GOVT

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GOVT

• CHAPTER 16
• Foreign Policy

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Learning Objectives
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Who Makes U.S. Foreign Policy?
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The Presidents Role

• As commander in chief, the president oversees the
  military and guides defense policies.
• The Constitution authorizes the president to make
  treaties, and to form executive agreements.
• The president has ultimate control over the use
  of nuclear weapons.
• As head of state, the president represents the
  U.S. to the world.

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The Cabinet

• As U.S. power in the world has grown and as
  economic factors have become increasingly
  important, the Departments of Commerce,
  Agriculture, Treasury, and Energy have become
  more involved in foreign policy decisions.
• The Department of State is responsible for
  diplomatic relations with nearly 200 independent
  nations, as well as with the United Nations.
• The Secretary of State has traditionally played a
  key role, and many presidents have relied on his
  or her defense.

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The Cabinet

• The Department of Defense establishes and carries
  out defense policy and protects our national
  security.
• The secretary of defense advises the president on
  U.S. military and defense policy and supervises
  military activities.
• The Joint Chiefs of Staff include the chief of
  staff of the Army, Air Force, and naval
  operations, as well as the commandant of the
  Marine Corps.
• The joint chiefs serve as the key military
  advisors to the president, the secretary of
  defense, and the National Security Council.

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Other Agencies

• Two key agencies are the National Security
  Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.
• The formal members of the NSC include the
  president, vice president, secretary of state,
  and secretary of defense.
• The CIA provides the president and his or her
  advisors with up-to-date information about the
  political, military, and economic activities of
  foreign governments.

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Congresss Powers

• Congress alone has the power to declare war and
  appropriate funds to build weapons systems, equip
  the armed forces and provide for foreign aid.
• The Senate has the power to approve or reject
  treaties and to appoint ambassadors.
• The Armed Services Committee and the Committee on
  Foreign Affairs in the House and the Armed
  Services Committee and the Foreign Relations
  Committee in the Senate.

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A Short History of American Foreign Policy
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Isolationism

• The founders believed that avoiding political
  involvement was the best way to protect American
  interest.
• George Washington urged Americans to steer clear
  of permanent alliances with any portion of the
  foreign world.
• The Monroe Doctrine stated that the U.S. would
  not tolerate foreign intervention and promised to
  stay out of European affairs.

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The Beginning of Interventionism

• Interventionism, direct involvement in foreign
  affairs, began with the Spanish-American War of
  1898.
• The growth of the U.S. as an industrial economy
  confirmed the nations position as a world power.
  
• In the early 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt
  proposed that the United States could invade
  Latin American countries when it was necessary to
  guarantee political or economic stability.

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The World Wars

• When WWI broke out in 1914, President Wilson
  initially proclaimed a policy of neutrality. The
  U.S. entered the war in 1917 after U.S. ships in
  international waters were attacked by German
  submarines.
• The U.S. returned to a policy of isolationism
  until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.
  
• One of the most significant foreign policy
  actions during WWII was the dropping of atomic
  bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and
  Nagasaki in August 1945.

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The Cold War

• After WWII ended, the alliance between the U.S.
  and the Soviet Union began to deteriorate.
• The Soviet Union opposed Americas political and
  economic systems.
• Many Americans considered Soviet attempts to
  spread Communist systems to other countries a
  major threat to democracy.
• The iron curtain symbolized the political
  boundaries between the democratic countries in
  Western Europe and the Soviet-controlled
  Communist countries in Eastern Europe.

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The Cold War The Marshall Plan

• In 1947, the Truman administration instituted a
  policy of economic assistance to war-torn Europe
  called the Marshall Plan.
• This and other actions marked the beginning of a
  policy of containment a policy designed to
  contain the spread of communism by offering U.S.
  economic and military aid to threatened nations.
• In 1949, the U.S., Canada, and 10 European
  nations formed a military alliance the North
  Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
• Though the Cold War was mainly a war of words and
  belief systems, the wars in Korea (1950-1953) and
  Vietnam (1964-1975) grew out of the efforts to
  contain Communism.

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The Cold War The Arms Race Deterrence

• The Soviet Union and the United States began
  competing for more and better weapons with
  greater destruction power a struggle known as
  the arms race.
• Supported by a policy of deterrence rendering
  ourselves and our allies so strong militarily
  that our strength would deter any attack.
• Out of deterrence came the theory of mutually
  assured destruction (MAD) if the forces of both
  nations were equally capable of destroying each
  other, neither would take a chance on war.

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The Cold War The Cuban Missile Crisis

• The Cuban missile crisis In 1962, the United
  States learned that the Soviet Union had placed
  nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba, 90 miles
  from Florida.
• The crisis was diffused diplomatically the
  Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles, and
  the United States agreed to remove some of its
  missiles from near the Soviet border in Turkey.

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The Cold War Détente and Arms Control

• In 1972, both sides signed the Strategic Arms
  Limitation Treaty (SALT I) which marked the
  beginning of a period of détente a relaxation
  of tensions.
• In the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev initiated
  reforms to democratize the Soviet political
  system and decentralize the economy.
• In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down, and by
  the end of 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist
  Republics (USSR) no longer existed.

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Post-Cold War Foreign Policy

• When the Cold War ended, U.S. foreign
  policymakers were forced to rethink the nations
  foreign policy goals.
• Policymakers have struggled to determine the
  degree of intervention that is appropriate and
  prudent for the U.S. military.
• Since September 11, 2001, our goal has been to
  capture and punish the terrorists who planned and
  perpetuated the events of that day and to prevent
  future attacks against America.

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The War on Terrorism
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Varieties of Terrorism

• Terrorist acts generally fall into one of three
  broad categories
• Local or regional terrorism extremists
  motivated by the desire to obtain freedom from a
  nation or government.
• State-sponsored terrorism terrorist attacks
  planned and sponsored by governments.
• Foreign terrorist networks nonstate terrorist
  networks, such as al Qaeda. It operates in
  cells so that often one cell of the
  organization does not know what the others are
  planning.

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The U.S. Response to 9/11 The War in Afghanistan

• In late 2001, the U.S. military launched an
  attack against al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and
  the ruling Taliban regime.
• Once the Taliban had been ousted, the United
  States helped to establish a government in
  Afghanistan that did not support terrorism.
• Instead of continuing the hunt for al Qaeda
  members, the Bush administration increasingly
  looked to Iraq as a threat to U.S. security.

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The Focus on Iraq

• In January 2002, President Bush described Iraq as
  a regime that sponsored terrorism and sought to
  develop weapons of mass destruction.
• A preemptive war occurs when a nation goes to war
  against another because it believes that an
  attack from that nation is imminent.
• When President Bush did go to war against Iraq,
  it was a preventive war to prevent the
  possibility that Iraq could attack the U.S. in
  the future.

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The Second Gulf War

• March 20, 2003 U.S. and British forces entered
  Iraq.
• Most of the world opposed the attack.
• Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003. He
  was convicted of crimes against humanity and
  executed in 2006.
• Many Iraqis opposed the occupation. Opposition
  was strongest among members of the Sunni branch
  of Islam.

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Focus on Iraq The Insurgency

• Between May 2003 and March 2004, casualty rates
  for American soldiers averaged more than 50 per
  month.
• In January 2005, Iraqis went to the polls to vote
  in the first free elections in half a century. A
  coalition of Shiite Muslims won the most seats.
• The Bush administration increased troop levels in
  2007 with the hope that, given more time, Iraqis
  could work out their differences and establish a
  united government.
• In February 2009, President Obama announced that
  U.S. combat forces would leave Iraq by the end of
  August 2010.

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Again, Afghanistan

• In 2003, NATO took responsibility for coalition
  military operations in the central and northern
  parts of Afghanistan.
• In 2009, Taliban forces began to take complete
  control of districts in the Tribal Areas on the
  far side of the Afghan-Pakistani border. The
  Pakistani military began to engage the Taliban
  forces.
• In February 2009, President Obama ordered 17,000
  additional troops into the country. U.S.
  secretary of defense warned that the war could be
  lost if more troops were not sent.

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The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
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The Arab-Israeli Wars

• Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, a large
  number of Palestinians Arab residents of the
  Holy Land, known as Palestine until 1948, were
  forced into exile.
• The failure of the Arab states in the 1967 war
  led to additional refugees and the rise of the
  Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) a
  nonstate body committed to armed struggle against
  Israel.
• Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty in 1979
  that marked the end to an era of wars between
  Israel and other states.

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The Israeli-Palestinian Dispute

• Many Palestinian families lost their homes after
  the 1948 war, and after the 1967 war, the West
  Bank of the Jordan River and the Gaza Strip fell
  under Israeli control.
• Vicious attacks by Palestinians which frequently
  resulted in the deaths of civilians made
  negotiations difficult.
• An international consensus on terms for settling
  the conflict included granting the lands seized
  by Israel in the 1967 war to Palestinians who
  could organize their own independent nation-state
  there.
• Also, Palestinians would have to recognize
  Israels right to exist and take steps to
  guarantee Israels safety.

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Negotiations Begin

• Talks between Israel, Arab nations, and non-PLO
  Palestinians commenced at Madrid in 1991.
• In 1993, Israel and the PLO met officially for
  the first time in Oslo, Norway resulting in the
  Oslo Accords, which were signed in Washington.
• A major result was the establishment of a
  Palestinian Authority, under Israeli control, on
  the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

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Negotiations Collapse

• Further talks in 2000 at Camp David in Maryland
  collapsed. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon
  carried out a plan to withdraw from the Gaza
  Strip in 2005 and also build an enormous security
  fence between Israel and the West Bank.
• In 2007, Gaza was taken over by Hamas, a radical
  Islamist party that refuses to recognize Israel.
• In December 2008, Hamas launched missile attacks
  on Israel after the imposition of an Israeli
  blockade.

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Weapons Proliferation in an Unstable World
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North Koreas Nuclear Program

• North Korea signed the Treaty on the
  Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1985 and
  submitted to weapons inspections by the
  International Atomic Energy Agency in 1992.
• In 2002, U.S. intelligence discovered that North
  Korea had been receiving equipment from Pakistan
  for a highly enriched uranium production
  facility.
• Later that year, North Korea openly lifted a
  freeze on its nuclear weapons program and
  expelled the IAEA inspectors.

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North Koreas Nuclear Program

• In 2003, North Korea agreed to talks with the
  U.S., China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea.
• In 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear
  test.
• In 2007, North Korea agreed to dismantle its
  nuclear facilities and allow UN inspectors to the
  country. In return, the other nations agreed to
  provide 400 billion in various aid, and the U.S.
  would begin to discuss normalization of relations
  with North Korea.

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Iran An Emerging Nuclear Threat?

• Iran has made considerable progress in many
  aspects of its nuclear program, although Iranian
  leaders have publicly claimed that they are
  seeking only to develop nuclear energy plants.
• Iran has implemented an extensive terrorism
  campaign in hopes of undermining U.S. influence
  in the middle east.
• The UN has imposed sanctions, and the United
  States has threatened to impose its own to
  isolate Iran from the community of nations.
• Talks with Iran concerning its nuclear program
  resumed at Geneva on October 1, 2009. Iran agreed
  to allow international inspectors access to its
  facilities.

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China The Next Superpower?
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China

• During the Clinton administration, rapid growth
  of the Chinese economy and increasingly close
  trade ties between the United States and China
  helped bring about a policy of diplomatic
  outreach.
• Many Americans protested when the U.S. government
  extended normal trade relations (NTR) status to
  China on a year-to-year basis.

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China

• Chinas gross domestic product (GDP) could
  surpass that of the United States by 2039.
• The U.S. already runs a multi-billion dollar
  trade deficit with China and could be vulnerable
  if Chinese economic growth continues at its
  present pace.
• The Chinese did not support the American invasion
  of Iraq in 2003.
• China has expressed desire to take control of
  Taiwan, historically supported by the U.S. as
  free and separate.

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POLITICS ON THE WEB

• www.whitehouse.gov
• www.bartleby.com/124
• www.Millercenter.org/academic/americanpresident
• www.4ltrpress.cengage.com/govt