Role of U.S. In Aftermath of the Cold War

Ronald Steel, in Temptations of a Superpower, examines the role of the United States in the world in the aftermath of the Cold War. Steel's simple and straightforward analysis of the changed world and the changed U.S. role in that world allows the reader to feel that he is discovering that world and that role along with the author.

Immediately, the reader trusts Steel and sees that he is not like so many pretentious experts in international relations who presume to know the answers to questions which will not have answers for years to come. His book should be taken as a work formulating questions which must be asked and asked again and again, not as a work meant to supply definitive answers to those questions.

Steel notes that the United States "won" the Cold War with the other superpower, the Soviet Union, but he asks what precisely that victory means or represents. The general picture he paints in the Introduction is that of an uncertain and dangerous global reality and a United States also uncertain about its place in that world.

For almost fifty years, the United States and the Soviet Union based almost the entirety of their foreign policy on their Cold War antagonism. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc at the end of the 1980s meant that suddenly the United States was left, essentially, without a foreign policy, for the primary foe on which that policy was based was suddenly gone.

Nevertheless, the United States remains a superpower, the only true

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er, it remains clear, despite the ambiguities of U.S,. involvement in Kosovo (under United Nations auspices), that for better or worse, as Steel pointed out five years ago, the United States remains the nation to which all other nations look when a major crisis arises. Of course, this does not mean that the United States has the power to accomplish whatever political or military goals it seeks, as Steel also points out. In one sense, Steel is incorrect in stating that our foreign policy concerns have caused us to neglect our domestic problems. If we look at his statement in economic terms, for example, the Clinton administration, in office since 1993, has focused almost entirely on domestic issues. The occasional foreign policy problem has dominated headlines momentarily, but in general Clinton has avoided foreign policy entanglements which would steal his attention from the economy. The scandals brewing around Clinton throughout his terms have distracted him, but not foreign policy, for the most part. The engagement in Kosovo threatens to mire his final years in office in foreign policy, but in general Steel is not accurate when he argues that the 1990s have continued previous decades' focus on foreign policy. Steel is off-ba

Category: Government - R