Abstract
The 2008 publication of Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams was the latest chapter in the ongoing debate over the nature of American internationalism. In it, Kagan argued that a new ‘league of democracies’ is required in foreign affairs. The idea is more than academic: Republican Presidential candidate John McCain promoted such an idea in his 2008 campaign.1 Sympathetic reviewers have argued the promotion of such a league represents a move away from neoconservative idealism towards international legitimacy and offers a potential brake on US foreign policy. Critics, meanwhile, claim any such league merely represents an alternative forum or international community to the United Nations from which the US could legitimise its foreign policy actions.
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Notes
Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Atlantic Books: London, 2008), 85–6, 97–105. Despite Kagan’s explicit dig at Francis Fukuyama in the book’s title, Fukuyama had made a similar argument for a Community of Democracies in his After the Neocons (London: Profile Books, 2007), 176–7. A similar argument is also made by Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay in ‘Democracies of the World, Unite’ , The American Interest, Vol. 2, No. 3 (January/February 2007).
G. John Ikenberry, Thomas Knock, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Tony Smith, The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 62, 63.
Warren Kuehl and Gary Ostrower, ‘Internationalism’, in Alexander DeConde, Richard Dean Burns and Frederik Logevall, eds., Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, Second Edition, Vol. 2 (New York, Scribner, 2002), 241, 254.
For an example of use of the term internationalism referring primarily to US involvement overseas, see David Schmitz, The Triumph of Internationalism: Franklin D. Roosevelt and a World in Crisis, 1933–1941 (Washington: Potomac Books, 2007).
Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 347.
For an attempt to move beyond the term isolationist and adopt the more accurate ‘anti-interventionist’ for the interwar years, see Justus Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
See Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America and the World 1600–1898 (London: Atlantic Books, 2006).
See Ruhl Bartlett, The League to Enforce Peace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944);
Warren Kuehl and Lynne Dunn, Keeping the Covenant: American Internationalists and the League of Nations 1920–1939 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997);
Robert Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967);
Andrew Johnstone, Dilemmas of Internationalism: the American Association for the United Nations and US Foreign Policy 1941–1948 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009);
Robert Accinelli, ‘Pro-UN Internationalists and the Early Cold War: The American Association for the United Nations and U.S. Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History, 9 (1985), 347–62.
For a survey of the development of international organisations, from William Penn, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant onwards, see F.H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).
For the ongoing debate over Wilson’s legacy and the meaning of Wilsonianism, see G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Tony Smith, The Crisis of American Foreign Policy; on Wilson’s diplomacy, see Thomas Knock, To End All Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
See Divine, Second Chance, and Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
H. Schuyler Foster, Activism Replaces Isolationism (Washington: Foxhall Press, 1983), 31.
Robert W. Gregg, About Face? The United States and the United Nations (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 6–7.
Evan Luard, A History of the United Nations, Volume 1: The Years of Western Domination, 1945–1955 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 93–105.
Gary Ostrower, The United Nations and the United States (New York: Twayne, 1998), 93, 125. The most striking decade of growth was between 1955 and 1965, where the membership increased from 60 to 119. See
Evan Luard, A History of the United Nations, Volume 2: The Age of Decolonization, 1955–1965 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1989), 517.
In contrast, the USSR had issued over 100 vetoes up to that point. Between 1946 and 1965, the USSR issued 101 vetoes compared to zero from the US. Between 1966 and 1992, the USSR issued just 13 vetoes compared to 69 from the US. See Adam Roberts and Benedict Kingsbury, eds., United Nations, Divided World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 10.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Dangerous Place (London: Secker and Warburg, 1979), 245–7; Ostrower, The United Nations and the United States, 135.
See Roger Coate, Unilateralism, Ideology, & US Foreign Policy: The United States In and Out of UNESCO (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988).
Yves Beigbeder, Management Problems in United Nations Organizations: Reform or Decline? (London: Frances Pinter, 1987), 12.
Thomas Hughes, ‘The Twilight of Internationalism’, Foreign Policy, 61 (Winter 1985–86), 25–48.
Quoted in James Traub, The Best Intentions (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 24.
Warren Cohen, America’s Failing Empire (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 24; Meisler quoted in Ostrower, The United Nations and the United States, 201.
Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation (London: Atlantic, 2006), 115.
Joan Hoff recently revised her term ‘independent internationalism’ to ‘unilateral internationalism’. See Joan Hoff, A Faustian Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 7–9. For the concept of ‘instrumental multilateralism’, see
Rosemary Foot, S. Neil MacFarlane and Michael Mastanduno, US Hegemony and International Organizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 265–72. Robert Kagan, Washington Post, 13 September 2002 (seen at https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1065&prog=zgp&proj=zusr (Accessed 20/04/10).
See Edward Luck, Mixed Messages: American Politics and International Organization 1919–1999 (Washington: Brookings, 1999), 15–40; Obama’s Inaugural Address: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=44 (Accessed 20/04/10).
Luck, Mixed Messages, 129; also see Craig N. Murphy, ‘The US and the UN: Return of the Prodigal Son?’ in Inderjeet Parmar, Linda B. Miller and Mark Ledwedge, eds., New Directions in US Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2009), 210–11.
G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law (Princeton Project Papers, 2006), 7.
Thomas Carothers, ‘A League of Their Own’, Foreign Policy, 167 (July–August 2008), 46.
Joseph Nye, The Paradox of American Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
John Bolton, Surrender is Not an Option (New York: Threshold Editions, 2008), 442.
For a recent assessment of the state of the UN, see Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York: Random House, 2006).
Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008).
Stephen Walt, Taming American Power (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 144–52.
Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 174.
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Johnstone, A. (2011). The United States and the United Nations: Hegemony, Unilateralism and the Limits of Internationalism. In: Sewell, B., Lucas, S. (eds) Challenging US Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230349209_11
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