1. Winner Takes All: How did Unilateralism Triumph in the Republican Party?
- Author
-
Monten, Jonathan and Busby, Joshua
- Subjects
- *
TREATIES , *INTERNATIONAL relations ,FOREIGN relations of the United States, 1993-2001 ,UNITED States politics & government, 1989- - Abstract
In the 2000 presidential campaign, then-candidate George W. Bush called for a "humbler" foreign policy.. Yet as President, Bush surprised both domestic and international audiences through a series of actions overtly hostile to existing multilateral policy instruments: his Administration declared the Kyoto Protocol "dead;" de-signed the treaty in support of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and punished countries that failed to sign immunity agreements with the United States; undermined enforcement protocols for the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions; and withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM). These policy changes all occurred before September 11th, frequently cited as the âshockâ that caused the United Statesâ dramatic shift towards a policy of unilateralism and the aggressive use of national power. The puzzle that animates this paper is, "How was this set of unilateralist ideas about foreign policy, which were not clearly evident in the campaign, able to take hold in the Republican Party and Bush Administration? How did these ideas overcome and displace the counter-vailing establishment internationalism that had largely governed the policies of the Clinton Administration and most of his predecessors since World War II?" This paper show how these unilateralist ideas gained expression by looking at several key, pre-September 11th instances of unilateralismâ"the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, the ICC, and the ABM Treaty. Our explanation is that the Bush Administration was elected in 2000 exclusively on domestic policy grounds. Americans were not paying much attention to foreign policy in the 2000 elections. The end of the Cold War and America's unipolar moment gave the United States considerable slack for what kind of foreign policy it would pursue. However, undercurrents of traditional isolationism (what we call conservative nationalism) and neo-conservativism (what we call liberal nationalism) both were rising up in the Republican Party to cut against establishment internationalism, the governing philosophy of the Cold War era that united liberal internationalists and conservative internationalists (in other words, realists) in a broadly multilateralist grand coalition. The twin strands of the new anti-multilateralism in the Republican Party were exemplified in Congress by Jesse Helms (largely a conservative nationalist) and in the Executive Branch by Paul Wolfowitz (largely a liberal nationalist). While they differed over the degree to which U.S. influence could reshape the world in its image, both were united in their relative hostility to the existing multilateral instruments and orientations that had characterized Cold War and Clinton era policymaking. The 2000 elections and the capture of the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress, we argue, allowed those groups to gain politically and bureaucratically at the expense of liberal and conservative internationalists through chairmanships of key Congressional committees as well as the appointments process in the Executive Branch. This electoral change thus allowed expression of these tendencies which were then reinforced by the events of September 11th, 2001. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2008