The Quiet Clinton Military Intervention Analysis

The Clinton (Democrat) administration’s military intervention foreign policy is in the ‘half-out’ category due to Clinton’s policies of “hegemony on the cheap” (“The Quiet Clinton Era of the 1990s: A Liberal Internationalist Strategy for Unipolarity?”) which emphasized multilateralism and avoided conflicts in which the U.S. had little to no interests, but wanted to “preserve an American-centered order” (“The Quiet Clinton Era”). Clinton wanted to maintain the status quo of the American unipolar power structure that occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union (“The Quiet Clinton Era”). On Clinton’s policy on military intervention, the general goal was to act as a regional stabilizer (“The Quiet Clinton Era”) but to avoid engagements in conflicts and areas that “posed little threat to American interests, narrowly defined” (Power 396). This quote is from Samantha Power’s article on the Clinton administration’s lack of response to the Rwandan genocide, a place with little significance to American regional politics. However, the …show more content…
In order to further prove that this distinction is faulty, I will also compare same-party presidential foreign policy dealing with military intervention. The Republicans include Eisenhower, Nixon, and George W. Bush. While both Nixon and Bush were secretive—Nixon in his Russian, Chinese, and general diplomacy and Bush in his fabricated connection between Saddam Hussein and the events of 9/11—Nixon utilized diplomacy more often than military, rather than Bush who did the opposite. While Eisenhower told the people of his time that every modern heavy bomber had a large opportunity cost for the American people (Jablonsky 8), Bush spent trillions on foreign wars as well as encouraged the American people to spend their money. Both Republican presidents had different ideas about where the American taxpayer’s money should