Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making

by Alex Mintz

Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making presents a decision making approach to foreign policy analysis. This approach focuses on the decision process, dynamics, and outcome, highlighting the role of psychological factors in foreign policy decision making. The book includes a wealth of extended real-world case studies and examples that are woven into the text. The cases and examples, which are written in an accessible style, include decisions made by leaders of the United States, Israel, New Zealand, Cuba, Iceland, United Kingdom, and others. In addition to coverage of the rational model of decision making, levels of analysis of foreign policy decision making, and types of decisions, the book includes extensive material on alternatives to the rational choice model, the marketing and framing of decisions, cognitive biases and errors, and domestic, cultural, and international influences on decision making in international affairs. Existing textbooks do not present such an approach to foreign policy decision making, international relations, American foreign policy, and comparative foreign policy.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Grad School, Political Science

224 pages, Paperback

First published February 22, 2010

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mintz and DeRouen try to summarize a broad set of literature that models and tries to understand the key criteria in foreign policy decisions. The goal is admirable, trying to bring a scientific objectivity to an ideologically cluttered subject matter. As so often happens in social sciences, however, the answers they give are a series of theories and lists and categories, which are occasionally brilliantly explanatory but more often tedious and self-important.

There a lot of insights to take away from this book, but it was a tedious slog to read, because it is organized by broad categories like "media marketing," "psychological factors," and "models of decision making." This means that it often covers the same ground over and over and over again. It seems like the authors might have been better off structuring the book around the historical development of FPDM's explanatory techniques, looking at how major models were created and verified and later challenged, refined, and replaced, using a synthesis of all these aspects. This would have emphasized the broad set of phenomena to be explained (which is really the interesting bit).

Further, presenting the theories and categories themselves as the meat of the book, with history-of-poli-sci and case studies as examples to support them, belies the self-evident fact that each model or point of view can never stand alone - they are not competing with each other but simply apply to different extents in different situations. The authors acknowledge this throughout, but the way the book is set up frames the theories as possible facts, not useful tools.

One of the key insights from the class I read this for (US Foreign Policy) was that FP is not just about conflict and other major events. For a book about FPDM in general, the emphasis on US/Israeli examples, particularly those involving invasions and conflict, was somewhat disappointing. It prevented the book from achieving a broader synoptic view of foreign policy.

The insights that I found valuable concerned the network of constraints that limits possible decisions: a leader's first priority is to maintain his power (essentially, self-preservation); after that, a series of domestic lobbies, the media, and the way foreign institutions perceive various actions, effectively limit the number of things a head of state can realistically do. Poltical science, like any science, shows the determinism of the world (by definition, since it actively seeks out these patterns and explanations).

[Jack Ewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had to read for class, not my cup of tea that's for sure

[Kennedy Mesker]

I think that Mintz and Derouen take a very understandable approach to the topic of FPDM. Though I found much of the book repetitive I thought it was very useful to my knowledge on the subject and consistently find myself referencing it in conversations/classes on the topic of Foreign Policy.

[Afifah Mim · Rating 3 out of 5]

ব্যক্তিগত নোট:
পরীক্ষায় পাশ করতে চাই বলে এখন এতো তাড়াহুড়ো করেও অবশেষে পড়ে শেষ করলাম এটা। তাই জানিনা- বইটা ঠিক কেমন। মেবি ভালোই হবে। আপাতত কোনো ধারণা নাই। সেজন্যই মাঝামাঝি গিয়ে দিলাম = ৩ স্টার।

[Dylan Vargas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a reading for a grad school class, but it was very clearly written and the flow and organization was easy to follow and understand. This is a great book for anyone wanting to know a bit more about Foreign Policy and decisions. It was full of real world case studies and examples across a broad range of events, I loved that. Although much of the information is a bit common sense the real world example and terminology was still very accessible and informative

[Castro Thangarasu · Rating 5 out of 5]

it explains about same decision making concepts of psychology in a geo-political environment with some interesting anecdotes

[Aziz Qaissi]

A little bit of everything in FPDM