Foreign Policy Leadership Research Articles

Through the Looking Glass: The Helsinki Final Act and the 1976 Election for President

The controversy surrounding the 1975 Helsinki Final Act made it an enduring issue in the 1976 campaign, and the political backlash against President Gerald R. Ford damaged his electoral chances. Ford's signature of the agreement, his continuation of détente, and his foreign policy more broadly may not have been decisive issues in his contests with Ronald Reagan and then Jimmy Carter, but they certainly were prominent throughout the election. Examining the influence of the Final Act on Ford's election campaign illuminates the extent to which a number of candidates sought to use popular opposition to the agreement to their advantage. Furthermore, it reveals how the 1976 presidential candidates, and Ford in particular, struggled to address growing questions about détente, human rights, and morality in foreign policy. Ford's failure to defend his signature of the Final Act adequately raised concerns about his foreign policy and personal leadership with the electorate.

Know Your Enemy

Know Your Enemy Thomas W. Zeiler (bio) Marc J. Selverstone. Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. 304 pp. Notes and index. $49.95. If there is one certainty about the origin of the Cold War it is that leaders on all sides were simply uncertain about the intentions of their enemies. We know even less about the Soviet thought processes; Russian records are still restricted, and the mysteries of Joseph Stalin’s mind remain the purview of psychologists and the ground of guesswork by historians. The calculations of the United States and Great Britain, however, are now amply available. Marc Selverstone painstakingly traces the evolution of a surprisingly overlooked but cardinal idea of the Cold War—the notion of a communist monolith—a concept addressed by foreign policy thinkers and leaders with considerable conviction during the budding superpower rivalry from 1945 to 1950. Fundamental questions arose: what objectives did the communists seek in the world arena and how would they attain them? Did they want a global revolution, security, independence, or some combination? Were they unified or divided? These questions continue to pique scholars; ambivalence among policy makers back then continues to occupy historians today.1 Selverstone supplies some answers. The book concentrates on images, perceptions, and ideologies rather than a litany of events. The latter appear as markers through which leaders pondered, formulated, and prescribed policies—as backdrops to an intellectual history of the monolith concept. The idea that international communism represented a unified conspiracy led by Moscow became a powerful image that shaped Western perceptions and simplified foreign policy, regardless of the various national brands of socialism and the Titoist rift within the communist bloc in 1948. Debate within policymaking circles in Britain and America revealed that monolithism came under constant questioning. But, it was a useful idea that solidified Western foreign policies and helped draw public and legislative attention to prosecuting the Cold War. A self-fulfilling circularity arose as a result of calculations based on appealing to voters and the press. Bureaucrats might have preferred more nuance on occasion, yet they, too, pursued hard-line, [End Page 133] anticommunist ideologies by emphasizing the monolithic threat to Western values, practices, and power. Stalin made this all the easier. After the Soviet-inspired Turkish crisis of 1946, even a prudent realist like future Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who straddled the fence between confrontation and conciliation, “sensed a clear pattern of provocative behavior, one that met his lawyerly standards of evidence” on the part of Moscow, writes a recent biographer.2 Regardless of ongoing, bifurcated historiographical debate that lays blame for the Cold War at the doorstep of American imperialism or alarmism or on Soviet paranoia or grasping, Moscow’s firm hand made it clear that the world was engaged in a zero-sum game.3 There could be no peace until the Soviet Union simply did not exist; “communism was the equivalent of war” (as was capitalism for Stalin), writes Anders Stephanson, and until it ended, world peace and Western security were impossibilities.4 The threat was clear, but was it also as extensive and pervasive as Anglo-American leaders believed? Perhaps. This is not to say that Western leaders were not rational but that they sought to simplify the approach to communism into a neat formula of conspiracy in order to pursue their goal of weakening Moscow’s power. This would serve the ultimate purpose of mobilizing their publics while also driving a wedge between Stalin and his acolytes in Eastern Europe and Asia, and thereby breaking apart the monolith. They knew full well that several national brands of socialism existed (and that Moscow had encouraged its allies to travel different roads), but Anglo-American officials saw opportunities to capitalize on this diversity. By considering international communism as both monolithic and non-monolithic, Anglo-America leaders revealed their doubts about the USSR. They were nuanced thinkers, which is ironic because the monolith concept endured in the public consciousness to create a meat-cleaver approach to foreign policy—a good versus evil mentality. Part of Selverstone’s interest in scrutinizing such deep and subtle...

Out of the Shadow: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War. By Christopher Maynard. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. xvi, 176 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-60344-039-4.)

An unintentional consequence of the recent conclusion of the second Bush administration is that it elevated estimations of the achievements of the first Bush presidency. Despite the father-son bond between numbers forty-one and forty-three, their differences, especially in foreign affairs, offer a stark and instructive contrast. George H. W. Bush and his tightly knit foreign policy team approached foreign policy as realists. As the Tiananmen Square massacre unfolded before the eyes of the world in 1989, for example, Bush issued a stern public statement deeply deploring “the decision to use force,” calling for sanctions against China for its brutal violence against protesting students (p. 35). Yet he secretly contacted Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to reassure him that he would not allow this incident to disrupt Sino-American relations. A year later, in the face of heavy criticism, Bush renewed China's most favored nation trading status. One could scarcely imagine George W. Bush functioning similarly, for his was an administration propelled by ideology and the foreign policy leaders within his administration were set against each other. It is beyond imagining during the administration of the elder Bush, as happened in the younger Bush's years, that the secretary of state and national security adviser would learn of a major administration foreign policy decision from a cnn news report.

Presidential Saber Rattling and the Economy

Saber rattling is a prominent tool of the U.S. president's foreign policy leadership. Yet there has been no study of how presidential saber rattling affects international or domestic political outcomes. This study evaluates how presidential saber rattling affects U.S. economic behavior and performance. Theoretically, the study demonstrates that presidential rhetoric affects the risks that economic actors are willing to take, as well as the consequences of these resulting behaviors for U.S. economic performance. Using monthly time series running from January 1978 through January 2005, vector autoregression methods are applied to show that increased presidential saber rattling produces increased perceptions of negative economic news, declining consumer confidence, lower personal consumption expenditures, less demand for money, and slower economic growth. More broadly, the study demonstrates an important linkage between the president's two most important roles: foreign and economic policy leadership. The president's foreign policy pronouncements not only impact other nations, but also affect domestic economic outcomes.

Defending Democracy in Wartime: Thomas P. Gore's Liberal Dissent in World War One

The global war on terror, in conjunction with America's invasion of Iraq, has prompted liberals to reconsider the relationship between democracy and security both at home and abroad. Upholding the civil liberties of Americans, while enhancing government power to interdict terrorists and protect borders, cannot be understood apart from the nation's interests and moral aspirations in a conflict-prone world. Far too little attention has been devoted to how America at war in a global setting reopens an old foreign policy debate that divided liberal and progressive groups at the time of America's entry into the First World War. Historians have devoted considerable attention to the alignment of progressive groups that supported Woodrow Wilson's defense of American foreign policy leadership at the time of the war. Yet there were other liberal-minded politicians who shared Wilson's assumptions about America's greatness without endorsing Wilsonian methods of statecraft. Senator Thomas P. Gore, a former Democratically of Wilson, was unsurpassed in his fierce opposition to Wilson's wartime policies, Wilson's moral defense of those policies, and the illiberal trappings of the League of Nations. This paper examines Senator Gore's populist background and liberal dissent from the tenets of Wilsonian internationalism. Gore provides a timely reminder that the way security is purchased abroad has an important bearing on the freedom and lives of Americans at home.

American Asia Policy and the U.S. Election

This article reviews post-Cold War U.S./Asia policy and its potential electoral impact even as the United States selects its future foreign policy leadership and course of direction. This essay is presented in three parts: the first focuses on the U.S. security architecture in the Asian region, a brief second section on the relevance of recent changes in regional political economy, and the third attempts to determine how this emerging economic-security model might dovetail with perceived American political interests at a time of national resolution.

Lessons in International Communication: Carr, Angell and Lippmann on human nature, public opinion and leadership

AbstractThe sub-field of International Communication within International Relations is insufficiently cognisant of the social foundations of communication. Through a selective interpretation of three prominent interwar thinkers’ works, it will be argued that International Communication is a largely social, even ideological, field. The advantage of reading interwar international theory lies in their eclectic appreciation of the power of public opinion and leadership without undue fixation with realist and idealist labels. By reading Edward Carr, Norman Angell and Walter Lippmann, one can tease out the following three themes for organising the study of International Communication: human nature assumptions; opinion as power; and leadership in foreign policy in terms of public education.

A Chinese Diplomat's Responsibility and Conscience

This is Chapter 12 of the author's book in Chinese, The Inside Stories of China–US Diplomacy after Tiananmen. As a senior PRC diplomat who experienced the Tiananmen event, Chen makes an insightful background analysis of the process and way of thinking of the Chinese leaders in foreign policy making during that period. The JCC published the first chapter of Chen's book in vol. 11, no. 30, February 2002 and the last chapter of his book in vol. 12, no. 37, November 2003.

Energy and Security: Toward a New Foreign Policy Strategy

For more than a century, energy and its procurement have been central to the U.S. position as a world power. How can U.S. relations with established producer nations ensure the stability of energy supplies? How can non-OPEC resources best be brought to the international marketplace? And what are the risks to international security of growing global reliance on imported oil? In Energy and Security: Toward a New Foreign Policy Strategy, Jan H. Kalicki and David L. Goldwyn bring together the topmost foreign policy and energy experts and leaders to examine these issues, as well as how the U.S. can mitigate the risks and dangers of continued energy dependence through a new strategic approach to foreign policy that integrates both U.S. energy and national security interests. Contributors include Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, Kevin A. Baumert, Michelle Billig, Loyola de Palacio, Jonathan Elkind, Michelle Michot Foss, Leon Fuerth, Lee H. Hamilton, Evan M. Harrje, John P. Holdren, Paul F. Hueper, Amy Myers Jaffe, J. Bennett Johnston, Donald A. Juckett, Viktor I. Kalyuzhny, Melanie A. Kenderdine, William F. Martin, Charles McPherson, Kenneth B. Medlock III, Ernest J. Moniz, Edward L. Morse, Julia Nanay, Shirley Neff, Willy H. Olsen, Bill Richardson, John Ryan, James R. Schlesinger, Gordon Shearer, Adam E. Sieminski, Alvaro Silva-Calderon, Luis Tellez Kuenzler, J. Robinson (Robin) West, Daniel Yergin, and Keiichi Yokobori.

Environmental Protection in an Expanding European Community: Lessons from Past Accessions

The EU has transformed environmental policymaking for the states of Europe. In many environmental policy areas the EU now plays an international leadership role. How will the planned accession of ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, where environmental capacity is still weak and environmental problems are serious, affect environmental policymaking within the EU? This contribution seeks to answer this question from a comparative perspective by looking at past cases of accession to the EU, with particular attention to the accession of the southern European states that are economically less well off than their northern neighbours and where environmental protection has a weaker tradition in national policy. It argues that a variety of changes to EU institutions and norms have helped to strengthen the EU's capacity to protect the environment, mitigate against moves towards the least common denominator, and aid weaker states in coming into compliance with EU regulations. Particularly important in this regard are the influence of the relatively strong and increasingly widespread voices of environmental advocates in Europe, the greater variety of environmental policy instruments available to member states that should make implementation more flexible and cost-effective, institutional reform that has addressed the EU's ‘democratic deficit’, and the importance that environment has taken on as an arena for foreign policy leadership by the EU.

Like Father, Like Son: Testing the Bush I-Bush II Comparison Predictions

Professor Carpenter challenges the conventional wisdom that George W. Bush must avoid the fate of his father by focusing on the economy. He argues that the economic picture was quite different for father and son, such as dissimilar rates of change in unemployment and inflation during their tenures in office. More importantly, economic approval ratings fail to predict accurately their overall approval ratings. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, Carpenter’s analysis shows that perceptions of foreign policy leadership appear to be more important in predicting approval for both presidencies. And even though the combination of economic and foreign approval ratings appear to drive Bush II’s performance ratings overall, these played a rather insignificant role for Bush I.

Locating the proper authorities: the interaction of domestic and international institutions

In an era of democratization and globalization, the number of decision makers has multiplied exponentially. Parliamentarians, bureaucrats, international secretariats, regional governors, and nongovernmental organizations have all gained influence at the expense of heads of state. How do these competing layers of authority bargain with each other to govern? International relations theorists have traditionally focused on how leaders' domestic constraints affect their bargaining position internationally. However, there has been much less work on the flip side of this question--how foreign policy leaders can use international institutions as a means of circumventing or co-opting domestic opposition. Locating the Proper Authorities offers some preliminary answers, drawn from a number of theoretical perspectives by the contributors to this volume.Written by some of the most promising theorists in the field of international relations, the essays in Locating the Proper Authorities address a broad array of substantive issue areas, including humanitarian intervention, trade dispute settlement, economic development, democratic transition, and security cooperation. This broad case selection has the virtue of incorporating developing countries, which are too often ignored in international relations, as well as less well-known international organizations. Each chapter examines the mechanisms and strategies through which policy entrepreneurs use international organizations as a means of bypassing or overcoming opposition to policy change. By examining the effects of different institutional design features, Locating the Proper Authorities helps us understand the variety of influence mechanisms through which international institutions shape the interaction of policy initiators and ratifiers.Daniel W. Drezner is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago.

China's foreign policy making as seen through Tiananmen

This is the last chapter from the author's book (in Chinese), The Inside Stories of China–US Diplomacy after Tiananmen. As a senior PRC diplomat who experienced the Tiananmen event, Chen makes an insightful background analysis of the process and way of thinking of the Chinese leaders in foreign policy making during that period. The JCC published the first chapter of Chen's book in vol. 11, no. 30, February 2002.

Presidential Leadership: Skill in Context

The essay illustrates the value of studying individual presidents consecutively across time in order to compare and assess the relative importance of personal political skill in political and historical contexts. The presidency is the primary source of moral agency in American politics, and policy and agency occur in the leadership of individuals. An analytic framework to compare presidents encompasses the historical context; the skill factor; leadership strategies and tactics; and the assessment of results of skill in contexts. Use of the framework will permit systematic comparison of presidents in relation to the ad hoc ahistorical comparisons that permeate journalism and some scholarship. Narratives of leadership in domestic, economic, and foreign policy are presented for presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. This approach achieves an understanding of presidential leadership that cannot be achieved by work that bemoans the small N and focuses on pieces of the presidential institution, without including the president, because the dynamics of leadership shape the institution more than the reverse. Among the conclusions are that skill and context reinforce each other in policy achievement; skill can be effective at the margins, even in unfavorable contexts; ineptness makes a difference for the worse; and cumulative presidents may resolve policy problems across time as each contributes a step on the way.

Japan's Political Leadership Deficit

Analysts have long pondered the question: 'Who rules in Japan?'. Prime Ministers who have exercised strong leadership have been the exception rather than the rule. Despite the widespread acknowledgment that Japan's political leadership deficit undermines the ability of the government to act swiftly in a crisis and to exercise international leadership in trade and foreign policy, a systematic explanation for Japan's weak political executive is yet to be advanced. While historical and cultural factors cannot be ignored, more relevant in a contemporary context are institutional factors that restrict the power of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. A parliamentary Cabinet system is not incompatible with strong leadership but, in Japan's case, the inability of the political executive to exercise indisputable authority, or indeed, merely to exercise the legitimate prerogatives of Prime Ministerial and Cabinet Office, is directly attributable to the constraints imposed by a collection of informal power structures within the ruling conservative party and by an autonomous central bureaucracy, all of which have held power away from the political executive. Various institutional remedies are currently being pursued to enhance the leadership of the executive branch. They are part of a deliberately engineered shift in power from non-elected bureaucrats to elected politicians. The reforms will also help to diminish the influence of ruling party factions over personnel selections to executive office and the ascendancy of internal policy cliques within party policymaking.

Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam, and Public Opinion: Rethinking Realist Theory of Leadership

The authors use primary archival records from Lyndon Johnson's presidency to rethink realist theory in international relations concerning leadership of public opinion in foreign policy. Much as the realists expect, Johnson pursued a strategy of opinion leadership that was intended to direct public opinion as he and his administration reacted to the country's international position. Using archival evidence and statistical analysis, the authors examine the relationship between public opinion information that was privately channeled to the White House and several measures of Johnson's behavior including presidential statements and military decisions about bombing and troop deployments. They find that Johnson was unresponsive to public opinion and also generally ineffective in directing public opinion. They conclude that realists' analysis of opinion leadership in representative democracies is inadequate and can lead to impractical prescriptions. What is needed is a theory of foreign policy making that incorporates the complexities of opinion leadership.

The convergence of American elites’ domestic beliefs with their foreign policy beliefs

Contemporary scholarship on elites’ foreign policy beliefs is based upon the implicit assumption that the dimensions underpinning these attitudes are separate and distinct from those which undergird attitudes about domestic politics. Indeed, the dominant conception of Americans’ foreign policy beliefs uses labels to describe dimensions—militant internationalism and cooperative internationalism—which are relevant to international affairs but meaningless to domestic policy attitudes and disputes. Such accounts imply that people do not possess common principles, or ideology, that structure beliefs across both issue domains. We argue that the analytical barrier between foreign and domestic policy beliefs is artificial, at least for elite beliefs. Data from the 1988 Foreign Policy Leadership Project survey and the 1988–1992 Leadership Opinion Project panel study demonstrate that foreign and domestic policy beliefs share a common structure. Since this structure is strongly associated with simple self‐placement scores on a left/right continuum, we label it liberalism/conservatism. This finding reaffirms earlier research about the importance of ideology in constraining elites’ beliefs. It also provides a possible explanation for the evidence that elites’ general stances towards militant internationalism and cooperative internationalism have remained remarkably stable despite the end of the Cold War: because these dimensions are anchored in ideology and reflect core values, they were not moved much by transformations within the international arena.

John F. Kennedy and the Limited Test Ban Treaty: A Case Study of Presidential Leadership

John F. Kennedy's foreign policy leadership style has evoked contradictory historical evaluations. The early assessments written by administration officials like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Theodore Sorensen, and Roger Hilsman depicted Kennedy as a consummate pragmatist, skilled crisis manager, and, more generally, a great world leader.(1) Kennedy's almost heroic reputation as a foreign policy leader came under attack for the first time in the early 1970s with publication of works by David Halberstam, Louise Fitzsimons, Richard J. Walton, and Henry Fairlie.(2) Whereas Halberstam put at least some of the blame for America's unfortunate involvement in the Vietnam War on Kennedy's shoulders, the work of the three other writers referred to Kennedy as the great cold warrior and considered his foreign policy as imperialist in fact, if not in intent. Neither the portrayal of Kennedy as a decisive and courageous statesman nor his depiction as an irresponsible and dogmatic cold warrior went unchallenged in light of growing insight into the U.S. policy-making process during the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Emerging from the new body of sources and literature of the 1980s was a far more ambiguous Kennedy, whose foreign policy decisions were often characterized by vacillation and indecisiveness, marked by rhetorical overkill on one hand and restrained pragmatism on the other. At the same time, it became clear that Kennedy's ambiguity often had to be attributed to the interplay of domestic and foreign concerns and their influence on Kennedy's foreign policy.(3) Despite the considerable number of books and articles written about Kennedy, his foreign policy achievements and presidential leadership style still await a balanced assessment.(4) This article contributes to our understanding of Kennedy's foreign policy by examining Kennedy's leadership in successfully concluding the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT). The authors conclude that Kennedy pursued the goal of signing a nuclear test ban with vigor and persistence from his first days in office through the trilateral debate of the treaty's language among American, Soviet, and British representatives in July 1963. Before the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, however, Kennedy felt that his domestic as well as his foreign policy position was too weak to take on arguments of those opposed to negotiating a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. Kennedy's room for maneuver expanded with successful conclusion of the Cuban missile crisis. The months leading up to the final, two-week-long negotiation of the LTBT were marked by Kennedy's willingness to use his greater political freedom and take the lead in pushing the test ban. In doing so, he was prepared to take considerable risks both domestically and in terms of U.S. relations with its allies. The test ban case reveals Kennedy as an active and flexible but still cautious president. His personal leadership and flexible organization of the policy process features that might have been a weakness regarding decision making on other issues formed the basis for successful negotiation of the first effective arms control agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union. While Kennedy was clearly not the cold warrior that Fitzsimons, Walton, and Fairlie accused him of being, his foreign policy decisions were subject to political considerations related to domestic and foreign pressures to a far greater degree than Schlesinger, Sorensen, and Hilsman lead the reader to believe with their emphasis on Kennedy's personal skills as a foreign policy leader and crisis manager. Senator Kennedy, a Nuclear Test Ban, and Nuclear Nonproliferation The issue of a nuclear test ban was not a new one in the 1960s. American, Soviet, British, and French delegations had discussed draft agreements to end nuclear weapons tests as early as the Truman administration. But during the early years of the cold war, the arms control and disarmament talks in Geneva never really left the realm of propaganda, and no substantive progress on the test ban issue was achieved. …

Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America

William J. Perry and Ashton B. Carter, two of the world's foremost defense authorities, draw on their experience as leaders of the U.S. Defense Department to propose a new American security strategy for the twenty-first century. After a century in which aggression had to be defeated in two world wars and then deterred through a prolonged cold war, the authors argue for a strategy centered on prevention. Now that the cold war is over, it is necessary to rethink the risks to U.S. security. The A list--threats to U.S. survival--is empty today. The B list--the two major regional contingencies in the Persian Gulf and on the Korean peninsula that dominate Pentagon planning and budgeting--pose imminent threats to U.S. interests but not to survival. And the C list--such headline-grabbing places as Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti--includes important contingencies that indirectly affect U.S. security but do not directly threaten U.S. interests. Thus the United States is enjoying a period of unprecedented peace and influence; but foreign policy and defense leaders cannot afford to be complacent. The authors' preventive defense strategy concentrates on the dangers that, if mismanaged, have the potential to grow into true A-list threats to U.S. survival in the next century. These include Weimar Russia: failure to establish a self-respecting place for the new Russia in the post-cold war world, allowing it to descend into chaos, isolation, and aggression as Germany did after World War I; Loose Nukes: failure to reduce and secure the deadly legacy of the cold war--nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union; A Rising China Turned Hostile: failure to shape China's rise to Asian superpower status so that it emerges as a partner rather than an adversary; Proliferation: spread of weapons of mass destruction; and Catastrophic Terrorism: increase in the scope and intensity of transnational terrorism.They also argue for better management of the defense establishment so the United States will retain a strong military prepared to cope with all contingencies, deter aggressors, and win a conflict if deterrence fails.

Bully of the Free World

Foreign policy has become an ambiguous phrase. It once meant leading American people in formation and execution of national policy. But some now use it to state a less obvious idea: United States leading other nations in international arena. Why should other nations follow U.S. leaders rather than their own? Leadership involves some common stake between leader and led, some basis for agreement on goals to be sought and prices to be paid. The more recent meaning of foreign policy leadership has thrust itself to fore because of America s claim to be the leader of free world.