Foreign Policy Experts Research Articles

L’administration Carter et la Corne de l’Afrique : anatomie d’un renversement d’alliances américano-soviétiques.

Faced with an ever-expanding Soviet and Cuban sphere of influence on the African continent, the Carter Administration could not but place the 1977 Somali invasion of the Ethiopian province of the Ogaden on its Cold War agenda. Beyond the specific evolutions and revolutions inherent to the Horn of Africa, Jimmy Carter's foreign policy experts extended their advice across the entire political spectrum, from devout isolationist creeds to an all-out globalist interventionism, and finally spurred a reversal of alliances which took the Ogaden desert by storm.

Parallel event sequences in international crises

This study presents a theory of foreign policy decision-making based on event structures that would account for the ability of foreign policy experts to make short-term predictions in the presence of incomplete information and noise. An algorithm is devised that constructs subsequences of events that occur in international crises coded in the Behavioral Correlates of War (BCOW) data set. Four subsets of BCOW crises are considered: nonwar crises, pre-World War I wars, post-World War I wars, and a mixture of nonwar and war crises. About six common subsequences are found in each of the sets; these cover about 35% of the events in the crisis sequences after the sequences have been filtered on the basis of novelty. The subsequences differ substantially between the subsets of crises and exhibit a degree of internal consistency. The subsequences also can be used to differentiate between nonwar and war crises by using the fit of each subsequence to construct a vector characterizing the crisis, then clustering on the basis of those vectors.

The Reagan Doctrine and International Security

In a message to Congress last March, President Reagan gave a comprehensive outline of what the media and the foreign policy experts had already been calling the Reagan Doctrine. The message reaffirmed "active American support" to the "growing resistance movements [that] now challenge Communist regimes installed or maintained by the military power of the Soviet Union and its colonial agents—in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua."This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Soviet Far East Military Buildup: Nuclear Dilemmas and Asian Security

The growing nuclearization of the Soviet military presence in the Far East has been of increasing concern to the United States and its Asian-Pacific allies. This volume brings together the diverse perspectives of multinational groups of defense and foreign policy experts associated with the Security Conference on Asia and the Pacific.