11 2001,
the Bush Administration moved on to a war footing and hard-Wilsonian,
neo-con ideas briefly had their day – the US National Security Strategy
announced in September 2002 appeared to endorse a doctrine of pre-emptive
war that was highly unilateralist, and the Iraq War of 2003 (on which more
below) was widely regarded as a neocon project. However, the tide has sub-
sequently turned somewhat against this position – and, in any event, the
necessary Congressional support for a hard-Wilsonian policy is rarely pre-
sent, partly because this policy is not popular with the American people.
Americans are, at the moment, more deeply divided on most issues than
they have been for generations, but some generalizations seem to hold,
namely that Americans are not keen to promote global governance when
this would restrain the US or place American citizens under foreign juris-
diction, but neither do they yearn to promote American democracy and
human rights by force in the world at large. Opinion poll data here are hard
to read – they suggest, for example, that Americans would welcome stricter
US Hegemony and World Order
239

---

controls on the environment, but, plausibly enough, Congress collectively
doubts that this really means that their voters would be happy to see the
price of gasoline triple or quadruple – but they certainly do not suggest wide
support for the neocon project. And, for that matter, large-scale business
and financial interests (with the exception of a few construction firms such
as Halliburton) are equally sceptical of such a project; the stable environ-
ment desired by business is unlikely to be produced by an active policy of
democracy-promotion.