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Face-to-face diplomacy is an important feature of international relations. But when and why do high-level diplomatic interactions occur? We examine different theoretical perspectives using a new dataset of diplomatic visits by the US President and Secretary of State. We argue for assessing these visits along two dimensions. First, we posit that the degree of discretion or constraint in the diplomatic calendar falls along a spectrum. Strategic and domestic factors are at opposite extremes while diplomatic routines fall in the middle. Second, we consider the convergence in the relative influence of these sets of factors across the President's and the Secretary's calendars. We develop and test hypotheses about the determinants of visits by the President and Secretary of State across twelve presidencies from 1946 to 2010. Overall, the travels of the President and Secretary converge to serve a set of priorities that derive from a fairly stable set of national interests and from diplomatic routine. We observe that the President effectively retraces the footsteps of the Secretary more than the reverse. We find some evidence of domestic (including individual-level) influences on diplomacy, but only limited evidence that times of crisis produce distinct patterns in face-to-face encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the Great Recession's foreshocks in fall 2007, most American security studies scholars believed that unipolarity-and perforce American hegemony-would be enduring features of international politics far into the future. However, in the Great Recession's aftermath, it is apparent that much has changed since 2007. Predictions of continuing unipolarity have been superseded by premonitions of American decline and geopolitical transformation. The Great Recession has had a two-fold impact. First, it highlighted the shift of global wealth-and power-from West to East, a trend illustrated by China's breathtakingly rapid rise to great power status. Second, it has raised doubts about the robustness of US primacy's economic and financial underpinnings. This article argues that the Aunipolar moment is over, and the Pax Americana-the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945-is fast winding down. This article challenges the conventional wisdom among International Relations/Security Studies scholars on three counts. First, it shows that contrary to the claims of unipolar stability theorists, the distribution of power in the international system no longer is unipolar. Second, this article revisits the 1980s' debate about American decline and demonstrates that the Great Recession has vindicated the so-called declinists of that decade. Finally, this article takes on the Ainstitutional lock-in argument, which holds that by strengthening the Pax Americana's legacy institutions, the United States can perpetuate the essential elements of the international order it constructed following World War II even as the material foundations of American primacy erode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]