The Challenges to American Leadership

Abstract

In the wake of the 1988 Presidential election, there is a deceptive calm about American foreign policy. Relations are better with the USSR, arms control is in full swing, Afghanistan, Southern Africa, and other hot spots seem cooler. Central America has been pushed into the subconscious. Yet despite this calm, we are in the midst of a vast watershed in our postwar foreign policy when a changing world has rendered old categories obsolete. The only similar comparison would be 1948 and 1968: Truman’s reelection brought American internationalism, exemplified in the NATO Treaty of 1949, and a break from isolation to meet the challenge of Soviet aggression; Nixon’s election and the development of the Guam Doctrine, which preached more allied self-help and the end to American omnipotence, eventually brought the opening to China and concluded the bipolar world.