Speaking at the Munich Security Conference recently, newly elected U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden promised what he referred to as a "new tone" for American foreign policy. This change, according to Biden, is a necessity because, "While every new beginning is a moment of hope, this moment for America ... is fraught with concern and peril." From this starting point, Biden announced that the U.S. would seek to strengthen relations with other nations, promote international co-operation and reach out to nations like Iran and Russia, both of which tend to ignore American efforts at intimidation and threat.

The interesting point about Biden's calls for change in U.S. foreign policy is that this sort of approach is not new at all. What the Obama administration is in fact trying to do, is return to the stable nature of international order that has existed since the end of the Cold War. The audacity of hope is actually a desire for the status quo.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, relations between nation-states have been relatively stable. There have been no major wars, little interstate conflict and perhaps most importantly, increased co-operation among international society. These relations have been a welcome surprise to many observers after fifty years of tension, uncertainty and threat of nuclear war that dominated the conflict between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. It was almost impossible to foresee a transition from Cold War anxiety to an era of order and constancy. Yet, this is exactly what has happened within the system of states.

This does not mean that the world is at peace, of course. There has been a rise in conflicts within nations, like Somalia, Rwanda, Sudan, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and a variety of others. In each of these situations, many lives have been lost and the world has witnessed the worst forms of evil. Even so, the relations between states have been mostly predictable and co-operative, which has allowed for greater attention to be paid to these other civil conflicts which affect human security. Perhaps the greatest threat to this post-Cold War order, however, came in the form of the Bush Doctrine in the aftermath of 9/11.

The Republican neoconservative movement in the U.S., which was exemplified by president George W. Bush, felt that the moment was right in the international system after 9/11 to spread democracy, human rights and American notions of freedom. It is understandable to see how Bush came to this conclusion in an era where many onlookers were calling for greater attention to human rights and security, humanitarian intervention and a UN system that paid greater attention to people rather than the countries which comprised it. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, seemed to highlight for Bush and his senior advisers that this was the time for a change in foreign policy creation, which led to the introduction of the Bush Doctrine in 2001 and the promotion of foreign interventions.

Prior to the Bush Doctrine, the international system of states, established in 1648 under the Peace of Westphalia, was ordered by rules such as the independence of states, the right to sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention. These mutually accepted rules governed the system and kept states in a sort of stable balance with each other. The balancing behaviour of states was exemplified throughout the Cold War, as these systemic rules kept the Cold War from becoming a nuclear holocaust.

9/11 did represent a threat to the stability of the system, as it became apparent that the U.S. was under attack, but the immediate response was focused on an internationally sanctioned mission to invade Afghanistan. This mission was not driven by the American quest to liberate the Afghan people in its initial articulations. Instead, the operation in Afghanistan was done according to the traditional conception of collective security, whereby a member of NATO, in this case the U.S., was attacked; under the NATO constitution, the other members of the alliance have the legal right to retaliate against those who initiated the attack. NATO and the U.S. could not simply attack al-Qaida; they were forced to choose a state which they felt embodied the funding, training and support for groups like al-Qaida, namely Afghanistan.

The considerations of international law, collective security and sovereignty did not play a role in the American calculations as to whether Iraq should be invaded. Instead, the new values and norms promoted by the Bush Doctrine dictated that Iraq was a legitimate target for intervention, even if weapons of mass destruction did not exist.

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the world has seen the failures, costs and dangers of a foreign policy strategy which denies the rules of the international system and that aims to rebuild nations in a democracy-loving way. The U.S. sacrificed its global economic, military and political superiority and has gained absolutely nothing in return. Iraq is no closer now to democracy than it was in the immediate aftermath of the ousting of Saddam Hussein, there has been a marked rise in anti-American sentiment both within Iraq and throughout the world, and the U.S. can no longer think of itself as a superpower in any sense of the word.

When President Obama, Vice-President Biden, Secretary of State Clinton or any other member of the new administration speak of a supposedly "new" approach to foreign policy, it is important to see the larger picture. America may be willing to use its diplomatic and rhetorical strength to influence foreign governments and non-state actors to do their bidding, but the ultimate goal is for the U.S. to return to its place as a sovereignty-respecting and responsible member of international society. This sort of role would be very close to what the world saw during the Clinton administration, where democracy was heavily promoted but not physically instituted outside the realm of international law and alliance-based mission deployment, as in the case of the former Yugoslavia (which, in itself, can be considered a failed nation-building experiment as well).

Biden's "new tone" sounds remarkably familiar, and so it should. Under the current economic conditions plaguing the U.S. and the world, the best thing America can do for itself and the society of states is to talk the talk, and only walk the walk if it is sanctioned by international law, supported by a wide array of allies and not a utopian quest to build nations in America's own image.

Robert Murray is a SSHRC doctoral fellow in the department of political science at the University of Alberta