Abstract:

The attacks taken place on September 11, 2001 went down in history as a day that the world changed for the U.S. and the U.S. people. In the wake of these attacks, during which more than three thousand civilians died, the U.S. foreign policy understanding went through a radical change. During this new period, when the principles and priorities of foreign policy changed to a large extent, George W. Bush and his team started to adopt a more aggressive and unilateral orientation. The objective of this study is to make a theoretical analysis of the U.S. foreign policy understanding of the Bush Era, a period of radical change in foreign policy. We will try to carry out this analysis based on the “grand unified theory”, in which Jack Snyder synthesized hypotheses from three grand theories of international relations and over- expansionism. We argue that Snyder’s theory, which he used to explain the foreign policy understanding of Hitler’s Germany, is the most successful theory in explaining the tendency of the U.S. foreign policy restructured after the September 11 attacks.

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