Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy
Foreign policy, conceptualized most broadly and simply, is the totality of a state’s external behavior toward other states and nonstate actors (e.g., international organizations and terrorist organizations). Foreign policy involves everything from the most consequential decisions about war and peace to more seemingly mundane issues of tariff levels on imports. Foreign policy encompasses long-term goals and objectives (e.g., the U.S. policy of containing the expansion of Soviet influence during the cold war) as well as discrete decisions and actions (e.g., the Soviet Union’s decision to deploy nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1961).
In the social sciences, foreign policy analysis emerged in the 1960s as a subfield of international relations. Foreign policy analysis represented a conscious attempt to move beyond what were seen as predominantly descriptive, unsystematic, and atheoretical accounts of foreign policy often found in diplomatic histories and policy analyses in opinion journals. The goal was to study the determinants of foreign policy behavior in a more theoretically oriented and empirically rigorous manner. This rigor was reflected in greater attention to data gathering and analysis, the development and testing of theory, and a move away from single country studies to more comparative analyses designed to assess the relative importance of various determinants of foreign policy. In this sense, foreign policy analysis reflected the broader trend of behavioralism in political science and the social sciences more generally in the 1950s and 1960s.
One of the first manifestations of the move to greater rigor in foreign policy analysis was the development of frameworks to help organize both empirical research and theory development. The frameworks that eventually exerted the greatest impact on how scholars thought about foreign policy and conducted their research involved some version of what came to be known as the levels of analysis. The hope was that the use of such common frameworks would encourage scholars to think more systematically about the sources of foreign policy while making empirical research more cumulative.
LEVELS OF ANALYSIS
As with all social sciences, the study of foreign policy is ultimately about understanding human behavior, whether people are acting alone as individuals or in groups as social collectives. As Valerie Hudson notes, “Understanding how humans perceive and react to the world around them, and how humans shape and are shaped by the world around them, is central to the inquiry of all social scientists, including those in IR [i.e., international relations]” (Hudson 2005, p. 1). Though foreign policy analysis can be differentiated from other social sciences in terms of the actor and behavior in question, many of the basic insights for understanding any type of human behavior are relevant and have been adapted for the study of foreign policy.
Generally speaking, there are two types of explanations for the behavior of any social actor. We can loosely refer to these as dispositional and situational. Dispositional explanations portray an actor’s behavior as the result of some feature or characteristic of the actor itself: An actor behaves in a certain way because something about the actor predisposed it to behave in a particular fashion. Situational explanations focus on external forces that shape an actor’s behavior regardless of its unique characteristics: Something in the actor’s environment led it to behave in a certain way. In all but the most extreme instances of course, social scientists recognize that any actor’s behavior results from some combination of dispositional and situational forces. Thus the goal of most social scientific inquiry is to determine the relative importance of dispositional/internal and situational/external forces in shaping an actor’s behavior.
Kenneth Waltz (1959) was among the first to introduce a similar scheme into international relations. Focusing on theories of war, not foreign policy per se, he drew a distinction between individual-, national-, and international-level explanations of state behavior. Numerous versions of the basic scheme incorporating further refinements and distinctions within the different levels have been developed and applied since its first appearance. The most influential of these was presented in 1966 by James Rosenau in his call for the development of “theories and pre-theories” of foreign policy.
Several levels of analysis highlighted by Rosenau are common to virtually all such frameworks. The individual or idiosyncratic level focuses on the decision makers themselves and draws heavily on research and theory from social and cognitive psychology. Research at this level has examined the impact of personality traits, beliefs/perceptions, and cognitive processes. The societal level deals with the impact of general national attributes, such as a state’s economic system, regime type, level of development, public opinion, or political culture. The governmental level emphasizes the institutions and dynamics of decision-making processes, particularly bureaucratic competition and organizational dynamics. The international level stresses the general impact of the anarchic and competitive nature of an anarchic international system, a state’s position in the overall distribution of power, and factors such as geography. Two things are apparent from the levels-of-analysis frameworks and determinants of foreign policy specified within each level: First, any explanation of a state’s foreign policy will certainly incorporate elements from multiple, if not all, levels; second, the study of foreign policy is by its very nature multidisciplinary, drawing on insights from a wide array of social sciences. In this respect, once again, foreign policy is probably no different than most other social phenomena.
MODELS OF FOREIGN POLICY
Graham Allison (1969, 1971), in his seminal article and book on decision-making during the Cuban missile crisis, claimed that observers often analyze and explain foreign policy through the lens of a rational actor model. Either implicitly or explicitly, analysts portray states as unitary actors possessing a coherent set of ranked national goals and objectives. According to this model, states confronted with international circumstances that require action will craft, evaluate, select, and implement policy options that maximize these goals and objectives. This rational actor model is often applied in reverse to understand a state’s foreign policy and determine what its goals and objectives might be. If a nation deploys a certain weapons system or decides to use force, for example, observers assume that this policy was chosen in order to maximize its goals and objectives. As Allison explains, “This paradigm leads analysts to rely on the following pattern of inference: if a nation performed a particular action, the nation must have ends toward which the action constituted an optimal means” (Allison 1969, p. 694). A rational actor model views foreign policy as an intellectual or analytical, as opposed to political, process. Though a rational model is often applied implicitly, some international relations adopt it explicitly, even though they realize that it is usually not an empirically accurate portrait of how foreign policy decisions are made. In their view, such unrealistic simplifications of reality are theoretically useful and necessary even if they are descriptively inaccurate. Allison, among others, argued that the routine application of the rational actor obscures a genuine understanding of foreign policy: The “black box” of the state needs to be opened and unrealistic assumptions abandoned or modified if we want to understand and explain state behavior. In fact one of the underlying goals of levels-of-analysis frameworks and their inclusion of domestic and individual variables is to direct attention to the internal workings of the state and decision-making processes.
With the goal of better understanding foreign policy, Allison presented two other models that offered better pictures of how foreign policy is actually made: the bureaucratic politics model and the organizational process model. In the bureaucratic model, the state is not seen as a unitary rational actor but rather as a collection of actors representing governmental organizations with different perspectives, goals, and objectives. There is no single, coherent, and ranked set of national goals and objectives. Policy is the result of a political process, not an analytical process. In this model, “the decisions and actions of governments are essentially intra-national political outcomes” (Allison 1969, p. 708). Decision makers are seen as reflecting the interests and perspectives of the government bureaucracies they represent, a tendency embodied in the cliché that where one stands (on any given issues) depends on where one sits (within the government). A state’s behavior should be seen as reflecting the relative power of the players in the process, not as something designed to maximize a well-defined national interest. Under other circumstances, it might make more sense to understand foreign policy through the lens of an organizational process model. This model assumes that states are large organizations that seldom reevaluate policy from scratch and consider the full range of options when action is required. The crafting, evaluation, choice, and implementation of policy options are often determined by such factors as precedent and the standard operating procedures and routines usually found in any large organization.
Allison did not claim that the bureaucratic and organizational models were always more accurate than the rational actor model. Nor did he suggest a complete rejection of the rational actor model. In laying out the models and applying them to the Cuban missile crisis, Allison was attempting to make two points. First, there are some, perhaps many, circumstances in which foreign policy decisions may be the result of different decision-making processes and dynamics. Second, the alternative models are useful for highlighting and illustrating the real world constraints and forces that limit the applicability of rational models to understand foreign policy (or policy in any area for that matter).
EXPLAINING FOREIGN POLICY
One problem with levels-of-analysis frameworks is that they often result in a seemingly endless laundry list of variables that influence foreign policy. Those seeking to explain a state’s behavior can easily become overwhelmed by the proliferation of determinants at each level. It is easy for the analyst to drown in a sea of details and determinants. Analysts need to find some way to include more without becoming overwhelmed. To deal with this problem, it is useful to emphasize that foreign policy can encompass everything from general policy orientations that persist over long periods to discrete decisions. There is a need for some precision about exactly what one wants to explain. If an analyst wants to explain why Great Britain pursued a policy of naval supremacy throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this is very different from trying to explain a particular decision about the use of force. In thinking about the determinants of broad policy orientations such as Britain’s policy of naval supremacy, it would make little sense to look to the personality traits of British prime ministers. Behaviors and policies pursued over long periods are more likely to be the result of similarly enduring determinants such as geography and culture. On the other hand, if one is trying to explain a specific decision, such as Britain’s military response to the Argentinean seizure of the Falkland Islands in 1983, it might very well make sense to focus on leader traits (Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in this case). Foreign policy analysis requires clarity not only in terms of the determinants of policy but also what is to be explained. In this way, one thinks about which determinants are likely to “match up” with the level of policy one is seeking to explain.
Similarly analysts sometimes worry about the proliferation of models. The critical point is to remember that there is no reason to assume that any one model is generally applicable. The description of various decision-making models merely highlights the fact that not all decisions are the result of the same process. The process itself is likely to vary with the nature and importance of the issue at hand, the amount of time decision makers have to act, and whether the problem is new or familiar. Critical issues of war and peace and the use of force, for example, are almost always decided at the highest levels, not within the confines of bureaucracies and organizations. As a result these decisions may more closely resemble the rational actor model. If the problem requiring a decision is novel or unfamiliar, there are unlikely to be preexisting, organizational, standard operation procedures that can be applied. If decision makers have little time to make a decision, they may be unable to craft and evaluate a wide range of new policy options and may thus choose to implement preexisting plans or routines. If the policy has important consequences for the allocation of resources, the influence of bureaucratic politics may be greater. Analysts need to think about the issues and conditions that are most conducive to different decision-making processes.
The development of levels-of-analysis frameworks and alternative decision-making models were both attempts to move analysts away from the tendency to view foreign policy as a rational and strategic response to external events. As Waltz, frequently criticized for treating states as unitary, rational actors, admits, “foreign-policy behavior can be explained only by a conjunction of external and internal conditions” (Waltz 1993, p. 79). In most political science departments, foreign policy is treated as a subfield of international relations. There are good reasons for this, given that the focus is on the external behavior of states. But one could make an equally compelling case that it should be viewed as a subfield of public policy, since there is no compelling reason to believe that foreign policy is free of all the same influences that shape policy in other areas. Foreign policy is, after all, foreign policy.
SEE ALSO Alliances; Bureaucracy; Cold War; Cuban Missile Crisis; Decision-making; Deterrence; Deterrence, Mutual; Falkland Islands War; International Relations; Leadership; Neutral States; Non-alignment; Peace; Rationality; Strategic Behavior; Strategic Games; Thatcher, Margaret; Waltz, Kenneth; War
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allison, Graham. 1969. Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis. American Political Science Review 63 (3): 689–718.
Allison, Graham. 1971. The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. 2nd ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999.
Hudson, Valerie. 2005. Foreign Policy Analysis: Actor-Specific Theory and the Ground of International Relations. Foreign Policy Analysis 1 (1): 1–30.
Hudson, Valerie. 2006. Foreign Policy Analysis: Classic and Contemporary Theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Ikenberry, G. John, ed. 2004. American Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays. 5th ed. New York: Longman.
Neack, Laura, Jeanne A. K. Hey, and Patrick Haney, eds. 1995. Foreign Policy Analysis: Continuity and Change in Its Second Generation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Rosenau, James. 1971. Pre-Theories and Theories of Foreign Policy (1966). In The Scientific Study of Foreign Policy, ed. James Rosenau, 95–151. New York: Free Press.
Waltz, Kenneth. 1959. Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press.
Waltz, Kenneth. 1993. The Emerging Structure of International Politics. International Security 18 (2): 44–79.
Yetiv, Steve. 2004. Explaining Foreign Policy: U.S. Decision-Making and the Persian Gulf War. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Keith Shimko