Suchergebnisse

It has become a staple among critics of American foreign policy to refer to the United States's approach as "liberal imperialism." By this they mean that America's globalist agenda and its willingness to use force in theaters across the globe derives from its desire to evangelize the gospel of liberalism and thereby extend the reach of a US-dominated democratic capitalist order. These critics point to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and trace how this agenda evolved over the next century. The dominance of liberal ideology, they argue, is so all-encompassing that virtually all of the main variants within the modern US foreign policy tradition, from anti-communism to neoliberalism to neoconservatism, fit under liberalism's umbrella. In Republic in Peril, the eminent foreign policy scholar David C. Hendrickson turns this thesis on its head. A trenchant critic of America's quest for global dominance, Hendrickson argues not only that liberalism is not the culprit, but is in fact where we should turn because it offers a powerful critique of both militarized interventionism and the US quest for full-spectrum global dominance. Covering all of the major episodes of the past century, he shows how the US has fully abandoned a tradition of republican liberalism that dates back to the Founders. The republican liberal tradition, which dominated US foreign policy for over a century, mandated non-intervention and the promotion of peace. This "golden rule" policy toward other nations served America well, he contends, and many of the pathologies that plague US foreign policy now - particularly its disastrous approach to the Middle East - can be traced to the desertion of the republican liberal tradition. He therefore advocates returning to the more collegial form of internationalism ("iso-internationalism") that preceded Wilsonianism. Combining both a rich historical overview of modern American foreign policy with a forceful indictment of the illiberal straitjacket in which US has bound itself, Republic in Peril provides a genuinely original defense of liberalism in the service of peaceful non-intervention - a position that contemporary critics of aggressive liberalism are sure to find surprising.

This essay offers a constitutional perspective on the American encounter with the problem of international order. Its point of departure is the American Founding, a subject often invisible in both the history of international thought and contemporary International Relations theory. Although usually considered as an incident within the domestic politics of the United States, the Founding displays many key ideas that have subsequently played a vital role in both international political thought and IR theory. The purpose of this essay is to explore these ideas and to take account of their passage through time, up to and including the present day. Those ideas shine a light not only on how we organize our scholarly enterprises but also on the contemporary direction of US foreign policy and the larger question of world order.

The bequest for the Church Peace Union—the predecessor of today's Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (and the publisher of this journal)—was given by Andrew Carnegie in February 1914. The Church Peace Union subsequently sponsored the first worldwide gathering of religious leaders, which was held in Constance, Germany, on August 2, 1914. Convened under the shadow of an impending war, not all delegates made it to the gathering. Six months previously, Carnegie had stipulated that the Church Peace Union devote its funds to the deserving poor "after the arbitration of international disputes is established and war abolished, as it certainly will be some day." This could happen, he noted, "sooner than expected, probably by the Teutonic nations, Germany, Britain, and the United States first deciding to act in unison, the others joining later." The outbreak of war was a catastrophic blow to such hopes, as the very nations expected to be at the core of this civilized project descended into an orgy of destruction the likes of which the world had never seen.