American grand strategy after the Cold War: Clinton’s grand- strategy makers and neoliberal globalization

Having mapped and analyzed the (corporate) elite networks in which the grandstrategy makers of the three post-Cold War administrations have been embedded in the preceding chapter, we pick up our narrative from Chapter 2 by examining how the first post-Cold War president and his team sought to make use of the opportunity that was offered by the collapse of the Soviet Union to prolong and indeed intensify the third, neoliberal, wave of non-territorial expansionism that had already set in following the 1970s recessions under Reagan. Steeped into the Wilsonian tradition of liberal internationalism of not only the Democratic Party but also more broadly American twentieth-century foreign policy (see Chapter 2), and influenced by those forces within the (Democratic) foreign policy establishment that favored both a hawkish and assertive foreign policy as well as an unequivocal commitment to opening and deepening global markets, Clinton, this chapter will argue, embarked upon what we will call a grand strategy of neoliberal globalization in which the global Open Door was not only defended but indeed expanded into former enemy territory. In terms of means, this renewed and intensified round of expansionism – seeking to, in the words of Clinton’s grand-strategy makers “enlarge the community of market economies” involved a mix of instruments of multilateral governance and, increasingly, the unilateral use of force. In line with our theoretical framework as elaborated in Chapter 1, we will explain this particular variety of America’s liberal (non-territorial) expansionism by analyzing both the continuity in elite networks in shaping grand-strategy makers’ worldview as well as the variation in this respect with regard to specific policy planning bodies and concomitant ideas that we can link to the Clinton administration, on the one hand, and analyzing the changing global context, as interpreted by the leading grand-strategy planners and grand-strategy makers, on the other. This chapter is structured as follows. First, we will zoom in on the (prior) state, corporate, and policy planning affiliations of Clinton’s selected 30 grandstrategy makers and analyze in detail how these ties both resemble and deviate from the general patterns as observed in the previous chapter. We will provide a profile both of the respective networks as well as of key grand-strategy makers. The second section will elaborate the global context within and toward which the Clinton administration came to formulate its grand strategy at the time Clinton entered the White House. Here we will emphasize how the end of the Cold War above all offered an opportunity for unprecedented expansionism. The third section will show how the ideology and foreign policy discourse underpinning this grand strategy reproduced the long-standing Open Door worldview, but with a particular (neoliberal) twist involving an all-out embrace of and push for a U.S.-centered globalization. This, then, became the new mission for the new unipole. The fourth section will identify and analyze, set within an ongoing changing context, the main elements of the evolving grand strategy of neoliberal globalization.