MULTILATERALISM IN AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

The relationship of the United States to international organizations has been called "ambiguous." On the one hand, the United States has taken the lead in establishing a great array of international institutions since World War II.  This has been true of the organizations of the United Nations system created at the end of the war and specialized and regional agencies set up in the years that followed.  At the same time, the United States has often been less than supportive of the work of international organizations.  This has been especially true of the United Nations.  The Clinton Administration withdrew American troops from a UN peacekeeping mission in Somalia after 18 soldiers died in an ambush and refused to get involved in the UN operation to prevent the Rwanda genocide.  In recent years, the Bush Administration has withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, refused to join the International Criminal Court and withheld funding from international family planning programs.

The purpose of this course is to try to find the sources of this "ambiguity."  One study has concluded that the United States supports those international programs that are in the American national interest and does not support those that are not.  But what – or who - determines what is in the national interest?  Why was it not in the interest of the United States to intervene in Rwanda at the time of the mass killing  and why is a program to prevent global warming not in the American national interest?  At first blush, the answers to these questions may be obvious, depending on your political stance and personal experience.  But what may be obvious may be more complicated than you imagine.  The study of multilateralism forces us to understand not only the state of contemporary international politics, but also the sources of American foreign policy, including the role of the president and the congress and the effects of public opinion on the choices that policy makers make.

The course will be held for 6 weeks and be limited to 25 persons to permit maximum discussion. Weekly readings will be assigned from a recently published book edited by Foot, MacFarlane and Mastanduno, United States Hegemony and International Organizations (Oxford, 2004).

Class is limited to 25 members.

GENE LYONS is Professor of Government Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Dickey Center at Dartmouth.  He has also taught at MIT and the University of Paris and has most recently been co-editor and contributor to two books:  Beyond Westphalia and Protecting the Rights of Groups