ABSTRACT
US foreign economic policy has prompted fiercely contested debates. Liberals see US capitalism as flawed, but benign and progressive, while New Left historians and world systems theorists see it as an aggressive force, which ruthlessly exploits other countries. Paul Kennedy discerns a dangerous pattern of US relative economic decline since the Second World War: Joseph Nye does not. Stephen Gill sees a form of supranational capitalism emerging with hegemonic control of the world emanating primarily from US corporations and the capitalist ethos that permeates Washington. Others, like Susan Strange, assert that an international political economy exists, which challenges both traditional distinctions between security and economic concerns and state-centric analyses of international relations. Strange sees states functioning in an interpenetrated and economically interdependent world, where one not only needs to concentrate on military security, but also on production, financial and knowledge structures. If even part of this analysis is accepted, it more than justifies our present concern with economic aspects of US foreign policy.1
