Risk and Presidential Decision-Making ─ The Emergence of Foreign Policy Crises

The book aims at gauging whether the nature of US foreign policy decision-making has changed - after the Cold War – as radically as a large body of literature seems to suggest. It aims at evaluating the assessment that the Cold War world represented a certain, clear and secure world that had nothing to do with the uncertain, unpredictable and risky post-Cold War one.

This book develops a new framework to interpret presidential decision-making in foreign policy. Based on developments in the health and environment literature, the book identifies the President as the ultimate risk-manager. The book demonstrates how a President is called to perform a delicate balancing act between risks on the domestic/political side and risks on the strategic/international side. In this context, every decision represents a ‘risk vs. risk trade-off,’ in which the management of one ‘target risk’ leads to the development ‘countervailing risks.’ The book applies this framework to the study three major crises in US foreign policy in the post-1945 period: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, and the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. It suggests how the crises represented the result of accumulated mis-managed, ignored or unrecognised risk factors.

The book therefore locates the study of risk in US foreign policy in a wider intellectual landscape that draws on contemporary debates in historiography, international relations and Presidential studies. Each case-study results from substantial primary-source research. The research also benefited from over twenty interviews with policymakers and academics, including with President Jimmy Carter and Senator Bob Dole.