Foreign Policy Problems Research Articles

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DAVID MALONE'S EXCELLENT ARTICLE, 'Foreign policy reviews reconsidered' (International Journal, autumn 2001), raises the question of why these reviews have apparently become rooted in Canadian practice. There have now been foreign policy reviews in each of the last three decades. While there are important differences between them - in the part played by parliament, for example - the experiments of 1968-70, 1985, and 1994-5 all belong in a single category. In particular, to judge from the comments of David Malone's informants, they all seem to have involved a great deal of work for modest results.How many democracies try to make policy in this way? David Malone does not say. The suspicion, however, is few, if any. That, even if it were true, might not matter so long as the process worked for Canada. Evidently this is not the case. Not only do Canadians seem to be almost the only people in the world to use such a process, but even they seem to have a hard time making it produce useful results. Why do they persist?Perhaps they are attached to reviewing foreign policy because they can afford it. It is hard to imagine other countries with the time and patience for this quasi-academic approach. Policy-making in the manner of Israel's Ariel Sharon seems to be at the opposite pole. In Britain, says David Malone's British counterpart: 'We don't review foreign policy, we do it.' In a similar vein, an American expert once observed that whereas Americans talked about their country's interests, Canadians talked about the role Canada should play in international affairs. Helmut Schmidt, who liked Canada and who liked its prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, used sometimes to speak as if he envied Trudeau the possibility of playing the dilettante leader of a country without problems, whereas, for him, as chancellor in a divided Germany, foreign policy problems were as real and menacing as the muzzle of the nearest Soviet gun. The implication of all these observations is that foreigners tend to see Canadians as carefree people for whom foreign policy is not real, but is instead a kind of theatre in which their country is free to play whatever part it chooses.How fair is this? David Malone refers to a concept of foreign policy making that was part of the intellectual background to all of the reviews he considers, namely that foreign policy springs from domestic interests and should be framed accordingly. Another version of this idea holds that interests a country shares on an undifferentiated basis with any other - a general interest in peace or prosperity for example - are too vague and ill-defined to qualify as a guide to policy-making in the national interest. To determine where a country's real interests lie, it is necessary to start from the domestic base and trace the extension abroad of domestic interests.Applied to Canada, this approach can be helpful and enlightening in critical areas. National unity, for example, was obviously a supremely important domestic preoccupation throughout the past generation. It had significant and obvious implications for Canada's international relations. Defining these implications was a way to set foreign policy priorities.Similarly the tens of thousands of domestic interests projected upon Canada's relations with the United States defined a massive, often overriding, set of foreign policy priorities. So much was this the case that the authors of the 1968-70 review found it impossible to incorporate Canada's relations with the United States in a single framework with the rest of foreign policy and, consequently, had to leave that subject to a separate examination several years later.Evidently there are large areas of foreign policy where interests are clear, substantial, and compelling and where choice is correspondingly constrained. Unfortunately for logical tidiness, however, there also appear to be large areas that are the product of the random accidents of history. …

State-Supported Terrorism and the U.S. Courts: Some Foreign Policy Problems

Terrorism is an evil that the United States and other civilized countries should combat aggressively. Fortunately, these countries have many tools they can use in their fight against terrorism, among them military force (as we have just demonstrated in Afghanistan), covert actions, and a variety of economic sanctions against a country or group that supports terrorists. These sanctions -- which would preferably be applied in union with other countries, though unilaterally if necessary -- can include freezing assets, as well as ending or limiting U.S. government programs (ranging from landing rights to foreign aid), cutting off exports to or imports from the country supporting terrorists, denying it credit or investment funds, and working in the multilateral banks to block loans to the country.

The reason for the crisis of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in 1941-1944

Restoration of religious life, the formation of an autocephalous Orthodox church in the occupied German troops, Ukraine faced a number of foreign-policy and domestic problems. First of all, it is about the approach of different personalities and groups of Orthodox hierarchs to their solution. At that time, there were two irreconcilable, antagonistic concepts - Metropolitan of Warsaw Dionysius (Valledinsky) and Archbishop of Kholmsky and Podlyassky Hilarion (Ogienko). It should be noted at the outset that both these hierarchs were in Poland, which was declared by the General Governorate of Hitler and actually bordered by the Germans occupied by Ukrainian lands, most of which were included in the "Reichscommissariat Ukraine". It was in these occupational administrative formations, under the direct guidance of Hitler and his close circle, that the whole range of Ukrainian problems - political, economic, national, cultural, and church - was solved. Ukrainian Orthodox circles and their leaders have long hoped for the invaders' good will to solve Ukrainian problems and, for the most part, tried to act on the basis of their own concepts of governance of church life. All of them, as time showed, were, to a greater or lesser extent, peculiar "ideas - fixed", since they contradicted the principled vision of the solution of the church issue in Ukraine by the German invaders.

The Clinton Administration and War Powers

The strongest of all governmental powers is the power to engage in war; and the strongest challenge for constitutionalism is to bring the war power of the state under meaningful control. The 1787 Constitution allocated some military powers to the Congress and others to the President as part of the scheme of constitutional checks and balances. To this day, however, the distribution of authority between the branches remains contested and uncertain. The Clinton Administration has had substantial opportunity to contribute to the evolution of constitutional practice concerning war powers, by virtue of numerous occasions of combat deployments, cruise missile strikes, and other forms of military engagement since January 1993. In broad outline, the constitutional practice of the Clinton Administration concerning war powers is similar to that of previous administrations in the sense that sweeping claims of executive authority have been tempered through pragmatic political accommodation. The legal opinions issued to explain the constitutional and statutory rationales for executive military initiatives embody some subtle differences from those of other administrations. This article compares the record of the Clinton Administration with those of its predecessors, after first briefly locating U.S. war powers practice in the context of crossnational comparisons. The subject of the Clinton Administration and war powers can be addressed from a crossnational perspective, along the lines of the comparative constitutional research on war powers I have been pursuing in other writing. In relation to the military intervention in Kosovo, for example, how did President Clinton's exercise of executive power compare to the authority of the heads of state or heads of government in the other member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that participated in the operation? Were other chief executives constitutionally authorized to commit their forces to a military campaign without reference to their national parliaments, as President Clinton effectively did, or are such decisions shared with parliament in the respective constitutional systems? Crossnational comparisons show variations in the degree to which national parliaments participated in determining the nature of a given state's commitment to the NATO engagement in Kosovo. President Clinton was not the only NATO leader who initiated his country's participation in the Kosovo operation without obtaining explicit authorization from the legislative branch. In the parliamentary system of the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Tony Blair may assume support from the House of Commons without necessarily putting the matter to a formal vote. In France's mixed system, President Jacques Chirac operates under Gaullist premises that military decisions belong to the presidential domaine reserve with little scrutiny from the Assemblee Nationale. In other countries, however, parliamentary control is considered a fundamental constraint on executive war-making powers. Germany's postwar constitution broke with the past by renouncing war, but participation in collective defense or collective security organizations is constitutionally permitted, subject to parliamentary approval. Notably, as required by a decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court at an earlier stage of the Yugoslav conflict, the Bundestag had to act affirmatively to approve German involvement in the Kosovo campaign. Polities in transition have looked to diverse constitutional models in developing their own approaches to executive-legislative relations with respect to war powers. The newest NATO members and NATO aspirants had their first tests of constitutional control of war powers in the post-cold war era with the Kosovo crisis. Hungary, a front-line state for this conflict, which borders on Yugoslavia and has close ties to ethnic Hungarians in the Vojvodina region of Serbia, submitted certain critical decisions for the affirmative authorization of the national parliament. Bulgaria and Romania, not yet NATO members but eager to prove themselves to be suitable partners, had parliamentary votes to approve opening their airspace to NATO planes. The remainder of this article focuses on comparisons between the Clinton Administration and its predecessors: Does President Clinton's approach to war powers and other foreign policy problems cohere with that of previous Presidents, or has the present administration forged a new approach in these domains? This general question also addresses the theme of Dawn Johnsen's paper: To what extent has the executive branch under Clinton declined to comply with congressional enactments regarding war powers on the basis of an executive position that the law in question is unconstitutional?

Mass Public Decisions on Go to War: A Cognitive-Interactionist Framework

How do Americans decide whether their country should use military force abroad? We argue they combine dispositional preferences and ideas about the geopolitical situation. This article reports the results of a representative national survey that incorporated five experiments. Findings include the following: (1) Respondent dispositions, especially isolationism versus internationalism and assertiveness versus accommodativeness, consistently constrained policy preferences, whereas liberalism-conservatism did not; (2) features of the geopolitical context—the presence of U.S. interests, relative power, the images of the adversary's motivations, and judgments about cultural status—also influenced support for military intervention; and (3) systematic interactions emerged between dispositions and geopolitical context that shed light on when and why ideological disagreements about the use of force are likely to be amplified and attenuated by situational factors. Our results are consistent with a cognitive-interactionist perspective, in which people adapt broad predispositions in relatively thoughtful ways to specific foreign policy problems.

American Public Opinion and the Civil War in Bosnia

The Bosnian civil war offers an opportunity to examine the American public's attitudes toward foreign policy problems in the post-cold war era. We use polls conducted for the Times Mirror/Pew Research Center for the People and the Press from 1992 to 1996 and indicators of media coverage of Bosnia to analyze trends in public attention to and knowledge of the conflict. As expected, events, media coverage, public attention to that coverage, and knowledge of the conflict are related. Knowledge rises over time, but the increase is greatest among the most educated. Greater knowledge also produced differing policy preferences. The more knowledgeable Americans were, the more they sympathized with the Bosnian Muslims. The relationship between knowledge and support for more aggressive U.S. options, however, was mixed. The data on Bosnia suggest that the public can become interested in foreign policy in the post-cold war era, but we cannot predict the duration of that interest.

The development of political science in Lithuania: Years of the breakthrough

Abstract. The development of political science was closely connected to the democratic changes and the restoration of statehood at the end of the 1980s in Lithuania. This paper examines the historical and contemporary social and academic roots of political science in the country. The other issue investigated in detail is the institutionalisation of political studies, which required the development of new academic curricula. Major vehicles for the institutionalization of political science were the decentralisation of academic activities and the establishment of new institutions, such as the Institute of Political Science and International Relations (University of Vilnius) and the Lithuanian Political Science Association, and intensive cooperation withWestern universities and funding organizations. Nonetheless, the growth and efficiency of political studies and research depend very much on their successful integration into the environment of the existing universities. The research output of Lithuanian political science is characterised by a widening of research interests and the further introduction of statistical and computer methods of investigation, with problems of Lithuania's foreign and security policy and issues of democratisation as topics of continuing popularity.

Decision Making and LeadershipDecision Making and Leadership, edited by HellerFrank.. Cambridge University Press, 1992, 247 pp.

The contributions address the leadership decision-making process at various levels of social reality, from global problems of foreign policy, via analyses of what happens in business organizations, to research findings and theories that operate at the level of individuals and small social groups.

Russia's Post-Cold War Security Policy in Northeast Asia

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE COLD WAR, all states have found it difficult to adapt to a rapidly changing, uncertain security situation in East Asia. This is particularly true for Russia. Russia is being forced to make this transition at a time when its own power is shrinking. Russian leaders are preoccupied with domestic crises and with urgent foreign policy prob lems in other ex-Soviet republics. This leaves them little time to think about East Asia. In Russia, security perceptions are changing. Traditional security concerns, which focused on protection against external military threats, are declining in importance. Increasingly, Russians are preoccupied with domestic sources of instability and insecurity. Economic concerns increasingly influence security policy. As Russians come to feel more vulnerable and beleaguered, there is growing concern about protecting Russia's autonomy and its capacity to forge an independent foreign policy. Russia is in the process of being transformed from an authoritarian political system and command economy to a new type of political and economic system. There is a lack of consensus regarding the direction in which Russia should be heading. The lack of consensus about the nature of Russia's domestic system affects perceptions of its external environment. These various domestic factors have had a growing influence on Russian security perceptions and policy in Northeast Asia.

Consolidation of the CPSU in a Multiparty System

We are publishing below a speech by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, E. A. Shevardnadze, to the Twenty-first Party Conference of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the occasion of the announcement of his candidacy for delegate to the Twenty-eighth Congress of the CPSU. We presume that this speech is of broad interest to readers since it touches on the most relevant and "sensitive" problems of foreign and domestic policy.

"Petty Spy" or Effective Diplomat: The Role of George Beckwith

George Beckwith, a Royal Army intelligence officer, lurked in the shadows of Benedict Arnold's treason. Still operating in shadows, he reappeared in the United States five more times during the next ten years. His activities reflected Britain's disdain for the republic and a decade-long frustration resulting from an irksome foreign policy problem of its own creation. The British had ignored the formal diplomacy offered by John Adams and refused to send their own minister to New York. Yet the very existence of the United States menaced British interests in North America, a threat that could not be ignored. Forestalling such threats, real or imagined, forced the English government to rely on a checkered assortment of semi-official or semi-secret contacts to observe, influence, and manipulate American domestic and foreign affairs. Beckwith was one of these informal instruments of British diplomacy--certainly the most interesting, perhaps the most effective.' Beckwith remains, however, an enigmatic figure in histories about the early American republic. More often than not, he is mentioned only in a footnote. Recently a few scholars have attempted to examine his role more closely, generally to prove a point of

External challenges and domestic legitimacy: Ireland's foreign policy, 1983–87*

Abstract In this paper the impact of EC membership on the foreign policy of the coalition government led by Garret FitzGerald between 1982 and 1987 is examined. It is argued that while the EC presented a number of major challenges to the government, notably on the milk super levy and some aspects of the Single European Act, it generally remained true to its communautaire self‐image, reassuring its fellow members of the Community and minimising the scale of the problems at home. Nevertheless, the government was unable to resolve a number of foreign policy problems or mobilise public opinion decisively behind its approach to them before it fell from power. Indeed, its approach to foreign policy questions may have contributed to its eventual political defeat.

The Assault on Global Education

Who has the right and responsibility to determine the content of education about foreign affairs? Should the Department of Education (DOE) seek to influence what the schools and universities teach? These questions are the subject of a smoldering debate sparked by the regional office of the DOE in Denver, Colorado. Answers to them would tell us a great deal about the environment for making foreign policy.There can be no doubt that in the United States, knowledge of foreign policy problems is extremely low. Surveys regularly show that in comparison to students overseas, American students lag in their awareness of other cultures. In a study of 30,000 10- and 14-year-olds in nine countries, undertaken by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Americans ranked next to last in their comprehension of foreign cultures. According to a recent New York Times poll, 44 percent of Americans questioned did not know that the Soviet Union and the United States were allies during World War II. Only 14 percent of American respondents in the same poll were aware that the United States had joined Britain, France and Japan in the invasion of Russia to fight the Bolshevik forces in the civil war of 1917 (“Flawed,” 1986). While there is also ignorance in the Soviet Union and other countries about the United States, the place to tackle the problem of provincialism is at home.

The Constitution and United States Foreign Policy: An Interpretation

Perhaps best single sentence defining Constitution was, appropriately, penned by father of document in 1792. In such charters of as Constitution, James Madison wrote, every word ... decides a question between power and liberty. He hoped being republicans, Americans would be anxious to establish efficacy of popular charters, in defending liberty against power, and power against licentiousness. Some one hundred eighty years later, while writing one of few extended analyses of relationship between Constitution and foreign policy, Louis Henkin noted in one critical area Madison's insight had been tragically neglected. No greater power existed than American, and specifically president's, ability to destroy all civilization, but books that deal with Constitution say little about American foreign relations, Henkin lamented, and those dealing with foreign policy have roundly controlling relevance of Constitution.' In truth, neglect of connection between foreign affairs and constitutional principles is relatively new. From time of Federalist, whose opening essays stressed foreign policy problems threatened new nation's liberties and security, and of 1792-1793 Hamilton-Madison debate over president's powers in global arena, through bitter imperialist versus anti-imperialist confrontations of 1898-1900, Americans argued over appropriate foreign policy while keeping Constitution closely in view, and they fought over constitutional principles with acute awareness of their effect on international affairs. By World War II, however, debate had dramatically changed. Scholars led by Edward S. Corwin repeatedly raised danger of conducting foreign policy without due regard for constitutional restraints, but Congress, courts, and, above all, executive ignored warnings. In top secret National Security Council document NSC 68 of April 1950, which became blueprint for United States policy thereafter, Truman administration argued the integrity of our system will not be

The Nordic Neutrals in Western European Integration: Current Pressures, Restraints and Options

The integration problem of European neutral states is in the first instance composed of the economic pressures that pull or push them into Western European integration, and the restraints of participation arising from foreign policy considerations. The present pressures mainly arise from the EC's progress towards the completion of its internal market, the joint EFTA-EC plan for a Western European home market for industrial goods, and the advance of Western European R&D projects. The pressures are amplified by the growing speculation that some EFTA countries are preparing themselves for bilateral talks with the EC. From the point of view of foreign policy, the neturals' main problem may no longer arise from the EC's role in the East- West conflict but from the EC's own integrative and bloc-like character. The R&D integration is unlikely to raise immediate foreign policy problems for the neutral participants, though their capacity for independent action may weaken in the long term. The comprehensive Western European home market is, as such, unlikely to compromise the EFTA neutrals' foreign policies. Due to her more open policy vis-à- vis the EC, Sweden's situation at the present time is more complex than that of Finland. Finland's problems would become more difficult, however, in the event that some EFTA states approach the EC for new basic treaty negotiations.

Living with Iran

In the past nine years the Islamic Republic of Iran has posed the most difficult of all foreign policy problems for the United States—a problem usually confronted by marriage counselors rather than diplomats, for Iran is the nation that the United States cannot live with and cannot live without.

Regional Governments and International Affairs: Foreign Policy Problem or Deviant Behaviour?

Regional Governments and International Affairs: Foreign Policy Problem or Deviant Behaviour?

World Power and the Strategic Trap of Territorial Commitments

Long cycle theorizing argues that systemic leadership depends upon the creation and maintenance of a global network of bases to support sea, and later aerospace, based capabilities of global reach. Control over, and responsibility for, extensive amounts of territory tends to be counterproductive to the extent that territorial commitments drain attention and resources from the global network. After briefly illustrating the existence of this strategic dilemma in the 16th and 17th centuries, we concentrate on the empirical relationship between onsets of British imperial warfare and the ratio of navy to army budgets between 1671 and 1913. As anticipated, the longitudinal relationship between imperial warfare, an indirect indicator of expanding territorial commitments, and the budgetary primacy of sea-power concerns is found to be negative and statistically significant. We interpret this finding to be supportive of the view that expanding territorial commitments can constitute a strategic trap for system leaders, and as such, a partial explanation for the decline of their ability to function as leaders. We conclude with some suggestions about how this historical problem may relate to the contemporary foreign policy problems of the current system leader, the United States.

Regional Governments and International Affairs: Foreign Policy Problem or Deviant Behaviour?

Regional Governments and International Affairs: Foreign Policy Problem or Deviant Behaviour?

Persia's foreign policy between the two Herat crises, 1831–56

A number of events in the early nineteenth century led to a radical change in Persia's foreign policy, from a pro-British to a pro-Russian orientation. First, the Second Russo-Persian war of 1826-28 was unfavourable to Persia and led to the loss of the Transcaucasian territories. Second, Russia's impressive success in the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-29 gave Russia a strong foothold in the Western Transcaucasus and strengthened her influence in the Balkans. The third factor was the fantastic success of Russian diplomacy at Unkiar Skelessi in 1833. Russia's representatives at the Shah's court, and first and foremost A. S. Griboyedov,' were using every means to strengthen the anti-British tendencies evident in the policy of Abbas Mirza, de facto ruler of Persia and heir to the throne. That unintelligent though energetic statesman and military leader wanted military and political revenge at any cost, to save his country's face after the recent defeat and humiliation. It was understandable that after Russia's victories both on the battlefield and in diplomatic negotiations, he and his people regarded Russia as the most powerful state in Europe. Russia's attitude towards its co-religionists in the Transcaucasus and the Slav and Christian populations of the Balkan Peninsula demonstrated that Russia had at all times been true to her obligatiQns; she was a faithful ally and staunch supporter. Russia's representatives at the Shah's court were constantly stressing these points, and by comparison Britain's behaviour looked to say the least unattractive. Abbas was impressed by Russia's autocratic regime which he thought gave her considerable advantages over Britain when it came to solving problems of foreign policy: 'The government of Russia is not dependent on a parliament nor on public opinion'.2 Guided by these considerations, in 1830-31 Abbas Mirza made his choice and adopted a pronounced antiBritish position. The latest Anglo-Persian agreement (the Tehran agreement) of 25 November 1814 was, in his opinion, dead. His view met with the approval of no less a personage than Lord Palmerston, who had written to his closest collaborator, Hobhouse, in 1836: