The American Approach to Arms Control: What Can We Expect from American Diplomacy for the Next Twenty Years?

America is widely recognized to be a powerful hegemon today. It is important to understand what the American approach to arms control might be like over the next twenty years. Will it mirror the departures of the current Bush administration, or will it go off on different trajectories? Using the broad definition of arms control that is found in the official U.S. State Department arms control and disarmament glossary, this paper offers a historically informed discussion of how the United States got to the point it is today in arms control and where it may go from here. This is not an attempt at prediction or forecasting so much as a discussion of plausible possibilities and relevant trends. Focusing on weapons of mass destruction, and especially on nuclear weapons, I conclude that arms control is not dead in American diplomacy but is evolving. The paper describes that evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]