In what ways does national culture influence the direction of US foreign policy? This study analyzes how certain cultural elements influenced the policy preferences and policymaking behaviours of three Cold War-era statesmen - John Foster Dulles, Averell Harriman and Robert McNamara.

The book examines a critical time and place in recent world history (the end of the Cold War) and the strategies and values employed in the public diplomacy of the Bush and Clinton Administrations to build domestic and international consensus. It provides insight into the uses of Presidential power and provides a model and an illustration of how the role of rhetoric may be used to study the foreign policy of the United States.

The concept of soft power has caught the attention of policymakers, scholars, and political pundits for the last thirty years. Soft power studies most often focus on measures of public opinion toward a power-wielder and draw conclusions about a state’s level of soft power from that opinion. This research examines soft power influence by focusing on the elite discourse and the foreign policy decisions of states that are the target of soft power influence. Beginning with Joseph Nye’s conception that soft power is an attractive force that influences state policy decisions and its level of support for another state’s policies, Confronting the Myth of Soft Power in U.S. Foreign Policy examines whether U.S. soft power was part of key policymakers’ decision calculus. Soft power is tested against two plausible alternate explanations—balancing and state identity. Data from the discourse of key foreign policymakers in France and Germany indicate that U.S. soft power does not account for those states’ policy decisions to support U.S.-led policy interventions in Kosovo in 1999, or against ISIS in 2014. The results of this research are suggestive regarding the potential of soft power influence and its implications on scholarship and U.S. foreign policymaking.

A comprehensive account of ideology and its role in the foreign policy of the United States of America, this book investigates the way United States foreign policy has been understood, debated and explained in the period since the US emerged as a global force, on its way to becoming the world power. Starting from the premise that ideologies facilitate understanding by providing explanatory patterns or frameworks from which meaning can be derived, the authors study the relationship between ideology and foreign policy, demonstrating the important role ideas have played in US foreign policy. Drawing on a range of US administrations, they consider key speeches and doctrines, as well as private conversations, and compare rhetoric to actions in order to demonstrate how particular sets of ideas – that is, ideologies – from anti-colonialism and anti-communism to neo-conservatism mattered during specific presidencies and how US foreign policy was projected, explained and sustained from one administration to another. Bringing a neglected dimension into the study of US foreign policy, this book will be of great interest to students and researchers of US foreign policy, ideology and politics.

Foreign policy decisions are influenced by many factors. The real world is complex and many variables have to be considered when making a decision. A psychological approach to decision-making facilitates the understanding and explaining of the complexity of foreign and global policies precisely because of the prolonged transitional stage of the contemporary international system. The course of world politics is shaped by the decisions of leaders. Uncertainty involved in decision-making in foreign policy can relate to the motivations, beliefs, intentions or calculations of the opponents. If it is not possible to understand how decisions are made, then maybe it is at least feasible to understand these decisions and, perhaps more importantly, predict various results with regards to international politics. This book provides a new perspective on the study of international relations by analyzing the subjective elements (idiosyncrasies) that occur in decision-making at the individual level. The use of psychological methods of analysing the foreign policy decision-making process proposes a necessary investigation path into international relations.

Portraying the other in international relations significantly shapes interaction among actors in the international field, consequently colouring views of the other and legitimating behaviour toward the other. This edited volume presents current analyses by international scholars on othering processes and self-other constructions within international relations, attempting to fill a gap in the debate on this fascinating topic and its socio-political implications. Othering is illustrated in three thematic sections: I) Othering in interstate and interregional relations, II) Othering in the policy field of terrorism and counterterrorism, and III) Possible transformations of othering. Contributions discuss othering from diverse angles and with different conceptual approaches, illustrating the multiple forms othering can take. They show how othering can be studied and its dynamics and consequences critically analysed and more comprehensively understood, but also the limits to these attempts. Various motivations for engaging in othering are elaborated. The images, ways of representations and stylistic means that are applied are exposed, and their internal logic as well as effects on thinking and behaviour in the international arena examined. Furthermore, possibilities for modifying othering processes, that is, how negative self-other constructions may be transformed, with the goal of enabling the peaceful existence of different groups, are presented.

Coming at the heels of September 11, Operation Iraqi Freedom has focused the limelight on the way in which the United States predicts and manages political change. The failure to find WMD and more important, the continued violence in Iraq instead of the hoped for democracy, has engender an acrimonious debate on the motives of the Bush administration and its uses or misuses of intelligence. The question of who got what right or wrong has been fought out along ideological, and partisan lines, with supporters claiming that, given what was known about Saddam Hussein, the decision to change his regime was justified and detractors arguing that a group of largely Jewish neoconservatives, acting on behalf of Israel, manipulated intelligence in order to trick the United States into an unnecessary and costly war. The book provides a systematic and objective analysis of the problems that faced American intelligence in deciphering the behavior of the highly secretive and confusing Iraq regime and its enigmatic leader.

In 1976, with the US trade embargo against Cuba underway, Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau visited the island nation, befriended his counterpart, and exclaimed publicly "Long live Prime Minister Fidel Castro!" During the past half-century of communist rule in Cuba, Canada's policy of engagement with the country has contrasted sharply with the United States' policy of isolation. Based on a series of interviews conducted in Havana, Washington, and Ottawa, Perceptions of Cuba moves beyond traditional economic and political analyses to show that national identities distinct to each country contributed to the formation of their dissimilar foreign policies. Lana Wylie argues that Canadians and Americans perceive Cuba through different lenses rooted in their respective identities: American exceptionalism made Cuba the polar opposite of the United States, while Canada's self-image as a good international citizen and as 'not American' has allowed the country to engage with the Cuban government. By acknowledging that competing national identities, perceptions, and ideas play a major role in foreign policies, Perceptions of Cuba makes a significant contribution to our understanding of international relations.

In 'Kennedy's Wars' noted historian Lawrence Freedman draws on the best of Cold War scholarship and newly released government documents to illuminate Kennedy's approach to war and his efforts for peace.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, deployed a tactic Chris Tudda calls “rhetorical diplomacy”— sounding a belligerent note of anti-Communism in speeches, addresses, press conferences, and private meetings with allies and with Moscow. Yet all the while, Tudda discloses, the two were confidentially committed to a contradictory course—the establishment of a strong system of collective security in Western Europe, peaceful accommodation of the Soviet Union, and the maintenance of a new, albeit divided Germany. Tudda explores the Eisenhower administration’s pursuit of these two mutually exclusive diplomatic strategies and reveals how failure to reconcile them endangered the fragile peace of the 1950s. He builds his argument through three case studies: of the administration’s badgering the French and their allies to ratify the European Defense Community, of its threat to liberate Eastern Europe from Moscow’s rule, and of its forcing the issue of German reunification. By emphasizing the threat from the Soviet Union, Eisenhower and Dulles were trying to promote an activist rather than an isolationist foreign policy. But their rhetorical diplomacy intensified Cold War tensions with European allies as well as with Moscow and effectively overwhelmed the administration’s true diplomatic aims. Based on American, British, Eastern European, and Soviet primary sources—many only recently unearthed—The Truth Is Our Weapon is a major contribution to the historiography of Eisenhower’s diplomacy and an important statement about the implications of public and private policy making.