What's good for the United States may well turn out to be good for international economic policy coordination. In this post-cold war era marked by pressing domestic social concerns and fiscal deficits, Robert L. Paarlberg says that the U.S. government should take an inward-first approach to global economic policy. Unless the domestic front is secured, he believes that international initiatives cannot succeed for lack of domestic support. It's a contrary view. The outward-first approach has dominated U.S. policy in the post-war and cold war eras. Paarlberg holds that the period was exceptional in the longer history of the nation and its relations with other nations. In the future, this sort of policymaking will be increasingly difficult to sustain. The U.S. economy is not as strong as it once was in relation to other economies. The security imperatives of the cold war have largely evaporated. And Congress is certainly no longer deferential to the executive branch. Under these new circumstances, outward-first international conferences, international negotiations, and international agreements may not work as a starting point for international economic cooperation. In this highly readable book, part of the Brookings Integrating National Economies Series, Paarlberg offers an in-dept examination of the merits of an inward-first approach to economic policy leadership. He contends that this approach should not be equated with protectionism, because it refers only to policy sequence, not to content. To the extent that inward-first is unilateral, he maintains that unilateral action at home can pave the way for cooperative actions abroad. He tests his argument with more detailed studies in several different policy arenas—including international fiscal policy coordination and discipline, agricultural policy reform, and global environmental policy. Leadership Abroad Begins at Home presents an instructive survey of American political and policymaki

"A concise, comprehensive guide to America's critical policy choices at home and overseas . . . without a partisan agenda, but with a passion for solutions designed to restore our country's strength and enable us to lead." -- Madeleine K. Albright A rising China, climate change, terrorism, a nuclear Iran, a turbulent Middle East, and a reckless North Korea all present serious challenges to America's national security. But it depends even more on the United States addressing its burgeoning deficit and debt, crumbling infrastructure, second class schools, and outdated immigration system. While there is currently no great rival power threatening America directly, how long this strategic respite lasts, according to Council on Foreign Relations President Richard N. Haass, will depend largely on whether the United States puts its own house in order. Haass lays out a compelling vision for restoring America's power, influence, and ability to lead the world and advocates for a new foreign policy of Restoration that would require the US to limit its involvement in both wars of choice, and humanitarian interventions. Offering essential insight into our world of continual unrest, this new edition addresses the major foreign and domestic debates since hardcover publication, including US intervention in Syria, the balance between individual privacy and collective security, and the continuing impact of the sequester.

The United States has never felt at home abroad. The reason for this unease, even after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is not frequent threats to American security. It is America's identity. The United States, its citizens believe, is a different country, a New World of divided institutions and individualistic markets surviving in an Old World of nationalistic governments and statist economies. In this Old World, the United States finds no comfort and alternately tries to withdraw from it and reform it. America cycles between ambitious internationalist efforts to impose democracy and world order, and more nationalist appeals to trim multilateral commitments and demand that the European and Japanese allies do more. In At Home Abroad, Henry R. Nau explains that America is still unique but no longer so very different. All the industrial great powers in western Europe (and, arguably, also Japan) are now strong liberal democracies. A powerful and peaceful new world exists beyond America's borders and anchors America's identity, easing its discomfort and ending the cycle of withdrawal and reform. Nau draws on constructivist and realist perspectives to show how relative national identities interact with relative national power to define U.S. national interests. He provides fresh insights for U.S. grand strategy toward various countries. In Europe, the identity and power perspective advocates U.S. support for both NATO expansion to consolidate democratic identities in eastern Europe and concurrent, but separate, great-power cooperation with Russia in the United Nations. In Asia, this perspective recommends a shift of U.S. strategy from bilateralism to concentric multilateralism, starting with an emerging democratic security community among the United States, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Taiwan, and progressively widening this community to include reforming ASEAN states and, if it democratizes, China. In the developing world, Nau's approach calls for balancing U.S. moral (identity) and material (power) commitments, avoiding military intervention for purely moral reasons, as in Somalia, but undertaking such intervention when material threats are immediate, as in Afghanistan, or material and moral stakes coincide, as in Kosovo.

This volume is a detailed account of President Clinton's foreign policy during 1992-2000, covering the main substantive issues of his administration, including Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo. The book emphasizes Clinton's adaptation of the elder Bush's 'New World Order' outlook and his relationship to the younger Bush's 'Americanistic' foreign policy. In doing so, it discusses in detail such key policy areas as foreign economic policy; humanitarian interventionism; policy towards Russia and China, and towards European and other allies; defence priorities; international terrorism; and peacemaking. Overall, the author judges that Clinton managed to develop an American foreign policy approach that was appropriate for the domestic and international conditions of the post-Cold War era. This book will be of great interest to students of Clinton's administration, US foreign policy, international security and IR in general. John Dumbrell is Professor of Government at Durham University. He specialises in the study of US foreign policy.

This book draws together key issues resulting from the World Trade Organization's planned 'Millennium Round' and the hope that it will lead to freer trade as we begin this new century.

This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to US foreign policy. Bringing together a number of the world's leading experts, the text deals with the rise of America, US foreign policy during and after the Cold War, and the complex issues facing the US since September 11th.

The American economy is in many ways uniquely unfettered. Nowhere else in the industrial world is it easier to set up a discount store, start a new airline, or shrink a payroll. But extensive economic deregulation has been matched by a burgeoning body of social law cracking down on business. From shareholder litigation and strict product liability to punitive environmental controls and workplace rules, entrepreneurs run a gauntlet of legal perils. The costs of this expanding and contentious agenda often exceed the value of its social benefits. The projected annual costs over benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act, for instance, surpass the estimated value of U.S. exports blocked by all of Japan's known import restrictions. How sustainable is this situation amid the pressures of globalization? The contributors to this volume explore the question from a variety of perspectives. U.S. policymakers frequently criticize the rest of the world for policies and practices that are said to constrict American commerce. Yet some trade disputes have been ignited by questionable rules made in the United States. Indeed, legal strictures have posed barriers to imports and possibly discouraged foreign investors, as well as interfered with some U.S. exports. At times the social regulatory regime has also stirred abrasive efforts to extend U.S. sanctions to foreign soil. Even if those frictions have been of minor consequences so far, inefficient legal and regulatory conventions exact a toll on U.S. productivity growth. The book concludes that in a global economy the burdensome regulations of foreign countries deserve attention, but increasingly so do the burdens that American "adversarial legalism" imposes on itself and sometimes on others. Ideas and prospects for correcting the problem are discussed throughout. The contributors include Lee Axelrad, Thomas F. Burke, Loren Cass, Robert A. Kagan, Mark K. Landy, Roger G. Noll, and David Vogel.

The cold war came to a grinding halt during the astounding developments of 1989-1991. The Berlin Wall fell, Eastern European countries freed themselves from Soviet domination, and the Soviet Union itself disintegrated after witnessing a failed coup presumably aimed at restoring a communist dictatorship. Suddenly the "evil empire" was no more, and U.S. foreign policy was forever changed. This volume explores the revisions to a variety of bureaucratic institutions and policy areas in the wake of these political upheavals.

Exploring the intersection of the 'domestic' and the 'international' in environmental politics, this book presents seven original case studies which show how the internationalization of environmental protection efforts is altering policy-making processes, policy outcomes, and the effectiveness of policy implementation. The authors argue that while new norms and institutions for the global environment are emerging which are changing policy-making processes at the national and regional levels, sub-state politics continues to influence strongly the nature of national responses to international environmental problems. The volume examines climate change politics in China, Japan, and Germany; ozone layer protection in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany; East-West environmental cooperation and the former Soviet Union; Zimbabwe and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species; biodiversity politics in the United States and United Kingdom; and environmental protection within the European Union.

A deep and unresolved tension exists within American trade politics between the nation’s promotion of an open world trading system and the operations of its democratic domestic political regime. Whereas most scholarly attention has focused on how domestic politics has interfered with the United States’ global economic leadership, Orin Kirshner offers here an analysis of the ways in which U.S. leadership in the arena of global trade has affected American democracy and the domestic political regime. By participating in multilateral trade agreements, the U.S. Congress has transferred its trade policymaking authority to the president and, through international trade negotiations, from the American state to the GATT/WTO regime. This reorganization of policymaking authority has resulted in the "triumph of globalism," and fundamentally alters the citizen-state relationship assumed in democratic theory. Kirshner illustrates this process through four case studies: The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1945, The Trade Expansion Act of 1962, The Trade Act of 1974, The Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, and further examines the impact of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994 on the political and institutional structure of American trade politics up to the current period. American Trade Politics and the Triumph of Globalism makes a significant contribution to the study of both international trade and domestic American politics. This is essential reading for students and scholars of trade policy, international political economy, American politics, and democratic theory.