American Foreign Policy: Where Are We Headed?

Think back to the 1970s: the end of the Vietnam War, inflation, America’s rust-belt factories going bust, disco, a stagnant Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, intense global poverty in populous places like Communist China. Now look around today, 40+ years later: the Soviet Union is long gone and Russia has a large middle class, led by strongman Vladimir Putin, a villain straight out of Hollywood central casting. Now China is the world’s great economic dynamo. And here at home we have a new Commander-in-Chief with very different attitudes towards the rest of the world than the Presidents who came before him.What happened? How should we understand these changes? How might things look another 40 years hence? Does this portend a decline in American power and influence? Is America’s place in the world, in fact, changing? Should it change? Or, is this just a temporary phenomenon, overhyped, a marketing slogan? Might China instead crash? Is Russia set for further reversals, too? What are the real strengths and weaknesses of China, Russia and our own United States? More broadly, what lessons can we draw from these cases about global geopolitics and the world in which our children and grandchildren will inherit?

Stephen Kotkin / Princeton University
Stephen Kotkin is the John P. Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton. Professor Kotkin established the department’s Global History workshop. He serves on the core editorial committee of the journal, World Politics. He founded and edits a book series on Northeast Asia. From 2003 until 2007, he was a member and then chair of the editorial board at Princeton University Press, and is a regular book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business section.