Ideologies of American Foreign Policy

Ideologies and American Foreign Policy is a welcome contribution to the study of both the international effects of political ideologies and U.S. foreign policies. The book makes two main contributions to these literatures. First, it deepens our understanding of ideologies by demonstrating the ideological foundations of seemingly non-ideological worldviews and decisions, including those consistent with realist international relations theories. Realist and ideology-based foreign policies are typically described as opposites, but the authors demonstrate that this can be a false dichotomy. Their argument is best illustrated by the book's examination of the foreign policies of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who are usually described as arch realists. According to the authors, however, particular ideological convictions were central to these leaders’ “realist” preferences. Nixon's extreme form of U.S. exceptionalism, for example, which inclined him to believe that most countries in the developing world were largely incapable of adopting liberal political institutions on...