Idealpolitik in United States foreign policy: The Reagan administration and the United States promotion of democracy

This dissertation examines the Reagan Administration's foreign policy, with attention to its policy of promoting democracy abroad, and the ideological underpinnings of that policy. It concludes that the Reagan Administration's worldview was neither realist nor idealist, but represents a third construct which the dissertation names idealpolitik. Idealpolitik offers another analytic framework, in addition to realism and idealism, with which to analyze foreign policy. The roots of idealpolitik can be found in NSC 68 and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) political action programs carried out between 1948 and 1976, but the Reagan Administration's democracy promotion policy constitutes a more coherent rendering of this worldview.;Traditionally, U.S. foreign policy analyses assume that realism is both the operating paradigm of policymakers and the appropriate analytic lens for understanding U.S. policy. There has been an occasional, dismissive nod given to idealism, relegating it to Woodrow Wilson's discredited approach, but as this dissertation shows, a more recent president, Jimmy Carter, embraced idealism. This dissertation demonstrates that neither realism nor idealism adequately describes the Reagan Administration's worldview, but that idealpolitik does. The significance of this dissertation lies in its identification of idealpolitik as a distinctive framework through which U.S. foreign policy has been conceptualized by policymakers. This is particularly important and timely because idealpolitik continues to offer the best description of the worldviews of the Administrations that have followed Reagan.;A comparative case study approach is used to examine the ideological framework adopted by the Reagan Administration and to contrast it to the two alternate worldviews (realism and idealism) that were manifest in the Nixon and Carter Administrations, respectively. The Reagan Administration's democracy promotion initiative, and a new foreign policy vehicle called the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that was created to carry out Reagan's policy, are examined in detail. For comparative purposes, the NED's antecedents, i.e., CIA covert activities of previous Administrations, are also reviewed.