Making American Foreign Policy

Ole Holsti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136084508
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ole Holsti, one of the deans of US foreign policy analysis, examines the complex factors involved in the policy decision-making process including the beliefs and cognitive processes of foreign policy leaders and the influence public opinion has on foreign policy. The essays, in addition to being both theoretically and empirically rich, are historical in breadth--with essays on Vietnam--as well as contemporary in relevance--with essays on public opinion and foreign policy after 9/11.

1
Introduction

Beliefs, Perceptions, and
Opinions in Policy Making

[2005]

Friends who know that our father was a political scientist and Finnish diplomat sometimes say that my brother Kal and I must have been predestined to become political scientists. My earliest recollection of political activity was standing in front of the German Legation in Geneva, next door to our residence in the Finnish Legation, singing a popular song of the time: “We'll hang our washing on the Siegfried Line” (the German fortifications on the Western front). However, this was hardly the kind of undiplomatic behavior that received parental approval, even though father despised the Nazis. Moreover, we were only ten and eleven years old when father died and, at least in my own case, the path leading to an academic career in political science was highly circuitous.

Virtually everyone who attended Mr. Fuller's wonderful chemistry class at Palo Alto High School went on to college with the intention of becoming a chemist. I was no exception, but a general chemistry curriculum at Stanford that included only a single elective over four years gradually raised doubts about my commitment to that discipline. A year-long required freshman course on the history of Western civilization had whetted by appetite for more history, but a chemistry major would not have allowed that. A poorly taught quantitative analysis course during my sophomore year that included four-hour laboratories six days a week—in those prehistoric days Stanford still had Saturday classes—encouraged me to look for another major.

Two majors later I enrolled in a comparative government class taught by a vivacious visiting lecturer whose anecdotes were enough to keep even the sleepiest student awake. Faced with a deadline to declare a major, I thus elected political science on the basis of rather limited evidence and with little genuine understanding of the discipline. My last two years at Stanford were heavily focused on political science, combined with as many history courses as could be crammed into my schedule. Stanford's history department featured a number of distinguished scholars, including Thomas A. Bailey, Claude Buss, Gordon Wright, and H. Stuart Hughes, who were also noted for their eloquent lectures. A senior seminar with Martin Travis introduced me to Hans Morgenthau, Quincy Wright, and others, and for the first time gave me some sense of what international relations theory was all about.

During my senior year I happened to see a brochure about a new Master of Arts in Teaching program at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. A two-year program that included full-time teaching at a local high school during the second year, this appeared to be an ideal way to prepare for a teaching career. A fellowship award made it an easy choice. The first year at Wesleyan included courses in political science and history, along with seminars in educational philosophy and psychology.

Full-time teaching during the second year at Wethersfield High School was both enjoyable and discouraging. Despite four daily preparations for classes in history and government, the experience reinforced my interest in a teaching career. However, I was also discouraged by the low morale of many on the faculty. They seemed to be spending too much time on virtually meaningless paperwork and bureaucratic requirements, and their enthusiasm for the classroom appeared to be inversely correlated to age. Although I understood that the material rewards of teaching were, at best, modest, it was still a shock to learn that every male teacher save one at Wethersfield, part of a school district with the fifth highest per-capita income in the country, held another part-time job in order to made ends meet.

Upon leaving Wesleyan with an M.A.T. degree, I preempted my draft board by volunteering for a two-year stint in the army. I had joined the army reserves while in Middletown, rising to the exalted rank of sergeant. The enlistment promise that I could also select my branch of service was overridden by the urgent need of the infantry for my services even though the infantry competed with the artillery for last place on my list of preferences. Two years at Fort Lewis gave me more than ample time to think about my post-military career. Having decided that teaching in a college would be preferable to doing so in a high school, I naively applied to only a single graduate school, and was subsequently admitted to the Ph.D. program at Stanford.

By this time Kal was starting his third year of graduate work at Stanford and getting ready to take his comprehensive examinations. It was immensely helpful to have his wise counsel on how to survive in graduate school. At that time the Stanford political science department was a long way from the nationally renowned department that it was to become. Much of the curriculum consisted of undergraduate courses with added reading or writing assignments for graduate students.

A remarkable feature of the political science department during that time was the immensely talented and congenial pool of graduate students. Those with a primary interest in international relations included Kal Holsti, Dick Fagen, George Zaninovich, Dina Zinnes, Howard Koch, David Clarke, and Dave Finlay, and those in other fields also contributed to an atmosphere that was highly conducive to learning. Three of the international relations students of that period, 1958–62, later served as presidents of the International Studies Association.

The choice of a dissertation was a turning point in my own developing interest in foreign policy decision making. It is often difficult to recall the stimulus that ultimately led to a specific research project, but I have a clear recollection of the circumstances that first awakened a persisting interest in the beliefs, perceptions, and images of decision makers. As a second-year graduate student I was awarded a teaching assistantship for Political Science 1, American public policy. The last two weeks of the quarter were devoted to foreign and defense policy issues, including the doctrine of “massive retaliation” that had been made public by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1954. I had known of the doctrine and the controversies it had generated, and I had some familiarity with critiques by Henry Kissinger and others.¹ But the process of preparing for discussion sections drove home how significantly the concept of massive retaliation was based not only on considerations of geopolitics, weapons characteristics, and the like but, even more importantly, on assumptions about the nature of international politics, as well as images of the Soviet Union and its leaders, their motivations, and decision processes. This raised a central question: What if those assumptions and images were only partially valid? More generally, in a world of nuclear weapons it seemed increasingly likely that the dangers of war arise less from clearly calculated decisions to launch a war—for example, Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939 or the Pearl Harbor attack two years later—and more from decisions and processes that cannot wholly be understood through the unitary rational actor model that seemed to underlie massive retaliation.

During my graduate school years, fears of crises spiraling out of control were not merely the stuff of science fiction or such movies as “Dr. Strangelove.” The Soviet Union successfully tested a hydrogen bomb in 1957 and later that year it leaped ahead of the U.S. in the “space race” by placing a small satellite into earth orbit. Sputnik shattered some stereotypes about Soviet science but mostly it raised exaggerated military fears—the so-called missile gap—arising from a combination of Soviet atomic weapons and long range missiles with accurate guidance systems. A brief détente in 1955–56 had given way to a resumption of periodic crises arising, for example, from the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the status of Berlin, the downing of an American U-2 spy plane inside the USSR, and other issues. In October 1962, U-2 flights over Cuba confirmed rumors that the Soviet Union was erecting missile bases in Cuba, thereby triggering the most serious Cold War crisis. For almost two weeks the possibility of nuclear exchanges between the U.S. and USSR could not be ruled out.

This teaching experience was the immediate stimulus that pointed my interests in a particular direction, but other factors also sustained them. A number of books and articles published during the preceding half decade seemed to offer fruitful new ways of thinking about foreign policy and international politics. The Snyder-Bruck-Sapin monograph on decision making, although not yet available in book form was widely read and discussed by graduate students.² Of special relevance was its core premise that foreign policy choices could usefully be analyzed from the decision makers' perspectives and their “definitions of the situation;” these might or might not conform to reality but they had a powerful impact on decision processes. More generally, the decision-making approach forced analysts to consider the domestic political arena as well as external factors. Kenneth Boulding's The Image, followed by an article that stressed the importance of images in international politics, was another important influence, as were the works of Herbert Simon and James March on the cognitive limits on rationality and organizational decision making.³ A lively new interdisciplinary publication, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, provided an outlet for articles by a broad range of social scientists whose work in various ways seemed to challenge the assumption, widespread in traditional realist theories as well as in foreign offices and defense ministries, that foreign and defense policies could best be understood through reference to the prevailing realist theories.

Belief Systems and Foreign Policy

These interests led to a dissertation on John Foster Dulles that analyzed his belief system and his images of the Soviet Union, and the manner in which these served as filters through which he processed and interpreted new information about the USSR. The sudden departure from Stanford of my original dissertation chairman led me to ask Robert C. North, who had recently joined the department following reorganization of the Hoover Institution, to serve on my committee. I was also fortunate to have enlisted the distinguished diplomatic historian Thomas A. Bailey. Whereas North left his students on a long leash, Bailey was an exacting taskmaster. Careless choice of a word or a poorly constructed paragraph would also result in a firm but friendly reminder that loose writing has no place in scholarship. Bailey could not transfer his immense gifts for written and oral eloquence, but he did leave an indelible impression about the importance of repeated rewriting in the quest for clarity and precision. Another of his aphorisms—“Write a page a day and you'll have a book a year”—was also easier said than done.

Upon Dulles's death in 1959, his papers were donated to his alma mater, Princeton University, but they would not be available in time for my dissertation project. In any case even when they were opened for research, more senior scholars would, quite properly, be given first access to them. A seemingly workable alternative research strategy involved a quantitative content analysis of every publicly available word from Dulles during his years as Secretary of State, including speeches, press conferences, congressional testimony, and other such materials. Two books, several articles and many speeches from his pre-1953 years provided useful background information, but they were not included in the content analysis.

I also sent a questionnaire to the State Department and other officials who worked with Dulles. Although the questionnaire has all the earmarks of a novice effort, some of the responses, including accompanying letters, revealed useful information. One point that came through from several of them, including Eleanor Lansing Dulles, his sister and herself a State Department official, was that Dulles wrote all his own speeches with great care. Thus, a careful reading of those speeches would provide the best guides to his thinking about world affairs in general and specifically about the Soviet Union.

My central hypothesis was that Dulles would interpret information about the Soviet Union in a way that reinforced rather than challenged preexisting theories. The period in question (1953–59) encompassed substantial changes, beginning with Josef Stalin's death less than five weeks after the Eisenhower administration took office. Dulles had come to the State Department with an exceptional background in foreign affairs, beginning with attendance at the Versailles Peace Conference with his uncle, Secretary of State Robert Lansing. His work as a lawyer for the venerable firm of Cromwell and Sullivan involved extensive international travel and contacts. In addition, he had served as chief foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey in 1948, headed the team that negotiated the Japanese Peace Treaty, and had written two books on foreign affairs.

Dulles's reading of works by Lenin and strongly held beliefs about the nature of the Soviet system convinced him that he also possessed unique insight into Moscow's international behavior. This conviction, combined with a distaste for any bureaucratic competition, may account for his decision to force the dean of America's Russian experts, George F. Kennan, into retirement. Kennan, widely acknowledged as the intellectual father of the postwar policy of containing the Soviet Union, developed his deep interest in Russia as a Princeton undergraduate and had spent several tours of duty in the Soviet Union as a diplomat.

Dulles was especially fearful that the Western alliance might misinterpret such events as the death of Stalin, some reductions of armed forces, and the Austrian Peace Treaty of 1955 as signs of a permanent change in long-term Soviet goals for global domination rather than as tactical maneuvers designed to lull the West into a false sense of complacency. Chapter 2, a very brief summary of some findings from my study, reveals how Dulles interpreted Moscow's actions in ways that sustained his theory. In fairness, it should also be pointed out that in such actions as the invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Soviet Union often acted in ways that reinforced an “inherent bad faith” theory.⁴

As a graduate student I had known of the existence of a path-breaking project at Stanford—unofficially known as the “conflict project”—directed by Bob North. Its focus was on conflict dynamics, with considerable attention to the role of perceptions in conflict processes. Among the projects varied activities was an intensive study of the processes by which the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, led to outbreak of a general European war ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Beliefs, Perceptions, and Opinions 1 in Policy Making [2005]
• Part I Foreign Policy Leaders: Beliefs and Cognitive Processes
• Part II Opinion Leaders, Public Opinion, and American Foreign Policy
• Part III Conclusion: Theories of International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis
• Notes
• Index