This thesis adds to our understanding of American foreign policy and conflicts in the history of the United States through the use of the Wilsonian framework. This is an important topic because the United States is the single most important actor in international relations and its decisions have far reaching consequences. This thesis makes a unique contribution to the literature on the understanding of the decisions by the United States to go to war. It does this by emphasising that the Wilsonian framework has been overlooked in our understanding of these conflicts and can be used to give a more complete picture of the conflicts discussed. By using wars across the history of the United States this thesis shows that this framework is applicable independent of the power the United States possesses.

This thesis examines the history of the Yale Institute of International Studies from 1935 to 1951. The key Yale Institute members were Nicholas J. Spykman, Frederick S. Dunn, Arnold Wolfers, Percy E. Corbett, William T. R. Fox, David N. Rowe, Bernard Brodie, Klaus Knorr and Gabriel Almond. The Institute pioneered the study of international relations in the United States during the interwar period based on a realist-behaviourist approach. The Institute was part of the postwar American foreign policy establishment and it helped to reshape United States foreign policy by coordinating it with military policies and strategies and promoting the linkage of political goals with military means. Also, through their activities in the study of international relations the Yale group helped to fight the isolationist mood endemic to American society and to establish globalism as a central feature of American relations with the rest of the world. In this way, their educational and research programmes overlapped with some of the key elements of the new national security ideology that was to become dominant during the Cold War. The Yale Institute was not solely responsible for the development of this new ideology. They had the collaboration of academics from Princeton (Edward M. Earle, Harold Sprout, and Jacob Viner) and Columbia (Grayson Kirk and Philip Jessup) universities and received considerable financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, which was in part responsible for the Institute's foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and business At the higher levels of state power the Yale group worked closely, at particular periods of its history, with the State Department on international organization issues, and with the War Department on strategic doctrines and on the foundation of the National War College. Although the Institute did not influence any critical decision, examination of the archival material researched shows that the Institute's work and knowledge helped the state decision-makers to inform their opinions and to take decisions. Hence the national security policy relied not only on a series of incremental decisions made by policymakers in the absence of alternative policy choices, and pressed by historical events, but also on the slow transformation of American elite worldviews, to which the Yale Institute contributed. The Yale Institute gave rise to an intellectual movement that was to dominate postwar American academe. They trained future generations of prominent politicians, military officials and leading academics in international affairs, and they founded the journal World Politics, among other initiatives they took in the development of the academic study of international relations. The thesis tests four theoretical models: pluralism, corporatism, statism and the Gramscian perspective. It concludes that Gramsci's theory of power comes closest to explaining the Yale Institute's role in the construction of the United States national security ideology during the early Cold War.

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This thesis argues that America's national ideological history is crucially relevant to understanding the Bush administration's resistance to thinking about international order in the balance-of-power terms prescribed by realists. Bush pursued a world order based on the assumption of an underlying harmony of interests and the universal validity of an idealised conception of American liberal political values. He also sought an indefinitely sustainable American primacy in terms of hard power. The thesis argues that this strategy, despite some suggestions that it was 'revolutionary', was in fact the latest evolution of long-established trends in American internationalism. The thesis seeks to make the case that a nation's foreign policy strategy is the product of interaction between national/international circumstances and an evolved national culture or 'character' reflecting embedded ideological principles developed over the course of that nation's history. Thus, it suggests, American internationalism has particularities that can only be fully understood through awareness of the United States' ideological journey over the course of its history to a posture of global engagement. The thesis uses analysis of five key periods to make its argument for the relevance of ideological history, starting with the Founders' Era and proceeding through presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman before concluding with the Bush administration. It argues that the ideological cast given to America's pursuit of its interests in the early decades of independence impacted upon the nation's 20th Century leaders' construction of their arguments justifying the transition to international engagement. As a result, rather than contentedly entering into the existing Europe-dominated world order based on 'the balance of power', US leaders made America's internationalism conditional on the pursuit of a new world order reflecting the ideas of liberal universalism and military might in the service of 'civilisation'.

The United States' record of participation in international institutions is paradoxical. No country has done more to promote the creation of new institutions. Yet the US has also failed to join some of the very institutions it has proposed, or has joined them only after making changes that leave the institutions substantially weaker. The ultimate rejection of the League of Nations, which America's own president had conceived and championed, is the classic example of this phenomenon; and nearly a century later, it remains one of the great puzzles of American foreign relations. This thesis proposes a novel explanation of the League defeat, showing the decisive influence of an idea from the country's constitutional tradition: the doctrine of checks and balances. According to this idea, power must be distributed across separate institutions in such a way as to give them overlapping jurisdictions and thus the capacity to restrain one another from going beyond their assigned limits. While President Woodrow Wilson, a proponent of British constitutionalism, considered the safeguards in the League plan sufficient, senators schooled in the American tradition of checks and balances objected to the plan's consolidation of power, arguing that it would inevitably lead to abuses of discretion. The difficulty of reconciling checks and balances with the inherent limitations of international delegation represents an enduring dilemma for American foreign policy-a dilemma made all the more poignant by the strategic value of international institutions. As the analysis of key cases reveals, the concern of US officials to avoid concentrations of power explains the country's rejection of the International Criminal Court, its scaling back of plans for the United Nations, and its second thoughts about joining the World Trade Organization. An ideational commitment has thus made it difficult for the US to convert its superpower status into lasting institutional form.

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This thesis argues that American exceptionalism is a necessary, but insufficient, way of reading U.S. foreign policy. Exceptionalism is employed by different ideologists in different ways and in differing contexts. This thesis employs the contextualist methodology of Quentin Skinner to challenge proleptic, static understandings of American exceptionalism and, in doing so, uncovers American grand strategy as a keenly contested ideological battleground. In each constituent case study, the thesis identifies the ideological innovators of American strategic policy and the key moments of ideological innovation, and examines why ideological innovations became conventional, or not. The analysis proceeds with an introduction to the composition of grand strategy, continues with an examination of Quentin Skinner’s version of Cambridge School contextual analysis, and then places Skinnerian contextualism within the broader framework of International Relations theory. This analysis illustrates the methodological advantage of Skinnerian contextualism, which allows the reconstruction of the context in which past generations of ideological innovators operated and conceived of the world and the place of the United States within it. This specific type of analysis demonstrates ideological innovation in practice at four pivotal moments in American foreign policy: first, the emergence of containment as the cornerstone of the Truman Doctrine at the outset of the Cold War; second, détente and the supposed injection of realism into American foreign policy; third, President Clinton’s strategy of enlargement and the place of American exceptionalism in the aftermath of the Cold War; and, fourth, the Bush Doctrine and the interaction between American exceptionalism and neoconservatism. The thesis concludes by stressing the particularities of historical context, having demonstrated that, although exceptionalism has rarely been the only causal dynamic of American grand strategy, it has consistently provided the context with which innovating ideologists have been required to engage in order to create their own version of grand strategy.

Since the end of the Cold War private military companies––conflict entrepreneurs that kill or train others to kill, typically in foreign lands––have proliferated at an alarming rate. Curiously, the primary consumer of this new service are not weak states looking to consolidate their monopoly of force (although this has happened) but strong states like the United States of America, which possesses the greatest monopoly of force in the world. This thesis examines how and why this has occurred. The reappearance of private military actors is also a harbinger of a wider trend in international relations: the emergence of neomedievalism. The erosion of the taboo against mercenarism signals a return to the preWestphalian norm of the Middle Ages, when states did not enjoy the monopoly of force and subsequent special authority in world politics. Instead, the medieval system was polycentric in nature with authority diluted and shared among state and non-state actors alike. Because the return to the status quo ante of the Middle Ages is occurring worldwide, it is best described as 'globalised neomedievalism'. Globalised neomedievalism is a non-state-centric and multipolar world order characterized by overlapping authorities and allegiances on a local and global scale. It does not imply worldwide atavism. States will not disappear, but will matter less than they did a century ago. Nor does neomedievalism connote chaos and anarchy; the global system will persist in a durable disorder that contains rather than solves problems. A key challenge of neomedievalism is the commodification of conflict: offering the means of war to anyone who can afford it will change warfare, why we fight and the future of war. The implications of this are enormous since it suggests that international relations in the twenty-first century will have more in common with the twelfth century than the twentieth.