Publisher's Synopsis
In this book, David Campbell offers a fundamental reappraisal of American foreign policy. Since 1945 has US policy really been nothing more than a response to the Soviet threat? In the aftermath of Communism's collapse, is the US now seeing the emergence of new enemies to replace the old?;Campbell draws on interdisciplinary debates in the social sciences about the nature of social and political inquiry, and writers such as Foucault, to argue that foreign policy is not simply a response to objective dangers and external threats. He argues that the Cold War was in part a consequence of the logic of American identity, by highlighting the interpretive nature of politics and its manifestation in declassified US foreign policy documents.;He turns the conventional mode of analysis upside-down: foreign policy is not the response of a pre-given domestic society to an external anarchic realm, but rather the means by which the US produces and then reproduces itself. Challenges to a dominant domestic order are controlled by identifying them with external threats - world Communism, the Soviet Union, North Vietnam, terrorists, Iraq - which are perceived as challenges to ideas such as "freedom", "democracy", "private enterprise" and "the family". Campbell shows how this analysis can inform the reorientation of American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.
