ABSTRACT
“Does America need a foreign policy?” asked Henry Kissinger— shortly before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 seemed to answer everything (Kissinger 2001). Behind this rhetorical question lies the contradiction to the assumption that after the bipolarity of the East-West conflict came to an end, the United States was the only superpower able to lift itself up as a hegemonic power on a global scale. Then, American domestic policy would be the only decisive determinant of a foreign policy that could be explained as a dependent variable exclusively by domestic interests and constellations of the hegemony. As he had previously in his book of 1994, Diplomacy, Kissinger contradicts this notion of the dissolution of foreign policy: the dominance of the United States, he wrote, was neither so clear nor so unlimited in terms of time that the United States could do without an independent foreign policy that would be at least partially autonomous vis-à-vis domestic policy.
