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Introduction: The New Foreign Policy
IN THIS CHAPTER
• A Tangled Tale of Tibet
• The New Foreign Policy
• Defining the Subject: Foreign Policy
• Selecting Entrance Points: Levels of Analysis
• Worldviews and Theories Realism
Liberalism
Marxism
Constructivism
• The Bridge between International and Comparative Politics
• A New Millennium
• Chapter Review
Cases Featured in This Chapter
• The tangled relations between Tibet, China, and the United States.
• The impact of the Cold War on the development of the comparative study of foreign policy.
A TANGLED TALE OF TIBET
Let's go back to 1989 and up to the top of the world—Tibet. In 1989, the Tenth Panchen Lama, one of two of the highest leaders of Tibetan
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Buddhism, died under mysterious circumstances in his monastery. By Buddhist tradition, the soul of the Panchen Lama would be reincarnated, returning to Earth to teach others the path to enlightenment. Also according to Buddhist tradition, the former friends and teachers of the late Panchen Lama would begin a series of divinations designed to determine where he would be reincarnated so they could locate the living Buddha and ensure his proper religious training and preparation.
What does this have to do with The New Foreign Policy? This is one entrance into a tangled tale that involves many countries strong and weak, key international figures, transnational human rights and religious groups, the United Nations, and even Hollywood. We could open the tale years earlier—decades and centuries earlier—or in the year 2000. If we fast-forwarded to 2007, we would find the Dalai Lama in Washington, D.C., receiving a Congressional Gold Medal. Meanwhile, the Chinese government would be registering its anger over congressional meddling in Chinese internal affairs. Changing the starting point would change the issues somewhat, but the tangled nature of the tale would not change, nor would its entanglement in the foreign relations of some powerful states. Indeed, the fate of Tibetan Buddhism is inextricably enmeshed in the foreign policy choices of several important countries and presents us with a perfect case study on The New Foreign Policy.
In early 1995, the Panchen Lama search party narrowed its search to a short list of boys, in and outside Tibet, and assembled photos and evidence to present to the highest holy figure in Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama. The search party would offer its opinion on which boy was most likely to be the reincarnate lama. The Dalai Lama would make the final decision regarding the recognition of the Eleventh Panchen Lama, taking into account the evidence and opinion of the search party. So here's where we'll bring foreign policy in—the Dalai Lama is the spiritual and temporal leader of the government of Tibet in exile. The Dalai Lama and his government reside in Dharamsala in northern India, where they sought refuge from the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The Chinese army invaded Tibet in 1950 in order to incorporate it into the new communist regime. This incorporation required eliminating the independence-minded Tibetan government led by the young Dalai Lama. By 1959, brutal Chinese efforts to eradicate Buddhism and the culture of the Tibetan people led the Dalai Lama to flee Tibet in the hope of maintaining in sanctuary some semblance of the true Tibet. Of course, this is not the story the Chinese government told—then or now.
Regardless of whether one takes the position that Tibet was part of China for centuries or that Tibet was always independent, since 1950 Tibet has been part of the country called the People's Republic of China. Ever since he fled Tibet, the Dalai Lama has frustrated and angered the
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Chinese government because of his persistent work for the liberation of his people and culture. Since his flight from Tibet, the Dalai Lama has been accorded head of state treatment by governments around the world, including the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government, and been praised and supported by international human rights and religious freedom groups. As an advocate of nonviolence, the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. The Dalai Lama was but a single individual who caused the Chinese government considerable consternation and bad international publicity. Further, the Dalai Lama's government in exile was/is located in the territory of one of China's competitors, if not enemies—India.
The Panchen Lama chose to be reincarnated inside Tibet, it turned out. The Dalai Lama, worried about the reaction of the Chinese authorities, carefully weighed the options about announcing who the reincarnate lama was. In April 1995, the Dalai Lama decided to name the boy to start the process of his training and preempt any efforts by the Chinese to thwart the process. The Chinese government formed its own naming team and chose a different boy as the reincarnation. In December, the Chinese government (which is officially atheist) staged a grand ceremony at which its designate assumed the position of the Eleventh Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama's choice, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, and his family disappeared into Chinese custody and have not been seen since the spring of 1995. The Dalai Lama, human rights groups such as Amnesty International, and religious groups declared the boy to be the world's youngest political prisoner. The Chinese government, when its spokespersons even acknowledged Gedhun Choekyi Nyima's existence, only said that he "is where he is supposed to be."1
How does this tale become a foreign policy issue? The Chinese government has declared many times that this tale or any tale about Tibet should never be a foreign policy issue, since it involves the domestic affairs of China. As a foreign ministry spokesperson said in 1993 regarding Tibet, "The business of the United States should be addressed by the American people, and the business of the Chinese people should be handled by the Chinese people."2 But the domestic affairs of any country are often a source of contention with other countries. How and to what extent the tale of the Panchen Lama gets entwined in foreign policy depends on the decisions and actions taken and the "power" held by various interested actors in various countries. Let's switch sites and see how this plays out.
Since the Chinese government's violent crackdown on the prodemoc-racy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 3, 1989, the George H. W. Bush (Bush 1) administration had been open to criticism for its policy toward China. (A few months prior to Tiananmen, the Chinese had used violence to quell an uprising in Lhasa, Tibet.) President Bush's view was
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that the best way to influence China, avoid future Tiananmens, and end other alleged human rights violations was to remain "constructively engaged" with China, offering incentives rather than disincentives to change.
A majority in Congress disagreed with constructive engagement, as did human rights and religious interest groups. When an attempt by Congress to pass a tough sanctions bill to punish China was defeated by presidential veto, congressional critics decided to place human rights conditions on the yearly renewal of China's most favored nation (MFN) trading status.3 Constructive engagement remained U.S. policy during the remainder of the Bush 1 administration, but the 1992 presidential elections would keep a prosanctions coalition alive and hopeful.
After meeting with members of Congress and leaders of various interest groups opposed to the Bush 1 policy, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton came out in favor of attaching human rights conditions to any future granting of MFN status to China. Clinton announced his position: "I do not want to isolate China . . . but I believe our nation has a higher purpose than to coddle dictators and stand aside from the global movement toward democracy."4 This statement was repeated many times by Clinton on the campaign trail. Upon Clinton's election, Chinese authorities signaled their unhappiness with the results of the U.S. election by suspending further human rights talks. But the complexities of the China policy soon became clear to the president-elect, who announced a moderated view in late November 1992: "We have a big stake in not isolating China, in seeing that China continues to develop a market economy. ... But we also have to insist, I believe, on progress in human rights and human decency."5
Before his inauguration, Clinton hosted several conferences in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, to clarify key issues for the new administration. At the economic conference, the chief operating officer of toy manufacturer Mattel raised worries about Mattel's ability to stay on top of the world toy market if human rights conditions were attached to renewing China's MFN status. Voices within the United States—such as the aircraft and wheat industries—and voices outside the United States— such as the governments of Japan and Hong Kong—were similarly urging Clinton to back away from his campaign stand on China.6
Right before the Clinton inauguration, two different groups of Democratic senators visited China and Tibet in December 1992 and January 1993, at the invitation of the Chinese government. This Chinese effort to influence the domestic political debate within the United States—and thereby shape U.S. foreign policy in the new administration—reaped some benefits, as several of the senators declared that it would be shortsighted to link trade and human rights.
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A new U.S. policy on China was formulated in 1993 by the new administration in which the president, acting under executive orders authority, attached some pro-human rights conditions to the U.S.-Chinese relationship, but not on trade issues. This compromise policy was hammered out by talks on many levels between administration officials and various members of Congress, and with their respective domestic groups engaged behind the scenes. The compromise allowed voices on both sides to be partially satisfied and partially dissatisfied. Farm and business groups and their supporters in Congress were glad to keep trade off this particular table, while human rights groups and their congressional supporters were glad to see some official pronouncement privileging human rights and democracy. Even in this age of globalization, where market forces seemed to drive so much international activity, it appeared that key noneconomic values would remain central to U.S. foreign policy. At the signing ceremony for the executive order, leaders of human rights groups, business leaders, prodemocracy Chinese students, and members of the Tibetan government in exile stood behind President Clinton.7 The president warned that the next year's renewal of MFN status would be subject to human rights conditions and conditions designed to curtail Chinese weapons sales (an increasingly troublesome issue). Concurrently, demonstrations in Lhasa, Tibet, were being ended with force.8
There were others in the Clinton administration and Congress who favored a tough China policy for reasons other than Tibet or the treatment of prodemocracy advocates. Chinese weapons sales to "rogue" states were causing worries among some security analysts. Adding to these worries, in October 1993, the Chinese conducted an underground nuclear weapon test. In response, Clinton ordered the Department of Energy to prepare for its own test.9
The compromise China policy would not last and the threat about the following year would not be carried out. Internal divisions within the Clinton administration—reflecting divisions in American society—led to a reevaluation of policy over the year to follow. "On the one side were the economic agencies, Treasury, Commerce, and the National Economic Council (NEC), who favored developing ties with China and pursuing human rights concerns only secondarily. . .. On the other side were State Department officials ... who favored continuing a tough stance on human rights."10 The economic agencies gained the upper hand on the issue, with support from corporate leaders and increasing numbers of members of Congress, all of whom were interested in tapping into China's enormous potential market. This coalition was able to change the Clinton policy and avoid future annual threats to link MFN status with human rights issues. As Clinton explained the change in policy in May 1994, "linkage has been constructive during the last year, but. . . we have reached the end of the
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usefulness of that policy."11 Human rights groups went along with this delinking in order not to lose their potential leverage on the rest of the China policy.12
By the next year, 1995, the controversy over the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama came to a climax of sorts with the naming of the two competing "soul boys." That December, as the Chinese-favored Panchen Lama was ceremoniously installed, the Chinese government also sentenced a prominent democracy advocate to fourteen years in prison. These events caused some members of Congress and human rights groups to attempt to force a Clinton policy reassessment on trade with China. Yet even in the face of this pressure, the deputy U.S. trade representative reassured all that the president's previous decision to delink MFN status and human rights "remains fixed and unchanged."13 Although human rights problems in China might temper the climate of talks somewhat, the president was committed to helping China gain entry into the World Trade Organization, unless, the trade rep warned, the Chinese leaders continued to make no progress on opening their markets.
THE NEW FOREIGN POLICY
This saga demonstrates several important observations about foreign policy that will be explored in detail in this book:
• Foreign policy is made and conducted in complex domestic and international environments.
• Foreign policy results from the work of coalitions of interested domestic and international actors and groups.
• Foreign policy issues are often linked and delinked, reflecting the strength of various parties and their particular concerns.
• The "stuff" of foreign policy derives from issues of domestic politics as well as foreign relations.
• Foreign policy analysis needs to be multilevel and multifaceted in order to confront the complicated sources and nature of foreign policy.
How each of these key features pertains to the tangled tale of Tibet is summarized below.
Foreign policy is made and conducted in complex domestic and international environments. The "tangled tale of Tibet" illustrates that decision makers— here, Bill Clinton and the members of his administration in charge of China policy—operate in at least two different environments, domestic and international. Bill Clinton the candidate was focused primarily on the domestic environment, with very little attention paid to the international
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environment. Bill Clinton the newly elected president had to give attention to both the domestic and international environments. Political scientist Robert Putnam has described this situation that national leaders find themselves in as a "two-level," "dual," or "nested" game.14 Leaders cannot afford to focus exclusively on one level but must try to play both to some advantage. Sometimes issues on one level will cause a leader to put greater emphasis there, and sometimes leaders will use issues on one level to pursue goals in the other, but no leader can afford to ignore the reality of this nested game.
Foreign policy results from the work of coalitions of interested domestic and international actors and groups. Coalitions are, by nature, in constant flux. The coalition of interests and groups that might get a politician elected is not necessarily the coalition that will get that leader's programs legislated or executed. Leaders come to power "owing" some groups yet often intent on "wooing" others. As the environments shift, the issues shift and the nature of coalition building shifts. Leaders often need to pay more attention to those who form the opposition—trying to entice them into forming policy coalitions to get favored programs passed—than to their loyal constituents. The human rights and religious groups inside the United States and human rights and democracy advocates outside the United States (such as the Tibetan government in exile, Chinese students studying in the United States, and the governments of other countries) could not pose any significant threat to the Clinton presidency if Clinton were to "water down" his China policy somewhat. Indeed, we might say that these groups needed the Clinton presidency more than the Clinton presidency needed them—especially the coalition of non-U.S. actors who were not very "powerful" international actors. In order to pursue his broader list of goals—both domestic and international—Clinton needed to garner key support from groups that opposed linking trade with human rights.
Foreign policy issues are often linked and delinked, reflecting the strength of various parties and their particular concerns. Because of the "nested game" leaders play and the necessity of building various policy coalitions, issues cannot help but be linked and delinked. Politics is a game of bargaining and compromising, and this involves trade-offs. The politics of foreign policy making is no different. Although the Chinese government insisted that human rights should not be linked to trade issues, by this very demand China made it clear that the United States could not hope to achieve its goals vis-á-vis China unless it quit talking about human rights. That is, the Chinese linked favorable relations with the United States on a broad array of issues to the requirement that human rights stay off the table. The Chinese government and the U.S. domestic interests that wanted entrance into the potential Chinese market commanded the greatest influence over the Clinton policy, and this informal "coalition" was able to win the day
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and get trade policy delinked from human rights. The domestic and international groups in favor of using trade as a way to compel China to follow a better human rights standard found themselves with less leverage, perhaps because their issues were more narrowly focused, and so they could not link their desired China policy to other issues over which they had control.
The "stuff" of foreign policy derives from issues of domestic politics as well as foreign relations. Despite Chinese insistence that domestic politics was off-limits to outsiders, the line between domestic politics and international politics is blurry. Issues go across national borders, and coalitions supporting or opposing certain policies on those issues also form across national borders. Some have called this blurring of the distinction between international and domestic politics "intermestic," combining the words to indicate the combining of issues and interests. Others prefer to use the terms transnational actors and transnational forces to indicate the linking of interests and actions across national lines. Since the mid-1990s, most observers have suggested that the line between domestic and international politics is not just blurry but is quickly disappearing because of globalization. Globalization is a term that refers to "the increasing internationalization of culture and economics."15 As national markets are increasingly opened to the global market, national cultures similarly are opened to the global culture. National sovereignty is eroded in terms of both control of the national economy and—perhaps more importantly— preservation of national culture. When the Clinton administration took human rights conditions off its China trade policy, the justification was that opening up China for trade would open up China for other influences, ultimately changing the behavior of the Chinese government in the way that human rights and democracy groups wanted. Put another way, the Clinton policy was based on the idea that, ultimately, the forces of globalization would compel changes in Chinese human rights behavior, and U.S. policy should facilitate those forces.
Further emphasizing this "intermestic" quality of politics, leaders have been known to use foreign policies to promote domestic agendas, and vice versa. In the U.S. presidential election of 1992, Bush 1 attempted to convince American voters to reelect him—a domestic agenda—by pointing to his foreign policy accomplishments. This can be turned around the other way—sometimes domestic credentials are used to promote foreign policy goals. The Chinese government has released political prisoners from time to time as a demonstration of its cooperative nature in order to garner greater U.S. investment, U.S. support for Chinese membership in the World Trade Organization, and international support for hosting the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
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DEFINING THE SUBJECT: FOREIGN POLICY
Before we go any further we need to be clear about our subject: foreign policy. Charles Hermann calls foreign policy a "neglected concept."16 He asserts, "This neglect has been one of the most serious obstacles to providing more adequate and comprehensive explanations of foreign policy." Hermann thinks that part of the reason for this neglect is that "most people dealing with the subject have felt confident that they knew what foreign policy was."17 To put it colloquially, we know it when we see it. Ultimately, Hermann defines foreign policy as "the discrete purposeful action that results from the political level decision of an individual or group of individuals. ... [it is] the observable artifact of a political level decision. It is not the decision, but a product of the decision."18 Hermann defines foreign policy as the behavior of states.
Hermann rejects the idea that the study of foreign policy is the study of policy, but his is a minority view. Bruce Russett, Harvey Starr, and David Kinsella take an opposite and broader view: "We can think of a policy as a program that serves as a guide to behavior intended to realize the goals an organization has set for itself. . . . Foreign policy is thus a guide to actions taken beyond the boundaries of the state to further the goals of the state."19 Although these scholars define foreign policy as a program or statement of goals, they also stress that the study of foreign policy must involve study of both the "formulation and implementation" of policy.20
Deborah Gerner takes foreign policy further when she defines it as "the intentions, statements, and actions of an actor—often, but not always, a state—directed toward the external world and the response of other actors to these intentions, statements and actions."21 Gerner combines Hermann's interest in behavior with Russett, Starr, and Kinsella's emphasis on programs or guides. Note that in Gerner's definition the emphasis is on states but does not have to be on states. Other actors—such as international cause groups, businesses, religions, and so forth—in the international system formulate guidelines and goals that direct their actions toward other international actors. In this book, the emphasis is primarily on states, but other actors will appear from time to time as well.
We will use a broad definition of foreign policy that includes both statements and behaviors or actions. The study of foreign policy, however, needs to consider more than what states declare to be their goals and how they attempt to achieve them. The study of foreign policy needs to consider how certain goals arise and why certain behaviors result. Thus our focus is on how goals are decided upon. We will explore the factors that cause a state to declare and embark on a certain foreign policy course. Our emphasis will be on determining these factors and the processes by which
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policy (statements and behaviors) is made. In summary, the "stuff" of our foreign policy study includes processes, statements, and behaviors.
SELECTING ENTRANCE POINTS: LEVELS OF ANALYSIS
This book rests on the assertion that studying foreign policy is a complicated undertaking requiring multilevel, multifaceted research. This is not meant to imply, though, that we need to study every foreign policy case in all of its varied aspects. Indeed, this quickly could become an unmanageable task. Instead, foreign policy analysts disaggregate or break down each case into different component parts in order to study and understand select aspects. The knowledge generated by many such studies— studies conducted in the same way, asking the same questions, in similar and different contexts and cases—begins to accumulate and form a body of knowledge.
As the case of the tangled tale of Tibet demonstrates, we can enter a case and study it at many different points. For example, we might want to study the change that occurred in Bill Clinton's stance from the perspective of Bill Clinton the individual decision maker. Was Clinton inclined to see the world through a particular "lens" that somehow altered what he saw to fit what he believed? Did he have some weakly held beliefs about the Chinese, allowing him to be open to new thinking about China policy? Were there key advisers whose opinions shaped his, or did his opinion or preferences shape the views of his closest advisers? Were there some group dynamics at play that gave the economics-focused Cabinet members greater leverage over those who privileged human rights? Did this lead to an imbalanced consideration of the policy and, therefore, a policy recommendation that did not leave Clinton much room for choice? We could conduct a study of this case using any of these questions to guide our research. Each of these is posed at what scholars call the individual level of analysis—a focus on individual decision makers, how they make decisions, what perceptions and misperceptions they hold, the ways key decision makers interact in small, top-level groups, and so on.
We might, instead, decide to explore the involvement of interest groups and Congress in the changing nature of the Clinton China policy. We could explore the lobbying of Congress and the Executive branch by groups on the pro-human rights and protrade sides. We could explore the "turf" problems between the Executive and Legislative branches on the defining of the U.S. China policy. We could ask whether the Pentagon, worried about potential Chinese military threats, lobbied the White House and Congress for a certain stand against the Chinese. We could investigate the rise and fall of the fortunes of the pro-human rights groups
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and the rise of the protrade groups, charting their different strategies, arguments, and overall effectiveness. Entering the case in this way involves study at the state level of analysis. At the state level, we examine those societal and governmental factors that contribute to the making of foreign policy in a particular state.
If we expanded our focus, we could investigate the following questions. Did changes in the overall balance of power between countries in the Asia Pacific region convince American leaders that accommodating China was the most prudent way to have some influence over China? Were there some international mechanisms for pursuing human rights separately from trade, thus allowing the United States to delink the issues and still pursue both? Was there some consensus among key allies that China would need to be enticed into being a "good international citizen" rather than bullied into such a role? These questions about state versus state, or geostrategic concerns about regional power tilts, or states acting through international organizations, are all posed at the system level of analysis. The system level explores bilateral (state-to-state) relations, regional issues and interactions, and global issues and multilateral interactions between states. At this level we also consider the role played by regional and international organizations and by nonstate actors such as transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have a direct influence on the foreign policies of states.
The levels of analysis are tools—heuristic devices—that help us study our subject. All disciplines employ levels of analysis, although the levels vary depending on the discipline. The levels might be better understood by thinking about the lens on a camera and the detail we desire in our subject. At each level of analysis, we gain a particular understanding of our subject. Our understanding may be quite thorough for that level but will necessarily exclude information that can only be attained using one of the other levels of analysis. When we pose our questions at a single level, we acknowledge that our understanding will be limited. Recall that the case study detailed above revealed complexities across the levels of analysis. One level of understanding will not yield a complete picture. Yet we take such a risk and emphasize a single level because we are curious about questions at that level and, perhaps, we are convinced that one level gives a better explanation than the others. It is also true that choosing to frame our study at a single level helps us better manage what we study.
This book is organized around the three levels of analysis. Just as these can help make a single research project more manageable, the levels are useful ways to divide the study of foreign policy. We could divide our subject using more levels of analysis. One of the "pioneers" of foreign policy study, James Rosenau, suggests five levels or sources of foreign policy making: individual, role, governmental, societal, and systemic.22 The levels used
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in this book encapsulate these five. Another important international relations scholar, J. David Singer, describes two broad levels: system and subsystem. This scheme collapses our individual and state levels into the subsystem category.23 It is important to reiterate that we'll use a levels-of-analysis approach in this book as a way to manage the study of foreign policy. It is, though, impossible to truly isolate one level from the other levels, as we'll see when we discuss each. Not only is it analytically impossible to isolate one level from another, it would also be foolhardy to make pronouncements or policy decisions using but a single-level analysis in an era of globalization.
WORLDVIEWS AND THEORIES
In some important ways, the number of levels described is related to what the individual scholar thinks is important. Every one of us holds a view of "how things work" or "human nature." These views might be very elaborate or very simple, but they set the stage for how we act in the world. These "worldviews" don't have to apply to politics; generally a personal worldview can be used to explain why your best friend won't talk to you today, how to play the stock market or pick lottery numbers (or whether to bother playing the market or picking lottery numbers), or why countries choose peace over war.
The study of foreign policy derives, in large part, from the discipline called international relations. There are three worldviews or grand theories that dominate the study of international relations: realism,24 liberalism,25 and Marxism.26 Although there are variants and even disagreements within each of these worldviews, these offer three fairly straightforward explanations of "how things work" in the world. Scholars and foreign policy makers all have identifiable worldviews, although from time to time, individuals may use one or the other or borrow key concepts to fit particular circumstances.
An explanation of how something works is also known as a theory. We can call realism, liberalism, and Marxism worldviews, traditions, or theories. At their most fundamental level, each offers what we call a grand theory of how the world of politics works. A grand theory purports to explain how things are the way they are—or, how things might be. In this latter sense, theories can be prescriptions for action to achieve the desired end-point.
Theories are also used to help us tell the future, or predict. An explanation of a single incident in the past might be interesting, but it cannot tell us anything about the future. This is a problem for scholars, but even more so for foreign policy makers. Foreign policy makers need to be able
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to confront new circumstances with decisive, effective responses, and they need to be able to be proactive when planning the course for their countries. Theories about how the world works can help policy makers generalize from the past to new experiences, thereby helping them know which policies to undertake and which to avoid.
When analysts apply their theories about the world to the study of particular aspects of foreign policy—such as why countries form alliances, why countries enter into trade agreements, why countries ban land mines or why they don't—they offer something of use to policy makers. The explanations of the world that result from these particularized studies are called midrange theories. These midrange theories don't claim to explain everything, just selected parts of world politics. In fact, midrange theories tend to do a better job of explaining parts of the world than the grand theories do in explaining all of the world. This should make sense on an intuitive level.
Theories explain the past and help predict the future. With predictive capability, policy makers can plan their own actions. Theories are of no use to analysts or policy makers if they are too particular, or overly specified. Theories need to go beyond single instances; they need to generalize across cases, events, incidents, and time frames. That is, theories should help in the development of generic knowledge.
How much do foreign policy makers consider the theories—grand or midrange—of scholars? Scholars around the world sit in foreign ministries (or state departments) and analyze the world and advise their governments. Sometimes these scholars are officeholders—such as U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, who was a professor of international relations and politics at Princeton University before he was president—or hold key ministerial/cabinet positions. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the president of Brazil (1995-2003, serving two terms), was a leading scholar in the Marxist-dependency theory tradition studying asymmetrical power relations between rich and poor countries. In Canada, as another example, foreign policy and international relations scholars frequently spend part of their careers in universities, and part in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Sometimes scholars write syndicated columns for newspapers or host talk shows that are broadcast around their countries. The work of scholars gets translated into the work of foreign policy makers, and that translation happens in many different ways. This is why there is an imperative that foreign policy studies have something to say about the world—something tangible and practical.
Scholars in different traditions can and do examine the same set of events and arrive at different explanations about why those events occurred and how best to deal with similar events in the future. These theories give us different answers to the puzzles of the world because they
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begin with different starting assumptions, stress different "critical" variables, and have different ideal endpoints. It is also important to note that an analyst working within a particular tradition will ignore evidence that another analyst using a different worldview would find indispensable. When a scholar comes up with an answer as to why an event occurred and whether it will occur again, we would be wise—especially as foreign policy makers—to ask ourselves: What tradition is this person applying? What factors did this person ignore, disregard, or downplay? Will we imperil our policy if we ignore other potentially important variables?
As foreign policy makers as well as students of foreign policy, we should read every study with caution—with a critical mind—remembering that each scholar's orientation has led her or him to choose some variables over others. We might learn a great deal from this scholar's work, but the things we are not learning might be just as important. We would be wise, then, to critically mix and match our studies, looking for scholars of different orientations to offer us competing explanations that we can assess critically on the path to a more comprehensive understanding of events.
Let's review the dominant grand theories in brief. Realism
Classical realists start with a pessimistic view of human nature and from this they make key assumptions about the "nature" of states and state behaviors. Humans are essentially self-interested (some would say selfish) and exist in a social condition characterized by the constant struggle to maintain autonomy from other self-interested humans. States also are self-interested actors existing in an international system characterized by the constant struggle to maintain autonomy (sovereignty) from other states.
Whereas in a national society some legal limitations are placed on the ability of individuals to infringe on the autonomy of other individuals, in the international system any "society" that exists is loosely formed with no ultimate guarantor of the sovereignty of states except the states themselves. Indeed, the dominant characteristic of the international system is anarchy. Neorealists or structural realists emphasize this, rather than human nature, as the starting point for their explanation of world politics.
Because of anarchy, states are compelled to be constantly vigilant, watching out for impositions on their autonomy. The best way to protect a state's autonomy—and thus ensure its survival—is to amass power resources that can be used to deter or defend against other states. All states are similarly motivated and thus can be expected to do what is necessary to survive—sometimes resorting to the use of armed violence against oth-
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ers to capture additional power resources that can be harnessed for the protection of the state. Power itself (or the things that together constitute power, such as military and economic might) is finite in the international system, so whenever a state lays claim to a certain amount of power resources, other states are deprived of those resources. For classical realists, international politics is a zero-sum game where the gains of one state equal the losses of another. International politics is also necessarily con-flictual.
The realist perspective is state centered. States and only states are international actors, or the only international actors of note, privilege, and agency. International organizations and nongovernmental actors are only important to study as instruments of states pursuing their own national interests. What goes on within a state also is unimportant because all states have the same operating motivation—protect the state (the national interest) by acquiring greater and greater amounts of power. The important topics to study from a realist perspective include power balances, relative versus absolute power, and the multiple uses of power by one state over another (or a group of states over another group). More recent realist scholarship focuses on whether to balance power or threats and states' pursuit of relative and contingent gains over others.
Globalization is a process that realists meet with some suspicion. Globalization both poses a serious threat to national autonomy and control and creates interdependencies that impede the pursuit of national interests.
Liberalism
Liberals start from a different assumption about human nature and end up with a different view about international politics. Humans, in the liberal view, cherish autonomy but do not assume that their autonomy is threatened by other humans. Instead, humans exist within many networks of relationships that help them achieve collectively what they cannot achieve on their own. Humans who have the opportunity to exercise self-determination will respect others' rights to the same and will value the social fabric that assists all individuals in self-realization. Just as national society should result from a system that respects the rights of individuals and serves the collective will of those individuals, international society should also be founded on principles that respect the rights of individual, self-determining states and serve the collective good. International politics, then, is characterized by—or can be characterized by—harmony among international actors. Because of this expectation that the future might find countries in harmony with one another, the liberal view is sometimes called idealism.
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Liberals are pluralists. They conceptualize politics as the interaction of multiple actors pursuing multiple interests and using different types of resources and methods of interaction (such as bargaining, coalition building, arm twisting, and so on). States and nonstate actors of all sorts are important in different ways, depending on the issues at hand. Liberals focus on the formation of international law, organizations, and cooperative arrangements of many sorts, as well as on coercive statecraft directed at preserving some greater, collective good such as international peace or the promotion of human rights. Liberals value multiplicity and norms that protect and encourage multiplicity, all in the service of a greater, collective good.
Liberalism has a corollary in liberal economic theory in which it is proposed that free and open trade between countries can decrease the possibility of conflict between them. Essentially, the argument is that the more people trade, the greater the ties that bind them together. And the more people trade, the more they reap the benefits of trade together. In time, in-terdependencies and mutual gains will make war and violent conflict less likely, as all countries benefit from—and understand that they benefit from—their open relationships with one another. Globalization is a phenomenon that liberals welcome, even as they acknowledge that aspects of globalization need to be tempered in order to accommodate different peoples' concerns and interests.
Marxism
Before I explain the Marxist view on international politics, let's consider whether this worldview is still relevant with the collapse of the Soviet-led communist world. In brief, it is! The Marxist view was established before the founding of the Soviet Union as a critique and response to capitalism. Both of the grand political theories discussed above, realism and liberalism, are compatible with capitalism. Marxism constitutes both a response to the problems inherent to capitalism—an economic system—and a response to realism and liberalism—which chiefly describe political systems.
As with realism and liberalism, there is more to Marxism than I will describe here. The foundation of the Marxist view is that the economic organization of a society determines the political and social system. A society founded on capitalism, with its free market and private ownership of wealth and property, is a society divided into economic/social classes. Essentially, there are two classes—owners and workers. The societal norms and political system built on a capitalist-based economy are designed to maintain the continued profit taking of the owner class. Politics will be dominated by elite interests, and the institutions of government will be
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designed and directed to keeping the workers in an exploited, dependent position in order to preserve and increase the wealth of the owners. An international system based on capitalism is also a system divided into the owners, or the "haves," and the workers, or the "have-nots." The institutions of the rich states—such as their militaries—are used to maintain the world capitalist system, which serves elite interests. International institutions, similarly, are used to maintain the system in favor of the wealthy class/states.
Communist or Marxist states attempted to build a different political/ social domestic order by instituting an economic system that rejected private ownership and rejected wealth-based social classes. Instead, centrally planned economies were constructed to serve the interests of all citizens—theoretically. Internationally, these states—primarily the Eastern bloc led by the Soviet Union—attempted to remove themselves from the capitalist world system in order to protect themselves from the inherent distortions in that system. The Cold War conflict between the Soviet-led Eastern bloc and the American-led Western bloc was inevitable, according to the Marxist view, as capitalist states would use all means necessary to protect against the threat posed by communism.
Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the worldwide turn to liberal capitalism (a turn even manifested in the remaining communist states of China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba), the Marxist critique of capitalism remains relevant. During and beyond the Cold War, Marxist discussions of international politics focus(ed) on how the world's rich states mobilize their resources and tools of statecraft to maintain and increase their wealth and predominance. International organizations, such as the United Nations, and international institutions, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, serve as instruments of the rich (called the core or centre) states to maintain a world system that remains stratified into the rich few and the poor many on the periphery. Because this view stresses the structure of the world system and the structural determinants of power within the world economic system, it is also referred to as structuralism.
A Marxist or structuralist observer might focus on how the policies of international lending agencies keep the developing countries submerged in debt and dependent on the core states for trade and investment. Similarly, such an analysis might discuss how the terms attached to international loans coerce developing countries to enact domestic economic policies that increase poverty and human suffering in order to be able to make the service payments on external debt. Marxists also examine the patterns in the use of force—unilaterally and multilaterally—by core states against dependent states as continuing evidence of inevitable class conflict.
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In this era of globalization, the Marxist/structuralist perspective on international politics remains an ongoing critique of the problems of a global free-market system. In an interesting twist, globalization provokes strong opposition among realists and Marxists alike. The realists reject globalization because, as mentioned above, it erodes national sovereignty. That is, the opening of national borders and markets diminishes the ways in which central governments traditionally exert power. The Marxists reject globalization because there appears to be no safe harbor for poor people in the free-market tsunami. The economic system being globalized is a wide-open liberal economic system; if states want to ride this wave to potential prosperity, they must disengage any "safety net" provisions designed to protect their poor and workers against the free market. Further, there is no countering force in globalization that will ensure a more equitable distribution of power in the system; thus globalization will only increase the structural power of the center at the expense of all others.
These worldviews don't focus on just different actors and issues but also on different levels of analysis. Realists are focused on the state—not on what's "in" the state but on relations between states based on differences in power. Thus realists study foreign policy at the system level— whether bilateral, regional, or global. Realists often conflate leaders and countries; for instance, a realist may examine the calculations of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser leading up to the 1967 war between Egypt and Israel, with reference to Nasser and Egypt as if they were one entity. A realist would never examine the personal beliefs of leaders—all leaders, like all countries, are the same: they all pursue the national interests (the protection of the state and its power) in a rational, strategic, calculating manner.
Liberals, being pluralists, focus on all the levels of analysis, depending on the subject of the study. Liberals borrow from comparative politics and look at the persons, groups, structures, cultures, and so on within a state that may lead it to take certain foreign policy stands. They may examine the workings of international organizations—which is a system-level international relations interest. Liberals also explore the interaction of non-state actors across state boundaries. Or they may look at the belief sets or personalities of individuals who form the foreign policy elite.
Marxists look at foreign policy from the system and state levels. At the system level, the asymmetrical relations between states are important. At the state level, Marxists study the common interests of economic elites in one state with the elites in another. Or they study how military capitalist industrial interests push a state into war. Group politics is important to Marxists, so we can find such explanations of foreign policy posed at the state and system levels.
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Constructivism
Is it true, as the realists say, that the world is a hostile place in which no other state can be trusted and every state must be constantly ready to prey or be preyed upon? Is anarchy a reality that states ignore at their own folly? If we start with realist assumptions about the world, we must go where the realists take us—to a self-help system in which violence is both natural and at times the preferred foreign policy instrument. If we change the starting assumptions, we can go to a differently constituted world. This idea has led scholars to use alternative grand theories to understand the world, such as liberalism and Marxism. Of course, all three world-views present starting assumptions that, if accepted, will lead us in certain intended directions.
There is an approach to understanding reality that, although not a grand theory per se, offers an alternative tool for analysis. This approach is called constructivism. Constructivists argue that there is no more or less objective social reality, but that reality is socially constructed from society's perceptions of it. Society projects a certain understanding of reality onto the world—such as the "reality" of anarchy—and from this identities and appropriate behaviors result. States /societies make the system anarchic and then the system they create makes the states self-interested and predatory by necessity. Constructivism can help us understand how certain views of the world have become predominant. But constructivism itself does not offer us an alternative vision of the world and so I choose to include it here as a tool rather than a worldview. Other scholars would disagree with this choice.
THE BRIDGE BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE POLITICS
The study of foreign policy sits in the area of political science known as international politics, although you could say foreign policy sometimes jumps over the fence into comparative politics. As a "field" of study, foreign policy analysis is relatively new, coalescing more or less in the mid-1960s. There were, of course, scholars who studied foreign policy before this time, but their pursuit was one of many within the broader study of international politics.
The early study of foreign policy, like the study of international relations and comparative politics, reflected academic debates over the proper "ways of knowing" that dominated social science research in the 1950s and 1960s. Foreign policy study arose in this era as a bridge between international relations and comparative politics. To understand
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the construction of foreign policy study, we need to consider the development of international relations and comparative politics against real-world politics.
Prior to the twentieth century, Deborah Gerner explains,
neither foreign policy nor international relations constituted a distinct field. Diplomatic history probably came the closest to what we now label as "foreign policy," and much of what we call international relations came under the rubric of international law, institutional analysis, or history.27
Although the post-World War I years marked the strong emergence of the idealist (liberal) worldview and witnessed tangible efforts to incorporate idealist notions into the newly established League of Nations, the study of international relations and foreign policy was dominated by realism. According to Gerner,
For the study of foreign policy, this essentially meant the study of the international actions of individual state leaders—frequently monarchs—who were believed to have few constraints on their actions other than those imposed by the external situation.28
Real-world events, such as states' nationalistic responses to the Great Depression and the mobilization for World War II, reinforced the appropriateness of the IR (international relations) emphasis on political realism. Growing fascism on the European continent, as well as the entrenchment of Soviet-style communism, caused significant out-migration of political scholars. Many of these scholars made their way to the United States, bringing with them "new and often broader perspectives about international relations and foreign policy"29 than typically had been found in American academic departments studying politics.
The study of comparative politics was established in the interwar period as a result of the same exodus of European scholars.30 "Fascist Italy, Imperialist Japan, and Nazi Germany taught [these scholars] the dangers of mobilized masses from the extreme right end of the spectrum, while the politics of the Soviet Union taught them the dangers of mobilized masses from the left."31 The new study of comparative politics was normative in its focus, exploring the development of "good" moderate participatory politics as found in the United States and some countries of Western Europe.32
In the post-World War II years, this new study of comparative politics coalesced around modernization theory (also called developmental economics), with its emphasis on state and economy building along the path of the Western model. In brief, this model proposed that all countries could develop into advanced industrialized countries with participatory
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democratic systems if they followed in the established footsteps of the United States and its Western friends. Moreover,
as the Cold War emerged and deepened, the modernization/developmental model became the formula by which Western states, especially the United States, examined, judged, and intervened in developing states to protect them from the dangers of the mass politics of the left (communism) being exported by the Soviet Union.33
That is, the political cause and theoretical model that characterized the study of comparative politics was adopted with alacrity by Western policy makers as one of many tools to be used to fight the Cold War.
The politics of the day also influenced the broader study of politics, as Laura Neack, Jeanne Hey, and Patrick Haney explain,
A principal strategy of the United States in the Cold War involved beating the Soviets through scientific advancements; academics were recruited to this cause. Federal funding for "scientific" research created a strong impetus among social scientists to become more "scientific" (and perhaps less "social" or "historical"). . . . This is also the era in which the majority of departments of politics or governments in the United States turned into departments of political science.34
International relations scholars joined this movement in political science, although Gerner tells us that those who focused on foreign policy were temporarily left behind:
the fields of international relations and foreign policy, which had been intertwined, began to pull apart. International relations—or at least a significant subgroup of researchers represented after 1959 by the International Studies Association—became more scientific, with a goal of increasing knowledge through statistical tests and rational and dynamic modeling. Foreign policy theorists, however, were slower to adopt the behavioralist approach, and instead tended to continue in the classical tradition [derived from philosophy, history and law].33
As part of this positivist shift in international relations, a team of scholars produced two studies that proved critical to later foreign policy scholarship. In 1954 and 1963, Richard Snyder, H. W. Bruck, and Burton Sapin36 presented a systematic decision-making framework in response to realism's privileging of national interest over human agency.37 The emphasis for their framework was on decision makers:
It is one of our basic methodological choices to define the state as its official decision makers—those whose authoritative acts are, to all intents and
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purposes, the acts of the state. State action is the action taken by those acting in the name of the state.38
Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin rejected the realist notion that national leaders, regardless of individual differences, would make the same national interest-based foreign policy choices. Instead, they suggested that foreign policy choice derives from multiple sources, including the "biographies" of the individual decision makers as well as the organizational framework in which decisions are made. Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin pointed the way to studying foreign policy using multiple levels of analysis, a key theme of this book. Their work was taken up in James Rosenau's field-establishing work that appeared in the mid-1960s.
Charles Hermann and Gregory Peacock write, "If Snyder's framework invited scientific inquiry, Rosenau insisted upon it."39 In his famous and foundational article, "Pre-Theories and Theories of Foreign Policy," James Rosenau sounded a clarion call to make the study of foreign policy into a science.40 This is how Rosenau established the cause and scope of his call:
To probe the "internal influences on external behavior" is to be active on one of the frontiers where the fields of international and comparative politics meet. Initial thoughts about the subject, however, are bound to be ambivalent; it would seem to have been both exhausted and neglected as a focus of inquiry. Even as it seems clear that everything worth saying about the subject has already been said, so does it also seem obvious that the heart of the matter has yet to be explored and that American political science is on the verge of major breakthroughs which will make exploration possible.41
Rosenau was frustrated because foreign policy study had remained behind the times and, without significant recasting, would fail to benefit from the "major breakthroughs" on the horizon.
The nontheoretical state of foreign policy research is all the more perplexing when it is contrasted with developments elsewhere in American political science. In recent years the discipline has been transformed from an intuitive to a scientific enterprise, and consequently the inclination to develop models and test theories has become second nature to most political scientists.42
Foreign policy suffered, according to Rosenau, from the lack of a central theoretical framework (like realism in international relations) and the lack of a common methodology. He suggested that the common methodology be a commitment to comparative analysis, and that the central theory could be established through the subsequent efforts of scholars working within an agreed-upon framework. Rosenau offered his "pre-theory" framework—one in which he combined national attribute indicators to
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formulate "ideal nation-types." He hypothesized that factors at different levels of analysis might account for foreign policy differences that could be observed between these ideal nation-types. Using this "pre-theory," scholars could launch a systematic research program aimed at building a general body of theory that would, in time, define the scientific field of foreign policy. In response to Rosenau's call, a "self-conscious" field of foreign policy was begun by a more or less cohesive group of scholars whose collective efforts come under the heading of "Comparative Foreign Policy,"43 or what Neack, Hey, and Haney call the "first generation" of foreign policy study.44
Real-world events in the late 1960s and into the 1970s again influenced the direction of international relations, comparative politics, and foreign policy study. By the mid-1960s, most of the world's colonies had become independent states, entering the United Nations as an emblem of their sovereign statehood. The countries of the "Third World" brought different issues to the United Nations and to discussions of world politics. They shifted the debate within the United Nations to issues of economic development, and in world politics oil exporters demonstrated a new kind of power when they withheld oil from the world market, causing the oil shocks of the 1970s. International relations scholars needed to develop frameworks for analyzing nonmilitary bases and definitions of power, as well as "find" a place for discussions of less-than-great power states. Further, the problems of Third-World countries were not primarily strategic or military, but also involved issues of economic development and dependency, as well as issues of state and nation building. International relations scholars had to develop more diverse theoretical and conceptual tools to study this altered reality.
Western and non-Western international relations scholars began exploring alternative theoretical frameworks to realism. Some scholars in the West resuscitated the old idealist school under a newer, more reality-based rubric of "complex interdependence," or "transnationalism."45 Today, the umbrella category of liberalism is applied to various works in this tradition. Other scholars—in the West and especially from developing countries—proposed that the world should be understood in terms of the historical development of political and economic relations among states that has resulted in a world of "haves" and "have-nots." These scholars drew on Marxist understandings of politics. As these contending paradigms emerged in international relations to challenge the dominance of realism, so, too, was realism's insistence on positivist-behavioralist methodology challenged. By the end of the 1970s, more complex qualitative as well as quantitative research efforts were underway.
Similarly, the emphasis in comparative politics on modernization theory/ developmental economics came under significant challenge. There were
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some early critics of modernization theory such as Raul Prebisch, head of the U.N. Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA). Prebisch and ECLA proposed in the 1950s that economic development in the developing world—or, the periphery of the world economic system—would always be impeded by ever-declining terms of trade. That is, non-oil primary product exporters would keep falling behind because what they sold on the world market (coffee, rubber) would remain the same in price while what they bought on the world market (manufactured goods, petroleum products) would increase in price each year. Prebisch represented a Marxist variation called dependency theory, a theory with strong foundations in Latin America particularly and the broader developing world more generally. Although the dependency challenge to modernization theory was sounded in the 1950s, modernization theory remained dominant in comparative politics until the late 1960s and early 1970s. By this time, mainstream comparative politics had to make room for new voices and issues such as dependency theory.
Neack, Hey, and Haney describe the change in comparative politics in this time:
Scholars from developing countries and Western "area specialists" who had rejected modernization theory were able to exploit the cracks in the crumbling modernization theory paradigm and assert the importance of studying complex domestic processes in comparative politics. . . . The study of domestic processes took a variety of forms in the 1970s, including the study of domestic class-based divisions caused by colonialism and perpetuated in post-independence dependent relations, political economy, state corporatism, and state-society relations. . . . The unifying feature of comparative politics from the 1970s onward was not a central theoretical core, but a central methodological agreement on the comparative method.46
Just as before, real-world political changes affecting international relations and comparative politics also affected the new field of comparative foreign policy. One result of the disequilibrium being felt in the fields of international relations and comparative politics was that divisions between the two were becoming less and less distinct. This was especially true in the case of political economy approaches to international and comparative politics. This blurring of divisions occurred precisely at the junction of these fields that foreign policy was supposed to bridge.
By the start of the 1980s, a variety of theoretical and methodological accountings from both international and comparative politics were adopted by foreign policy scholars. The impact of these accountings was evident in the growing number of contextualized, multilevel foreign policy analyses undertaken in the 1980s and into the early 1990s. This wave of scholarship has been called the "second generation" of foreign policy analysis
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by Neack, Hey, and Haney A critical aspect of this second generation was the conscious choice by scholars to link their work to the major substantive concerns in foreign policy
Second-generation foreign policy study reflected the complex issues of the times—the impact of the latest wave of democratization, the importance of the relative decline in U.S. economic power in the early to mid-1980s, the collapse of the Soviet empire and Soviet-style communism, the unprecedented international collaboration in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and the December 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.
A NEW MILLENNIUM
The New Foreign Policy takes off from the second generation of foreign policy study, as the second generation was launched from the first. Just as the first and second generations reflected real-world politics, The New Foreign Policy reflects politics in this era of globalization. The New Foreign Policy is not necessarily a declaration of a third generation of foreign policy scholarship; instead, this book signals a refocusing of the rich research programs of the second generation on the politics of the new millennium.
The end of the last millennium and start of the new were marked by some monumental politics. From the mid-1990s until 2001, the American economy was in resurgence—a remarkable situation given relative American economic decline in the 1980s and a necessary boost to the world economy given the global economic downturn of the mid-to-late 1990s in Asia and Europe. The early 1990s saw another resurgence—in the use of the United Nations to address humanitarian crises and to promote human rights. In these tasks, the United Nations was not effective, doing little to stop genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda. As the 1990s wore on into the new millennium, the United Nations fell out of favor among some countries, and multilateral actions by groups such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) gained more favor. Still, some type of international response to conflict seemed in order with the outbreak of war and violence in the 1990s that only intensified into the 2000s. Refugee crises; HIV crises; sharp increases in illegal drug, human, and small arms trafficking—all these seem to have become the norm in this new era. Two countries pushed their way into the elite nuclear weapons club when India and Pakistan tested their own weapons in 1998. (A third attempted to do so less than a decade later when North Korea tested a low-yield nuclear device in 2006.) At the same time, the new era has not been without some significant advances in the promotion of democracy and protection of basic human rights. But the benefits of the new era have yet to be felt by all and have not been met by all with the
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same welcome and enthusiasm, as suggested by the frequency of Islamic fundamentalist attacks against U.S. military and diplomatic personnel in the late 1990s. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington, D.C., brought the dangers and frustrations of the new millennium home to the United States. Since then, interstate war has returned to center stage with the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, terrorist groups have responded to these wars with spectacular attacks in Indonesia, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom, among other places.
Global politics in the new millennium include the following features that set the context for The New Foreign Policy. First, the American post-World War II grand strategy of building a liberal international trading order has succeeded. The economic and cultural currents that flow into and mold this order collectively can be called globalization. Yet, at the same time, the international system today is dominated by the single (hyper) power of the United States. This unipolarity itself might be the source of international instability (a topic considered in chapter 8), but certainly the Bush 2 administration's use of unilateralism and muscularity also have contributed to instability, backlash, and global insecurity. Second, globalization erodes the distinctions between domestic and foreign politics at the same time that it creates strong countercurrents among peoples attempting to assert their differences and their right to those differences. The example set by the United States in this period establishes the use of force as the norm rather than the exception in the pursuit of group goals. Those inclined to resist globalization take note of this example and modify their behaviors accordingly. Third, on a brighter side, democratization seems to be accompanying globalization into the new millennium. But, whereas democratization requires the protection of individual human rights, globalization gives governments an excuse to vacate their responsibilities to their citizens. Further, democratization can unleash dangerous demands on governments, many of which are inadequately prepared to manage the pace of globalization. Fourth, intrastate and interstate warfare as well as networked terrorism all are prominent and terrible features of the new landscape in the new millennium. The New Foreign Policy is intended as a guidebook for studying and considering state responses to globalization, global violence, and American overreach in the twenty-first century.
CHAPTER REVIEW
• "A Tangled Tale of Tibet" demonstrates how no policy issue is exclusively foreign or exclusively domestic in nature.
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"A Tangled Tale of Tibet" demonstrates, too, how state and nonstate actors try to build coalitions in support of their policy preferences, linking their issues with those of others.
National leaders are said to play a two-level, dual, or nested game between the demands of the international system and those of domestic politics.
The study of foreign policy is the study of both the statements or policies of decision makers as well as the behaviors or actions of states.
The levels of analysis used in the study of foreign policy are the individual, state, and system levels. These are heuristic devices or tools that help us manage our subject matter. The levels of analysis also ask different questions of and provide different answers to foreign policy puzzles.
The study of foreign policy is primarily situated in the field of international relations. International relations is dominated by three worldviews: realism, liberalism, and Marxism.
Foreign policy is also a bridging discipline, taking lessons from both the study of international relations and the study of comparative politics.