American Foreign Policy - A Framework for Analysis

How can students best understand the ideas that animate U.S. foreign policy decisions and the processes that facilitate them? How can they come to terms with the motivations that guide these decision makers? In his distinctive new text, William O. Chittick identifies three value orientations--security, economic, and community--that fundamentally shape U.S. foreign policy choices. Chittick argues that it’s not enough to look at only one of these dimensions--security, in the case of most traditional texts--or even one at a time. Instead, he makes a cogent and convincing case for the systematic study of all three and explains why privileging any one dimension over another leads to oversimplification and faulty decision making. Once students are shown how these value orientations work together in complex and interesting ways, they in turn can bring richer, more insightful analysis to the field.

Chittick applies the book’s cohesive analytical framework throughout,