Making American Foreign Policy (2006)
Ole R. Holsti (1933)
390 pages
American public opinion has been characterized by some analysts as unstable and incoherent, and having little impact on foreign policy; but is such a view supported by actual evidence, or does it simply represent an unsubstantiated assumption? More generally, how has the foreign policy environment in the United States changed since the relatively strong consensus that existed during the first two decades after the end of WW II, when the Cold War focused the minds of political leaders and the public alike? And, Classical Realist models of international relations assume that nation-states are unitary rational actors, that is, that they can be considered as single entities that make rational choices; but should foreign policy decisions by the US government be made based on such a model of international behavior, ignoring the varied and particular characteristics of any nation’s leaders?
In Making American Foreign Policy, Ole R. Holsti, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Duke University, examines these and other questions concerning American foreign policy over the past half-century.
Holsti opens the book with two chapters in which he argues that the analysis and understanding of decision making in political contexts can benefit from considering the behaviors of the leaders involved; he refers to this as a cognitive approach to political science, and differentiates it from the unitary rational actor model mentioned above. To understand a leader’s behavior, he begins by characterizing their Belief System, which he defines as a set of lenses through which a person perceives the world, and with which order is brought to an otherwise unmanageable amount of information. In a data-driven approach that he follows throughout the remaining chapters of the book, Holsti parses, categorizes and analyzes the public comments about the Soviet Union made by John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State from 1953-59, in order to understand Dulles’ belief system. Holsti begins by developing a hypothesis that describes Dulles’ opinions regarding the Soviet Union, and then demonstrates the validity of the hypothesized belief system by analyzing Dulles’ public statements. Thus, Holsti does not simply rely on an arm-chair psychological evaluation of Dulles, he instead quantifies the nature of Dulles’ beliefs, and shows that a consistent pattern can be found in his public declarations.
Having established the importance of taking a cognitive approach to analyzing and understanding foreign policy behaviors, Holsti uses the next eight chapters of the book to examine how the beliefs and opinions of American leaders and the public have affected foreign policy decisions and behavior. Holsti begins from the premise that for the two decades after the end of WW II a fairly consistent, coherent and broadly-held consensus existed in American foreign policy, one shaped principally by the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He then uses survey data that he and his team gathered, as well as data from other researchers and organizations, to quantifiably chart public and leadership opinion in the US, as well as the trends in these opinions since the mid-1960’s, a period of dramatic change encompassing Vietnam, several rounds of détente, the end of the Cold War, the post-Cold War era, and the events and aftermath of 9-11.
Whether it’s the “Almond-Lippmann Consensus” (that American public opinion is volatile, incoherent and has little impact on foreign policy), the popular notion that Americans will not support foreign involvement once casualty figures begin mounting, or Arthur Schlesinger’s statement in 1995 that Americans are becoming more isolationist in the aftermath of the cold war, Holsti does not simply argue for or against these propositions. He instead goes back to the survey results and shows us what an analysis of actual data says about the validity of these assumptions --- or general lack thereof in the case of the three listed above. In doing so he is careful to describe the limitations of the survey results he presents, and also where the data do not allow a clear distinction.
To note just one of the intriguing results that comes out in these chapters: Holsti charts how the opinions of American leaders and the public have been affected and changed by the significant international events of the past 50 years. Analyzing the extensive survey data that he and others have collected, he demonstrates how Vietnam sundered the Cold War consensus that had existed since WW II, and from the data he demonstrates the quite divergent and highly partisan viewpoints that have developed, and how an alignment arose between domestic and foreign policy opinions on each side of that partisan divide. He also examines the trends in opinion over the past five decades, noting that even such dramatic events as the end of the Cold War and the 9-11 attacks have not led to the development of a new consensus, and that in fact the partisan and ideological divides in politics have only become deeper. Surely it would be difficult to argue with the impression --- even without data --- that in the decade since the book was published these trends have only intensified.
Holsti concludes with two chapters that discuss more broadly the analysis of international relations and foreign policy. In the first of these, he summarizes the main approaches, or models, used in the study and understanding of these areas, discussing their principal features, and some of the shortcomings critics have raised against them. One element of the discussion that particularly stood out for me was the realization that these models and their respective supporters tie back to Holsti’s opening chapters on Belief Systems and their impact on an individual’s perception and ordering of information about the world. Classical Realism, according to Holsti, is grounded in a pessimistic theory of human nature, and a focus on the causes of war and conditions of peace; it’s not difficult to see how a person’s view of the world could lead them to favor this model. Similarly, the model that Holsti lumps together under the title of Global Society, Interdependence, Institutionalism acknowledges that issues of war and peace are important, but believes too that nation-states can have other motivations for their behavior, which can lead to institution building between states, and so to a non-zero-sum structure; again, one can imagine that a person’s belief system might lead them to accept the validity of such a model. Other approaches, such as Marxism, World Systems, Dependency (built around the idea that conditions arising from modes of production, such as poverty and exploitation, are key elements) and Post-Modern (negating the idea that a general model for the international system can even be developed) fit the same pattern. As in so many areas of science, and beyond it for that matter, how one views the world --- one’s belief system --- inevitably affects how one imagines (models) it.
In the same chapter, Holsti discusses Decision Making structures, such as bureaucratic/organizational, small group and individual leader models. These approaches link back to a fundamental criticism of the Classical Realism (unitary rational actor) theory, that nation-states cannot be considered to act either as singular units or rationally because their actions come down to the beliefs and behaviors of individuals or groups. Holsti also points out that there has been a growing movement to consider multiple levels of models at once in order to more fully understand and make sense of international relations and foreign policy; so, for example, to use a classical realism or global systems model, but in conjunction with (more detailed) decision making-based models.
Holsti concludes with a final chapter that summarizes his take away from over forty years of studying American leadership and public opinion and its impact on foreign policy behavior and decisions. He states that “by conventional measures of power and status power” (p. 345) the United States continues to dominate the international arena, but that we have lost much of our ability to guide and influence foreign relations --- the soft power that helps a country to avoid having to resort to military force to further its interests. He also laments (perceptively one could say, from the perspective of 10 years on) the continuing trend toward an ever more partisan and ideologically driven foreign policy debate, from which our influence on international relation can only suffer. He finds that the United States continues to pay a heavy price for the way our government executed the Iraq War --- from its attempt to coerce allies into participating or lending support, to its misleading statements made to justify the war --- which he feels has been particularly damaging to our standing and influence in world affairs.
The chapters in Making American Foreign Policy consist of a dozen or so published papers from Holsti’s five decades of work in the field of analyzing international relations and foreign policy. Their origin as stand-alone papers leads to some level of overlap in the results and discussion from one chapter (paper) to the next, which Holsti addresses in part by including an introduction in which he describes the overarching themes of the book, and provides a brief outline of the individual chapters and their place in the whole. The choice of issuing the book as a collection of papers does have an advantage for the reader: with the chapters arranged in roughly chronological order, covering papers he published between 1972 to 2005, we can evaluate and understand the results and analysis in the context of the dramatic changes that occurred over that period. In addition we benefit from an authoritative, data-driven analysis of American foreign policy over the last half-century. This is not purely a work of one person’s opinion, like so many books on domestic and international politics can be. Instead Holsti summarizes and analyzes the results of several decades of surveys of both the American public and American decision making elite, to help us understand how their opinions have evolved, and to allow us to evaluate which popular assumptions about their opinions and beliefs stand up to scrutiny, and which are misguided, or worse, wishful (often for political purposes) thinking.
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Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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