Fall Semester Courses
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GOVT 385: American Foreign PolicyMany liberals and realists have regarded the triumph of neo-conservatism after 9/11 as a freak accident that will come to an end together with the Presidency of George W. Bush. And many neo-conservatives have regarded the war in Iraq as a noble experiment in democracy-building that the United States so successfully accomplished in Germany and Japan after World War II. In tracing the effects of America’s multiple identities on its foreign policies and analyzing how America relates to different world regions, this course disagrees with both views. Neo-conservatism is not a freak show but draws on America’s multiple political traditions and orders. And the Iraq war is not a noble experiment but arguably the greatest foreign policy disaster of the last generation, the consequence of a combustible mixture of arrogance and ignorance. The course develops these two overarching arguments. The first half of the course challenges the simplified view that on questions of foreign affairs the main faultline in American politics has divided realist-nationalists from liberal-internationalists. This interpretation reads religion and race out of the conflicts that have shaped American politics, and thus does not give proper importance to the pivotal role of the South in the dominant coalitions that have shaped American foreign policy. Furthermore, a multiplicity of different kinds of values (encompassing both power and prosperity, Protestantism and prostitution) shape the American imperium (which combines hard/territorial with soft/non-territorial sources of power). The second half of the course argues that America’s relationship to Europe and Asia differs from its relationship with other world regions. After their total defeat in World War II, American occupation and extensive domestic reforms converted Germany and Japan initially to client and later to supporter states that have made it easier for the United States to shape political outcomes in these two regions. In the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East the United States lacks supporter states and has engaged instead regional pivots such as Brazil, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Israel that, compared to Germany and Japan, play different roles in their respective regions and in their relations with the United States. The intellectual hinge that connects the two arguments, and the two parts of the course, is the idea of multiplicity –of traditions and values motivating American politics and its foreign policies on the one hand and of forms of modernity that are distinguishing a number of different civilizations in a world of different regions on the other. When the multiple gears that connect America with the world mesh properly, mutual engagements are possible that preserves both diversity in values within a loosely shared sense of moral purpose and international order. When those gears do not mesh properly, mutual engagements are likely to feed misunderstandings and conflicts of interests that can lead to war.
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