Foreign Policy Choices Research Articles

International restraints and foreign policy choices: British behavior in military situations, 1931–1941

Most scholars characterize the 1930's as the era of appeasement in British diplomatic history. In this study Simon‐Blalock causal modelling techniques and path analysis are used to compare British conflict behavior in military confrontations with Germany, Italy, and Japan between 1931 and 1941. In these conflicts, British decision makers did not pursue continuous appeasement tactics toward any of the three Axis dictatorships. Instead, changing perceptions of cross pressures, military capabilities, and diplomatic stakes account for variations in the intensity of British conflict behavior and its potential for radical escalation. The relationships among these variables form either additive or developmental causal models, depending upon whether British behavior is analyzed collectively for the entire decade or disaggregated into shorter time frames and toward different nations. Within the same decade the other Great Powers appear to have responded comparably to similar international restraints. These causal ...

The Impact of Economic Conditions on Presidential Popularity

THIS RESEARCH NOTE presents some preliminary considerations building toward a theory of presidential popularity as it explores the possible impact of economic conditions on the popularity of chief executives from Eisenhower to Nixon. It does not treat other forces such as war, corruption, and domestic violence, and is meant to be suggestive, not definitive. More specifically, it is concerned with the choice and measurement of economic variables to be used, if any. In the most systematic and imaginative study of presidential popularity to date, John E. Mueller examined economic slump (in percentage unemployed) as one of four explanatory variables along with coalition-of-minorities, rally-round-the-flag, and war in a

The academy on Japanese foreign policy

Japan's foreign policy was all but totally ignored by American scholars and politicians alike through the late 1960s. The recent rash of English-language publishing on the subject, therefore, amounting to at least thirteen major monographs since 1970, is itself an occurrence worthy of note. Well-known works on U.S. foreign policy of the Kennedy and Johnson years (Schlesinger's Thousand Days, Hilsman's To Move a Nation, Walton's Cold War and Counterrevolution, LBJ's Vantage Point, and others) fail to devote even one single paragraph to the role expected of Japan under America's order in the Pacific. And the first five volumes of this Bulletin (1969-73) contain only four articles about current Japanese foreign affairs, three of them by the same author, Herb Bix. Were it not for Bix, John Dower, Pacific Imperialism Notebook, and the AMPO Collective in Tokyo, the anti-imperialist wing of American Asian Studies as well would be guilty of a most serious oversight. Now, however, it appears the halycon era of Tokyo's passive free-riding “low posture” is coming to a close. Foreign sectors of both the American and Japanese economies are growing. Competition between the two economies is increasing, especially for limited fuel and raw material resources around the world. The Nixon Doctrine is selectively curtailing the U.S. military presence in Asia. China is expanding its diplomatic capacity in the region, even to the extent of pursuing detente with America. And Tokyo is finally being presented with some real foreign policy choices. The Pacific “Anglo-Saxon lake” may not yet have changed into a multipolar ocean, since the U.S.-Japan alliance remains the defining diplomatic relationship in East Asian international relations. But the whole scene is less predictable now than at any previous time during the postwar Cold War decades. And once again the academic world has responded to emergent international conflict by producing an imposing quantity of policy-oriented writing.

Analysis and foreign policy choice

Analysis and foreign policy choice

Elite Images and Foreign Policy Choices: Krishna Menon's View of the World

FOREIGN POLICY may be viewed as a system of action. Like all social systems it comprises an environment, a group of actors, structures through which the units of behaviour respond to challenges and initiate decisions, and processes which sustain or alter the flow of demands and products of the system as a whole. It is possible-indeed it is necessary for rigorous analysis of foreign policy--to explore the content and interrelations of these key variables: environment, actors, structures, and processes, all placed within a framework of demands on policy or inputs, and products of policy or outputs. The complexity and yet comparability of foreign policy behaviour emerge from a brief exposition of the construct of a foreign policy system, universally valid in time and space. This will be elaborated and explored in depth elsewhere.' The essentials may be noted here in order to relate the empirical data of the writer's dialogue with Krishna Menon2 to a theoretical frame of reference. This will not only enrich the value of his recollections and reflections as a primary source but will also enable us, through an analysis of one facet of a foreign policy system, to illustrate the kind of research which is now essential and possible if the study of foreign policy is to progress beyond the bounds of historical survey and to induce rigorous comparative analysis and efforts at prediction worthy of a discipline. A foreign policy system may be likened to a flow into and out of a network of structures which perform certain functions and thereby produce acts or decisions or outputs. These, in turn, feed back into the system in a ceaseless flow of Demands on Policy (Inputs), Policy Process, and Products of Policy (Outputs). In all systems of foreign policy there are six basic