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1 - Structures, Processes, and Personalities in U.S. Foreign Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2009

Asaf Siniver
Asaf Siniver
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Summary

The vast bulk of ‘liberals’ in the U.S. Foreign Service / State Department establishment believe that the allegedly thin margin of Mr. Nixon's victory will make it impossible for the new Nixon team to impose any deep or meaningful change either upon the internal system which has nurtured them or upon the outward working of the system in terms of U.S. foreign policy operations.

Bryce Harlow (Nixon's aide), 11 November 1968

The complex nature of the foreign policy machinery during the Nixon years calls for the use of more than a single theoretical framework for the dual purpose of advancing knowledge and theory testing. Indeed, Henry Kissinger himself acknowledged that ‘[in] the world in which we find ourselves now…it is necessary for us to conduct a more complicated foreign policy without the simple categories of a more fortunate historical past.’

While this book does not purport to use the case studies to validate or refute alternative foreign policy analysis (FPA) models, it is nonetheless important to provide an analytical framework which will help generate more general observations about the interplay of structures, processes, and personalities in foreign policy crisis decision-making. Rather than providing alternative theoretical explanations to historical events or decisions, this book examines how the decision-making process within a particular crisis management group was facilitated by certain organisational structures that were put in place by the president. For this purpose, this chapter outlines pertinent approaches to the study of foreign policy decision-making in the FPA literature.

Type
Chapter
Information
Nixon, Kissinger, and US Foreign Policy Making
The Machinery of Crisis
 , pp. 12 - 39
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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