At Home In Our World: Evolving Ideologies in American Foreign Policy
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In this thesis I consider the puzzling shift towards what many perceive as an increasingly unilateral U.S. foreign policy and ask: What accounts for the contrasting approaches that Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush adopted towards international affairs? After reviewing and refuting the most common explanations, I employ a framework devised by Walter Russell Mead to identify each president’s ideological approach to the rest of the world. I build upon Mead’s structure with a voter typology developed by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press to create a dual-classification schema. Using this schema to analyze public opinion surveys, voting records, and campaign contribution data, I identify the unique core and empowered constituencies each politician depended upon for political and financial support. By providing examples of rhetoric and policies from the campaigns and presidential tenures of Clinton and Bush, I argue that they adopted opposing approaches to international affairs to reflect the ideology of their respective core constituencies. Furthermore, certain policy positions can be attributed to the influence of critical empowered constituencies within the American electorate. I illustrate this argument with a closer examination of two cases of multilateral cooperation – the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Kyoto Protocol – to show how each president’s words (style) and actions (strategy) demonstrate a consistence adherence to the political ideology shared by his core constituency. I conclude by considering the implications of each president’s ideological approach to foreign policy for these international institutions, for the U.S., and for the 2004 presidential election.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 2004 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Lengsfelder, J. Savannah |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Krasner, Stephen |
Subjects
| Subject | CISAC |
|---|---|
| Subject | Center for International Security and Cooperation |
| Subject | Stanford University |
| Subject | foreign policy |
| Subject | public opinion |
| Subject | voting records |
| Subject | campaign contributions |
| Subject | international relations |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Lengsfelder, J. Savannah. (2004). At Home In Our World: Evolving Ideologies in American Foreign Policy. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/xq318wf5927
Collection
Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies, Theses
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- Contact
- savannahkase@yahoo.com
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