To recapitulate, policy is viewed as a guide or plan of action centered around a set of goals or objectives that are enunciated by those with the authority to commit the resources of the U.S. government; as such, policy provides a role for interpreting what is happening as well as for delimiting the range of actions that appear feasible for achieving a particular goal and representing a set of values in the current context. Policy becomes foreign in orientation when it is directed toward entities outside one’s borders or jurisdiction or, as noted above, when it is focused on goals and objectives that “the nation’s officials seek to attain abroad.” Some examples of U.S. foreign policy actions that reflect this definition are containment, the “enlargement and engagement” focus of the Clinton administration, and the guides for intervention often referred to as the Weinberger and Powell Doctrines.
Continuity vs. Change in U.S. Foreign Policy
Opinion and scholarship seem to differ with regard to how consistent American foreign policy is and has been across time. Some scholars have argued that there is consistency in American foreign policy—that U.S. foreign policy is both reflective of and contributes to the exceptionalism inherent in American history .Originating most tangibly with de Tocqueville’s (1835) observations, American exceptionalism is represented in the notion that the United States inherited a “special spiritual and political destiny” – that the U.S. is a shining become of liberty to the rest of the world. The argument goes that American exceptionalism remains a dominant component of American national identity and by extension is promoted through its foreign policy, embracing as it does the language of the nation’s founding document : liberty, democracy, and independence(Huntington 1993)