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"United States -- Foreign relations administration -- Case studies"
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Difficult Transitions: Foreign Policy Troubles at the Outset of Presidential Power
New presidents have no honeymoon when it comes to foreign policy. Less than three months into his presidency, for example, John F. Kennedy authorized the disastrous effort to overthrow Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs. More recently, George W. Bush had been in office for less than eight months when he was faced with the attacks of September 11. How should an incoming president prepare for the foreign policy challenges that lie immediately ahead? That s the question Kurt Campbell and James Steinberg tackle in this compelling book. Drawing on their decades of government service in the corridors of Capitol Hill, the intimate confines of the White House, the State Department, and the bare-knuckles Pentagon bureaucracy Campbell and Steinberg identify the major foreign policy pitfalls that face a new presidential administration. They explain clearly and concisely what it takes to get foreign policy right from the start. The authors set the scene with a historical overview of presidential transitions and foreign policy including case studies of such prominent episodes as the Black Hawk Down tragedy in Somalia that shook the Clinton administration in its first year and the Bush administration s handling of the collision between a U.S. reconnaissance plane and a Chinese fighter jet in the spring of 2001. They pinpoint the leading causes of foreign policy fiascos, including the tendency to write off the policies of the outgoing administration and the failure to appreciate the differences between campaign promises and policy realities. Most important, they provide a road map to help the new administration steer clear of the land mines ahead. America s next president will confront critical foreign policy decisions from day one. Difficult Transitions provides essential guidance for getting those choices right.
eBook
Knowing the adversary
States are more likely to engage in risky and destabilizing actions such as military buildups and preemptive strikes if they believe their adversaries pose a tangible threat. Yet despite the crucial importance of this issue, we don't know enough about how states and their leaders draw inferences about their adversaries' long-term intentions.Knowing the Adversarydraws on a wealth of historical archival evidence to shed new light on how world leaders and intelligence organizations actually make these assessments.
Keren Yarhi-Milo examines three cases: Britain's assessments of Nazi Germany's intentions in the 1930s, America's assessments of the Soviet Union's intentions during the Carter administration, and the Reagan administration's assessments of Soviet intentions near the end of the Cold War. She advances a new theoretical framework-called selective attention-that emphasizes organizational dynamics, personal diplomatic interactions, and cognitive and affective factors. Yarhi-Milo finds that decision makers don't pay as much attention to those aspects of state behavior that major theories of international politics claim they do. Instead, they tend to determine the intentions of adversaries on the basis of preexisting beliefs, theories, and personal impressions. Yarhi-Milo also shows how intelligence organizations rely on very different indicators than decision makers, focusing more on changes in the military capabilities of adversaries.
Knowing the Adversaryprovides a clearer picture of the historical validity of existing theories, and broadens our understanding of the important role that diplomacy plays in international security.
eBook
Talk at the brink
In October 1962, the fate of the world hung on the American response to the discovery of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba. That response was informed by hours of discussions between John F. Kennedy and his top advisers. What those advisers did not know was that President Kennedy was secretly taping their talks, providing future scholars with a rare inside look at high-level political deliberation in a moment of crisis.Talk at the Brinkis the first book to examine these historic audio recordings from a sociological perspective. It reveals how conversational practices and dynamics shaped Kennedy's perception of the options available to him, thereby influencing his decisions and ultimately the outcome of the crisis.
David Gibson looks not just at the positions taken by Kennedy and his advisers but how those positions were articulated, challenged, revised, and sometimes ignored. He argues that Kennedy's decisions arose from the intersection of distant events unfolding in Cuba, Moscow, and the high seas with the immediate conversational minutia of turn-taking, storytelling, argument, and justification. In particular, Gibson shows how Kennedy's group told and retold particular stories again and again, sometimes settling upon a course of action only after the most frightening consequences were omitted or actively suppressed.
Talk at the Brinkpresents an image of Kennedy's response to the Cuban missile crisis that is sharply at odds with previous scholarship, and has important implications for our understanding of decision making, deliberation, social interaction, and historical contingency.
eBook
The national origins of policy ideas
In politics, ideas matter. They provide the foundation for economic policymaking, which in turn shapes what is possible in domestic and international politics. Yet until now, little attention has been paid to how these ideas are produced and disseminated, and how this process varies between countries.The National Origins of Policy Ideasprovides the first comparative analysis of how \"knowledge regimes\"-communities of policy research organizations like think tanks, political party foundations, ad hoc commissions, and state research offices, and the institutions that govern them-generate ideas and communicate them to policymakers.
John Campbell and Ove Pedersen examine how knowledge regimes are organized, operate, and have changed over the last thirty years in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark. They show how there are persistent national differences in how policy ideas are produced. Some countries do so in contentious, politically partisan ways, while others are cooperative and consensus oriented. They find that while knowledge regimes have adopted some common practices since the 1970s, tendencies toward convergence have been limited and outcomes have been heavily shaped by national contexts.
Drawing on extensive interviews with top officials at leading policy research organizations, this book demonstrates why knowledge regimes are as important to capitalism as the state and the firm, and sheds new light on debates about the effects of globalization, the rise of neoliberalism, and the orientation of comparative political economy in political science and sociology.
eBook
Ethnic politics in europe
This detailed account of ethnic minority politics explains when and how European institutions successfully used norms and incentives to shape domestic policy toward ethnic minorities and why those measures sometimes failed.
Going beyond traditional analyses, Kelley examines the pivotal engagement by the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Council for Europe in the creation of such policies.
Following language, education, and citizenship issues during the 1990s in Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania, she shows how the combination of membership conditionality and norm-based diplomacy was surprisingly effective at overcoming even significant domestic opposition. However, she also finds that diplomacy alone, without the offer of membership, was ineffective unless domestic opposition to the proposed policies was quite limited.
As one of the first systematic analyses of political rather than economic conditionality, the book illustrates under what conditions and through what mechanisms institutions influenced domestic policy in the decade, preparing the way for the historic enlargement of the European Union.
This thoughtful and thorough discussion, based on case studies, quantitative analysis, and interviews with nearly one hundred policymakers and experts, tells an important story about how European organizations helped facilitate peaceful solutions to ethnic tensions--in sharp contrast to the ethnic bloodshed that occurred in the former Yugoslavia during this time. This book's simultaneous assessment of soft diplomacy and stricter conditionality advances a long overdue dialogue between proponents rational choice models and social constructivists. As political requirements increasingly become part of conditionality, it also provides keen policy insights for the strategic choices made by actors in international institutions.
eBook
Organizing for Foreign Policy Crises
Presidents often assemble ad hoc groups of advisers to help them make decisions during foreign policy crises. These advisers may include the holders of the traditional foreign policy positions--secretaries of state and defense--as well as others from within and without the executive branch. It has never been clear what role these groups play in the development of policy. In this landmark study, Patrick Haney examines how these crisis decision groups were structured and how they performed the tasks of providing information, advice, and analysis to the president. From this, Haney investigates the links between a president's crisis management structure and the decision-making process that took place during a foreign policy crisis.
Haney employs case studies to examine the different ways presidents from Truman through Bush used crisis decision-making groups to help manage foreign policy crises. He looks at the role of these groups in handling the Berlin blockade in 1948, the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Tet offensive in 1968, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the Panama invasion in 1989, among other crises. He extends our understanding of the organization, management and behavior of the decision-making groups presidents assemble during foreign policy crises. This book will appeal to scholars of the American presidency and American foreign policy.
Patrick Haney is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Miami University of Ohio.
eBook
America's Role in Nation-Building
The post-World War II occupations of Germany and Japan set standards for postconflict nation-building that have not since been matched. Only in recent years has the United States has felt the need to participate in similar transformations, but it is now facing one of the most challenging prospects since the 1940s: Iraq. The authors review seven case studies--Germany, Japan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan--and seek lessons about what worked well and what did not. Then, they examine the Iraq situation in light of these lessons. Success in Iraq will require an extensive commitment of financial, military, and political resources for a long time. The United States cannot afford to contemplate early exit strategies and cannot afford to leave the job half completed.
eBook
How do leaders make decisions?: evidence from the east and west
Understanding how leaders make foreign policy and national security decisions is of paramount importance for the policy community and academia. This book explores how leaders such as Trump, Obama, Netanyahu and others make decisions using the Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) method. The chapters gathered here analyse the decisions made by key political figures around the world, past and present, in order to shed light on how these decisions are made and what policy implications they have for their own and other nations. Several chapters also focus on military decision making, including around pivotal times in history including the second world war and the evolution of nuclear warfare.
eBook
The rise of the blended professional in higher education
This paper builds on earlier work by the author to explore the international dimensions of a study of the changing roles and identities of professional staff in higher education (Whitchurch 2008a, b). It further develops the concept of the blended professional, characterising individuals with identities drawn from both professional and academic domains, and examines the institutional spaces, knowledges, relationships and legitimacies that they construct. Comparisons between the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States are used to provide indicators of possible futures for this group of staff, including their positioning in the university community, the challenges they face, and the potentials that they offer to their institutions. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).
Journal Article