ABSTRACT
Incongruity has been the only seeming constant in America’s approach to international affairs from the end of the Cold War to the ongoing Global War on Terror. American determinations in the Global War on Terror have engendered increased geopolitical insecurity, warranted scrutiny, and geostrategic risk. Informed by an ethical commitment with a cosmopolitan purpose, this chapter provides an overview of American foreign policy from the beginning of the twenty-first century to the present. It argues that America’s security practices in the Global War on Terror have been guided by an anachronistic Cold War logic that has resulted in the degeneration of strategy into tactics in a misguided attempt to fight a transnational terrorist threat to security in state-centric terms. To test these claims, the chapter assesses the two most predominant foreign policy models in historically contingent practices: neo-conservatism as it pertains to the Iraq War and liberal interventionism as it relates to the Arab Spring.
