Annotated Bibliography: US Foreign Policy

Complete Annotated Bibliography

Cox, Michael, and Doug Stokes. 2008. US Foreign Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cox and Stokes (2008) define liberal internationalism” as the framework in which U.S. foreign policy has been dictated throughout the 20th, and well into the 21st century. The “Wilsonian” doctrine of international cooperation is defined as being the framework for liberalism through the development of the League of Nations and the United Nations, which has been a longstanding tradition through the development of the United Nations under the leadership of the United States. This form of “liberal internationalism” assumes that the interests of the United States and its democratic allies have a right to defend their interests

President Obama’s foreign policy often appears to provide a more diplomatic solutions to international conflicts in his opposition of the Iraq War of 20034, but he invariably repeated the same policies of the Bush Doctrine by invading Libya. Dueck (2015) defines Obama 's foreign policy of “regime change” in Libya, which is was not unlike Bush’s illegal invasion and bombing of Iraq. In this manner, Obama appears to be a “democratic” president, yet he is enacting a realist theoretical mindset that utilizes massive military interventions to resolve global conflicts between states. Dueck (2015) relies on Walt’s theory of "defensive realism” to validate this “hybrid” of Obama’s cooperative diplomacy as a “balance” to the harsh military measures that he has wielded against Libya. Naturally, Dueck (2015) exposes the hypocrisy of a "defensive” posturing by the Obama Administration, especially when it has invaded and destroyed a sovereign nation, such as Libya, in the expansion of the realist tenets of Bush Doctrine. This is an important course that will be added to the research paper to show the extension of realist theory across multiple presidencies to define the continued unilateralism of U.S. militarism around the world.

The ideological premise of democracy and capitalist ideals define the fact that democracies do not go to war against each other. This argument defines the important aspects of liberalism that illustrate the cooperative nature of democracies that forge diplomacy, economic agreements, and other factors of international foreign relations in a largely democratic framework. Therefore, Goldsmith (2016) is arguing that Obama’s foreign policies are largely liberal practices that rely on cooperative nation states that agree on the principles of democracy and capitalistic ideology.