ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses in tandem the evolution of American foreign policy and international relations (IR) theory and provides an explanation for why the US maintained enduring policies of broken diplomatic relations with Cuba and Iran. The basic American preference for overarching doctrines in foreign policy and dominance of structure over agency as the elemental assumption of prevailing IR theory are closely related. American IR theory has never exhibited much interest in analyzing diplomacy as a significant potential factor determining outcomes in international politics. The universalism and transhistoricism associated with the New Diplomacy are at odds with the historically contingent character of social enterprises conditioned by changing interests and circumstances. IR theory and the New Diplomacy came of age in the immediate aftermath of World War I and held similar assumptions about the way the world functioned and how international dynamics could be understood.