How Do Domestic Factors Affect Foreign Policy Making? What are the pressing problems of the presidency in foreign policy decision making, and what, if anything, can and should be done about them? There are several empirical and normative dilemmas associated with this question. However, mainly domestic factors affect American foreign policy. While forthright in asserting American interests, U.S. diplomats and officials have walked out of no international forum. They continue to participate behind the scenes in all, for example in the International Criminal Court and Kyoto Protocol working committees. Thousands of treaties, even those the United States has not ratified, continue to be observed by Washington since internal factors greatly shape foreign policy.
Bush is no more unilateralist than his predecessors, for an element of unilateralism has always been prominent in U.S. foreign policy. Examples of U.S. unilateralism long preceding Bush include the boycott of Cuba, special relations with Israel and Taiwan, dual containment of Iran and Iraq, virtual containment of North Korea, and a plethora of trade sanctions. The current coalition backing the U.S. war on terrorism will fracture and its resolve will weaken in due course. Russia, China, and the moderate Arab states will re-assert their traditional interests, which diverge from those of the United States.
The economic downturn and evaporation of the federal budget surplus may lower Americas fiscal ability to pursue its interests abroad. This may be a defining moment in US policy, but it may last only a moment. American leaders have not been freed by the war on terrorism from their responsibility to decide on priorities for domestic as well as foreign policy in the coming year. George W. Bush will be judged not by his conduct of a short victorious war but by his stewardship of a just and prosperous peace in the longer term. Security factor in my opinion is the most important domestic factor that affects American foreign policy.
The Essay on Public Policies Towards Native Americans
Public Policies Towards Native Americans Native American Policy is the set of laws and procedures developed and adapted in the United States to define the relationships between Native Americans and the federal government. Over the course of two hundred years, this policy has undergone many changes. At times, the federal government has recognized indigenous peoples as independent political ...
Having successfully driven Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power, American politics appear to hope that the threat of regime change may also dislodge hostile Syrian, Iranian, and North Korean regimes that support terrorism or are otherwise inimical to U.S. security interests. The decisive U.S. military action in Iraq may well intimidate some unfriendly tyrants and induce them to modify some of their adverse policies. However, the example of Iraq is unlikely to produce sudden regime change in the Middle East or elsewhere, even when combined with new, menacing noises from top U.S. officials.
The Iraq war was the first application of the new theory that preventive war can be an effective instrument against the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. China gets nuclear weapons, India responds to China, and then Pakistan to India. Israel builds nuclear weapons, and then Iran tries, even as the acquisition of chemical and biological weapons by other states adds to the region-wide malignancy. North Koreas nuclear weapons program prompts worries of proliferation to the U.S. The United States and other concerned states may yet try to use the Iraq treatment as an object lesson to induce states such as North Korea and Iran to change their behavior. Some officials favor limited military strikes against North Koreas facilities for reprocessing fuel rods into plutonium or against the nuclear fuel plants now under construction in Iran, Yet even the most aggressive advocates of military surgery acknowledge real problems here. Every good strike depends on great intelligence. Intelligence officials caution that locations of key facilities in North Korea and Iran remain unknown.
The future of Iran and its relations with the United States will significantly shape the character of the post-Iraq war world. With a population nearly three times that of Iraq, and a budding but still repressed democratic political culture, Iran could be the catalyst for a reformed Middle East. But with nuclear weapons and continued support for anti-Israel terrorists, Iran could also be the regions most disruptive force and there is not doubt that shortly the U.S. will try to influence the situation in Iran. Iran continues to be one of the most important vectors in U.S. foreign policy. Judging from the mixture of silence and recrimination coming from Tehran and Washington, neither government has either a strategy or tactics for capitalizing on postwar opportunities. The United States has removed two of the most direct security threats that could motivate Irans quest for nuclear weapons.
The Term Paper on The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988)
... 129). The agreement stated that neither Iran nor Iraq would attack population centers. So, Iraq then began to ... known as Al Dawah, which was supported by Iran, was responsible for the assassination attempt ... 60,000 (Hiro 137). Hussein also unleashed chemical weapons on the Iranians, which have been used ... Darbhandi Khan, Iraq’s nuclear facility, which was damaged, and the capital of Iraq, Baghdad. The ...
Yet, Washingtons axis of evil rhetoric and veiled threats have negated any comfort that these two actions might otherwise have conveyed to Iranian decision-makers. The U.S. doctrine of preemption, paired with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharons aggressive security policy in Israel, may intensify Iranian security officials quest for a nuclear deterrent. Or, as U.S. officials hope, the prospect of close U.S. military support for the new Iraq could induce Iran to comply with U.S. demands to end Irans nuclear program and its support for terrorist organizations. For their part, Iranian leaders have made at best only thickly veiled diplomatic overtures to the United States.
The war in Iraq was intended, partly, to reshape the Arab world. But three non-Arab Muslim countries could be most affected by the success or failure of U.S.-led reconstruction efforts in Iraq. An overwhelming 90 percent of Turks opposed the Iraq war. Islamic solidarity was one reason. But Turkey was particularly alarmed by the prospect that Iraqs disintegration would lead to demands by its own Kurdish population for an independent or autonomous Kurdistan. A perceived U.S. failure in rebuilding Iraq, or Islamist-led unrest in Baghdad, could put Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan under pressure to revert to a more Islamist position.
The Essay on Causes Of Conflict Between Native And European Americans
Disrespect was a major cultural difference. From the beginning of the relationship between Native and European Americans, the European Americans(Europeans) repeatedly dishonored the treaties which they agreed to uphold. Usually, they established the same treaties they betrayed, such as the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851); which eventually led to the tragic massacre of the Cheyenne Indians at Sand ...
That, in turn, could provoke the avowedly secular Turkish military to act against the AKP government. Turkeys support for the United States will also depend on U.S. economic assistance and Washingtons ability to influence the European Union in hastening Turkeys pending membership. It is planned, that America will support Turkey financially. Yet even under the questionable assumption that a 19th-century balance of power would be a more desirable system than one characterized by American hegemony, a return to multipolarity is not in the cards. A multipolar world cannot be decreed; it must be created. Europe lacks the will to establish itself as a second pole capable of balancing American power.
Nor would most Europeans want to see multipolarity and global balance created by the rise of a superpower China or the return of a superpower Russia. Europes inability or unwillingness to create actual global multipolarity explains much of the European desire to establish the U.N. Security Council as the sole authority for determining the legitimacy of military action, and especially American action. By investing equal power in the five permanent members, which include France and Britain, the Security Council today produces an institutional multipolarity, at least in theory to compensate for the lack of genuine multipolarity in the international system. Certainly, the U.S. wants to be the single superpower in the world; therefore, the U.S. plays close attention towards the development of European Union and possible threats this may cause in the future.
Sources: http://www.cia.gov/nic/speeches_foreignpolicy.html http://webscript.princeton.edu/~afp/ http://www.afpc.org/op.shtml http://www.state.gov/s/p/rem/9632.htm http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_m2393/is_n1_v161/ai_20973123 http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/c c/omara.html http://www.cosmopolis.ch/english/cosmo34/ us_american_foreign_policy_iraq_2.htm.
