Diplomacy, Force, and Leadership

Essays In Honor Of Alexander L. George

Dan Caldwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429719950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Alexander L. George is a paragon of scholarship-an academic who successfully crosses boundaries between theory and policy, political science and several different disciplines, and case study analysis and theory building. Most of all, he bridges the gap between the ivory tower of research and the world of people, power, and politics. In these original essays, former students, colleagues, and admirers collaborate in portraying the research program of Alexander George's scholarship in all its diversity and complexity, examining subjects ranging from the role of beliefs in foreign policy-making to the factors involved in diplomacy and the use of force. Taken together, these essays offer strong testimony to Alexander George's extraordinary vision, erudition, and humanity.

Part One
The Beliefs of Publics and Elites

Research on public opinion or more specialized surveys of various foreign policy elites analyze beliefs in an attempt to show how they shape or are shaped by policy. Although this approach has long been used to understand domestic policy formation in the United States, its application to foreign policy studies is more recent and unusual, and its application outside the U.S. is particularly novel. Ole Holsti's study of U.S. leadership attitudes toward the Soviet Union from 1976 to 1988 draws upon a panel of large-scale elite surveys begun in the mid-1970s. The length and breadth of this project is unsurpassed among elite surveys oriented to foreign policy questions; this makes it possible for Holsti to explore inter-temporal changes in attitudes in far more detail than is customarily the case. The study by Bruce Russett and Samuel Shye re-analyzes American survey research data from the early years of the Vietnam War to specify the dimensionality of mass beliefs. It reveals that at least two major dimensions (rather than just a simple hawk-dove continuum) are necessary to account for public attitudes towards the war. It also suggests that these dimensions of foreign policy opinion are only weakly related to opinions about domestic policy questions. This latter result is consistent with recent research on Congressional voting showing that foreign policy votes tend to generate somewhat distinctive alignments. Alexander Dallin's study of the belief system of the Soviet elite explores how the disintegration of Marxist-Leninist doctrine can be understood in terms of existing psychological theories of opinion change. For those who doubt the value of analysis for policy, it is worth noting that the initial draft of Dallin's assessment of the collapse of Marxism-Lenism even within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was written several months before the August 1991 coup and subsequent events which led to the end of the Soviet regime.

1
U.S. Leadership Attitudes Toward the Soviet Union, 1976–1988

Ole R. Holsti

Introduction

During his long and distinguished career, Alexander George made significant contributions to many areas of inquiry in international affairs, including studies of political elites and American-Soviet relations. His and Juliette George's psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson still stands out as a model of scrupulous scholarship and sensitive interpretation.¹ Although Wilson continues to be the subject of analysis by political psychologists, some of whom have advanced competing explanations for his political behavior, the Georges' study had defined the terms of the debate about the twenty-eighth president. Elite analysis has also been enriched by his creative work on the concept of the "operational code" of political leaders.² The operational code was originally developed by his RAND Corporation colleague, Nathan Leites, in a study of Soviet leaders. George reformulated the concept by abstracting from it the politically most salient philosophical and instrumental beliefs, thereby making it more accessible to political analysts. The substantial number of operational code studies, some by George's own students and many more by other scholars, is testimony to the impact of his seminal article.

After moving from the RAND Corporation to Stanford, much of George's work centered on techniques of statecraft, including coercive diplomacy, deterrence, and crisis management.³ His goal was to develop richer and more systematic theory, but he had limited interest in developing highly abstract theories that might win plaudits for their elegance among academic colleagues but would be neither accessible nor relevant to policy-makers. Although this work was not narrowly confined in time or space, much of it inevitably focused on the most important relationship of the post-1945 era—the behavior of the United States and the Soviet Union.

This chapter touches upon both of these major interests in Alex George's work—political elites and American-Soviet relations—by examining the manner in which American opinion leaders assessed the Soviet Union and relations between the superpowers during the turbulent years between the end of the Vietnam War and the end of the Cold War.

Few questions have so persistently engendered debate within the United States during the past half century as those concerning the Soviet Union, its foreign policies, and the appropriate American approaches for dealing with the USSR. In his famous "long telegram" of 1946 and in an essay on "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" a year later, George F. Kennan wrote that Soviet foreign policy was driven largely by internal forces, including the need for real or imagined external enemies and, therefore, at least in the short run, American offers of friendship and cooperation were likely to prove fruitless.⁴ Kennan's diagnosis of Soviet international behavior and his prescription of a "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies" were enormously influential in providing an intellectual framework for American policy toward Stalin's Russia, but they did not end the debate about Soviet foreign policy or the best means for dealing with the USSR. Indeed, a thriving secondary industry has arisen to examine the question: "What did Kennan really mean in 1946 or 1947?"

The debate has often been stimulated by external events. The invasion of South Korea; the death of Stalin; the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan; Sputnik; the Cuban missile crisis; and the activities that constituted the high point of detente in 1972-73 are some of the more dramatic episodes that have intensified interest in the question. Almost as often the debate has been aroused by American domestic politics, especially presidential election campaigns. In 1952, the concept of containment came under attack from some Republicans, notably John Foster Dulles, as too "static." Later events demonstrated clearly that its putative replacement—"roll back"—was campaign rhetoric rather than policy. In order to disarm critics in the right wing of his own party in 1976, President Ford let it be known that "detente" was no longer a part of the White House working vocabulary. Four years later, the soon-to-be-nominated Ronald Reagan asserted in a long interview with a friendly newspaper that the Soviet Union was the sole source of international problems,⁵ and during the subsequent campaign he attacked arms control and detente as the causes of the "worst decade in American history."

During recent years American interest in these questions has been enhanced by external and internal developments. After 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev provided the Soviet Union with a style of leadership that seemed light years removed from that of his immediate predecessors; even those most skeptical about the significance or permanence of glasnost or perestroika agree that Gorbachev possessed political and public relations skills unmatched in recent Soviet history. At the same time, the American president who excoriated the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" in 1983 was, within five years, meeting regularly with Gorbachev and describing him as "my friend." Relations between the superpowers continued to improve during the early 1990s, reaching a level of cooperation not witnessed since World War II, when they joined forces in the United Nations Security Council to pass a series of resolutions aimed at compelling Iraq to reverse its invasion of Kuwait. Gorbachev's retirement with the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991 confirmed that he enjoyed a higher degree of popularity in most western nations, including the United States, than in his own country.

This chapter focuses on American leadership views of the Soviet Union and Soviet-American relations. It draws primarily upon evidence generated by four nationwide surveys undertaken in 1976, 1980, 1984, and 1988, each of which resulted in well over two thousand responses from persons occupying leadership positions in institutions ranging from the State Department and the Pentagon to businesses, labor unions, the media, universities, and churches. After a brief description of the data and methods used to generate them, the chapter will attempt to deal with three tasks:

1. Assess the evolution of leadership opinions on important foreign policy issues, with a heavy emphasis on those that deal directly with the Soviet Union and American-Soviet relations.
2. Compare contemp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One The Beliefs of Publics and Elites
• Part Two Leaders and Central Decision-making Groups
• Part Three Interest Group and Bureaucratic Politics and Processes
• Part Four Diplomacy and the Use of Force
• Bibliography of Published Works
• About the Book
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index