Since the ascendance of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States, there’s been much concern and debate over America’s place in the world. There’s no debate about the fact that America’s post Cold War unipolar moment is over as other powers like China and India rise.
However, there’s a great deal of debate over what the passing of that unipolar moment means for America and it’s relationship with the global community. Is America to lead on every front, or is America to let other countries take a role in global forums? Should America’s military shoulder the burden of global security or focus on national defense? What are America’s top foreign policy priorities, and what does that mean for our alliances and partnerships?
These are just a few of the questions swirling around the foreign policy space, and they’ll be taking up a good part of my time this semester as I’ll be taking courses on foreign policy and national security decision making.
To get myself geared up for such a semester and to introduce you to the big ideas that frame our foreign policy debates, I take a look, here, at some of the major schools of thought that shape our foreign policy and strategic thinking.
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Overview
Today, I’m shifting the discussion to the world beyond America’s shores. That’s right, we’re talking about international relations and foreign policy. In my intro, I say that this podcast is about “government, citizenship, and America’s place in the world.”
The first six episodes have largely focused on that “government citizenship” part and since we’re still in the early going/introductory phase of this podcast, I wanted to be sure to introduce this particular topic and provide you with some broad conceptual ideas about thinking about “America’s place in the world.”
Main Topic: Defining America’s place in the world
In 2016, the Council on Foreign Relations and National Geogrpahic commissioned a survey of US college students to assess their knowledge of global geography, politics and economics. The results were somewhat disappointing. As CFR President, Richard Haas put it:
“The survey…revealed significant gaps between what young people understand about today’s world and what they need to know to successfully navigate and compete in it. On the knowledge questions asked, the average score was only 55 percent correct. Just 29 percent of respondents earned a minimal pass—66 percent correct or better. Just over 1 percent—17 of 1,203—earned an A, 91 percent or higher. Respondents exhibited limited knowledge of issues critical to the United States.
Only 28 percent of respondents knew that the United States is bound by treaty to protect Japan if it is attacked. Just 34 percent knew this about South Korea. Meanwhile, only 30 percent knew that the constitutional authority to declare war rests in the legislative branch of the U.S. government.”
Global Literacy Survey
The upside of the report is that while the knowledge deficit was identified, it also identified a recognition on the part of students that knowing about the world was important, which leads me to the main question I’ll be looking at today: How do, or should, we think about the world at large and America’s place in it?
Well, like any big topic, that’s a big question with a lot of potential answers, so I’m going to start by introducing you to some fairly standard ways in which readers and writers talk about international relations, then I’ll inject a uniquely American spin on that thinking from one of America’s foremost scholars on American foreign policy.
Key points
The study of world politics is divided up into three, sometimes four, subfields:
- comparative politics
- international relations
- foreign policy and diplomacy
- (diplomacy is sometimes it’s own field)
The information and data gathered in these broad content buckets is most frequently passed through interpretive frameworks. The three most common are:
- Realism
- Liberalism
- Constructivism
Walter Russell Meade believes that American foreign policy gets a bad rap because it’s frequently interpreted through a lens of “Continental Realism” rather than viewed as a uniquely Anglo-American realism that’s economic and pragmatic in its orientation.
Meade suggests that we should drop the realism, liberalism, constructivism analysis and take a cultural-historical perspective asking, what ideas have driven American foreign policy through the years?
By asking that question, Meade concludes that American foreign policy can be broken up into four “schools”:
- Hamiltonians: emphasizing pragmatism and economics
- Wilsonians: emphasizing global leadership, human rights, moral leadership
- Jeffersonians: Generally libertarian, focused on preserving and realizing the aspirations of the American Revolution at home
- Jacksonians: Also concerned about domestic issues, but carrying a deep sense of American honor that is loyal to the American people and like-minded allies, and very hostile to perceived enemies
A critical point in Meade’s analysis: Few people are purely one of these schools in their foreign policy thinking.
Conversation starters
So how do you think America should behave on the world stage? What does our, now contested, position as “leader of the free world” require of us in terms of specific concrete action? Do you see it as being exporting America’s brand of democracy and capitalism, or merely serving as an example and consultant to those who would emulate us?
If you prefer the latter, then you’re a jeffersonian, if the former, then you’re wilsonian. But, if you’re wilsonian, how far are you willing to go to export and preserve the gains of democracy and free markets? That may indicate the relative strength of a Hamiltonian influence in your thinking.
\And what about those pesky, hard to nail down Jacksonians? Does a sense of American honor in need of defending influence your thinking at all?
Here’s a quick gut check: How’d you react to 9/11 and the news that Al-Qaeda was behind the attacks? Were you eager for justice and anxious for action to bring that justice about? Regardless of how you might feel about the posture, budget and actions of our military now, how you answer that question many indicate the presence of a Jacksonian impulse, however dormant, in your foreign policy thinking. Food for thought.
The spoken and written word (podcasts, reading, and sometimes film)
Special Providence: Walter Russell Meade’s book outlining America’s foreign policy tradition through the lens of four “schools” of thought: Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, and Jacksonian.
Global Literacy Survey: The study that I repeatedly cite as providing a window on the lack of global awareness and foreign policy thinking among American college students specifically, and the American public generally.
The Jacksonian Revolt: Walter Russell Meade’s excellent analysis of the 2016 presidential election through his “four schools” lens of American foreign policy.
How to Clean Up Your Information Diet: My brief arguing for the need to develop a broader awareness of global events and introducing the Weekly Brief.
War on the Rocks and it’s associated podcasts provide some of the most nuanced and fully developed thinking on foreign policy and national security. Here are the WotR podcasts I listen to:
The last word
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”