Out of the Cold: The Post–Cold War Context of U.S. Foreign Policy

James M. Scott and A. Lane Crothers

"Gosh, I miss the Cold War." These words, uttered by President Bill Clinton in late 1993, are characteristic of a growing disillusionment regarding American foreign policy in the post–cold war world. At first glance, this regret seems misplaced. After all, during the cold war, two superpowers approached the brink of nuclear war, played dangerous games of "chicken" with their military forces, sought to subvert each other by overt and covert measures, and routinely referred to each other as "evil." What could possibly drive the nostalgia for such a setting?

The president's musing reflects a growing suspicion that the cold war was, in a sense, a simpler time in which to set a foreign policy course, in spite of the high stakes and costly "imperatives" imposed by the contest between the Soviet Union and the United States. The U.S.-Russian relationship has evolved from confrontation to cooperation, making the post–cold war world a more benign environment for foreign policy choices. For example, Americans helped Russian president Boris Yeltsin win reelection, the United States and the international community have provided substantial assistance to the Russian government, Russian troops serve under the tactical command of U.S. officers as Bosnian peacekeepers, and Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov successfully brokered the reentry of U.S. weapons inspectors into Iraq to deal with that country's attempts to build an arsenal of destructive weaponry. Nevertheless, the emerging environment may also prove to be substantially more difficult to address.

The end of the cold war eliminated a number of reliable and well-recognized reference points from the landscape and established new, as yet ambiguous ones. Liberated from an overriding concern with the threat that the Soviet Union was understood to represent, policy makers are now required to think seriously about the roles, interests, and purposes of the United States in the twenty-first century. Since foreign policy may be conceptualized, at least in part, as adaptive behavior, it seems clear that the changing international context of the post–cold war environment requires adaptation to face the new issues and problems it raises. Just how well have U.S. foreign policy makers adapted to this altered setting? As the remainder of this volume will indicate, the U.S. response has involved both attempts to grapple with the new issues and challenges of the post–cold war world and alterations in the process through which policy makers shape foreign policy. However, the process adjustments have complicated the policy adjustments. To return to President Clinton's reflection, it is in the context of these substantive changes and the procedural permutations they help to create that the former era seems a simpler world that U.S. policy makers could address through a simpler process.

This volume examines the characteristics and patterns of policy making that are emerging in response to the shift from cold war to post–cold war. By considering the actors and institutions and probing their behavior in a set of foreign policy cases, the authors shed light on the changes and adaptations that have (and have not) occurred. This chapter sets the stage for the analyses that follow by introducing the context of U.S. foreign policy making and discussing the changes associated with the end of the cold war. It concludes by raising a few considerations that will be explored more thoroughly in the volume's chapters and revisited in the conclusion.

The U.S. Foreign Policy Context

Within the United States, the domestic context of U.S. foreign policy derives from societal forces and the institutional arrangements and structures established by the U.S. Constitution. This context makes societal forces—political culture, public opinion, and group interests and activity—a critical part of the U.S. foreign policy arena, and it establishes a complex set of fluctuating arrangements among the people and institutions of the government. Hence, understanding how U.S. foreign policy makers adapt to the issues and problems of the international environment first requires a grasp of the societal and institutional settings within which they act.

The American Societal Context

The institutions and actors that shape U.S. foreign policy do so in the context of multifaceted and complex societal setting. For definitional purposes, this context may be understood as, first, the broad attitudes and orientations of the people of the United States and, second, some of the societal actors that affect policy making. The broad societal context, or political culture, is a set of shared ideas, ideals, concepts, stories, and myths that orient citizens within their political systems. Its relevance rests in large measure on several strands of influence. It influences "the manner in which members of society, including the state elite, define themselves and their place in the larger global setting." It also gives shape to the arena of possible actions (i.e., the kinds of policies and programs that the American people are likely to support) and helps to shape the perceptual maps of the policy makers themselves.

The heart of the societal context within which U.S. foreign policy is made consists of a set of core dimensions or a "creed" through which Americans define themselves and politics. Foremost among these dimensions is democratic liberalism. The U.S. society is liberal in that, politically, it emphasizes the individual and the rights and freedoms to which he or she is entitled, with a particular commitment "to individual liberty and the protection of private property; to limited government, the rule of law, natural rights, the...