ABSTRACT
Despite prevalent domestic and international expectations of America’s global role, the U.S. is increasingly polarized at home about how to lead abroad. This chapter introduces domestic polarization to the study of U.S. foreign policy analysis and the U.S. global leadership role. With the bipartisanship consensus in the foreign policy realm rapidly declining since the end of the Cold War, the question has become to what extent ideological polarization shapes foreign policy elites’ conceptions of America’s global role; how polarization affects the foreign policymaking process; and finally, how polarization impacts U.S. international leadership-role taking. Contemporary scholarship has produced a rich literature on the sources of U.S. global leadership and the prospects of its sustainability. The chapter argues that leadership is best understood as a social role that is interactionist, inter-subjective, and dialectic. Three social effects are derived from the polarization scholarship for the making and enactment of U.S. global leadership: a sorting effect for the domestic distribution of role conceptions; a partisan warfare effect for the domestic role relationship between the legislative and executive branch; and an institutional corrosion effect concerning the institutional authority of the executive branch to enact international roles.
