Having read the chapter, the students should be able to do each of the following:
Outline the major international events that have influenced the evolution of American foreign and defense policy, focusing primarily on the emergence and subsequent collapse of a bipolar world. Included in the outline should be the Vietnam War and the demise of the Soviet Union.
Describe how the advent of large nuclear arsenals has altered the world security environment and changed the security policy options for the United States.
Compare the military and economic dimensions of national security policy, explaining why the latter has gained precedence in recent years.
Discuss the politics of national defense, including the role of public opinion and the alleged influence of the military-industrial complex.
Discuss the importance of American global trade relations with the industrialized world and the developing nations. Be sure to include America's need for access to natural resources available only from other nations.
The chief instruments of national security policy are diplomacy, military force, economic exchange, and intelligence gathering. These are exercised through specialized agencies of the U.S. government (such as the Departments of State and Defense) that are largely responsive to presidential leadership. National security policy has also relied on international organizations, such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, that are responsive to the global concerns of major nations.
From 1945 to 1990, U.S. foreign and defense policies were dominated by a concern with the Soviet Union. During most of this period, the United States pursued a policy of containment based on the premise that the Soviet Union was an aggressor nation bent on global conquest. Containment policy led the United States to enter into wars in Korea and Vietnam and to maintain a large defense establishment. U.S. military forces are deployed around the globe, and the nation maintains a large nuclear arsenal. The end of the cold war, however, made some of this weaponry and strategic planning less relevant to America's national security.
A first response to the post-cold-war world was multilateralism, the idea that major nations could achieve common goals by working together, including using force as a means of arresting regional conflicts. The interventions in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans during the 1990s are examples. They demonstrated that major nations can intervene with some success in global hot spots but also showed that the ethnic, religious, and national conflicts that fuel these flashes are not easily resolved. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 led to broad changes in national security organization and strategy. Increased spending on defense and homeland security have been coupled with a partial reorganization of U.S. intelligence, law-enforcement, and immigration agencies, as well as new laws affecting the scope of their activities. However, the defining moment of the post-September 11 period was America's invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was rooted in President George W. Bush's preemptive war doctrine and his willingness to commit the United States to unilateral action.
In recent decades, the United States has increasingly taken economic factors into account in its national security considerations, which has meant, for example, that trade has played a larger part in defining its relationships with other countries. The trading system that the United States helped erect after World War II has given way to one that is more global in scale and more competitive. Changes in communication, transportation, and computing have altered the way large corporations operate, and as businesses have changed their practices, nations have had to adapt. The changes include the emergence of regional and international economic structures, such as the European Union, NAFTA, and the WTO. Nevertheless, nations naturally compete for economic advantage, including access to natural resources; accordingly, trade is a source of conflict as well as a source of cooperation. In the coming years, oil is likely to be at the center of the conflict.
