ABSTRACT
As explained in the introductory chapter, this book aims to draw together the disciplines of international relations (IR) and history in productive synthesis in what it terms the ‘national ideology’ approach to the study of US foreign policy. Pursuit of this objective locates it within two vast, occasionally overlapping literatures, exhaustive surveys of which would be unfeasible, unnecessary and – from the reader’s perspective – undesirable. That fact notwithstanding, it is appropriate to attempt at the outset a concise explanation of how what follows connects with the broad conceptual frameworks provided by the existing disciplines. The IR and history literatures have often proceeded on parallel tracks, even though they draw on the same core of factual information, albeit at different levels of depth.1 This chapter seeks, where it can, to draw connections between the two, providing in the process an account of where the national ideology approach most comfortably sits amid the schools of thought used to subdivide the field. In so doing, it seeks not, unless absolutely necessary, to ‘pick sides’ in the major intra-disciplinary debates, but rather to show that the argument around which the book is constructed is ultimately reconcilable with several of the major analytical schools. The later sections of the chapter engage with some of the philosophical and
methodological issues arising from the approach’s focus on the interrelation of ideology and national interests and the role of national history in shaping strategic choice. The purpose of these sections is to render the approach’s deeper philosophical assumptions more explicit, complementing some of the conceptual clarification that has gone before. In this part of the chapter, the key concept of ‘ideology’ is defined, the case is made for studying of ideological change over time, and some methodological implications of this choice of topic are placed in the open.
