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Abstract

US foreign policy has a largely unacknowledged racial dimension due to the racial characteristics of the US foreign policy establishment, and in shared mindsets in a soon-to-be ‘majority-minority’ nation. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) racial-ethnic and class factors produce managed change through socialisation in an attenuated meritocratic order, adapting to challenges to elite dominance by incorporating rising talent, without altering broader patterns of power. The greatest success of such a system would be the assimilation of the most elite minority individuals, even as the bulk of those groups’ members continue to experience discrimination. Such success would be compounded by election to the highest office of a minority US president extolling the virtues of post-racial politics. President Barack Obama represents a ‘Wasp-ified’ black elite, assimilated into the extant structures of power that remain wedded to a more secular, non-biologically-racial, version of Anglo-Saxonism or, more broadly, liberal internationalism. Hence, it should occasion little surprise that there has been so little change in US foreign policies.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in International Politics. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Parmar, I. & Ledwidge, M. (2017). ... ‘a foundation-hatched black’: Obama, the US Establishment, and Foreign Policy. International Politics, 54(3), pp. 373-388. doi: 10.1057/s41311-017-0035-y is available online at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41311-017-0035-y.
Publisher Keywords:	race; establishment; Anglo-Saxon; WASP; liberal internationalism; elite socialisation
Subjects:	J Political Science > JK Political institutions (United States)
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs > International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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