Risk and Presidential Decision-making

The Emergence of Foreign Policy Crises

Trenta Luca, Luca Trenta

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138854246
• eBook ISBN: 9781317521259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book aims at gauging whether the nature of US foreign policy decision-making has changed after the Cold War as radically as a large body of literature seems to suggest, and develops a new framework to interpret presidential decision-making in foreign policy. It locates the study of risk in US foreign policy in a wider intellectual landscape that draws on contemporary debates in historiography, international relations and Presidential studies.

Based on developments in the health and environment literature, the book identifies the President as the ultimate risk-manager, demonstrating how a President is called to perform a delicate balancing act between risks on the domestic/political side and risks on the strategic/international side. Every decision represents a 'risk vs. risk trade-off, ' in which the management of one 'target risk' leads to the development 'countervailing risks.' The book applies this framework to the study three major crises in US foreign policy: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, and the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. Each case-study results from substantial archival research and over twenty interviews with policymakers and academics, including former President Jimmy Carter and former Senator Bob Dole.

This book is ideal for postgraduate researchers and academics in US foreign policy, foreign policy decision-making and the US Presidency as well as Departments and Institutes dealing with the study of risk in the social sciences. The case studies will also be of great use to undergraduate students.

1 Risk in International Relations and foreign policy

In 1992, a report from the Royal Society stated that risk had become ‘ubiquitous.’¹ If, at the time, the statement appeared excessive, today it is almost an understatement. Although risk has a long story,² the explicit definition of more and more aspects of life in terms of risk is a relatively new phenomenon. A Nexis search for UK newspaper articles containing the word ‘risk’ in the headline retrieved only two results between 1970 and 1990; more than 3,000 between 1990 and 2012.³ Today, as Michael Power claims, ‘it seems as if we must take a risk-based description of everything.’⁴ Starting in the 1980s, a boom in risk literature accompanied the increased attention to risk. Risk progressively abandoned its hard science origins to enter the world of sociology. In the long aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September the 11th, 2001, risk came to dominate sectors of the International Relations (IR) discourse. IR scholars developed a strong interest in risk and saw, in the new risks brought about by globalisation and by the end of the Cold War, the key determinant of Western domestic and foreign policies.⁵ More specifically, two schools – one inspired by Ulrich Beck’s theory of the ‘risk society,’ the other inspired by Michel Foucault’s study of government, security and bio-politics – positioned risk at the centre of a historical divide, of a radical rupture in the nature and practice of both domestic and foreign policies.

This chapter will explore these two schools looking both at their sociological origins and their adoption in IR. From the analysis, it will become clear that these two schools share a common claim regarding a radical discontinuity – coinciding with the end of the Cold War – in the nature and practice of foreign policy. This claim is supported by three main propositions: the rise to prominence of risk and uncertainty, the substitution of long-term strategies with short-term and minimalist practices of risk management, and a radical view of the decision-maker’s control. In spite of being based on the rise of risk and uncertainty, the two concepts remain remarkably undefined within the two schools. Furthermore, it is unclear – within these schools – who the decision-makers are and what are the options open to them. These deficiencies will spur a search for an understanding of risk and uncertainty adaptable to the foreign policy decision-making context. Risk is central in much of the studies that can be included in ‘decision theory.’⁶ This centrality should provide for more coherent definitions of risk and uncertainty and for a more adequate account of the foreign policy decision-maker. Still, the world portrayed by ‘decision theory’ is too aseptic to adequately reflect the messiness and complexity of international politics.

Risk in the post-Cold War world: from sociology to International Relations

A 2008 collection identified five theories of risk in sociology: ‘risk and reflexive modernization,’ ‘governmentality and risk,’ ‘systems theory and risk,’ ‘edgework and risk’ and ‘culture and risk.’⁷ Deborah Lupton provided a similar division in her seminal work on risk.⁸ Ortwin Renn listed seven theories, divided according to their realist or constructivist ontology and their structural or individualist approach.⁹ Beyond studies trying to distinguish between risk and threat,¹⁰ IR has witnessed a ‘boom’ in works specifically discussing risk since 2005. As Karen Lund Petersen noted, in 2006, eight articles cited other articles within IR journals with ‘risk’ in their topic. The number has grown steadily, with 539 articles in 2010.¹¹ Several scholars have tried to bring order to this maze, and two main classifications of theories of risk in IR have been presented. Petersen has suggested that studies of risk can be divided into three macro categories: critical risk studies, focusing on risk governance in the daily practices of government; global risk management studies, aimed at improving decision-making and changing the international environment; and political risk studies, adopting economic and technical approaches.¹² Global risk management studies certainly played a key part within this literature, fostering interdisciplinary efforts aimed at preventing strategic surprise and catastrophic risks.¹³ Petersen’s division, however, extends beyond IR to look at economic concepts such as country-specific political risk. William Clapton provided a classification more targeted to the world of IR and a succinct description of the debate:

Critical realists suggest that risks are real and exist ‘out there’; constructivists maintain that risks are social constructions and that what matters is how social norms … shape actors’ perceptions and responses to risk; and post-structuralist argue that risks are not real, and that representations of risk are actually a method of applying particular governing techniques.¹⁴

Three major problems can be identified in Clapton’s division. First, many of what Clapton calls ‘constructivist scholars’ do not deal with risk as a specific concept. Risk and threat, as Johan Eriksson admits, are treated as synonyms.¹⁵ An analysis of risk is not the point in these studies, which focus principally on processes of ‘framing,’ and of ‘threat inflation.’¹⁶ Second, as the analysis will make clear, a rigid division in terms of epistemology and ontology does not reflect many of the authors’ positions within the risk literature. The authors’ opinions have changed throughout their work, and they often sit uneasily at the crossroads between realism and constructivism. Third, only authors inspired by two sociological approaches, the ‘reflexive modernization’ or ‘risk society’ school and the ‘governmentality’ school, have laid a precise claim regarding the radical newness of risk and the changes that risk has brought to international politics and foreign policy. For these reasons, this book divides scholars discussing risk in IR into two main categories. The first group, inspired by Beck’s theory of ‘risk society’ and, more generally, by works on reflexive modernisation, will be defined as the ‘risk society at war’ scholarship. The second group, inspired by Foucault’s work on security, and by studies on ‘governmentality,’ will be defined as the ‘governmentality at war’ scholarship.¹⁷

The power of risk: from Foucault’s ‘notion of risk’ to governmentality studies

Foucault never dealt at length with risk. In his 1977–1978 lectures at the Collège de France, the French philosopher delineated the emergence, from the sixteenth century onwards, of new rationalities of government based on ‘security,’ as distinct from law or discipline. Whereas law sets clear benchmarks of what is permitted and what is prohibited, representing a ‘negative power,’ and discipline shapes behaviour, representing positive power, security can be understood as neutral. Security ‘stands back sufficiently’ to comprehend reality and to respond to it, possibly using instruments of prohibition (law) and prescription (discipline). This response ‘cancels out the reality to which it responds – nullifies it.’¹⁸ Behind an appearance of letting things happen, ‘security’ implies the management of possible outcomes through prevention and through an effort to eliminate everything that could be aleatory.¹⁹ The emergence of this new form of government and its diffusion depended largely on the rise of statistics. First, statistics permitted the identification of regularities and dynamics within the population that went beyond the family or the single individual.²⁰ Second, for Foucault, statistics helped in establishing the ‘absolutely crucial notion of risk.’²¹ With statistics, a case is no longer treated individually, but as part of a category. Establishing what is ‘at risk’ also defines what is ‘normal.’²² The rise of security and of statistics represented a crucial stage in the evolution of government. Governmental aims, in Foucault’s account, evolved from the wealth of the sovereign, to the security of the territory, and finally to the control of the population. In this shift, the population evolved. Initially it represented simply an object of repression. In mercantilist societies, it represented a raw source of power to be harnessed, and only in later stages it became an object of control. With this shift, a whole new series of elements became objects of knowledge and control, to form part of the ‘r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: risk and the Cold War/post-Cold War divide
• 1 Risk in International Relations and foreign policy
• 2 A new framework: risk vs. risk trade-offs, crises and International Relations
• 3 ‘I should have said that we don’t care:’ the Kennedy Administration and Cuba, 1961–1962
• 4 ‘We are sticking with the Shah’: the Carter Administration and Iran, 1977–1979
• 5 ‘Why is this happening and we are not doing anything?’: the Clinton Administration and the risky road to Srebrenica, 1992–1995
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index