Trends in US Foreign Policy in the Late 20th – First Quarter of the 21st Centuries: A Conceptual Aspect

Abstract

This article analyses trends in US foreign policy of the late 20th and first decades of the 21st centuries as a major factor influencing modern geopolitics. The problem is considered in the theoretical aspect and in the historical-political retrospect, from the 1990s to the present day. The subject of the analysis is the stages of the formation of the foreign policy doctrine upheld by the USA in international relations. For the 1990s, the paper studies the doctrines asserting hegemony and unipolarity as the goals of US foreign policy in the geopolitical realities that took shape after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The period of 2000s – 2010s was, according to the author, a time of transformation in US foreign policy: from the adoption after September 11, 2001 of the so-called Bush Doctrine, giving the USA rights to launch preventive strikes and make interventions against states suspected of cooperation with international terrorist organizations, to the idea of abandoning claims to global hegemony and attempts to normalize relations with Russia (“reset” policy) and China (the Group of Two) during Barack Obama’s presidency. The final part of the article examines the period of Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s presidencies, when the USA returned to the idea of global hegemony, based on the ideological thesis that the USA is the leader of the free world opposing the world of autocracies, whose leaders are Russia and China. According to the author, the current situation reproduces the realities of the Cold War, with the confrontation between the USA as the “defender of the free world” and the USSR as the founder of the world communism movement. The author concludes by attempting to determine the reasons for the transformations in US foreign policy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries as well as to give a forecast of its development trends.