Florida International University FIU Digital Commons FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations University Graduate School 3-31-2017 Foreign Policy Evaluation and the Utility of Intervention Graham Slater [email protected] DOI: 10.25148/etd.FIDC001754 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd Part of the American Politics Commons, Cognition and Perception Commons, Defense and Security Studies Commons, Industrial and Organizational Psychology Commons, International and Area Studies Commons, International Relations Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons, Public Policy Commons, Terrorism Studies Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Slater, Graham, "Foreign Policy Evaluation and the Utility of Intervention" (2017). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3217. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3217 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the University Graduate School at FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY Miami, Florida FOREIGN POLICY EVALUATION AND THE UTILITY OF INTERVENTION A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS by Graham Slater 2017 To: Dean John Stack, Jr. Green School of International and Public Affairs This dissertation, written by Graham Slater, and entitled Foreign Policy Evaluation and the Utility of Intervention, having been approved in respect to style and intellectual content, is referred to you for judgment. We have read this dissertation and recommend that it be approved. ___________________________________ John F. Clark ___________________________________ Eduardo Gamarra ___________________________________ April Merleaux ___________________________________ Pablo Toral ___________________________________ Félix E. Martín, Major Professor Date of Defense: March 31, 2017 The dissertation of Graham Slater is approved. ___________________________________ John F. Stack, Jr. Dean of Green School of International and Public Affairs ___________________________________ Andrés Gil Vice President for Research and Economic Development Dean of the University Graduate School Florida International University, 2017 ii © Copyright 2017 by Graham Slater All rights reserved . iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the members of the committee, some of the fellow graduate students off of whom I have bounced suspect contentions and questionable assertions, the illustrious members of my wonderfully fallible family, among whom there exists a Doctor of Philosophy in the Anthropological Sciences, esteemed girlfriend, Valerie Hudson, whose magisterial Foreign Policy Analysis informs this book at many junctures, even if cited only sparingly, and with which I taught FPA at FIU, my dissertation-friend Jim Misencik, decorated veteran of the Iraq War and tireless academician, and dissertation-father Félix Martín, who considers his trade a lifestyle and consistently prioritizes his graduate students far above the meager place they occupy in the international system, thus maximizing their utility-function if not their relative power. This dissertation is dedicated to my actual dad and others like him who bear the brunt of foreign-policy blunder before ever encountering the opportunity to understand why. It is my hope that its Lilliputian contribution to scholarship can lend a hand in bettering the status quo ante with regard to the motivations for and prosecution of foreign-policy decisionmaking in this, my beautifully flawed state of states, in the further hope that it will make itself great(er) in substance and values (as a continuation of prior greatness) as the sometimes-preeminent exemplar in our anarchical morass of confused nations. I apologize in advance for the quagmire of long-winded sentences contained herein, but a product of my longstanding quarrel with superfluous commas. iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION FOREIGN POLICY EVALUATION AND THE UTILITY OF INTERVENTION by Graham Slater Florida International University, 2017 Miami, Florida Professor Félix E. Martín, Major Professor This dissertation identifies and explains the factors contributing to the presence and severity of U.S. foreign-policy blunders, or gross errors in strategic judgment resulting in significant harm to the national interest, since the Second World War. It hypothesizes that the grand strategy of preponderance and the overestimation of military power to transform the politics of other states have precipitated U.S. foreign-policy blunders since 1945. Examining the Vietnam War and Iraq War as case studies, it focuses on underlying conditions in the American national identity and the problematic foreign policy decision-making (FPDM) that corresponds to this bifurcated hypothesis, termed the overestimation/preponderance theoretical model (OPM). Four indicators operationalize the OPM: (1) how U.S. foreign policymakers estimated the capacity of military power to transform the political dynamics of the target state through intervention; (2) and (3) how U.S. actors and institutions affected the capacity of the partner state and hostile state and nonstate actors; and (4) how the foreign policy was justified and rationalized within the leadership of v government and to the general public as it encountered disconfirming information. In each case, the grand strategy of preponderance instituted a bounded rationality of mission in the FPDM stage and the operationalization stage that precluded the inclusion of an unfavorable outcome. In each case, U.S. foreign policymakers greatly overestimated the capacity of the partner state to establish security and legitimacy and underestimated the capacity of hostile actors to mobilize and threaten the partner state. However, these preference-confirmation biases diametrically contradicted the assessment that victory would be easy to achieve; U.S. foreign policymakers promulgated this corresponding overestimation/underestimation even while inflating the threat far beyond what the actual threat to the national-security element of the national interest represented. The subsequent implementing of this inverted calculation created a national-security national interest where none was extant, then significantly harmed that new interest via intervention. This tactical application of the grand strategy of preponderance facilitated the strategic-tactical gap in U.S. foreign policy by creating monsters in order to have monsters to slay, consistent with the ideological tradition of the imperative of crusade in the modern history of American foreign relations. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE 1: The Strategic-Tactical Gap in U.S. Grand Strategy...........................................1 2: Toward a Process for Foreign Policy Evaluation.............................................13 3: Historical Progenitors of Preponderance and the OPM Model........................53 4: Methodology..................................................................................................105 5: The Strategic-Tactical Gap of the Vietnam War............................................141 6: The Iraq War: FPDM Prisms and the Man behind the Curtain......................276 7: The Infinite Multidimensionality of Foreign Policy Analysis............................377 Bibliography.......................................................................................................470 VITA..................................................................................................................499 vii LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE PAGE 1. Competing visions of grand strategy (Barry Posen)........................................77 2. U.S. Casualties of the Vietnam War..............................................................176 3. U.S. troops in Vietnam...................................................................................239 4. PAVN infiltration of the South........................................................................239 5. Gallup poll, "Was it a mistake sending troops to Vietnam?"......................... 243 6. U.S. fatalities in Vietnam................................................................................244 7. Summary of costs of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria, and Homeland Security, FY2001-FY2016............................................................297 8. Pew Research Center, "Do you support the decision to use force in Iraq?"..371 9. Major levels of analysis in FPA (Valerie Hudson)..........................................378 10. George Modelski's "Long Cycles"................................................................434 11. U.S. accounts for more than a third of global military spending...................447 12. U.S. Military spending as a share of total discretionary budget...................448 viii ACRONYMS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE) Chapter 1. FPDM: Foreign Policy Decision-Making FPA: Foreign Policy Analysis FPE: Foreign Policy Evaluation OPM: Overestimation/Preponderance Model IR: International Relations (as a field of social-scientific inquiry) Chapter 2. MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction AUMF: Authorization for the Use of Military Force Chapter 3. MID: Militarized Interstate Dispute NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization HST: Hegemonic Stability Theory DPT: Democratic Peace Theory CIA: Central Intelligence