At the heart of political leadership lies choice. And at the heart of choice lies judgment. A leader's psychology and experience intersect with political realities to produce consequences that can make or break a leader--or a country. Nowhere is judgment more important than in the making of foreign policy. Good judgments can avoid wars, or win them. Poor judgments can start wars or lose them. This book draws together a distinguished group of contributors--psychologists, political scientists, and policymakers--to focus on and understand both good and poor judgment in foreign policy making. Case studies of key leadership decisions combine with theoretical overviews and analyses to offer a highly textured portrait of judgment in action in the all-important foreign policy arena. An up-to-the-minute case on George W. Bush and the war on terrorism applies good judgment theory to contemporary events.

This book's introduction to foreign policy analysis focuses on decision makers and decision making. Each chapter is organised around puzzles and questions to which undergraduates can relate. The book emphasizes the importance of individuals in foreign policy decision making, while also placing decision makers within their context.

This book assesses the role of identity and Chinese face culture in Chinese foreign policy by analyzing China’s political and economic retaliation against South Korea’s deployment of the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system on its soil. By examining the history and military action of China, Japan, and North and South Korea, the book argues that China’s divergent responses were caused by different expectations according to whether states had a perceived identity as a friend or a rival. The author demonstrates that Chinese face culture shapes China’s reaction to others through three dynamics of seeking, saving, and losing face. This book shows how identity and culture have worked in the relationship between China and neighboring countries through three case studies exploring North Korea’s Taepodong-2 missile launch and first nuclear test in 2006, South Korea’s decision to allow the United States to deploy the THAAD around 2016, and Japan’s decision to deploy two U.S. X-band radars in 2005 and 2014. A timely analysis of the importance of identity and culture in international relations, the book will be of interest to scholars of Chinese foreign policy, Sino-South Korean relations, Sino-North Korean relations, Sino-Japanese relations, Korean Politics, Asian Politics, and International Relations.

In The Commander-in-Chief Test, Jeffrey A. Friedman offers a fresh explanation for why Americans are often frustrated by the cost and scope of US foreign policy—and how we can fix that for the future. Americans frequently criticize US foreign policy for being overly costly and excessively militaristic. With its rising defense budgets and open-ended "forever wars," US foreign policy often appears disconnected from public opinion, reflecting the views of elites and special interests rather than the attitudes of ordinary citizens. The Commander-in-Chief Test argues that this conventional wisdom underestimates the role public opinion plays in shaping foreign policy. Voters may prefer to elect leaders who share their policy views, but they prioritize selecting presidents who seem to have the right personal attributes to be an effective commander in chief. Leaders then use hawkish foreign policies as tools for showing that they are tough enough to defend America's interests on the international stage. This link between leaders' policy positions and their personal images steers US foreign policy in directions that are more hawkish than what voters actually want. Combining polling data with survey experiments and original archival research on cases from the Vietnam War through the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, Friedman demonstrates that public opinion plays a surprisingly extensive—and often problematic—role in shaping US international behavior. With the commander-in-chief test, a perennial point of debate in national elections, Friedman's insights offer important lessons on how the politics of image-making impacts foreign policy and how the public should choose its president.

" ... brings together piercing analyses of the American presidency - dealing with both current issues and historical events. The compendia consists of the combined and rearranged issues of [the journal] "White House Studies" with the addition of a comprehensive subject index."--Preface.

This collection of essays considers the evolution of American institutions and processes for forming and implementing US national security policy, and offers diverse policy prescriptions for reform to confront an evolving and uncertain security environment. Twelve renowned scholars and practitioners of US national security policy take up the question of whether the national security institutions we have are the ones we need to confront an uncertain future. Topics include a characterization of future threats to national security, organizational structure and leadership of national security bureaucracies, the role of the US Congress in national security policy making and oversight, and the importance of strategic planning within the national security enterprise. The book concludes with concrete recommendations for policy makers, most of which can be accomplished under the existing and enduring National Security Act. This book will be of much interest to students of US national security, US foreign policy, Cold War studies, public policy and Internationl Relations in general.

Mistakes, in the form of bad decisions, are a common feature of every presidential administration, and their consequences run the gamut from unnecessary military spending, to missed opportunities for foreign policy advantage, to needless bloodshed. This book analyzes a range of presidential decisions made in the realm of US foreign policy—with a special focus on national security—over the past half century in order to create a roadmap of the decision process and a guide to better foreign policy decision-making in the increasingly complex context of 21st century international relations. Mistakes are analyzed in two general categories—ones of omission and ones of commission within the context of perceived threats and opportunities. Within this framework, the authors discuss how past scholarship has addressed these questions and argue that this research has not explicitly identified a vantage point around which the answers to these questions revolve. They propose game theory models of complex adaptive systems for minimizing bad decisions and apply them to test cases in the Middle East and Asia.

"America has always taken a coherent national identity for granted. In recent decades that assumption has been challanged. Individual and group rights have expanded, eliciting acerbic debate about the legitimacy and limits of claims. National political leaders have preferred to finesse rather engage these controversies. At the same time, large numbers of new immigrants have dramatically made the United States more racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse. As a result this country faces critical political and cultural questions. What does it mean to be an American? What, if anything, binds our country and citizens together? Is a ""new American identity"" developing, and if so, what is it? Can political leaders help us answer these questions?For the second time in the history of the United States another civil war looms. Tthe new danger lies in conflicts among people of different racial, cultural, and ethnic heritages, and between those who view themselves as culturally, politically, and economically disadvantaged versus those whom they see as privileged. Unlike the first Civil War, the antagonists cannot take refuge in their family or their religious, social, cultural or political organizations. These are the precisely the places were the war is being fought. At issue is whether it is possible or desirable to preserve the strengths of a common heritage. Some quarters insist that our past has resulted in a culture only worth tearing down to build over, rather than one worth keeping and building upon.We are in conflict over the viability of American culture and identity itself.This volume is organized into a series of intellectually grounded but provocative chapters on political leadership, the 2000 presidential campaign. Immigration, affirmative action, and other contemporary social and political issues. Renshon uses the perspective of political psychology to help us to see old issues in new ways, and new issues in different ways. His critical questi"

Uncertainty surrounds every major decision in international politics. Yet there is almost always room for reasonable people to disagree about what that uncertainty entails. No one can reliably predict the outbreak of armed conflict, forecast economic recessions, anticipate terrorist attacks, or estimate the countless other risks that shape foreign policy choices. Many scholars and practitioners therefore believe that it is better to keep foreign policy debates focused on the facts - that it is, at best, a waste of time to debate uncertain judgments that will often prove to be wrong. In War and Chance, Jeffrey A. Friedman shows how foreign policy officials often try to avoid the challenge of assessing uncertainty, and argues that this behavior undermines high-stakes decision making. Drawing on an innovative combination of historical and experimental evidence, he explains how foreign policy analysts can assess uncertainty in a manner that is theoretically coherent, empirically meaningful, politically defensible, practically useful, and sometimes logically necessary for making sound choices. Each of these claims contradicts widespread skepticism about the value of probabilistic reasoning in international politics, and shows how placing greater emphasis on assessing uncertainty can improve nearly any foreign policy debate. A clear-eyed examination of the logic, psychology, and politics of assessing uncertainty, War and Chance provides scholars and practitioners with new foundations for understanding one of the most controversial elements of foreign policy discourse.

Every new president raises many questions in the public mind. Because Barack Obama was a relative newcomer to the national political scene, he raised more questions than most. Would he prove to be a pragmatic centrist or would his politics of hope ultimately flounder on the rocky shoals of America’s deep political divisions? What of his leadership style? How would the uncommonly calm character he demonstrated on the campaign trail shape Obama’s political style as commander-in-chief? Based on extensive biographical, psychological, and political research and analysis, noted political psychologist Stanley Renshon follows Obama’s presidency through the first two years. He digs into the question of who is the real Obama and assesses the advantages and limitations that he brings to the presidency. These questions cannot be answered without recourse to psychological analysis. And they cannot be answered without psychological knowledge of presidential leadership and the presidency itself. Renshon explains that Obama’s ambition has been fueled by a desire for redemption—his own, that of his parents, and ultimately for the country he now leads, which has enormous consequences for his choices as president of a politically divided America.