Browsing by Subject "foreign policy"
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Item Burden of the Cold War: The George H.W. Bush Administration and El Salvador(2012-02-14) Arandia, Sebastian ReneAt the start of the George H.W. Bush administration, American involvement in El Salvador?s civil war, one of the last Cold War battlegrounds, had disappeared from the foreign policy agenda. However, two events in November 1989 shattered the bipartisan consensus on US policy toward El Salvador: the failure of the FMLN?s largest military offensive of the war and the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter by the Salvadoran military, the FAES. Despite more than one billion dollars in US military assistance, the war had stalemated, promoting both sides to seek a negotiated political settlement mediated by the United Nations. The Jesuit murders demonstrated the failure of the policy of promoting respect for democracy and human rights and revived the debate in Congress over US aid to El Salvador. This thesis argues that the Bush administration sought to remove the burden of El Salvador from its foreign policy agenda by actively pushing for the investigation and prosecution of the Jesuit case and fully supporting the UN-mediated peace process. Using recently declassified government documents from the George Bush Presidential Library, this thesis will examine how the Bush administration fundamentally changed US policy toward El Salvador. Administration officials carried out an unprecedented campaign to pressure the FAES to investigate the Jesuit murders and bring the killers to justice while simultaneously attempting to prevent Congress from cutting American military assistance. The Bush administration changed the objective of its El Salvador policy from military victory over the guerrillas to a negotiated political settlement. The US facilitated the peace process by pressuring the Salvadoran government and the FMLN to negotiate in good faith and accept compromises. When both sides signed a comprehensive peace agreement on January 16, 1992, the burden of El Salvador was lifted.Item Politically rational foreign policy decision-making(Texas A&M University, 2006-10-30) Kent, Charles ToddThis dissertation is an analysis of how presidents make foreign policy decisions. Rather than explaining foreign policy decisions by focusing on individuals or institutions, I stress the role of political pressures and context faced by presidents. It shows that foreign policy decisions are not merely a reaction to stimulus from the international or domestic arenas but involve political considerations that affect policy choice. The dynamic elements in the argument are political resources and risk. The relationship between the risk propensity of the president and presidential political resources provides an important link to understanding foreign policy decisions. Within the realm of good public policy, a politically rational president can choose to act or respond to foreign policy disputes in various ways, including diplomacy, political coercion, economic coercion, covert action, or military intervention, based on his assessment of the political context and his willingness to accept the associated risks. The level of presidential political resources determines the risk propensity of the president. Presidential foreign policy decisions will vary depending on the quantity of available political resources. Thus, understanding the risk propensity of the president increases our ability to explain foreign policy decisions. The contribution of this research is the identification of a mechanism for understanding how the interaction between the domestic and international political environments, and individual decision-makers influence foreign policy decisions. My research bridges the gap between structural theories, ??????theories that make predictions about foreign policy outcomes without reference to the cognition and actions of the actors themselves,?????? and decision-making theories that stress the role of the actors (Ikenberry 2002, 5). Although the component parts of the foreign policy decisionmaking system are widely known, we lack theories that tie the pieces together.Item Politics and Power: The 1992 Israeli Loan Guarantees Policy, 1988-1992(2014-10-28) Willyard, KatherineThis paper examines the exercise of power in the U.S.-Middle East foreign policy formation process. Through application of historical methods, the capacity of state, class and historical contingency perspectives of political power to explain the formation of the U.S. Israeli loan guarantee policy between 1988 and 1992 is analyzed. Historical analysis supports a central proposition in historical contingency theory, which suggests that political power and alignment of class segments varies over time and is impacted by respective economic interests. Class segments unified to create political alliances with both Congress and the executive branch to establish preconditions to the provision of U.S. loan guarantees to Israel. As class segments began to mobilize politically, the pro-Israel lobby became split. Economic interests and previous state structures led to the establishment of class coalitions. Coalition efforts resulted in the establishment of the 1992 policy linking Israeli foreign aid to Israel?s settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, among other conditions. The analysis suggests that future research on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East should not focus only on the actions of state managers, but should examine how and under which conditions do social forces external to the state influence the foreign policy formation process.