Chapter 1
The Conceptual Debate: Setting the Stage for Structural Analysis
Scholars of world politics continue to disagree about the domestic sources of foreign and national security policy and the level of analysis in foreign policy/national security decision-making. While one school of thought has focused on how different domestic governmental structures produce variations in decision-making processes and the foreign policy/national security output, another stresses the importance of the perceptions, motivations, and workings of bureaucracies, organizations, and individual decisionmakers. Beginning in the early 1970s, scholars of foreign policy decisionmaking shifted their focus to ever lower levels of analysis. Dissecting the inner life and doings of executive branch agencies, Graham Allison formulated the organizational-process and bureaucratic-politics models of decision-making. According to the former, executive leaders struggle to manage organizational agendas and their standard operating procedures. According to the latter, they might be powerless to control the competitive and skilled tugging and pulling of bureaucratic players; policy is an unintended byproduct of this pulling and hauling.1
Morton Halperin argued that foreign policy is largely shaped by bureaucratic objectives rather than international agendas.2 In the cognitive realm, Irving Janis developed the theory of groupthink; groups are prone to miscalculations because members give up their individual judgment and conform to collective decision-making.3 John Steinbruner introduced the cybernetic paradigm, according to which leaders draw on intuitive repositories of past experiences to break down complex situations into simple problems, which are then dealt with separately.4 Robert Jervis argued that executive leaders are bound to perceive their opponents’ actions as less objective and more hostile than their own.5
In a similar vein, decision-making works since 9/11 have used a bureaucratic or organizational perspective to explain counterterrorism outcomes. Pursuant to Amy Zegart’s analysis, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), renamed the National Counterterrorism Center in 2004, was therefore created by a president who chose the path of least resistance and “studiously avoided getting embroiled with the Defense Department.”6 Taking an organizational view (paired with rational choice elements), Zegart argued that the inability of security organizations to change, adapt to new threats, or else implement a thorough intelligence reform after 9/11 is due to a combination of three factors: the nature of organizations themselves, the rational self-interest of decision makers and stakeholders, and the decentralized structure of the U.S. federal government (the fragmented congressional committee system in particular).7 Moreover, she stressed the direct connection between agency designs and foreign policy outcomes. Arguing that bureaucratic organizations have not received enough attention, Zegart concluded that “too often … discussion of foreign policy success and failure treats individuals as the only important factors, ignoring the powerful organizational forces in the background.”8
In an attempt to explain differences between British and French counterterrorism approaches, Frank Foley focused on organizational routines that govern how security bureaucracies interact, in addition to societal norms and executive/judicial institutional conventions.9 According to Foley, “a focus on organizational routines provides the best understanding of states’ different approaches to reforming the coordination of intelligence and police agencies.”10
Proponents of the structural school, who instead focus on how powers distributed among the various branches of government affect policymaking, do not discount the existence of bureaucracies, political cultures, and perceptions, but view government structures as a powerful independent or at least an intervening variable. Stephen Krasner thus famously argued that the U.S. president can exert the necessary powers to control bureaucratic soli, as “the ability of bureaucracies to independently establish policies is a function of presidential attention.”11 While some structural scholars argue that government systems and their inherent processes effectively curb and overwhelm any nonstructural/institutional effects,12 others have noted a more indirect and symbiotic relationship between policy issues, government structures, governing capabilities, and societal identities.13 Yet others view government structures and processes as a manifestation of countries’ distinct political cultures and histories and argue that their make-up holds important information about the thresholds and limits, as well as opportunities, of national policy-making.14
A focus on bureaucratic politics and organizational procedures has considerable utility in explaining bureaucratic infighting and routines but, as this book argues, is of less use for explaining and predicting variances in countries’ counterterrorism outcomes. Peter Katzenstein has noted that “it is simply not clear to what extent the bureaucratic politics approach universalizes a particular American syndrome (the internal fragmentation of the American state) and how much it particularizes a universal phenomenon (the push and pull which accompany policy-making in all advanced industrial states).”15 Yet, even if Allison and other scholars succeeded in developing models for a universal phenomenon in modern societies, it is not clear how the bureaucratic politics model advances the findings of what Robert Art called the “first wave” of scholars. According to Art, these theorists analyzed U.S. foreign policy decision-making and outcomes through the lens of its most defining characteristic—the pluralistic political process and, while doing so, identified the “internal structural conditions or restraints under which foreign policy is made” in the U.S. system of government.16 When applying this political, pluralistic perspective to policy-making, first-wave scholars Samuel Huntington, Richard Neustadt, Warner Schilling, and Roger Hilsman also took note of extensive bargaining practices in the U.S. system—but as an expression of genuine political processes that bring forth policy compromises that are both intended and necessary for bridging divides.
As a prominent member of what Art referred to as the “policy via politics” wave, Samuel Huntington identified patterns of executive decisionmaking processes.17 Huntington showed how decision-making regarding defense strategy in the U.S. executive branch exhibits bargaining practices similar to those found in the legislative branch, because the president “has less control over his cabinet than … a corporal over his squad.”18 Huntington on the whole welcomes the pluralistic nature of executive negotiations, which are reflective of the fact that “Madison not Bagehot wrote the Constitution.”19 In his view, competition encourages result-oriented actions, intrinsically sensible policy choices, and the need to build consensus among the various participants.
Others do not view the U.S. system quite so positively. Warner Schilling argued that defense budgeting is the product of political choices, which are significantly influenced by the nature of the political process. Because power is so widely dispersed among “quasi-sovereign powers” and drawn from various independent sources, government elites involved in the foreign policy process face conflict and “strain toward agreement.”20 Actors might succeed in persuading their opponents, but, so Schilling warns, these attributes can also take a toll on “the form of policy produced by that process.”21 Policies may lack cohesion, stability, and substance or might not be produced at all. The process might be slow, leaderless, or indecisive.22
Similarly,