Introduction
Since WWII, there has been a far reaching understanding among elite opinion leaders that for US foreign
policy to be effective, America should play an active global leadership role. Interestingly, such elites tend
not to engage in debates over the general tenets of internationalism or interventionism, as disagreements
and conflicts usually revolve around formulating and implementing specific goals, objectives, and tactics.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Communist governments, it was believed that
American elites would discuss and question the overall scope and range of US global leadership. After
looking back at this period from the vantage point of the Post-9/11 era, did elites really experience
fundamental change in their beliefs concerning America’s role in the world?
The presence of a strong neo-isolationist streak in the 1990s may help us to more fully understand
the evolution of foreign policy beliefs. The presidential campaigns of H. Ross Perot and Patrick
Buchanan reflected anti-free trade, anti-immigrant, and anti-interventionist agendas that appealed to what
were thought to be narrow segments of the public. The 1994 midterm elections enabled Republicans with
majorities in both the Senate and House to advance the “Contract with America,” which put forth the
notion of selective engagement. Such a climate led then-Senator Jesse Helms, Chair of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, to throw down a clear marker before the United Nations Security Council:
If the UN respects the sovereign rights of the American people, and serves them as an effective
tool of diplomacy, it will earn and deserve their respect and support. But a UN that seeks to
impose its presumed authority on the American people, without their consent, begs for
confrontation and- I want to be candid with you- eventual US withdrawal (quoted in Crossette
2000, 1).
The Clinton Administration became highly constrained by such ambivalence. Although President Clinton
called for “multilateral cooperation,” “democratic enlargement,” and “strategic engagement,” his foreign
policies contradicted these multilateral objectives (Harris 1994: 44-46). For example, between 1993 and
1995, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was driven by the view that the US would only intervene if the
fighting expanded beyond Bosnia and Croatia. The war ended only when Clinton unilaterally forced the
warring sides to the peace table at Dayton in 1995, allowing only a diplomat from the UK a minor voice
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Convention