How was American foreign policy changed since the end of the cold war?

Answer 1

I don't think any major goals have really changed. The major American foreign policy goals have been steady for centuries, and consist of (1) ensuring American security through, first, anticipating strategic threats and developing effective military countermeasures, and, second, developing and maintaining alliances; (2) defending general American interests by insisting on various traditional freedoms, e.g. the freedom to navigate on the high seas or in international air space, the suppression of piracy, et cetera; and (3) the promotion of American values of liberty and opportunity, by, for example, humanitarian aid to victims of natural disasters, and direct government-to-government aid to promote liberal republican forms of government. The methods and targets and immediate minor goals have changed, however. During the Cold War a great deal of foreign policy was concerned with neutralizing the threat of strategic (i.e. nuclear) conflict with the Soviet Union. There was a decades-long domestic dispute as to the best way of achieving this, whether through military deterrence and challenge, through detente, cultural exchange and trade, and negotiating regulatory frameworks and treaties, or through strong alliances. The fact that various Administrations did not agree on the best methods accounts for some of the inconsistencies in American foreign policy over the decades. But many actions can be rationalized through this lens: the placement of nuclear-armed IRBMs in Europe and development of SDI was deterrence and challenge, Soyuz-Apollo and the SALT I and II were examples of exchange and treatymaking, and the support of Pinochet in South America an example of trying to build strong alliances at a certain cost (of human rights credibility). Since the end of the Cold War no major power has emerged which poses a serious strategic threat to the United States. While both Russia and China could in principle, they are both seen as too busy with internal difficulties to do so at present. Furthermore, terrorism has steadily become a greater concern to American citizens. In 1972 it was seen as just a problem that affected the Israelis or the occasional traveler to Columbia, but by the famous attacks on NYC in 2001 it was generally seen as a problem that could affect even the continental United States. Consequently, the immediate goals of US foreign policy have shifted to actions likely to suppress terrorism. Two major distinctions between this goal and that of opposing the Soviet Union is that, first, terrorism has no easily-identifiable public face, which can be studied for guides to its intentions, and, second, that it has no collective assets -- no country, no capital, no economy -- and short of the lives of its individual members, nothing that can easily be held hostage or threatened.