Foreign‐Policy Advising: Models and Mysteries from the Bush Administration

There is a long tradition in the analysis of U.S. foreign policy to study how presidents assemble teams of advisers to help make decisions. Starting especially in the 1970s, a series of new works helped push our understanding of how presidents put these teams together, how they do their work, and what effects the structuring of decision making has on the process of reaching decisions and policy. Exploring the links among decision structure, process, and outcomes has been a consistent theme in the literature. While we have seen a diverse set of approaches to studying these questions in the last twenty or so years, they all trace themselves back in one way or another to the seminal works by Graham Allison (1971), Essence of Decision; Richard T. Johnson (1974), Managing the White House; Alexander George (1980), Presidential Decision-making in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice; and Irving Janis (1972), Victims of Groupthink. In this article, I try to highlight some of the conceptual developments we see in the literature in understanding presidents and their advisory structures since these works. I do so not in the form of an exhaustive review of the literature but rather by pointing to several examples of the kind of scholarship that has developed around these issues in the domain of foreign policy. Then I use two heuristic cases from the present Bush administration to show how the literature helps us understand some things about the policy process and the role of the president in it but frankly leaves us unable to fully grasp some others. U.S. policy toward Cuba and policy in Iraq, I argue, are interesting because many of the models from the literature are helpful in understanding how President Bush and his advisers work in a broader policy environment to craft foreign policy. But they also show the limits of what we can understand. We have models that help us see the president caught in a vast bureaucracy or porous policy environment rife with congressional and interest group activism where presidents must lead through persuasion; and we have models that help us see the president as the dominant foreign-policy player who leads by flat. In short, though, what we have yet to develop are theories that help us understand how the president can be both of these things at the same time in the same policy domain. Analysts of foreign-policy decision making have long understood small-group processes, and have perhaps more recently come to appreciate the impact of institutions and domestic politics on decision making, but now must take into account the increasing power of the president to act alone, even when in the midst of a dizzying array of political forces that constrain the White House. Models of the Foreign-Policy Process Research that attempts to understand how U.S. presidents have organized the White House for policy making has long explored the possible effects of those structures on policy making. Probably the most well-known study of the process of decision making is Janis's Victims of Groupthink (1972). Janis was motivated to explain performance failures, such as the American fiasco at the Bay of Pigs, by examining the internal dynamics or group processes that lead ultimately to group decisions. "Groupthink" is when individuals within cohesive groups seek unanimity or concurrence to such an extent that they cease to vigilantly perform the tasks of decision making. Janis hypothesized that the presence of groupthink during the process of-decision making might lead to policy failures. While a psychological phenomenon that cannot be directly observed, Janis argued that groupthink produces behavioral consequences or symptoms that can be observed--and that can be avoided with proper planning. Richard Johnson takes a more structural approach to these issues; he explores how the president "manage[s] a team of men to provide him with information, staff out his alternatives, and otherwise extend his reach" (1974, xxii) so that the president can be successful at leadership and policy making. …