Foreign Policy without Diplomacy: the Bush Administration at a Crossroads

The Bush administration's foreign policy hitherto suffers from a neglect of diplomacy. It has emphasised a strategy that combines unilateral and re-militarising elements. Security is conceived of in terms of a gated community writ large. Diplomacy is downgraded to alliance-building (conveniently misnamed multilateralism) for a policy already decided. Other countries are sheer objects, not subjects, within US foreign policy. The conception of order in international society is stripped of substantial components of justice or legitimacy, to which the US would accept being subjected itself. In short, there is a tendency to repeat the US cold war strategy which reversed Clausewitz, that is, where politics becomes the prolongation of war with other means. The article consciously bases its critique mainly on realist writers, simply to show that the present US foreign policy is debatable even in realist terms.