How Do Domestic Factors Affect Foreign Policy Making? Essay - 1,187 words

How Do Domestic Factors Affect Foreign Policy Making? What are the pressing problems of the presidency in foreign policy decision making, and what, if anything, can and should be done about them? There are several empirical and normative dilemmas associated with this question. However, mainly domestic factors affect American foreign policy. While forthright in asserting American interests, U.S. diplomats and officials have walked out of no international forum. They continue to participate behind the scenes in all, for example in the International Criminal Court and Kyoto Protocol working committees. Thousands of treaties, even those the United States has not ratified, continue to be observed by Washington since internal factors greatly shape foreign policy.


Bush is no more unilateralist than his predecessors, for an element of unilateralism has always been prominent in U.S. foreign policy. Examples of U.S. unilateralism long preceding Bush include the boycott of Cuba, special relations with Israel and Taiwan, dual containment of Iran and Iraq, virtual containment of North Korea, and a plethora of trade sanctions. The current coalition backing the U.S. war on terrorism will fracture and its resolve will weaken in due course. Russia, China, and the moderate Arab states will re-assert their traditional interests, which diverge from those of the United States.


The economic downturn and evaporation of the federal budget surplus may lower Americas fiscal ability to pursue its interests abroad. This may be a defining moment in US policy, but it may last only a moment. American leaders have not been freed by the war on terrorism from their responsibility to decide on priorities for domestic as well as foreign policy in the coming year. George W. Bush will be judged not by his conduct of a short victorious war but by his stewardship of a just and prosperous peace in the longer term. Security factor in my opinion is the most important domestic factor that affects American foreign policy.


Having successfully driven Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power, American politics appear to hope that the threat of regime change may also dislodge hostile Syrian, Iranian, and North Korean regimes that support terrorism or are otherwise inimical to U.S. security interests. The decisive U.S. military action in Iraq may well intimidate some unfriendly tyrants and induce them to modify some of their adverse policies. However, the example of Iraq is unlikely to produce sudden regime change in the Middle East or elsewhere, even when combined with new, menacing noises from top U.S. officials.


The Iraq war was the first application of the new theory that preventive war can be an effective instrument against the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. China gets nuclear weapons, India responds to China, and then Pakistan to India. Israel builds nuclear weapons, and then Iran tries, even as the acquisition of chemical and biological weapons by other states adds to the region-wide malignancy. North Koreas nuclear weapons program prompts worries of proliferation to the U.S. The United States and other concerned states may yet try to use the Iraq treatment as an object lesson to induce states such as North Korea and Iran to change their behavior. Some officials favor limited military strikes against North Koreas facilities for reprocessing fuel rods into plutonium or against the nuclear fuel plants now under construction in Iran, Yet even the most aggressive advocates of military surgery acknowledge real problems here. Every good strike depends on great intelligence. Intelligence officials caution that locations of key facilities in North Korea and Iran remain unknown.


The future of Iran and its relations with the United States will significantly shape the character of the post-Iraq war world. With a population nearly three ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: foreign policy, united states, united state, nuclear weapons, north korea

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