US Foreign Relations in the Twentieth Century: from World Power to Global Hegemony

The turn of the millennium has produced much thinking about the current direction of American foreign policy. In an interpretative essay on the broad patterns of American foreign relations during the twentieth century, Michael Dunne traces some recurrent themes in American diplomatic practice and its underlying ideologies. His conclusion is that the traditional introversion of American culture is likely to be projected abroad, as it has been in the past, by a rhetorical mixture of national and supranational idealism couched in the peculiar and self-referential discourse deriving from the earliest days of the Republic.