Making Foreign Policy

Presidential Management of the Decision-Making Process

David Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429581229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Originally published in 2005. David Mitchell provides a better understanding of the role presidents play in the decision-making process in terms of their influence on two key steps in the process: deliberation and outcome of policy making. The events that have taken place in relation to the Bush administration's decisions to fight the war on terrorism and invade Iraq highlight how important it is to understand the president's role in formulating policy. This influential study presents an advisory system theory of decision-making to examine cases of presidential policy formulation drawn from the Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations. Easily accessible to scholars, graduates and advanced undergraduates interested in US foreign policy or foreign policy analysis, presidential studies, and bureaucracy and public administrations scholars, and to practitioners and those with a general interest in International Relations.

Chapter 1

Presidents and Foreign Policy Processes

Disinterest in the day-to-day activities of leaders and advisors has characterized mainstream International Relations since the late 1950s when systemic explanations came to dominate much of intellectual thinking on international politics (Waltz 1959; Singer 1961); however this has not been true for the study of foreign policy, in which many scholars have closely examined the actions of individual decision-makers. The interest in individuals and small groups has been clearly demonstrated by those who have chosen to focus on the Kennedy administration’s decision-making during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Kennedy 1969; Allison 1971; May and Zelikow 1997; Garthoff 1988; Blight 1989; Welch 1989; Chang 1998; White 1998). The Cuban Missile Crisis perfectly demonstrates how crucial it is to study the relationships between leadership and advisors, because it is these interactions that are essential factors in determining a government’s behavior. However, the recognition that leaders and advisors matter is only the first step in explaining how states behave. At a public forum on presidential decision-making, Ted Sorenson—legal counsel and policy advisor during the Kennedy administration—makes a set of informative points regarding the decision-making process.

Questioner: Is there a larger lesson to be learned from the structure of the decision-making process during the crisis? Should American foreign policy be conducted in the informal manner of the ExComm, or should it be organized more formally?

Ted Sorensen: I don’t think there is a single answer to that. I think that was the best organization and the best group for John F. Kennedy. That is the way he made decisions, that is the way he operated. President Eisenhower had a far more structured system. He was accustomed to that from the military and he was more comfortable with that. I don’t second guess him, because I think every president ought to be able to make those decisions in the way which he is most comfortable, which will be most effective for him. (Lobel et al. 2000: 40)

Sorensen’s comments, first, indicate that the relationship between leaders and advisors varies based on the president’s needs. Kennedy, upon learning of the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba, recognized that the gravity of the situation required that a range of views be assessed and that in a time of crisis he needed to surround himself with those individuals that could provide him with the best informed views. Thus, Kennedy brought together an informal group of individuals he thought could provide the best advice. This action was partially driven by the crisis, but it was also partially a result of learning from the poor decision making that occurred during the planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion. As Sorensen points out, Eisenhower had a different approach to decision making that used a more formalized procedure, where deliberations over options took place within a set of committees that had specialized responsibilities, and options generated in those committees were presented to Eisenhower for choice.

In a similar dialogue, Brent Scowcroft (2001), former deputy national security advisor in the Nixon administration and national security advisor in the Ford and Bush administrations, notes the ways successive presidents organized their advisors to facilitate the making of decisions. Scowcroft points out, Nixon instituted a system of committees that formulated options allowing him to ‘take papers to his study, come back with them marked up.’ Only after this private deliberation would Nixon decide on a course of action. Ford and Bush, Scowcroft continues, were ‘just the opposite,’ because both presidents preferred to make decisions ‘in the course of hearing debate over the issues involved.’ Thus, differences among presidents’ leadership styles result in the formation of different advisory systems, with the important consequence that different advisory systems result in variations in presidential decision-making process.

This study is motivated by a simple yet vitally important question for an understanding of US foreign policy. Quite simply, how does a president’s choice of management style influence the US foreign policy decision-making process and decision outcomes? Presidents play a critical role in the formulation of United States foreign policy, however presidential studies and foreign policy analysis literature arrive at very different conclusions regarding how presidents influence the policy process and both are often inaccurate. This study develops an Advisory Systems Decision Framework to address how presidents influence the decision-making process. Four types of decisionmaking processes can be exhibited by a president at any given point in time based on the president’s choice of advisory structure and the degree of centralization that the president exercises over the decision-making process. Foreign policy analysts have addressed the relationship between presidential management style and the decision-making process, but have failed to seriously take into account centralization as a key variable in determining the nature of the decision-making process. Furthermore, previous studies have only dealt superficially with the connection between the decision process and decision outcomes. This study addresses this issue by arguing that the way in which president and advisors resolve disagreements has implications for the outcome of the process. Specifically, the choice of “unstructured solution” or method for resolving disagreements results in variations in decision outcomes.

A reasonable response to the proposed centrality of the president in organizing his advisors based on individual characteristics is that it is the president that ultimately matters and not the advisors. Why take an interest in advisors, if the variables that matter to the nature of foreign policy are found in the president and the president is the locus of decision making in any administration? The simple answer is that the president may organize their advisors, but once constituted the president’s decisions will be influenced and shaped by the interactions with and among advisors (Walcott and Hult 1987).

Traditionally, scholars have spoken of different structures, which were meant to describe the relationships between advisors and leaders, however their description of different structures reveals that these scholars were conflating two different dimensions of the advisor–leader relationship. The first dimension, structure, focuses on the organization of the advisors in relation to the president, for example some structures are hierarchic. The second dimension, operation, focuses on the nature of the interaction between advisors and leaders during the decision-making process within a given structure (i.e., the leader does not reach down to gain information, the leader participates in deliberation or the leader and advisors collectively pursue feasible options). Collectively, the two dimensions—structure and operation—form the advisory system, which is a distinct and more comprehensive concept than advisory structure. The use of the term system is deliberately chosen because a system or a complex decision-unit composed of smaller parts better represents the unit of analysis in this study.

A word on the definition of advisors is important at this juncture. A wide range of individuals have access to the president and during any given interaction have the ability to present the president with advice that can have a significant influence on the president’s thinking. Aside from members of the cabinet and the White House staff, the First Lady, personal friends, members of Congress, other heads of state are often in the position to advise the president. Nancy Reagan is known to have had a significant amount of influence on Ronald Reagan’s thinking about policy issues, while Richard Nixon often discussed, over drinks, issues he was confronting with his personal friend Bebe Rebozzo. Although many of these individuals are not formally considered advisors, these interactions can have a critical influence on presidential thinking. Given this state of affairs, the definition of advisor remains purposefully broad and includes all those individuals that have access to the president; however, this study focuses on those individuals who have been given the authority and whose job it is to give advice to the president. More specifically, the term advisor is meant to refer to the National Security Council Staff, White House Staff, and sub-cabinet appointees and those civil servants who are participating in the decision-making process at the highest level. These are the individuals who attend committee meetings and have the closest interaction with the president regarding the formulation of policy. Again, this focus is not meant to exclude the consideration of other individuals in the sense that when a non-formal advisor participates in the process their contribution is duly noted.

On its own, the advisory system framework is a valuable tool because it better specifies the links between management structure and decision-making process than the frameworks presented by Johnson and George. By the inclusion of the centralization variable, the advisory system framework expands the identified range of management structures and decision-making processes, while presenting an explanation of the variations in decision-making processes. The implications of such a framework is that it explains the consequences of the choices made by leader’s when they choose the means to formulate foreign policy, by constructing a set of ideal types that function as a baseline to understand both variations in management and processes. The Advisory Systems framework has a value beyond explaining how structure and centralization produce a particular kind of decision-making process; it has implications for how we think about other decision-making theories and models. If the framework’s explanation of the decision-making process is accurate, then it is possible to address a range of questions regarding the decision-making process. For example, are some advisory systems more or less prone to engage in bureaucratic politics? Likewise, which advisory systems are more prone to lead to breakdowns or policy failures? In what ways do advisors go about influencing the decision-making process given a type of presidential management? An investigation of these types of questions presents the future possibility that once a set of management characteristics are identified, it is then possible to not only explain how decisions are made by a leader and advisors, but whether the policy process will deadlock, result in groupthink, or be captured by a faction within the advisory system.

The Advisory System Decision-making Framework is examined using cases of US presidential decision making over five different administrations, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush. In addition, the new framework includes an explanation of the type of “unstructured solution” or decision outcome associated with each decision-making process, an aspect of the decision-making process that previous typologies have not fully addressed. Before moving on to a discussion of the reformulation of the existing advisory system typology, a discussion of group decision-making research is necessary in order to highlight the gap in the literature that the new Advisory System Framework fills.

Foundations of Group Decision Making

The recognition of differences between decision-making groups found in Sorenson’s comments, have not been lost on all foreign policy analysts, as previously noted. Scholars interested in decision making recognized that individual decision-making takes place within a context that must be taken into account in order to understand the decision-making process and its outcomes (Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin 1962; Golembiewski 1962; Verba 1962; Stodgill 1981). These early assessments of small group decision making were wide ranging in their scope and were not linked to an empirical assessment of their claims, ‘t Hart, Stern, and Sundelius (1997) have pointed out that these works and others written since by social psychologists and management theorists have been overshadowed by a focus on groupthink and bureaucratic politics. Thus, a serious effort to examine the decision-making processes within the context of different advisory settings, which is the object in this study, has not taken place. Groupthink (Janis 1971; ‘t Hart et al. 1997) and bureaucratic politics (Allison 1971; Allison and Halperin 1972; Halperin, Clapp, and Kanter 1974), and to a lesser extent organization theories (Cyert & March 1963; Steinbrunner 1974; Cyert and March 1976; March 1994) have in fact been given more attention by foreign policy analysts. Of these three different approaches, groupthink, a social psychological approach has been given the most attention.

Irving Janis (1972) presented the concept of groupthink as an explanation for policy fiascos where small cohesive groups seek to maintain unanimity and group cohesion in the face of external stress. The pursuit of concurrence on an issue comes at the expense of a thorough search and evaluation of all the options available to the group. This process, Janis explains, functions as an explanation for fiascos; specifically he cites the inability to foresee the possibility of an attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, to name two examples. Groupthink can be identified by a set of eight symptoms: illusion of invulnerability, a belief in the group’s superior morality, a shared illusion of unanimity, collective efforts at rationalizing the group’s actions, self-censorship of deviant views, pressure to conform, stereotyping of the enemy as evil, and the presence of self-appointed mind guards. Although groupthink is conceived of as being a myopic decisionmaking environment, Janis makes the caveat that policies emerging from such groups may in fact be appropriate and successful.

Groupthink has not escaped being the target of criticism. The primary criticism of groupthink revolves around the imprecision in the theory. Janis fails to precisely explain the relationship between the variables (the eight symptoms), and further, some of the symptoms that he ostensibly treats as independent variables can possibly be considered dependent (Longley and Pruitt 1980; Gaenslen 1992). The need to overcome the imprecision of the theory has led to a reformulation that has emphasized the need to better explain the antecedents that lead to groupthink (‘t Hart 1994). First among these antecedents is the influence of the leader’s point of view, which makes cohesiveness unnecessary for groupthink to occur. Second, the reformulation of groupthink posits that the inter-group context influences groupthink which can, in turn, express itself in two ways. ‘t Hart notes that during group conflict the group becomes hierarchically structured “increasing the potential for strong leaders to expect loyal behavior from group members” (‘t Hart 1994, 120). Alternatively, groupthink can occur in groups that engage in competitive interactions among the members resulting in one or both of the groups falling victim to groupthink.

Of critical importance in this reformulation is the fact that ‘t Hart reintroduces a critical factor in decision making: namely, the structural relationships between leaders and their advisors and among advisors themselves, ‘t Hart’s contribution is important because it redirects attention to the conditioning effect the leader has on the behavior of the advisors; in addition, it redirects attention back to group structure (hierarchic or competitive) and the influence on decision outcomes. However, this reformulation is not all that needs to be addressed when considering the utility of groupthink in the analysis of foreign policy. Specifically, the heterogeneity and the lack of continuity within the president’s administration are argued to be the factors necessary for groupthink to occur, ‘t Hart (1997, 11) claims that this means groupthink should be treated “as a contingent phenomenon, rather than as a general property of foreign policy decision-making in high level groups.” While this may be true, this comment presents (in addition to the other critiques of groupthink) an important point that environment and the government structure matter because they influence the decision process in groups. Small groups are not amorphous entities that are subject to any variety of social psychological processes in the course of arriving at a decision. There is a connection between the process and the structure of the decision-making group, meaning the relationship between leader(s) and subordinates. The implications of this are that there is a connection between the advisory system and groupthink can be made.

Bureaucratic politics can be thought of in two different ways. It can be thought of as a level of analysis suitable for explaining particular foreign policy decisions, thus allowing for different conceptualizations of bureaucratic politics (Welch 1998). For example, Destler’s (1972) study on bureaucratic politics in US foreign policy was wide-ranging and touched on the variety of ways bureaucrats and bureaus can influence policy. This differs from Allison (1971) who constructed a useful formulation of how bureaucratic politics or governmental politics produces particular kinds of policy outcomes. It is Allison’s depiction of bureaucratic politics that has had the greater impact and has influenced succeeding bureaucratic studies (Stern and Verbeek 1998). Bureaucratic Politics or Governmental Politics Model places a greater emphasis on the structure of the decision-making unit and the kind of interaction that develops between individuals that are a part of the decisionmaking process, yet represent different bureaucratic organiza...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Presidents and Foreign Policy Processes
• 2 An Explanation of Method and Cases
• 3 Nixon, Kissinger, and North Vietnam
• 4 Negotiating Strategic Arms Limitations
• 5 Strategic Arms Reduction Talks
• 6 Bill Clinton and Bosnia
• 7 Bush Decision-Making: Pre- and Post-9/11
• 8 Advisory System Framework
• 9 Building a More Effective Advisory System?
• Bibliography
• Index