V.S. Alexeyev

Oles Honchar Dnipropetrovsck National University (Ukraine)

FOREIGN POLICY-MAIKING IN THE USA

An interdependent economy connects all nations. Global issues involve serious questions of war and peace. Military policy is the making and implementing of policies devoted to planning, preparing for, and fighting wars. It is a part of foreign policy, which involves protecting and promoting American interests abroad.

Foreign policy involves making choices about relations with the rest of the world. In both foreign and domestic affairs, policymakers select goals, adopt policies in order to achieve them, and then try to implement these policies. Like domestic police, foreign policy is most often a political result rather than a clearly logical design for carrying out national objectives. All foreign policies depend ultimately on three types of tools: military, economic, and diplomatic. War and the threat of war are the oldest instruments of foreign policy. Today, economic instruments are almost as potent weapons as war. Diplomacy, such as a summit meeting, is the quietest instrument.

Nations are the main actors in international politics. International organizations play an increasingly important role on the world stage. The best known of these is the United Nations (UN), created in 1945 and headquartered in New York City. Its members (about 175 nations composing the General Assembly) agree to renounce war and respect certain human and economic freedoms. The Security Council is the real seat of power in the UN. The Secretariat, headed by secretary general, is the executive arm of the UN. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the International Postal Union are among the many other international organizations. Regional organizations of several nations bound by a treaty, often for military reasons, have proliferated in the post-World War II era. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created in 1949. Its members-the United States, Canada, most Western European countries, and Turkey-agreed to combine military forces and to treat a war against one as a war against all. The Warsaw Pact was a regional security community of the Soviet Union and its eastern European allies. The European Economic Community (EEC) is an economic alliance of the major Western European nations, often called Common Market. Multinational corporations are sometimes more powerful (and often wealthier) than the government under which they operate. Groups, such as churches and labor unions, have long had international interests and activities. More recently, groups interested in the world ecology and in global human rights have emerged. Some groups are committed to the overthrow of governments and operate as terrorists around the world. Finally, individuals, such as tourists and students, are also international actors.

The president is the main force behind foreign policy. He oversees the military as commander in chief and treaty-making powers make him the nation’s chief diplomat. The State Department is the foreign policy arm of the U.S. government. The secretary of state has traditionally been the key foreign policy advisor to the president. The State Department staffs U.S. embassies and consulates in about 300 overseas posts. About 26,000 people work in the State Department organized into functional areas and area specialists. Some presidents have found the State Department too bureaucratic and intransigent, relying more on personal systems for receiving foreign policy advice. Critics charged that this led to split-level government and discontinuity. Reagan, Bush, and Clinton relied more on their Secretary of State.

The Department of Defense is also a key foreign policy actor and the secretary of defense is the president’s main military advisor. The commanding officers of each of the military branches are members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Studies have shown that the Joint Chiefs are no more likely to than civilian advisors to push for aggressive military policy.

The National Security Council (NSC) was created in 1947 to coordinate American foreign and military policy. It is composed of the president, vice-president, secretary of defense, secretary of state, and the president’s national security advisor.

Congress shares the president constitutional authority over foreign and defense policy. Congress has sole authority to declare war, raise and organize the armed forces, appropriate funds for national security activities. The Senate ratifies treaties and firms ambassadorial and cabinet nominations.

Throughout most of its history, the United States followed a foreign policy course called Isolationism. The U.S. tried to stay out of other nations’ conflicts, particularly European war. Under the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. expected Europe to stay out of Latin America. Despite President Wilson’s urging, the U.S. stayed out of the League of Nations after World War I. American isolationism ended with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. At the end of World War II, the United States was unquestionably the dominant world power and it forged strong alliances with the nations of Western Europe. The Marshall Plan and NATO helped strengthen these alliances.

The cold war ensured that military needs and massive defense expenditures would remain fixtures in the American economy. Defense expenditures grew to be the largest component of the federal budget in the 1950s. The interests shared by the armed services and the defense contractors produced what some called a military-industrial complex. Pentagon capitalism linked the military’s drive to expand with the profit motives of private industry. Beginning in the 1950s, an arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States began, where one side’s weaponry became the other side’s goad to procure more weaponry until of mutual assured destruction (MAD) was reached where each side could destroy the other.

Détente, a term popularized be Henry Kissnger during the Nixon administration, represented a slow transformation from conflict thinking to cooperative thinking in foreign policy strategy. It sought a relaxation of tensions and firm guarantees of mutual security. The policy assumed that the United States and the Soviet Union had no long-range and irrevocable sources of conflict, that both had an interest in peace and world stability, and that a nuclear war was-and should be-unthinkable. The cold war ended spontaneously and rapidly. Forces of change sparked by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev led to the fall of Communist regimes and the postwar barriers between Eastern and Western Europe.