Home › Features › Essays › The Conduct of American Foreign Policy: Ideology in Search of a Policy

The Conduct of American Foreign Policy: Ideology in Search of a Policy

By Raymond Aron
America and the World 1981
Article Summary and Author Biography

Three signal events marked the year 1981 (at least, from the point of view of a Frenchman): the arrival of Ronald Reagan at the White House in January; the election of François Mitterrand to the presidency of the French Republic followed by the election of an absolute majority of the Socialists to the National Assembly in the spring; and, of course, the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in October. At the same time, no crises were settled during the past year (not even the Polish one), no wars begun, and none ended. The official calendar did not coincide with a historic period in any part of the world.

Raymond Aron, the French political philosopher, is a Member of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques. He is the author of The Century of Total War, The Opium of Intellectuals, Peace and War Among Nations, among many other works.

We're sorry, but Foreign Affairs does not have the copyright to display this article online.

Related

Essay, Special 1982
The Conduct of American Foreign Policy: Testing the Hard Line
Stephen S. Rosenfeld

Foreign policy is not ordinarily conducted in controlled laboratory circumstances, but 1982 gave Ronald Reagan that opportunity to an unusual degree. A self-confessed anti-communist, he had come to the White House insisting on the requirement for a hard line, and in his first year he had capitalized on it by winning congressional support for a five-year defense plan of $1.357 trillion (in 1983 dollars)--in peacetime and in a period of economic crisis, no less. On the eve of his second year, there occurred an event--the declaration of military law in Poland--which lent itself well to validating the premise of Soviet menace and mendacity on which the President's whole anti-communist stance rested. In those conditions of evident domestic support for a world view freshly authenticated by the main enemy, Reagan had an excellent chance to prove that his analysis of the central problem of American foreign policy was sound. With one year of experience under his belt, and two years to go before elections, 1982 seemed destined to be a good year.

Read
Essay, Summer 1981
The Third World and U.S.-Soviet Competition
Henry Trofimenko

The overdramatized political and diplomatic reaction of Washington to the military aid which the U.S.S.R. and Cuba have given to Angola and Ethiopia and, in recent times, to the aid which the U.S.S.R. has offered Afghanistan, has been one of the major factors clouding Soviet-American relations in the last few years. Alluding not only to these events but also to the general support and assistance which the Soviet Union and other socialist countries have been giving the Third World movements for national and social liberation, the American press has been claiming for years that while the United States and the Soviet Union seem to have agreed on stabilizing the world situation, the Soviet Union has been destabilizing it by its actions. In point of fact, the charge that the Soviet Union has "broken the rules of détente" in the developing world has been one of the main pretexts used by the Ford and Carter Administrations in domestic debates to try to justify their own abandonment of the policy of détente.

Read
Essay, Summer 1985
The Postwar Era: The Eagle and the Bear
James Schlesinger

The linkup of American and Soviet forces at Torgau on the Elbe in April 1945 may be taken as the event symbolizing a new era in international relations--one largely dominated by the central relationship between two great powers, later known as the superpowers. The meeting at Torgau meant the splitting of Germany, the preeminent European power for three-quarters of a century. Germany's division was to be both a fixture of the postwar era and, additionally, a continuing source of unease. Also, the event dramatically initiated what was to become die Wacht an der Elbe, an American protection against the power of the East of what was to become a democratic Germany--and behind Germany an abiding American commitment to the security of Western Europe. Despite the misjudgments in the immediate aftermath of the war, the lessons of two world wars had been insinuated into American foreign policy. Finally, in the way of symbolism, perhaps the brief exchange of fire between Soviet and American forces on the Elbe provided an early harbinger of the tensions that were ultimately to emerge.

Read