The ability of the Clinton administration to pursue policies of enlargement and multilateralism will depend on European perceptions and rest in part on how Washington can shape European views. While U.S. policies toward Russia, the Middle East, the G-7, and nuclear nonproliferation have on the whole been welcomed, American policy in Iraq, Somalia, and the Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade has raised questions. American reluctance to have U.S. troops involved on the ground in Bosnia has raised particular European worries that this issue is being handled as a derivative of domestic U.S. politics and doubts whether the U.S. is prepared to engage in what they experience as the most serious security issue on the continent. Nonetheless, Europeans continue to want an American role in Europe. Suggestions for a more detached American policy serve neither American nor European interests. Without an American capacity to help shape events, Europe faces more turmoil.

This volume explores how we can meaningfully relate today's world to the end of the Cold War. The over-all picture is one of flux. Many changes will be the outcome of longer-term trends (eg: Internet). Undeniably, though, many other changes are direct consequences of the end of the Cold War. An important aspect is the way Europeans and Americans have begun to redefine each other, in response to a creeping alienation that has affected public opinion and public discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Time to restore a more balanced view.

Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. relations with Europe have charted a new course, influenced especially by the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the expansion of NATO, and the growing strength of the European Union. This volume analyzes U.S. interactions with Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, and examines the new role for NATO and the evolving dynamics in the U.S.-EU partnership. Through their assessment of mutual perceptions, evolving interests, and clashing agendas, the contributors offer a fresh and thoughtful exploration of the U.S. relationship with the major European states.

A state's articulation of its national role betrays its preferences and an image of the world, triggers expectations, and influences the definition of the situation and of available options. Extending Kal Holsti's early work on the usefulness of the concept of role, Role Quests in the Post-Cold War Era examines the nature, evolution, and origins of role conceptions, key aspects largely ignored in a literature obsessed with the quest for immediate relevance. For each country contributors present the major foreign policy debate that took place at the end of the Cold War and examine, through an analysis of major speeches, the relative weight of identity and international status in the definition of the national role. Uncovering the different roles that states claim for themselves allows reflection on the possibility of international cooperation in the maintenance of international order. This study helps assess the importance of identity in national role conceptions, identify potential conflicts arising from the clash of roles masquerading as interests, and clarifies existing contradictions in prevailing roles. Contributors include Caroline Alain, Onnig Beylérian, Christophe Canivet, Jean-René Chotard, André Donneur, Philippe G. Le Prestre, Paul Létourneau, Jacques Lévesque, Alexander Macleod, Marie-Elisabeth Räkel, Jean-François Thibeault, and Charles Thumerelle.

This book re-examines the character of the USA and re-evaluates its relationship to the post-Cold War international order. The USA has often been seen as a model of democratic liberty, a vehement opponent of colonialism and the 'lone superpower' of the post-Cold War world. This book challenges all these views. Unlike previous studies of the post-Cold War role of the USA it connects US domestic affairs to systemic changes often characterized entirely in terms of the 'fall of Communism'.

As a former U.S. diplomat in Europe, John W. Holmes watched the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) fulfill its purpose with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In The United States and Europe after the Cold War, he explores the possibilities for future transatlantic relations in light of NATO's ebbing usefulness. Finding that a basis still exists for an alliance between the United States and the European Union, Holmes sets forth a comprehensive plan for establishing an association as long-lasting and profitable as the one now drawing to a close. Holmes advocates a solid foundation for the alliance, one that approaches a formal economic union. He lists key considerations for the construction of a new, effective relationship, including the growing impatience of Americans and Europeans with substantial U.S. military contingents in Europe, the changing nature of intra-European relations, and the need for a distribution of power more equitable than that of NATO.

This new study shows how the American-led ‘war on terror’ has brought about the most significant shift in the contours of the international system since the end of the Cold War. A new ‘imperial moment’ is now discernible in US foreign policy in the wake of the neo-conservative rise to power in the USA, marked by the development of a fresh strategic doctrine based on the legitimacy of preventative military strikes on hostile forces across any part of the globe. Key features of this new volume include: * an alternative, critical take on contemporary US foreign policy * a timely, accessible overview of critical thinking on US foreign policy, imperialism and war on terror * the full spectrum of critical view sin a single volume * many of these essays are now ‘contemporary classics’ The essays collected in this volume analyse the historical, socio-economic and political dimensions of the current international conjuncture, and assess the degree to which the war on terror has transformed the nature and projection of US global power. Drawing on a range of critical social theories, this collection seeks to ground historically the analysis of global developments since the inception of the new Bush Presidency and weigh up the political consequences of this imperial turn. This book will be of great interest for all students of US foreign policy, contemporary international affairs, international relations and politics.

How and why did NATO, a Cold War military alliance created in 1949 to counter Stalin's USSR, become the cornerstone of new security order for post-Cold War Europe? Why, instead of retreating from Europe after communism's collapse, did the U.S. launch the greatest expansion of the American commitment to the old continent in decades? Written by a high-level insider, Opening NATO's Door provides a definitive account of the ideas, politics, and diplomacy that went into the historic decision to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on the still-classified archives of the U.S. Department of State, Ronald D. Asmus recounts how and why American policy makers, against formidable odds at home and abroad, expanded NATO as part of a broader strategy to overcome Europe's Cold War divide and to modernize the Alliance for a new era. Asmus was one of the earliest advocates and intellectual architects of NATO enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism in the early 1990s and subsequently served as a top aide to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott, responsible for European security issues. He was involved in the key negotiations that led to NATO's decision to extend invitations to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, the signing of the NATO-Russia Founding Act, and finally, the U.S. Senate's ratification of enlargement. Asmus documents how the Clinton Administration sought to develop a rationale for a new NATO that would bind the U.S. and Europe together as closely in the post-Cold War era as they had been during the fight against communism. For the Clinton Administration, NATO enlargement became the centerpiece of a broader agenda to modernize the U.S.-European strategic partnership for the future. That strategy reflected an American commitment to the spread of democracy and Western values, the importance attached to modernizing Washington's key alliances for an increasingly globalized world, and the fact that the Clinton Administration looked to Europe as America's natural partner in addressing the challenges of the twenty-first century. As the Alliance weighs its the future following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and prepares for a second round of enlargement, this book is required reading about the first post-Cold War effort to modernize NATO for a new era.

America is the last remaining superpower. Yet what does this triumph mean when the challenges we face often defy military solutions? In Temptations of a Superpower, one of our most eloquent and incisive foreign policy analysts takes a hard look at this question, with all its implications for America's role in the post-Cold War world. Ronald Steel offers a devastating critique of a high-stakes game of foreign policy played by rules that no longer apply, and then proposes a more realistic--and pragmatic--view of the world and our place in it. The Cold War imposed a certain order on the world, giving us a secure sense of our enemies and allies, our interests and our mission. Steel paints a disturbing picture of the world now deprived of its ordering principle, where ethnic conflicts and national rivalries once held in check erupt in violence, where the shifting allegiances and fevered ambitions flout familiar strategies for keeping peace, conducting trade, and protecting human rights. He explores the history of our present predicament and explains the dangers of adapting outmoded but habitual policies to a new world whose shape is fast evolving. What, for instance, is the future of America's military, deeply embedded as it is in our culture and economy? If Wilsonian idealism, with its vision of converting the world to democracy, replaces anti-communism as the guiding principle behind foreign policy, how far should it take us? What distinctions should we make between our nearest neighbors and distant nations? How are we to balance economic needs and ethical imperatives? Analyzing the turmoil sweeping the world from China to Bosnia, Haiti to the Caucasus, Steel depicts the shattering dilemmas facing American policymakers. What concern should the United States have with many world quarrels? How can national interest be reconciled with strategic considerations and morality? When should domestic needs take precedence over foreign policy? The alternatives that Steel proposes to current policies defy much of the conventional wisdom and are certain to provoke controversy. He asks not only what America should do for the world, but what it must do for itself. Reminding us that foreign and domestic policy are inseparable, Steel argues that a renewed foreign policy must address not only changes in the world order, but the pressing, unmet needs within America itself.

From Berlin to Baghdad charts the often onerous course of recent American foreign policy, from the triumph of the fall of the Berlin Wall to the tragedies of 9/11 and beyond, analyzing the nation's search for purpose in the face of the daunting complexities of the post-Cold War world.