Explaining Foreign Policy

Explaining Foreign Policy PDF Author: Steve A. Yetiv
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801878114
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Scholars of international relations tend to prefer one model or another in explaining the foreign policy behavior of governments. Steve Yetiv, however, advocates an approach that applies five familiar models: rational actor, cognitive, domestic politics, groupthink, and bureaucratic politics. Drawing on the widest set of primary sources and interviews with key actors to date, he applies each of these models to the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis and to the U.S. decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. Probing the strengths and shortcomings of each model in explaining how and why the United States decided to proceed with the Persian Gulf War, he shows that all models (with the exception of the government politics model) contribute in some way to our understanding of the event. No one model provides the best explanation, but when all five are used, a fuller and more complete understanding emerges. In the case of the Gulf War, Yetiv demonstrates the limits of models that presume rational decision-making as well as the crucial importance of using various perspectives. Drawing partly on the Gulf War case, he also develops innovative theories about when groupthink can actually produce a positive outcome and about the conditions under which government politics will likely be avoided. He shows that the best explanations for government behavior ultimately integrate empirical insights yielded from both international and domestic theory, which scholars have often seen as analytically separate. With its use of the Persian Gulf crisis as a teachable case study and coverage of the more recent Iraq war, Explaining Foreign Policy will be of interest to students and scholars of foreign policy, international relations, and related fields.

Explaining Foreign Policy

Explaining Foreign Policy PDF Author: Steve A. Yetiv
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801878114
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
Scholars of international relations tend to prefer one model or another in explaining the foreign policy behavior of governments. Steve Yetiv, however, advocates an approach that applies five familiar models: rational actor, cognitive, domestic politics, groupthink, and bureaucratic politics. Drawing on the widest set of primary sources and interviews with key actors to date, he applies each of these models to the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis and to the U.S. decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. Probing the strengths and shortcomings of each model in explaining how and why the United States decided to proceed with the Persian Gulf War, he shows that all models (with the exception of the government politics model) contribute in some way to our understanding of the event. No one model provides the best explanation, but when all five are used, a fuller and more complete understanding emerges. In the case of the Gulf War, Yetiv demonstrates the limits of models that presume rational decision-making as well as the crucial importance of using various perspectives. Drawing partly on the Gulf War case, he also develops innovative theories about when groupthink can actually produce a positive outcome and about the conditions under which government politics will likely be avoided. He shows that the best explanations for government behavior ultimately integrate empirical insights yielded from both international and domestic theory, which scholars have often seen as analytically separate. With its use of the Persian Gulf crisis as a teachable case study and coverage of the more recent Iraq war, Explaining Foreign Policy will be of interest to students and scholars of foreign policy, international relations, and related fields.

Understanding Foreign Policy

Understanding Foreign Policy PDF Author: Michael Clarke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A concise introduction to the study of foreign policy, this textbook provides an essential guide to a major area of international politics which has become increasingly complex and sophisticated.

Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making

Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making PDF Author: Alex Mintz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139487221
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making presents a psychological approach to foreign policy decision making. This approach focuses on the decision process, dynamics, and outcome. The book includes a wealth of extended real-world case studies and examples that are woven into the text. The cases and examples, which are written in an accessible style, include decisions made by leaders of the United States, Israel, New Zealand, Cuba, Iceland, United Kingdom, and others. In addition to coverage of the rational model of decision making, levels of analysis of foreign policy decision making, and types of decisions, the book includes extensive material on alternatives to the rational choice model, the marketing and framing of decisions, cognitive biases, and domestic, cultural, and international influences on decision making in international affairs. Existing textbooks do not present such an approach to foreign policy decision making, international relations, American foreign policy, and comparative foreign policy.

Explaining Foreign Policy

Explaining Foreign Policy PDF Author: Lloyd Jensen
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


Explaining Foreign Policy

Explaining Foreign Policy PDF Author: Hans Mouritzen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781588268358
Category : International relations
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Why would Georgia attack South Ossetia in August 2008, with Russian forces conducting exercises nearby? This remains a puzzle to analysts-on a not inconsiderable list of foreign policy puzzles. Hans Mouritzen and Anders Wivel use the example of the Russo-Georgian war to illustrate and evaluate their original model for explaining foreign policy behavior. The authors apply the model to the actions of 40 countries in relation to the 2008 war. Uniquely linking system, interstate, and intrastate levels of explanation, and benefiting from the WikiLeaks revelations, they offer an important new tool for foreign policy analysis.

Explaining Foreign Policy

Explaining Foreign Policy PDF Author: Steve A. Yetiv
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421402645
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Steve A. Yetiv has developed an interdisciplinary, integrated approach to studying foreign policy decisions, which he applies here to understand better how and why the United States went to war in the Persian Gulf in 1991 and 2003. Yetiv’s innovative method employs the rational actor, cognitive, domestic politics, groupthink, and bureaucratic politics models to explain the foreign policy behavior of governments. Drawing on the widest set of primary sources to date—including a trove of recently declassified documents—and on interviews with key actors, he applies these models to illuminate the decision-making process in the two Gulf Wars and to develop theoretical notions about foreign policy. What Yetiv discovers, in addition to empirical evidence about the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars, is that no one approach provides the best explanation, but when all five are used, a fuller and more complete understanding emerges. Thoroughly updated with a new preface and a chapter on the 2003 Iraq War, Explaining Foreign Policy, already widely used in courses, will continue to be of interest to students and scholars of foreign policy, international relations, and related fields.

Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations

Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations PDF Author: Michael J. Hogan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521540353
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Originally published in 1991, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations has become an indispensable volume not only for teachers and students in international history and political science, but also for general readers seeking an introduction to American diplomatic history. This collection of essays highlights a variety of newer, innovative, and stimulating conceptual approaches and analytical methods used to study the history of American foreign relations, including bureaucratic, dependency, and world systems theories, corporatist and national security models, psychology, culture, and ideology. Along with substantially revised essays from the first edition, this volume presents entirely new material on postcolonial theory, borderlands history, modernization theory, gender, race, memory, cultural transfer, and critical theory. The book seeks to define the study of American international history, stimulate research in fresh directions, and encourage cross-disciplinary thinking, especially between diplomatic history and other fields of American history, in an increasingly transnational, globalizing world.

Explaining Change in Russian Foreign Policy

Explaining Change in Russian Foreign Policy PDF Author: C. Thorun
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230589960
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
An assessment of the explanatory utility of different approaches to account for post-Soviet Russia's foreign policy towards the West, arguing that only by focusing both on external constraints and changes in the Russian leadership's foreign policy thinking can we explain major facets of Russia's conduct from 1992-2007.

Small States in World Politics

Small States in World Politics PDF Author: Jeanne A. K. Hey
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9781555879433
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Offering empirical richness within a consistent theoretical framework, this work provides a comprehensive examination of small state foreign policy.

Foreign Policy, Inc.

Foreign Policy, Inc. PDF Author: Lawrence Davidson
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813173213
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Most Americans assume that U.S. foreign policy is determined by democratically elected leaders who define and protect the common good of the citizens and the nation they represent. Increasingly, this conventional wisdom falls short of explaining the real climate in Washington. Well organized private-interest groups are capitalizing on Americans' ignorance of world politics to advance their own agendas. Supported by vast economic resources and powerful lobbyists, these groups thwart the constitutional checks and balances designed to protect the U.S. political system, effectively bullying or buying our national leaders. Lawrence Davidson traces the history, evolution, and growing influence of these private organizations from the nation's founding to the present, and he illuminates their profoundly disturbing impact on the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing America's National Interest demonstrates how economic interest groups once drove America's westward expansion and designed the nation's overseas imperial policies. Using the contemporary Cuba and Israel lobbies as examples, Davidson then describes the emergence of political lobbies in the twentieth century and shows how diverse groups with competing ethnic and religious agendas began to organize and shape American priorities abroad. Despite the troubling influence of these specialized lobbies, many Americans remain indifferent to the hijacking of American foreign policy. Americans' focus on local events and their lack of interest in international affairs renders them susceptible to media manipulation and prevents them from holding elected officials accountable for their ties to lobbies. Such mass indifference magnifies the power of these wealthy special interest groups and permits them to create and implement American foreign policy. The result is that the global authority of the United States is weakened, its integrity as an international leader is compromised, and its citizens are endangered. Debilitated by two wars, a tarnished global reputation, and a plummeting economy, Americans, Davidson insists, can no longer afford to ignore the realities of world politics. On its current path, he predicts, America will cease to be a commonwealth of individuals but instead will become an amoral assembly of competing interest groups whose policies and priorities place the welfare of the nation and its citizens in peril.