US Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century

This chapter considers the menu of foreign policy choices open to the United States. It discusses competing foreign policy schools, and compares neo-conservative, liberal internationalist, and realist viewpoints, each of which has its own take on multilateralism. The standard cures that are usually mentioned are the same ones that have been contemplated by American foreign policy practitioners for more than two hundred years—isolationism, unilateralism, and multilateralism. The reverse image of America-Firsters, the inclination being to assume that American foreign policy is nothing more than the latest conspiracy theory waiting to be validated. The chapter presents the reader may be forgiven if his or her view of what is the best US foreign policy for the twenty-first century has been more muddled than clarified by the survey of foreign policy schools. "America-Worsters"—intellectual elites and others who tend to substitute a deeply entrenched cynicism for analysis as they often are prepared to attribute the worst motives to US behaviour.