Abstract
Why do foreign policies endure in conditions that should impel change? By persisting with particular strategies, states risk mounting responses disproportionate relative to the threat and overcommitting resources to situations that seldom warrant it. In adopting such an ‘overbalanced’ posture, states might also become entangled in unnecessary conflict, causing for themselves greater insecurity by worsening the original threat, increasing the risk of spiral dynamics, and fostering further instability. States also risk being counter-balanced, and even becoming underbalanced, as they become distracted from the actual threats they face in the international arena. What explains this puzzling behaviour?
To answer this question, this thesis makes two primary contributions. The first is nomothetic: it constructs a neoclassical realist theory of policy paradigms to argue that intervening between systemic stimuli and policy outcomes are paradigmatic frameworks of foreign policy ideas that hijack the policymaking process, accounting for extended periods of policy continuity in conditions where structural realism anticipates change. Paradigms stymy critical thinking and inhibit policy re-adjustment, rendering alternative modes of thinking outside the realms of conscious possibility. Thus, one carries on as it did before, and opportunities for change are rendered moot. It theorises that for invasive paradigms to be overcome, a shift from a permissive to a more restrictive strategic environment is required. The causal primacy at the structural level shows how systemic punishment mechanisms such as entanglement, entrapment, counterbalancing and under-balancing impel policy correction, forcing states back onto a structurally induced course.
The second contribution is empirical: drawing on primary source material, secondary literature and interviews with key foreign policy officials in the United States, the thesis sheds light on America’s inability to correct course on its Cuba and Iran policies since 1959 and 1979 respectively, and demonstrates how rapprochement became a conceivable and implementable option under the Obama administration. In doing so, it traces the process of paradigm formation under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter, establishes the ways in which the hostility paradigm became institutionalised within the bureaucratic features of American domestic politics preventing policy adjustment during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, and shows how, due to increasingly costly shifting structural dynamics in each case, Barack Obama was eventually able to reverse course.