Why Study Foreign Policy?

Leaders have made many puzzling foreign policy decisions across the years. Although some of those decisions turned out to be of little consequence and have been largely forgotten, on many occasions such decisions have plunged countries into major crisis or war. Consider the following decisions, which both reporters at the time and historians who wrote about them later found puzzling. Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq, invaded Kuwait in the early 1990s only to find that the United States, under President George H. W. Bush put together a coalition to push him back out. Saddam Hussein knew that the United States was more powerful and much better armed than Iraq. Although Iraq had, in those days, one of the stronger militaries in the region, it was no match for a superpower. Saddam Hussein may have calculated that the United States was too preoccupied with the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the latter’s economy to worry about his invasion of a small neighboring state. A meeting with the American ambassador to Iraq, career diplomat April Glaspie, reinforced his assessment. She made the now-famous statement that “we have no opinion on the Arab- Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait. ”1 Saddam Hussein may have interpreted this to mean that the United States would not take action if his military attacked Kuwait. Should he have realized that the United States, no matter how much it appeared to be otherwise engaged, could not accept his seizure of the small, but oil-rich Kuwait? Decades earlier, Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of Britain, made a fateful deal with Adolph Hitler 3 of Germany during the infamous Munich conference of 1938. Britain would not object to Germany’s seizure of the Sudetenland, a portion of Czechoslovakia bordering on Germany and with a German- speaking population, as long as Hitler promised he would respect the sovereignty of the remainder of Czechoslovakia. 2 This small country in the heart of Europe was a very recent creation at that time: it had been carved out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, just two decades earlier. It was a multiethnic state, home to the Czechs and Slovaks as well as German, Hungarian, and other smaller ethnic minority groups. Chamberlain returned home confident he had made a deal that would preserve the peace in Europe—an important consideration in a time when the memory of World War I and its enormous toll in human lives was still very fresh. He thought that meeting personally with Hitler had allowed him to judge the latter’s character and trustworthiness. He could not have been more wrong. Hitler continued his conquests and soon Europe found itself immersed in World War II. In the early 1960s, Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union made a decision to build launching sites for nuclear missiles in Cuba and soon found himself embroiled in a crisis. American U-2 spy planes photographed the launchpad while it was still under construction. The discovery came on the heels of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, during which American-trained Cuban exiles had attempted, and failed, to topple Fidel Castro, Cuba’s communist leader. The Cold War was still in full swing, and President Kennedy was presiding over a military buildup that would give the United States clear superiority in strategic weapons—something Khrushchev could not ignore. Under those circumstances, the possibility of being able to reach U. S. soil by placing missiles in Cuba was quite tempting, especially since the Soviet Union did not yet have the capacity to launch intercontinental missiles. In addition, the United States had missiles close to Soviet soil in Turkey. Khrushchev may have concluded that placing missiles in Cuba was comparable. Should Khrushchev have been able to foresee that no American president during the Cold War could have accepted that the Russians were building missile-launching capacities so close to American shores? Each of these leaders made a decision that was, certainly in retrospect, puzzling. Saddam Hussein stumbled into a war with a coalition of countries headed by the United States that he could not win and that became a prelude to another war a little over a decade later. In the interim, Iraq suffered the economic consequences of the destruction during and the sanctions that followed the war of the early 1990s. 3 Neville Chamberlain lost his position as Prime Minister of Britain and is frequently cited as the man who gave appeasement its bad name. Nikita Khrushchev stumbled into the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought his country to the brink of war and contributed to the premature end of his political career. From the vantage point of a foreign observer or with a historian’s hindsight, the decisions made by these leaders are puzzling mostly because they “should have known better. ” Often, such decisions are deemed “irrational, ” and the leaders who made them are judged to be crazy or just fools. While being dismissive of such policy choices and the leaders who made them may be tempting, it does not help us understand these puzzling decisions very well. There are on occasion leaders whose rationality may be questioned, but there are far fewer such individuals than those who are commonly labeled irrational. Hence, when seeking to explain foreign policy decisions, it is more fruitful to start with the assumption that the leaders who made these puzzling decisions were rational human beings trying their best to make “good” foreign policy decisions for their countries. 4 Once we make that assumption, however, we must also begin to ponder what motivates these leaders, what they understand about the situations they face, and what factors made their decisions turn out to be “bad” ones. Before we proceed, let’s consider two important concepts introduced in the last paragraph: rationality and good foreign policy decisions. It can be difficult to accept that Saddam Hussein was not crazy, Chamberlain not naive, and Khrushchev not a fool. Commonsense notions of rationality demand that each of these leaders should have known better. Yet if we stop to think about the world from the perspective of each leader, knowing what that leader knew at the time of the decision, it becomes a little more difficult to maintain this attitude. We might disagree with the goals Saddam Hussein or Khrushchev pursued, and we might judge Chamberlain too preoccupied with preserving peace, but in each case, we can make the argument that these leaders consistently pursued their goals. And this is the main requirement of rationality: the 4 demand that the means—or the policy choices—are logically connected to the ends—or the leader’s goals. In other words, rationality demands only that a decision maker has some purpose in mind and make choices designed to achieve those predetermined ends. 5 To argue that a decision maker is rational, therefore, does not mean that you agree with his or her goals—or that you, even if you had the same goals, could not make different choices. You may find the goals objectionable. Or you may share the goals and yet be convinced that different policies would better achieve those objectives. Additionally, and even more important, rationality does not guarantee a desirable outcome, because the outcome is in part dependent on the reactions of other actors. 6 That brings us to the second concept, that of good decisions. All too often, foreign policy decisions are judged to be good or bad in hindsight. Such evaluations are frequently based on the knowledge that the decision led to a desirable or disastrous outcome. 7 The examples of Saddam Hussein, Chamberlain, and Khrushchev are all decisions that, in hindsight, were judged to be disastrous. They “should have known better. ” But is hindsight a fair standard? The answer is no. Just as good decisions do not guarantee a good outcome, flawed decisions do not inevitably lead to bad results. If hindsight and a desirable outcome are problematic guides to judging whether a foreign policy decision was good, then how to we arrive at such judgments? An alternative is to judge decisions based on how they were made: were they based on a sound analysis of the situation and careful thought regarding the consequences of possible courses of action? 8 Such judgments rely on insight into the decision process and assessments of the priorities and motivations of leaders. The advantage of judging foreign policy decisions in this manner is that decisions can be evaluated without resorting to hindsight. There are two disadvantages, however. First, such process-oriented judgments are likely to overestimate the degree to which leaders make reasonable decisions. When leaders engage in sound analysis on the basis of a very narrow and skewed perception of the world or on the basis of obviously flawed information, a process-oriented evaluation would lead us to judge the decision as a reasonable one. After all, the proper process was followed. Does that sound like satisfactory analysis to you? Or does it sound like a case of “garbage in, garbage out”? Can a good decision process based on faulty information be expected to yield a reasonable, or even good, decision? More likely than not, you will conclude that it cannot. Hence, a process-oriented assessment is better at helping us understand why a policy maker, or group of policy makers, arrived at a specific foreign policy decision rather than at judging whether that decision was good. That is still valuable because it helps us achieve a greater awareness of the problems and pitfalls involved decision making. The second disadvantage of judging foreign policy decisions by the process used to achieve them is a practical problem: it can be quite difficult to figure out whether a foreign policy decision was based on sound analysis and careful thought. Frequently, relevant information may be classified or the necessary records may not exist. Governments and countries differ in their record keeping. They may also have different policies regarding declassification of the documents that do exist and making them available to researchers. This does not make analysis impossible, but it does mean that we sometimes need to infer process variables from the available information, rather than knowing for sure. A skilled analyst can often make very effective use of available information. In sum, there is no easy way to define good foreign policy decision making. Nevertheless, it is a subject worth pondering. When we judge that leaders should have known better, we are voicing the expectation that, given the responsibilities of their positions, we may expect them to transcend the narrowness of their own time and place to view the world from multiple perspectives. 9We return to the subject of good decision making in chapter 3. So far, the focus has been on leaders and decision making, but the study of foreign policy involves more. At the heart of the study of foreign policy is the desire to understand countries’ actions and behaviors towards other countries and the international environment generally. Foreign policy is defined as the totality of a country’s policies toward and interactions with the environment beyond its borders. 10 This 5 definition is quite broad and encompasses a variety of issue domains or issue areas, which are defined as a set of interrelated concerns in policy making that are, however, more loosely tied to other sets of interrelated concerns. Traditionally, the study of foreign policy has focused primarily on the quest to maintain and enhance a country’s power and security. It centered on questions of averting war when possible, deciding to fight if necessary, and—first and foremost—ensuring the integrity of the country’s borders. Increasingly, economic relations between countries have gained attention. Since the end of the Cold War, globalization has become an important process that highlights the interconnectedness of the world’s economies. This has had a greater impact on countries with economies that, in earlier eras, were less connected to the international economy. For those countries that traditionally have depended greatly on international trade, economic issues have had a higher priority on the foreign policy agenda much longer. The foreign policy agenda does not stop with security and economic issues: in recent decades, environmental issues have increasingly gained attention; so have issues such as human rights, population growth and migration, food and energy policies, as well as foreign aid, development, and the relations between richer and poorer countries. In addition to the increased diversity of issues on the foreign policy agenda, there is also an increasing variety in the actors who engage in foreign policy making. Traditionally, investigations of foreign policy looked primarily at states and leaders. This is still largely the case, although there has been increased recognition of, and interest in, the foreign policy roles of decision makers who were not traditionally associated with international diplomacy, such as a secretary of commerce or a minister of justice. Moreover, investigators are increasingly interested in public diplomacy, or a government’s diplomatic efforts that target citizens, the press, and other constituencies in other countries rather than their governments, and they also occasionally look beyond the government to study citizen diplomacy, or the efforts and effects abroad of actions by actors who are not official representatives of the state or its government. Often-cited as examples of U. S. public diplomacy are the efforts of the United States Information Agency (USIA). Other countries also engage in public diplomacy to influence the perceptions citizens in other countries have of their society and government. An example of citizen diplomacy is the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s 1984 negotiation with Syria’s government for the release of U. S. Navy pilot Lt. Robert Goodman, who had been captured after his plane was shot down over Syrian- controlled territory in Lebanon. 11 The foreign policies of countries—whether large and powerful, small and weak, or somewhere in between—drive the course of world history. At times, countries and their leaders have pursued wise policies that have yielded peace and prosperity. Yet at other times, they have made choices that have been destructive of both, as the previous examples show. What drives the study of foreign policy is the quest to understand not just why leaders make the choices they do, but also how and why domestic and international constraints and opportunities affect their choices. After all, leaders do not exist in a vacuum; they are surrounded by advisors and a bureaucracy, influenced by domestic constituencies, and dependent on the power their state can project in the international arena. Untangling the relative impact of these various factors on foreign policy is no easy matter. 12 The best explanations of the foreign policy choices of countries are frequently found in the complex interplay of multiple factors. 13 Untangling the relative impact of various factors on foreign policy decision making may not be an easy matter, but it need not be an impossible task, either. First, we need to be clear about what it is we seek to explain. Next, we will investigate where to look for explanations and discuss a framework that helps to organize the various factors or “causes” of foreign policy. Subsequently, we will turn our attention to the benefits of studying foreign policy comparatively.