2011 Volume 2011 Issue 163 Pages 163_110-124
Even though 20 years have passed since the end of the Cold War, the US president Obama and Russian president Medvedev still refer to “the Cold War mentality”: the U.S.-Russian relations after the Cold War has been, with a few exception of relatively favorable periods such as the immediate wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001, a long continuity of stagnated rivalry, thereby validating that the author terms it as “A Cold War after the Cold War”.
The American foreign policy attitudinal directions in the age of terrorism and globalization can be divided into four clusters: “traditionalists”, who incline to passive engagement and preserve American national interests; “multinationalists”, who decline militaristic interventionism and prioritize international cooperation; “liberal hawks” who basically praise liberal internationalism but occasionally approve military interventionism; and “unilateralists” or “military hawks” who prefer active engagement, including resorting to arms to protect American national interests and/or to spread American values abroad.
The George W. Bush administration intensified the two nuclear superpower relations by pursuing the deployment of missile defense (MD) systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, former Soviet allies and newly-admitted NATO member states, against alleged Iranian ballistic missile threats, at the expense of Russian cooperation on arms control and reduction accords. The policy was made in accordance with the administration's decision-making style: President Bush moved his traditionalistic foreign policy attitude to a unilateralistic one after the terrorist attacks, and his cabinet members mostly consisted of unilateralists; the president had an inclination to rely on those advisers, thereby bringing the whole administration to a unilateral, military-active direction.
The Obama administration reversed those courses by addressing “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons”, a scrap of the previous administration's European MD programs, and proceeding on U.S. Russian nuclear arms reduction negotiations, which led to the signing of START Follow-On treaty (New START). Those changes can partly be attributable to characteristics of the adminis-tration's decision-making style: President Obama has embraced a vision of “a nuclear-free world” from the early stages of his life, making him a multilateralist at the bottom; and since the administration has been characterized by a presidentially-led style, the presidential willingness to “reset” nuclear superpower relations and nuclear arms reduction overwhelmed his “liberal hawkish” cabinet members.
At the same time, President Obama is receptive to cabinet influences and the reality of world politics: “A Nuclear-Free World” concept was countered by a more realistic note in his own Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech; the change in European MD programs was not so much an entire abandonment of the previous administration's policy as a fine tuning to a more probable level of threats; and the Senatorial ratification process of New START has been delayed as it confronted Republican opposition.
“A World Free of Nuclear Weapons” is a destination worth exploring, but the road is long, narrow and winding.
