The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower

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Notes

1 Previous works offered a much more limited analysis. See Joyce Kaufman, A Concise History of U.S. Foreign Policy, Fourth Edition (Lanham, 2017); or Jerald Combs, The History of American Foreign Policy from 1895, Fourth Edition (London, 2015).

2 Mandelbaum explained power in international relations in one of his earlier books, The Fate of Nations (New York, 1988).

3 Michael Mandelbaum, Mission Failure (New York, 2016).

4 Hilde Eliassen Restad, “Old Paradigms in History Die Hard in Political Science: US Foreign Policy and American Exceptionalism,” American Political Thought, I:1 (May 2012), 53–76; Charles Kupchan, “The Clash of Exceptionalisms: A New Fight Over an Old Idea,” Foreign Affairs, XCVII:2 (March–April, 2018), 139–48.

5 Nicholas Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (New York, 2008); Eytan Gilboa (ed.), A Research Agenda for Public Diplomacy (Cheltenham, 2023).

6 This pattern is compatible with the theory Paul Kennedy presented in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1989). 

7 Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (Boston, 2018). For criticism and other views see Richard Hanania, “Graham Allison and the Thucydides Trap Myth,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, XV:4 (Winter 2021), 13–24; and Dong Wang and Travis Tanner (eds.), Avoiding the ‘Thucydides Trap’: U.S.–China Relations in Strategic Domains (New York, 2021).