ABSTRACT
As the Soviet Union crumbled and the Cold War ended in the late 1980s and early 1990s, US policymakers and analysts increasingly articulated the country’s national interests in terms of economic goals. Grim trade statistics, a declining dollar, and a spate of books examining the precipitous decline of American economic power promoted the view that America’s revitalization within a global economy needed to take center stage in the formulation of foreign policy, With the end of the Soviet Union and the KGB, officials of the CIA spoke of recasting their cold-war mission to emphasize “economic intelligence.” Similarly, in the first presidential election after the end of the Cold War (1992), most of the aspiring candidates emphasized international economic competitiveness as their foremost goal in foreign policy. President George Bush rushed to finalize the North American Free Trade Agreement to send to Congress just before the election. Democratic nominee Bill Clinton, in the first major foreign policy address of his campaign, promised to “elevate economics in foreign policy, [to] create an economic security council similar to the National Security Council.”1 Touting the importance of economic interests in foreign policy became so commonplace following the end of the Cold War that policy discourses of the early 1990s asserting the prominence of economics in foreign policy hardly seemed a remarkable, and much less a contestable, assumption.
