서강대학교

초록/요약

Due to the major role that the U.S. plays in international relations, there have been heated debates over whether U.S. foreign policy strategy is unilateralist or multilateralist in nature. In this respect, this thesis explores the causes of the unilateralist inclination of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. While the majority of scholars argue that the neoconservative elites were the main source of the unilateralism of the Bush administration, some experts point out that U.S. unilateralism has to be traced to the structural effects of the end of the Cold War. This thesis demonstrates that an explanation consisting of internal factors of policy makers alone would be a superficial analysis of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Rather, international structural forces of external factors provide a deeper level of explanation about unilateralism during the Bush administration. This claim is evidenced by analysis comparing the Cold War and post-Cold War eras through the analytical framework of the levels of analysis and case analysis. The systemic changes, especially the emergence of a unipolar system, increased the tendency for the U.S. government to adopt unilateralist foreign policy. Considering the external factors of international structural forces, they provide a broad explanation on the foreign policy approaches of the U.S. administrations after the Cold War era, from the Clinton administration to Obama administration.