The Foreign Political Discourse in the United Kingdom and the United States in the New World Order

The goal of this book is to examine some of the major foreign policy debates in the United Kingdom and the United States in the period from 1992 to 2008: from the end of the Cold War and the aftermath of the first Gulf War to the 2008 American presidential election. The first President Bush spoke in 1991 of a 'new world order' - which seemed to mean an American hegemony. The United States was now the world's only superpower, although a superpower afflicted with weaknesses, especially economic ones. But by 2008 the 'new world order' did not seem so new or so strongly American. The period saw the terrorist attacks against the U.S. of 11 September 2001, military problems for the superpower in Afghanistan and Iraq and, by the summer of 2008, near economic collapse. In all of these developments, Britain shared to a lesser or a greater extent. It is hoped that this book will shed an important light both on each nation and on the so-called 'special relationship' between the two. Furthermore, this book is also not specifically concerned with policy or how policy is made but with the debate around policy and the rhetoric used to present different points of view.