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National Security in Foreign Policy

Satisfactory Essays

• Foreign policy definition: a set of political goals that aims to outline how a particular state will interact with others
• Beach (2012): Foreign policy actions can be undertaken using a variety of different instruments, ranging from adopting declarations, making speeches, negotiating treaties, giving other states economic aid, engaging in diplomatic activity such as summits, and the use of military force
• No matter which instruments are used, the primary objective of states in outlining their foreign policies is to maximise their national security.
• States can go about maximising national security through different means such as by military force, economic prosperity and/or the general welfare of its people.
• Difficult to analyse to what extent national security is a primary objective of states – theories of IR will help explain states’ motives and how they go about maximising state security, if it is their prime objective at all.
• This essay will analyse the concept of national security through realism (focused on military power), liberalism (focused on cooperation through liberal internationalism) and constructivism (focused on wider definitions of security, such as health and the environment).

A. Realism

1. Core principles of realist view of national security
• For realists, the concept of national security is an effective balancing of external threats.
• The realist tradition of IR theory is said to have stemmed from the work of Thomas Hobbes, where he

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