Puzzled by the disjunction between global trends and US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, mostly American scholars of political science, law, and economics explore the causes and consequences of US ambivalence to multilateral cooperation. They consider such dimensions as the growing influence of domestic factors, US grand strategy, the chemical weapons convention, and the International Criminal Court. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The authors explore international reactions to U.S. conduct in world affairs.

This book examines the place of multilateralism in Russia’s foreign policy and Russia’s engagement with multilateral institutions. Throughout the post-Soviet period, both Yeltsin and Putin consistently professed a deep attachment to the principles of multilateralism. However, multilateralism as a value, concept, strategy or general phenomenon in Russian foreign policy has hitherto been neglected by scholars, seldom assessed in its own right or from a comparative perspective. This book fills that gap, combining wider conceptual perspectives on the place of multilateralism in Russian foreign policy thought and action with detailed empirical case studies of Russian engagement at the global, transatlantic and European levels, and also in Russia’s regional environment. It examines Russia’s role and relationship with the UN, NATO, G8, EU, OSCE, Arctic Council, Eurasian Economic Community, Commonwealth of Independent States, Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Collective Security Treaty Organization, covering a wide range of issue areas including nuclear non-proliferation and trade. Throughout, it considers the political, economic and security interests that shape Russia’ foreign relations, conception of multilateralism and activity in multilateral settings. Overall, this book is an important resource for anyone interested in Russian foreign policy and its role in international relations more generally.

Trust in International Cooperation challenges conventional wisdoms concerning the part which trust plays in international cooperation and the origins of American multilateralism. Brian C. Rathbun questions rational institutionalist arguments, demonstrating that trust precedes rather than follows the creation of international organizations. Drawing on social psychology, he shows that individuals placed in the same structural circumstances show markedly different propensities to cooperate based on their beliefs about the trustworthiness of others. Linking this finding to political psychology, Rathbun explains why liberals generally pursue a more multilateral foreign policy than conservatives, evident in the Democratic Party's greater support for a genuinely multilateral League of Nations, United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Rathbun argues that the post-World War Two bipartisan consensus on multilateralism is a myth, and differences between the parties are growing continually starker.

This edited volume offers a timely examination of one of the most crucial and controversial questions in international relations, namely should states adopt a unilateral or multilateral approach to contemporary security challenges?

The book provides a novel analytical perspective on regional multilateralism in South Asia and its neighbouring regions and covers the genesis, evolution and status quo of the four major regional organizations.

NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War re-examines the origins and implementation of NSC 68, the massive rearmament program that the United States embarked upon beginning in the summer of 1950. Curt Cardwell reinterprets the origins of NSC 68 to demonstrate that the aim of the program was less about containing communism than ensuring the survival of the nascent postwar global economy, upon which rested postwar US prosperity. The book challenges most studies on NSC 68 as a document of geostrategy and argues instead that it is more correctly understood as a document rooted in concerns for the US domestic political economy.