ABSTRACT
Having mapped and analyzed the (corporate) elite networks in which the grand-strategy makers of the three post-Cold War administrations have been embedded in the preceding chapter, we pick up our narrative from Chapter 2 by examining how the first post-Cold War president and his team sought to make use of the opportunity that was offered by the collapse of the Soviet Union to prolong and indeed intensify the third, neoliberal, wave of non-territorial expansionism that had already set in following the 1970s recessions under Reagan. Steeped into the Wilsonian tradition of liberal internationalism of not only the Democratic Party but also more broadly American twentieth-century foreign policy (see Chapter 2), and influenced by those forces within the (Democratic) foreign policy establishment that favored both a hawkish and assertive foreign policy as well as an unequivocal commitment to opening and deepening global markets, Clinton, this chapter will argue, embarked upon what we will call a grand strategy of neoliberal globalization in which the global Open Door was not only defended but indeed expanded into former enemy territory.
