Two significant contributions to the September 11th political dialogue are Arundhati Roy's essay "The Algebra of Infinite Justice" and Mohsin Hamid's novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The South Asian perspectives supplied by both Roy and Hamid are valuable to American readers because the authors present ideas not generally acknowledged in mainstream American media. The critical analyses offered by Roy and Hamid focus on U.S. foreign policy and its connection to the September 11th attacks. The authors are concerned with how the United States conducts itself in the world politically, economically, and militarily. Both examine the harmful consequences of U.S. foreign policy in developing countries, and use Afghanistan as an example.
Extends John Kingdon's work on predecision policy processes in US domestic policy to the foreign policy domain. Argues that while Kingdon's insights have significantly improved the understanding of predecision processes, further development is necessary for extension across both domestic and foreign policy domains. (Abstract amended)
The U.S. accession to the Second World War and indisputable victory initiated a new stage in the history of the United States. The country took a superpower position next to the USSR. The USA became the leading force of the democratic and capitalist world. During the Cold War, competing with the Soviet Union for influence in the global scale, the United States effectively spread its ideology, political system model, and value system. A number of determinants of an internal nature, both objective and subjective, influenced the shape of the foreign policy of the USA during the Cold War.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States of America has pursued an offensive foreign policy. In the realities of the 2010s and 2020s, marked by mounting resistance to American global dominance, primarily from Russia and China, there are prerequisites for the adjustment of the U.S. foreign policy strategy. The aim of the article is to identify the underlying causes of offensiveness in U.S. foreign policy of the post–bipolar period based on theoretical constructs of offensive realism and liberalism. Research has shown that offensive realism and offensive liberalism can help understand the offensive nature of U.S. foreign policy after 1991 in their own way and make appropriate projections for the future. Based on the tenets of offensive realism, it can be assumed that the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism have created an enabling environment for maximizing the power of the United States, which Washington could not but leverage. Witnessing the dwindling U.S. power potential, as well as the strengthening of China and Russia in the 2010s – 2020s, Washington has not stopped acting in the logic of offensive realism, but under the Trump and Biden administrations it has definitely began to move towards defensive realism. As the rivals to the US continue to strengthen their capacities, this trend can only intensify. Following the tenets of offensive liberalism, it is possible to assume that after the Cold War, the power of the United States has turned out to be so great in comparison with other great and major powers that Washington has begun to offensively build an American liberal hegemony, letting power rivalry falls by the wayside. However, due to the weakening of the U.S. power potential, as well as the simultaneous rise of China and Russia, it has been forced to begin a transition to a strategy based on offensive and defensive realism under the Trump and Biden administrations. If its rivals continue to rise, the U.S. may turn away from offense altogether.
US Pres John F. Kennedy's skillful management of the Cuban missile crisis, 50 years ago this autumn, has been elevated into the central myth of the Cold War. At its core is the tale that, by virtue of US military superiority and his steely will, Kennedy forced Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to capitulate and remove the nuclear missiles he had secretly deployed to Cuba. Kennedy's victory in the messy and inconclusive Cold War naturally came to dominate the politics of US foreign policy. What people came to understand about the Cuban missile crisis -- that JFK succeeded without giving an inch -- implanted itself in policy deliberations and political debate, spoken or unspoken. It's there now, all these decades later, in worries over making any concessions to Iran over nuclear weapons or to the Taliban over their role in Afghanistan. Adapted from the source document.
