The Clinton administration's conversion from indifference, or even skepticism of NATO, to insistence on NATO expansion was the result of a combination of disparate events and pressures.
One of the many consequences of communism's collapse is disarray in the conceptual structures of American foreign policy. Without a clear focal point, one-time hawks now flap like doves, while erstwhile doves behave like birds of prey. The strateg
America has at times oriented itself to the East, at others to the West. But what we have always had is a sense of our manifest destiny. And now the ideals of California—nihilism with a suntan—seem to be our primary ideological export.
Marxists are not alone in stressing that the wellsprings of a state's foreign policy almost always come from its domestic social, economic, and political systems, a perspective that has been reinforced by the recent arguments.
