Adam Quinn

For Better, for Worse: How America's Foreign Policy became Wedded to Liberal Universalism

No country has been more closely associated with the practice and ideology of “the liberal peace” than the United States. Indeed, the prominence of the concept is in major part the result of Americas rise to global power. As this article sets out, the ideological history of the United States has wedded it to a brand of internationalism that rests for its integrity, in American eyes, on the pursuit of liberal universalism. Those who favour interventionist solutions to conflicts within and between states must make their peace with this characteristic of US political culture or they risk attacking the political basis for significant US international engagement of any kind. Given the absolute necessity of American involvement for the success of any regime of global interventionism, the latter would be a move of dubious wisdom.

Does the Flaw Lie within Us? Classical Realism and Unrealistic Policy

This paper argues that one of classical realisms most useful contributions may be to explain “unrealistic” behaviour of the sort that structural realists find vexingly contrary to their prescriptions. The paper engages in detail with the writing of two of the primary scholars of the classical realist school, Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr, to demonstrate that these theories do not posit simplistically that individuals or states always act “selfishly” in their own interests. Rather, states and statesmen are routinely burdened by what might be called “failures of insight”: an inability to conceive of their own interests and preferences objectively when held alongside those of others. As a result, powerful states are prone to conflating their own particular national interests with universal or systemic interests, hindering their capacity to anticipate or deal effectively with resistance on the part of other actors who insist on defining their own interests in contrary ways. Having established this conceptual framework, the paper provides two illustrations of this phenomenon in action in US foreign policy: President Woodrow Wilsons interventionism in Mexico and George W. Bushs policy of regime change in Iraq.

Killing norms softly: US targeted killing, quasi-secrecy and the assassination ban

Abstract This article argues that when actors engage in controversial new security practices, it is misconceived to view secrecy as an opposed, counterproductive alternative to the pursuit of legitimation. Rather, we propose, deployment of “quasi-secrecy”—a combination of official secrecy with leaks, selective disclosure, and de facto public awareness—can be an effective strategy for achieving normalization and legitimation while containing the risks entailed by disclosure. We support this claim via a detailed case study of US targeted killing. First, we establish the existence of an American norm against targeted killing during the period 1976–2001. We then detail the process by which an innovation in practice was secretly approved, implemented, became known, and was gradually, partially officially acknowledged. We argue that even if quasi-secrecy was not in this instance a coherently-conceived and deliberately pursued strategy from start to finish, the case provides proof of concept for its potential to be deployed as such.

Admiration Reborn: The British View of the US Presidential Election

Listening in on Britain’s national conversation on the US presidential election during 2008, one might have been forgiven for thinking that what approached was a referendum on Barack Obama rather than a contest between two candidates. Certainly Obama’s photogenic visage and sweeping rhetoric in search of “change” won the lion’s share of the British media coverage. Indeed, often coverage and debate seemed to slide close to tacitly assume Obama’s coming victory, and minds turned regularly to asking whether and to what extent his rhetoric would be implemented once in office. To the extent that this presupposition of victory was challenged, it was through the prism of the debate on race, with a question mark suspended in British minds over the plausibility of America’s election of a black man to the highest office in light of its tortured racial history. This latter factor ensured that at least some consideration was given to the possibility Obama might be denied victory, though at the expense of drawing attention away from specific features of the candidate himself and onto his meaning in the context of evolving social attitudes to race. Only a relatively small effort was put into weighing the qualities of his Republican opponent, John McCain, who was thoroughly overshadowed in the popular consciousness by the bulldozer of the Obama narrative.