Читать книгу Kind Words, Cruise Missiles, and Everything in Between - Barbara Kunz - Страница 6

The purpose of foreign policy is to influence the policies and actions of other nations in a way that serves your interests and values. The tools available include everything from kind words to cruise missiles. Mixing them properly and with sufficient patience is the art of diplomacy.

Madeleine Albright

When the red flag on the Kremlin was hauled down for the last time in late December 1991, the United States attained a power matched by no other country. From that point in time onwards, U.S. grand strategy no longer consisted of checking a rival superpower within a bipolar international system, rather in preserving the unipolar moment and expanding its power position. This consistently was the goal of American administrations during the post-Cold War era. In pursuing that objective, it is yet remarkable that foreign policies led by the United States differed to the extent they did, even under circumstances that were largely identical. This observation indeed runs counter to expectations derived from fundamental (neoclassical) realist tenets: while the U.S. quest for (preserved) primacy confirms realist core assumptions, differences in foreign policy output under similar circumstances are puzzling. Realism is based on the assumption that it is first and foremost the environment that determines states' behaviour.1 For that reason, policy design processes taking place under similar circumstances—both at the systemic and domestic levels—should essentially be expected to result in similar policies. These expectations notwithstanding, this is obviously not the case as far as United States policies towards Central and Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War era are concerned. Under the exact same circumstances of unipolarity, the exact same state conducted entirely different policies towards three neighbouring countries with about the same degree of relative power as compared to Washington and highly similar historical legacies. These differences become apparent when analysing the United States' foreign policy output in terms of the foreign policy tools applied, based upon different types of power resources at Washington's disposal. This study, by means of an analysis of U.S. approaches to Poland, Ukraine and Belarus in the years 1989 to 2008, intends to provide an explanation of that puzzle. These almost twenty years cover the final years of the Bush senior administration as well as the complete Clinton and Bush junior administrations. They thus also include the formative years for post-Cold War security affairs on the European continent, from the fall of the Berlin wall to NATO's Bucharest summit at which Ukraine was denied membership in the Alliance. And while the literature on U.S. approaches to Russia in the same time-span is by now abundant, there are very few studies dealing with Washington's policies towards the countries 'in between'—that is, these other nations that had to (re)draft their security policies from scratch after the Soviet Union's demise.