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Chile and Argentina signed a Treaty of Peace and Friendship in Vatican City in 1984. The result of six years of papal mediation, this treaty marked the end of a territorial dispute with roots over a century old. A successful resolution of conflicting territorial claims was by no means guaranteed at the outset, and hostilities threatened to break out during the negotiations. Nevertheless, the Treaty of Peace and Friendship resolved territorial issues and navigation rights, and Chile and Argentina remain at peace today. Contrary to predictions based on mechanisms borrowed from a theory of mediation and peacekeeping from Smith and Stam, a biased and powerless mediator credibly facilitated the exchange of the “wrong” kind of information and, without resorting to the “right” leverage, successfully formulated a peace treaty, and the treaty remains in force nearly four decades later. The fields of history, religious studies, international relations, and diplomacy offer an interdisciplinary framework to explore and explain this unexpected result. While it is not possible to derive a general theory of mediation and conflict resolution from a single example, this case highlights the importance of confidentiality, institutional patience, information management, and flexibility as salient characteristics of the Holy See’s successful role as a weak mediator.

Can religious cultural heritage (RCH) affect international policy decisions? Conventional social scientific studies of leaders, leadership, and decision-making frameworks often overlook this possibility. This paper explores highlights of the 1946 Iran Crisis using memoirs, archival documents, and other data. This article also examines the Baruch Plan to internationalize control of nuclear technology as part of the background against which this crisis took place. In so doing, the paper treats how President Harry Truman navigated both international law and international politics through lenses including history, political science, and political philosophy. Truman’s writings and actions reveal coherence among his philosophical ethics, philosophical anthropology, and philosophy of government. Moreover, his attitudes toward sovereignty, authority, and the common good support the claim that Truman’s religious cultural heritage (RCH) influenced his patterns of thought and behavior as a decision-maker. This paper does not argue that RCH drove Truman’s attitudes and decisions. Instead, this article shows how an analysis that includes RCH can complement traditional analysis based on power, interest, opportunity, and other factors. The findings of this study open up the possibility of future work treating the influence of RCH on other nuclear and non-nuclear public policy decisions made by Truman and other world leaders.

This paper sheds light on how religious cultural heritage influences the decision-making framework of state leaders by considering U.S. President Harry Truman through the lenses of history, political science, and religious studies. By utilizing archival data from Truman’s presidential library and museum, this paper connects his philosophical ethics, his philosophy of government, and his philosophy of human nature to a coherent decision-making framework employed by Truman for issues ranging from economics to race. This paper does not conclude that religious cultural heritage is the determining factor in Truman’s decisions. Rather, this paper demonstrates the usefulness of incorporating religious cultural heritage into analyses which explore how leaders make decisions, for religious cultural heritage can complete analyses based on competing interests, cost-benefit criteria, and other factors. By implication, the methodology applied successfully to Truman in these cases may be applied to Truman’s other decisions (for example, nuclear decisions); moreover, generally similar approaches may be applied to other leaders in future work.

The influence of religious cultural heritage on nuclear decision-making has often been overlooked. Demonstrating the influence of religious cultural heritage on such decision-making depends on establishing patterns of thought and patterns of behavior. For this reason, it is worth taking note of some illustrative examples of what one might find when systematically approaching case studies of nuclear decision-making which include religious cultural heritage among the independent variables. Drawing on archival sources and physical artifacts, this paper presents six short episodes touching upon nuclear decision-making during the terms of American presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Reagan. These half-dozen vignettes reveal the importance of interpretation in the social sciences, illustrate how religious cultural heritage can condition attitudes toward decisions and interactions concerning foreign cultures or peoples, demonstrate how morality can affect political decision-making, show how politics can affect religious cultural heritage, clarify how the reach of religious cultural heritage can be limited by politics, and reveal that religious cultural heritage can act in multiple directions at the same time; they simultaneously delineate the parameters which a comprehensive theory of decision-making must encompass in order to capture influences arising from religious cultural heritage.

International politics, as a practice and as an academic discipline, has been adjusting to nuclear realities since the first atomic bomb. World religions also have sought to accommodate their understandings to the nuclear age. Nuclear weapons pose the ultimate realist test and ethical challenge by throwing questions of security, power, interest, and morality into stark relief. The cultural heritage of the nine nuclear-armed states includes the five great world religions. Does religious cultural heritage influence nuclear decision-making? Realism predicts decisions will be driven solely by questions of security and power, but religious cultural influences might affect nuclear decisions in ways state-level or system-level analysis would not predict. If religious cultural heritage affects leaders’ nuclear decisions, evidence of influence should be present in the decision-making. In this paper, I go beyond the operational code framework of political psychology and international relations to study the influence of religious cultural heritage on nuclear decision-making. First, I survey prior work on nuclear proliferation, nuclear ethics, religion, strategic culture, international politics, and operational code. I then go beyond the operational code methodology by proposing a model of how religious cultural heritage can influence decision-making frameworks and by offering a tool to characterize decision-making frameworks. I illustrate how my methodology could be applied in practice. A summary concludes the paper.