The Foreign Policy of the Bush Administration: Terrorism and the Promotion of Democracy

Abstract

<p>During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush announced that he would pursue a "distinctly American internationalism" in foreign policy (Bush i999a), largely in contrast to the liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration. He initially sought to have a foreign policy that placed greater emphasis on American national interests than on global interests. The 9/11 attacks quickly changed both the content of the administration's foreign policy and the process by which American foreign policy was made. As a result, the administration pursued a foreign policy that was universal in scope and that viewed virtually all international actions as affecting American interests. The efforts to build a "coalition of the willing" to find and defeat "terrorists and tyrants" on a worldwide scale illustrated the universal nature of this policy, but the difficulties that the invasion and occupation of Iraq created also demonstrated the limitation of this policy approach...</p>