U.S. Foreign Policy in Perspective
What is the long-term nature of American foreign policy? U.S. Foreign Policy in Perspective refutes the claim that it has varied considerably across time and space, arguing that key policies have been remarkably stable over the past hundred years, not in terms of ends but of means
Closely examining U.S. foreign policy, past and present, David Sylvan and Stephen Majeski draw on a wealth of historical and contemporary cases to show how the U.S. has had a client state empire for at least a century. They clearly illustrate how much of American policy revolves around acquiring clients, maintaining clients and engaging in hostile policies against enemies deemed to threaten them, representing a peculiarly American form of imperialism. They also reveal how clientilism informs apparently disparate activities in different geographical regions and operates via a specific range of policy instruments, showing predictable variation in the use of these instruments.
With a broad range of cases from U.S. policy in the Caribbean and Central America after the Spanish-American War, to the origins of the Marshall Plan and NATO, to economic bailouts and covert operations, and to military interventions in South Vietnam, Kosovo, and Iraq, this important book will be of great interest to students and researchers of U.S. foreign policy, security studies, history and international relations.
David Sylvan is Professor of International Relations and head of the Political Science Unit at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland.
Stephen Majeski is Professor of Political Science and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington, Seattle, United States.
U.S. Foreign Policy in Perspective
Clients, enemies and empire
David SylvanandStephen Majeski
First published 2009
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
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2009 David Sylvan and Stephen Majeski
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sylvan, David, 1953
U.S. foreign policy in perspective : clients, enemies, and empire / David Sylvan and Stephen Majeski.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. United StatesForeign relations. 2. United StatesForeign relationsPhilosophy. I. Majeski, Stephen. II. Title.
E183.7.S975 2009
327.73dc22
2008041149
ISBN 0-203-79945-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 10: 0-415-70134-1 (hbk)
ISBN 10: 0-415-70135-x (pbk)
ISBN 10: 0-203-79945-3 (ebk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-70134-1 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-70135-8 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-203-79945-1 (ebk)
To Irwin S. Sylvan and Sally v. Sylvan and to Sheila OBrien
Figures
Organizations and policy instruments
U.S. enemies post-1898
Client acquisition by context
Clients 1940
Clients 1950
Clients 1980
Clients 2005
Distribution of resource flows by client type, 194673
Changes in distribution of resource flows to wealthy clients, 19462003
Changes in distribution of resource flows to less wealthy clients, 19462003
Resource flows to Egypt, 19462003
Resource flows to Iran, 19462003
Resource flows to El Salvador, 19462003
Changes in distribution of resource flows to all clients, 19462003
Aid flows to all countries, 19462003
Distribution of resource flows between clients and non-clients, 2004
Distribution of types of resource flows to clients and non-clients, 19462003
Distribution of resource flows to clients, 2004
Distribution of resource flows to non-clients, 2004
Total resource flows for 2004
Budgetary cost of economic and military assistance, 19462003
Client intervention situations, 1: overview
Client intervention situations, 2: non-military
Client intervention situations, 3: military
Client intervention situations, 4: unacceptable leaders
Hostile intervention situations, 1: overview
Hostile intervention situations, 2: covert
Hostile interventions situations, 3: overt
U.S. military spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product
U.S. clients and enemies over time
Use of military force in the nineteenth century
Tables
U.S. clients as of February 2005
Clients acquired: post-occupation
Clients acquired: switches
Clients acquired: danger
Clients acquired: pre-/post-war planning
Clients acquired: special access
Resource flows to clients and non-clients by region in 2004
Largest recipients of resources, 2004
U.S. clients having experienced at least one rebellion
Preface
Early in the twenty-first century, United States foreign policy began to be talked about as having undergone major changes. Journalists and academics began to speculate that with the advent of the George W. Bush administration and its reaction to the events of 11 September 2001, the U.S. was now acting toward other countries in a way that was fundamentally different than in the past. Those differences included a more frequent resort to military force and a concomitant downgrading of diplomacy; a penchant for acting unilaterally rather than with allies or through multilateral institutions; and an ideological classification of countries into friends and foes, with the latter being combatted even if they did not pose a military threat to others. In short, whether this was seen as good or bad, the United States was said to have shifted to a fundamentally imperial stance toward the rest of the world.
These types of claims are misleading. On the one hand, they greatly exaggerate just how much U.S. foreign policy was militarized, or unilateralized, or ideologized, under Bush; on the other, they present past U.S. policy in a considerably more diplomatic, multilateral, and modest light than was in fact the case. Both criticisms are easy to demonstrate and we do so in the following pages. Specifically, we show how, from 1898 to the present, U.S. foreign policy has been fundamentally continuous, with the same types of routine and interventionary policies being opted for in similar situations. What this continuity involves is not an unchanging set of long-term goals but rather a small set of means, resorted to over and over as a means of taking on as clients certain states and supporting them, while at the same time actively opposing other states as enemies. In this sense, the book is both a detailed description of American foreign policy today and a history of how, within rigid limits, that policy evolved over the past eleven decades.
