Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy :: O-W

POST–COLD WAR POLICY

Richard A. Melanson

While the precise dates that marked the beginning and the end of the Cold War remain the subjects of scholarly debate, the era's major foreign policy focus was unambiguous: containing the spread of Soviet power and international communism by supporting friendly governments with aid, arms, and, occasionally, troops; deterring nuclear attacks on the United States and its allies; and supporting economic institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. Deprived of a global enemy, American foreign policy since the Cold War seemingly became more diffuse, perhaps even incoherent. But, though political elites awaited the arrival of a reincarnated "X" (the pseudonym senior State Department official George F. Kennan used in his famous article on the strategy of containment in 1947) to articulate a crystalline, new strategy, several discernible and related themes and concepts have, nevertheless, characterized post–Cold War American foreign policy.

At least six themes and concepts have steered U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War:

the preservation of American global hegemony
the fostering of globalization through the continued development of liberal international economic institutions
the promotion of an ever-growing "zone of democratic peace"
the repeated employment of military power to ease humanitarian disasters
the isolation and punishment of a handful of "rogue" states that allegedly threatened regional stability and American security;
growing concerns about the vulnerability of the United States to attacks from these regimes as well as from transnational terrorist groups.

Efforts to formulate concrete policies from these themes and concepts have provoked both domestic and international dissent about their appropriateness and feasibility.