This book offers a nuanced and multifaceted collection of essays covering a wide range of concerns, concepts, presidential doctrines, and rationalities of government thought to have marked America's engagement with the world during this period. The collection is organised chronologically and looks at the work of intellectuals who have written both in support and critically about US foreign policy in various geographical and historical contexts. This includes Andrew Carnegie, Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Samuel Huntington, Paul Wolfowitz and many other such thinkers and practitioners who have contributed in shaping the ways in which we have come to think of US foreign policy over the years. The book will be of significant interest to students and academics within the fields of US foreign policy analysis, international relations and intellectual history.

Reviews

'In these volatile times traditional ways of thinking about American foreign policy have been upended. This stimulating collection of essays opens up a fascinating and far wider range of perspectives on the intellectual history of American foreign policy that help provide the conceptual, theoretical an empirical resources to help us all think more creatively about that history.'
Andrew Hurrell, Montague Burton Professor of International Relations, Balliol College

'Realist or idealist? For years, it appeared that was the only question ever asked about American foreign policy. Now, Jean-Francois Drolet and James Dunkerley have consigned that simplistic dichotomy to history. In this brilliant collection, an unrivalled cast of scholars reveal the real role of complex ideologies of race and nation in the making of American power.'
Marc Stears, Professor and Director, Sydney Policy Lab, University of Sydney

'This original and distinctive book subverts many common assumptions about the origins and character of the ideas that have shaped America's role in the world. Essays from an international array of scholars bring fresh perspectives to the thought of individual figures as diverse as Andrew Carnegie, Carl Schmitt, Samuel Huntington and Paul Wolfowitz - addressing such central themes as Americans' conception of nation-building and the origins of the Cold War.'
John Thompson, Emeritus Reader in American History, University of Cambridge

Introduction: thinking about America in the world over the longer run - James Dunkerley
1 The strange career of nation-building as a concept in US foreign policy - Jeremi Suri
2 Race, utopia, perpetual peace: Andrew Carnegie's dreamworld - Duncan Bell
3 Carl Schmitt and the American century - Jean-François Drolet
4 Realist exceptionalism: philosophy, politics, and foreign policy in America's 'second modernity' - Vibeke Schou Tjalve and Michael C. Williams
5 The social and political construction of the Cold War - Tracy B. Strong
6 Chaotic epic: Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order revisited - James Dunkerley
7 Paul Wolfowitz and the promise of American power, 1969-2001 - David Milne
Index

Editors

Jean-François Drolet is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London

James Dunkerley is Professor of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London