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- Author or Editor: Klaus Brummer x
- Comparative Politics x
This chapter zooms in on three structural factors located on different levels of analysis that are frequently emphasized in the FPA literature as important for bringing about policy change. Those are:Â international pressure; bureaucratic pressure; and societal pressure. The discussion explores the extent to which those factors offer similar or even better explanations of the fundamental changes in U.S.-Cuba policy during the Obama administration than the one based on the leader-centered theory of foreign policy change presented in the previous chapter.
This chapter introduces a “leader-centered theory of foreign policy change.” The theory seeks to account for the independent, systematic, and predictable effect of leaders in bringing about major changes in a country’s foreign policy, in the sense of broader redirections that entail multiple decisions spanning different issue areas. More specifically, the theory explores the possible effect of leaders on the “why,” the “what,” and the “how” of foreign policy change in terms of: (a) the reasons due to which leaders try to fundamentally redirect their countries’ foreign policy, which is henceforth referred to as “triggering change”; (b) the substantive direction in which leaders seek to change foreign policy, which is henceforth referred to as “guiding change”; and (c) the actions that leaders undertake to bring about change in the domestic political arena, which is henceforth referred to as “implementing change.”
This chapter opens with a discussion of whether U.S.-Cuba policy during the Obama administration actually qualifies as an instance of major policy change. It suggests that this is indeed the case as per Charles Hermann’s typology. The chapter then explores whether President Obama had a systematic and predictable effect on the redirection of U.S. policy toward Cuba. To that end, the chapter first examines whether Obama considered the Cuba policy of his predecessors as a major policy failure, which is considered as main trigger for the initiation of policy change (“triggering change”). The chapter then identifies Obama’s political beliefs with respect to Cuba. Based on a comparison with the beliefs of his immediate predecessor George W. Bush, the chapter infers the direction of policy change that U.S. foreign policy should have taken based on Obama’s “Cuba beliefs” and examines whether those expectations align with the empirical record (“guiding change”). Finally, the chapter ascertains Obama’s leadership traits. On that basis, it develops expectations on how Obama should have gone about putting his goal of changing U.S.-Cuba policy into practice and finally matches those expectations with the empirical record (“implementing change”).
This introduction proceeds in six steps. The next section reviews the FPA literature on foreign policy change and highlights the lack of clarity concerning the role of leaders as drivers, or agents, of major foreign policy change. The following section introduces core tenets of the “leader-centered theory of foreign policy change” whose aim is to address the aforementioned shortcoming. The discussion then turns to the empirical case to which the leader-centered theory is applied, in form of changes in U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba during the Obama administration. Next, alternative explanatory factors are introduced that the FPA literature proposes as key drivers of foreign policy change and which potentially may provide equally good, if not better, explanations for the case under examination. The penultimate section discusses the aspired contributions of this book to the scholarly debate about foreign policy change in general and the specific case of U.S. foreign policy change toward Cuba in particular. The introduction concludes with a brief plan of the book.
This book introduced a leader-centered theory of foreign policy change and applied said theory to examine changes in the U.S.-Cuba policy during the Obama administration. This concluding section proceeds in three steps. It first summarizes the argument of the book. It then briefly explores the extent to which the proposed theory can account for additional changes, in the form of reversals of Obama’s policy changes, that were introduced by his successor Donald Trump. The discussion concludes with avenues for future research.
Foreign policy analysis is a major part of international relations scholarship, yet many models are ill-equipped to examine the effects of individual leadership on policy. Written by a leading figure in the field, this innovative account challenges traditional views in international relations by theorising the influence of individual leaders on foreign policy change. It examines how and why leaders have shaped policy throughout history, showcasing Obama's Cuba pivot as a prime example.
Using an original theoretical approach, this book will appeal to academics and practitioners in foreign policy analysis, international relations and comparative politics.
