Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Probabilistic Reasoning ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Policy Decisions ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Policy Analysts ◽  
Bay Of Pigs

This chapter describes widespread skepticism regarding the value of assessing uncertainty in international politics. “Agnostics” argue that assessments of uncertainty in international politics are too unreliable to be useful for shaping major foreign policy decisions. “Rejectionists” argue that attempting to assess uncertainty in international politics can be counterproductive, surrounding foreign policy analyses with illusions of rigor or exposing foreign policy analysts to excessive criticism. “Cynics” claim that foreign policy analysts and decision makers have self-interested motives to avoid assessing uncertainty. The chapter explains how these ideas lead many scholars, practitioners, and pundits to avoid holding careful debates about the risks surrounding major foreign policy choices. The chapter describes how this aversion to probabilistic reasoning appears in several high-profile cases, such as President Kennedy’s decision to authorize the Bay of Pigs invasion and President Obama’s decision to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Placing Probability Front and Center in Foreign Policy Discourse

2019 ◽  
pp. 187-196
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Probabilistic Reasoning ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Policy Analysts ◽  
Policy Proposals

The book’s concluding chapter explores practical opportunities for improving assessments of uncertainty in foreign policy debates. It focuses on the value of creating norms that place probabilistic reasoning front and center in foreign policy debates. There are three main ways to pursue this goal: foreign policy organizations can improve formal analytic standards for assessing uncertainty; decision makers can actively encourage foreign policy analysts to assess uncertainty in clear and structured ways; and critics can press their opponents to describe the uncertainty that surrounds controversial policy proposals. This last dynamic is especially important, because it shows that the goal of improving assessments of uncertainty in international politics is not just an issue for government officials; it is also a matter of how scholars, journalists, and pundits can raise the standards of public discourse.

Analysis and Decision

2019 ◽  
pp. 161-186
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Probabilistic Reasoning ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Risky Decision ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Over Time

This chapter explains how decision makers can incorporate assessments of uncertainty into high-stakes foreign policy choices. It begins by describing a simple analytic tool called break-even analysis, with which leaders can use explicit probability assessments as a point of leverage for determining whether or not a risky decision is worthwhile. The chapter then explains how transparent probabilistic reasoning is especially important for assessing strategic progress. In some cases, it can actually be impossible to make rigorous judgments about the extent to which foreign policies are making acceptable progress without assessing subjective probabilities in detail. This argument departs from a large body of existing scholarship on learning in international politics that assumes leaders can use a straightforward logic of trial and error to determine how they should update their strategic perceptions over time. The chapter provides examples of these dynamics drawn from the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Framing the National Interest: The Manipulation of Foreign Policy Decisions in Group Settings

1990 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zeev Maoz
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Policy Decisions ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Individual Preferences ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Group Settings ◽  
Crisis Conditions

Social psychologists have long attempted to explain the group-induced shift phenomenon: that it is impossible to predict group choices from knowledge of individual preferences prior to group discussion, and that individuals change their choices during group deliberations. Most explanations of group-induced shifts have focused on substantive changes in individual preferences induced by group dynamics. This study explores the possibility that individual preferences do not necessarily change in the course of group discussions. Rather, decision makers may switch their choice in part because one or more individuals manipulate the decision-making process in a manner that helps them achieve their desired outcome. The study distinguishes between rational and nonrational variations of decisional manipulation and considers examples of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy choices under crisis conditions to illustrate such processes. The implications of these ideas for the study of foreign policy decisions are discussed.

Intervention and Intransitivity: Public Opinion, Social Choice, and the Use of Military Force Abroad

1995 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 534-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt Taylor Gaubatz
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Choice ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Public Preferences ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
The Impact

This article argues that the problems identified in the literature on public choice should critically affect our research on public opinion and our understanding of the impact of public opinion on foreign policy. While a robust literature has emerged around social choice issues in political science, there has been remarkably little appreciation for these problems in the literature on public opinion in general and on public opinion and foreign policy in particular. The potential importance of social choice problems for understanding the nature and role of public opinion in foreign policy making is demonstrated through an examination of American public attitudes about military intervention abroad. In particular, drawing on several common descriptions of the underlying dimensionality of public attitudes on major foreign policy issues, it is shown that there may be important intransitivities in the ordering of public preferences at the aggregate level on policy choices such as those considered by American decision makers in the period leading up to the Gulf War. Without new approaches to public-opinion polling that take these problems into consideration, it will be difficult to make credible claims about the role of public opinion in theforeignpolicy process.

Image Theory and the Initiation of Strategic Rivalries

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manjeet S. Pardesi
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cognitive Process ◽  
International System ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Other ◽  
Image Theory ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Domestic Affairs

The assessment of an opponent as a strategic rival is analytically equivalent to evaluating its strategic image. The central decision-makers of states reevaluate the image of other regional states and the great powers of the system in response to strategic shocks, as they have an impact on interstate interaction capacity. Interaction capacity in the international system can be affected by three types of changes—military, political, and economic. A strategic rivalry is a process that initiates when the central decision-makers of at least one state in a dyad ascribe the image of an enemy to the other as a consequence of such shocks. It is important to empirically demonstrate the ascription of these images through a cognitive process because strategic rivalries are a function of decision-maker perceptions by definition. Four types of enemy images are identified here—expansionist states, which are territorially revisionist; hegemonic states, which circumscribe a given state’s foreign policy choices; imperial states, which intervene in a given state’s domestic affairs in addition to being hegemonic; and peer-competitors, who pose latent and/or long-term threats. Once formed, these images are sustained over long periods of time and change only slowly in response to additional strategic shocks. These images also inform the strategy that a given state pursues toward its rival.

9. Feminism

2019 ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
Helen M. Kinsella
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
International Politics ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Policy Decisions ◽  
Policy Changes ◽  
Poststructural Feminist ◽  
Postcolonial Feminist ◽  
International League

This chapter examines international feminism, focusing on how feminist international relations theories are necessary for understanding international politics, what feminist international relations theories provide for understanding international politics, and how feminist international relations theories have influenced the practice of international politics. The chapter proceeds by explaining feminism and feminist international relations theory as well as feminist conceptions of gender and power. It also discusses four feminist international relations theories: liberal feminist international relations, critical feminist international relations, postcolonial feminist international relations, and poststructural feminist international relations. Two case studies of women's organizations are presented: the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom and the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether feminist foreign policy changes states' foreign policy decisions.

Qatar and the Arab Spring: down the foreign policy slope

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed Nuruzzaman
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
National Security ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
Proactive Role

Qatar, a backwater state in regional and international politics until 1995, has in recent years pursued a high-profile foreign policy in the areas of dispute mediations, maintaining balanced relations with allies and adversaries alike, adept use of soft power tools, and even military interventions in fellow Arab states, Libya in particular, to aid the Arab pro-democracy forces. This high-profile foreign policy has aimed at strengthening Qatar's national security in the Gulf neighbourhood and playing a more proactive role in the Arab world. This article examines Qatar's activist foreign policy role in the Arab Spring and probes whether such a role is sustainable in future in view of the constraints Qatar faces at home, in the Gulf neighbourhood and beyond. It concludes that Qatar, as a tiny state, has little choice other than to strike a balance between its oversized foreign policy role and the imperatives of regional and international realities.

Explaining Self-Defeating Foreign Policy Decisions: Interpreting Soviet Arms for Egypt in 1973 Through Process or Domestic Bargaining Models?

1992 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 759-766 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Anderson ◽  
Margaret G. Hermann ◽  
Charles F. Hermann
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Information Processing ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Policy Decisions ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Bargaining Models ◽  
Level Model ◽  
Causal Sequence ◽  
Level Process ◽  
Two Level Model

How should we explain why a state sometimes adopts a foreign policy in one region that interferes with its concurrent policies elsewhere? In their article in the March 1989 issue of this Review, Stewart, Hermann and Hermann proposed a three-level process model of foreign policy to explain such Soviet behavior towards Egypt in 1973. The analysis has continuing interest because it interprets the puzzling behavior as a manifestation of general problems of information processing in making foreign policy choices. Richard Anderson suggests that a two-level model of domestic bargaining better accounts for the causal sequence in Soviet-Egyptian relations and is in general more parsimonious. Margaret and Charles Hermann defend their substantive analysis and argue in any case for the complementarity of process and bargaining approaches.

Transnational Relations and World Politics: A Conclusion

1971 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 721-748 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph S. Nye ◽  
Robert O. Keohane
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
International Politics ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Policy Decisions ◽  
Secondary Importance ◽  
Transnational Relations ◽  
Domestic Interests

World politics is changing, but our conceptual paradigms have not kept pace. The classic state-centric paradigm assumes that states are the only significant actors in world politics and that they act as units. Diverse domestic interests have effects on international politics only through governmental foreign policy channels. Intersocietal interactions are relegated to a category of secondary importance–the “environment” of interstate politics. As Karl Kaiser has pointed out, the reality of international politics has never totally corresponded to this model. Nevertheless, the model was approximated in the eighteenth century when foreign policy decisions were taken by small groups of persons acting within an environment that was less obtrusive and complex than the present one.

To Intervene or Not to Intervene? Democratic Constraints on Third-Party Support in Civil Wars

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Casper Sakstrup ◽  
Jakob Tolstrup
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Institutional Characteristics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Policy Decisions ◽  
Party Support

Abstract Do democracies and autocracies differ when it comes to whether and how they provide third-party support to warring parties in civil wars? We argue that the political institutions of potential third-party states have important consequences for both questions. We emphasize how three particular institutional characteristics of democratic polities constrain decision-makers. This makes democracies less likely than autocracies to intervene in intra-state conflicts in general, and less likely to provide combat-intensive support specifically. An empirical analysis of incidents of third-party support to actors in civil wars in the period 1975–2009 corroborates the overall argument, although the results regarding support types are less clear. These results have important implications not only for our understanding of civil wars but also for how foreign policy decisions are made across different regime contexts.

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