Foreign Relations Of The United States 1949 National Security Affairs Foreign Economic Policy

This volume of essays by German and American historians discusses key issues of US policy toward Germany in the decade following World War II.

This book assesses and evaluates the decision-making behavior of United States presidents and their chief advisers from Roosevelt to Kennedy pertaining to China. Seeking to dispel with the notion that each administration sought policy outcomes on the basis of a rational decision-making model, Bartley highlights the contradictions of adopted presidential decision-making processes and the nature of domestic politics as playing prejudicial and debilitating roles. The book demonstrates that elite decision-making processes interacted with assumptions made about Chinese behavior, interests, and attitudes only superficially and in some cases not at all. Misinformation and misperception were the natural outcomes. Reinforced by the politics of McCarthyism at home, intellectual debate on China policy was squashed, parochialism and nuance were shunned, and information was closed off. Ultimately, a divorce between the norm of behavior and the search for rational policy was registered in each administration. The net result was a lasting and destructive cognitive dissonance: to fit expectations of a China reality constructed, information was ignored, overlooked, and distorted. Offering new insights into the China policies of consecutive administrations from 1941 to 1963, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of American foreign policy, security studies, and international relations.

Preventive war has a long history in international politics, but until it became an instrumental part of the Bush Doctrine, it was mostly overlooked. Renshon argues that the best avenue for understanding decisions to initiate preventive action is through a close examination of the individual leader responsible for such decisions. In this work, he develops a theory of psychological motivations for preventive action. By examining five situations, including the Iraq war, he pinpoints the factors that matter most in decisions to take preventive military action. There have been preventive wars throughout history, but the motivations behind them have remained elusive, and many crucial questions remain unanswered. What exactly constitutes preventive action? What differentiates preventive action from pre-emptive action? Are there significant differences between preventive strikes and full-on preventive wars? What is the relationship of preventive action to traditional concepts of deterrence, compellence, and international law? Finally, why do states initiate preventive action? Renshon argues that the best avenue for understanding decisions to initiate preventive action is through a close examination of the individual leader responsible for such decisions.