Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Twin Pillars to the Axis of Evil: Presidential Security Metaphors and the Justification of American Intervention in the Persian Gulf, 1971-2001(2021) Fowler, Randall; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)On January 16, 1968, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced that his country would withdraw its forces from the Persian Gulf by 1971. U.S. policymakers interpreted this decision through the lens of the Cold War. They feared that the Gulf—a region whose oil was vital to American defense strategy—was at risk of becoming a “vacuum” and falling under the sway of the Soviet Union. Over the next three decades the United States would steadily assert its dominance in the Persian Gulf, as American policy toward the region evolved in tandem with the language used by presidential administrations to conceptualize and address the challenges they saw in the area. This study examines the security metaphors (and the ideas and images they conveyed)employed by U.S. presidents to sell their national security vision for the Persian Gulf to the American people. Four presidential metaphors—Twin Pillars, Strategic Consensus, the New World Order, and Dual Containment—functioned to reconstitute norms of sovereignty and American responsibility for the Gulf. Drawing on the symbolism of the Cold War, these metaphors were used by presidential administrations to progressively articulate a U.S. right of intervention in the region to combat forces perceived to be hostile to U.S. interests. The power of these metaphors derives from the way their logics and symbolism built on each other, collectively constructing interpretive frameworks through which officials, commentators, and reporters made sense of the region and its importance to the United States. This project is divided into four case studies to examine each metaphor, focusing on the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. In each chapter, I outline the development of the metaphor within the administration, analyze the public invocations of the metaphor in presidential discourse, trace expressions of the metaphor and its symbolism in press coverage and foreign policy commentary, and consider criticisms directed at each metaphor. In sketching the constitutive trajectory of each metaphor, I show how the collective picture the presidential administrations painted of the Gulf as a vulnerable and vital region worked to encourage military intervention. These rhetorical developments linked the Cold War to the War on Terror, ultimately setting the stage for George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” campaign and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.Item The Smoking Gun: Toward Understanding the Decision Calculus Behind Repressive Outcomes(2015) Munayyer, Yousef; Telhami, Shibley; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Why do states repress? Why are civil liberties curtailed? Explorations of these questions have departed from the assumption that security concerns motivate decisions that lead to repressive outcomes. If the state is challenged, it will repress. A state, it is assumed, must "strike a balance" between security and liberty. But what if those assumptions are flawed? If the decisions behind politically repressive outcomes are not always motivated by security challenges to the state, then we must ask a different set of questions about what can motivate state behavior and repression. This study examines the validity of these assumptions. A survey of cases of repressive episodes in the United States, using both primary and secondary sources, reveals that the decisions behind enacting repressive measures is not as straightforward as these assumptions would have it seem. A unique case, situated both contextually and historically by the preceding survey, is then explored in depth using data that is rarely available to shed a new degree of light on a decision making process. This data is overwhelming primary source information and includes declassified material from a variety of archives, material obtained from Freedom of Information Act Requests, as well as uniquely revelatory audio evidence that has only recently been made publicly available. After reviewing the case I argue that enough evidence exists to suggest the main assumptions of the repression and civil liberties literature fails to encompass all motivating factors behind repressive outcomes and a deeper understanding of how other factors can lead to repressive outcomes is needed.Item WHEN COERCION BACKFIRES: THE LIMITS OF COERCIVE DIPLOMACY IN IRAN.(2015) Mohseni Cheraghlou, Ebrahim; Steinbruner, John D; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Coercive diplomacy is a deceivingly attractive strategy. If it can be made to work, it has the potential of achieving foreign policy objectives with considerably fewer costs. But when adopted in unconducive circumstances, the strategy has the potential to backfire and make peaceful resolution of conflicts more difficult. Since 2002, when the full scope of Iran's nuclear program and ambitions were revealed to the public, the United States has primarily relied on coercive diplomacy to force Iran to accept limitations and oversight that go beyond the NPT and Iran's safeguards agreement. This dissertation assesses how Iran's nuclear policy and program has been affected by US and UNSC sanctions. It argues that not only has coercive diplomacy failed to persuade Iran to accept binding selective constraints on its fuel cycle activities, but it has also triggered a series of reactions that have strengthened Iran's determination to advance, enhance, and expand its nuclear fuel cycle program. The findings of this dissertation corroborate the conclusions of most other scholars that have studied coercive diplomacy. Indeed, the recurrent failure of coercive diplomacy is rooted in the strategy's neglect of the reality that national-level decisions are the resultant of the pulling and hauling of various forces within the target state and that in dealing with objectionable policies of states, one must seek to weaken the forces that promote and strengthen those that oppose the objectionable policy. In the case of Iran, sanctions have done the opposite. They have intensified Iranian distrust of the US and the post-war international order and have consequently augmented the forces in Iran that promote and have weakened those that oppose Iran's nuclear fuel cycle program. Taking the factors that drive and shape Iran's nuclear policy, this dissertation argues that the proliferation risks of Iran's nuclear program could be resolved more quickly, reliably, and effectively through arrangements that are based on mutually acknowledged rights and equitable principles than through arrangements based on coercion.Item To Dictate the Peace: Power, Strategy, and Success in Military Occupations(2014) Marcum, Anthony Scott; Huth, Paul K; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation addresses the following question: why do some states win a war only to lose the occupation whereas other states can successfully impose their preferred outcome via the control of foreign territory? For example, compare the United States' failure in Iraq (2003-2008) to the Allied Powers' success in France (1815-1818). To explain this variation, I develop and test a principal-agent model in which I incorporate the occupied elite's costs of compliance and the occupier's strategies of control. As agents, the occupied elites expect to incur significant domestic and international costs if they consent to the occupier's demands, and thus have strong incentives to not comply. The occupying state can overcome this hostility through a costly exercise of power to shape the choices and manipulate the incentives of elites to influence their decision-making. Occupying states that engage in dictating as a strategy of control are compelling the elites to make a costly choice. By constraining the choice set to compliance or non-compliance with its terms, the occupying power can effectively separate strongly adverse elites from moderately or weakly adverse ones, and thereby gain a commitment to its objectives. Although previous work on occupations recognizes the difficulties in achieving success, the costs of compliance to the elite and the occupiers' strategy of control are largely overlooked in previous scholarship. To evaluate the theoretical argument, I employ two research methods in the project. First, I built an original dataset to test the effects of the costs of compliance and the strategies of control on the outcomes of 137 military occupations that result from interstate wars between 1815 and 2003. The statistical analyses are paired with two plausibility probes: the Chilean Occupation of Peru (1881-1883) and the Soviet Occupation of North Korea (1945-1948). Second, I examine in-depth the American Occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952. The case study investigates how the costs of compliance - across regime change, economic stabilization, and rearmament - generated resistance among Japanese politicians, and how the Americans exercised their power to dictate that the former comply with the latter's costly terms during the course of the occupation.Item Understanding the Class Enemy: Foreign Policy Expertise in East Germany(2009) Scala, Stephen J.; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study makes use of reports, resolutions, analyses, and other internal documents as well as oral history interviews in order to detail the construction, functioning, and output of foreign policy expertise in the GDR. Subordination to the practical needs and political-ideological requirements of the leadership of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) represented the defining feature of East German foreign policy expertise. Yet its full politicization, which was essentially complete by the late 1960s as the SED succeeded in establishing a comprehensive system of foreign policy expertise tailored to meet its particular vision, entailed the maintenance of a degree of professional and intellectual autonomy--the GDR's Aussenpolitiker, or foreign policy professionals, were expected not only to comply with the political and ideological postulates espoused by the party leadership but also to deliver sound, specialist analysis of international relations. The persistent tension between these contrasting objectives was directly reflected in the output of East German experts, who in the conditions of diplomatic isolation prevailing until the early 1970s formulated a GDR-specific conception of international relations that fused clear identification of East Germany's realpolitical interests with the Marxist-Leninist notion of foreign policy as a form of class struggle. Following foreign policy normalization in the first half of the 1970s, however, increasing specialization and professionalization matched with a dramatic increase in East German experts' exposure to the capitalist West, including integration into a transnational network of foreign policy specialists, allowed the specialist element of expertise to gain preponderance over the dogmatic-ideological element. The great challenge to the international position of the Soviet Bloc and the GDR represented by the "second Cold War" in the first half of the 1980s then prompted East German experts to abandon simplistic adherence to Marxist-Leninist foreign policy dogma in favor of prioritization of the concrete realpolitical interests of the GDR. In the process, the GDR's experts formulated a body of non-dogmatic foreign policy thought that mirrored the Soviet New Thinking without taking on its comprehensiveness or overt rejection of inherited postulates.Item Foreign Policy Decision-Making and Violent Non-State Actors(2004-11-23) Andersen, David R.; Wilkenfeld, Jonathan; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A state's foreign policy is directed toward a variety of external actors. Most understanding of foreign policy behavior, however, is derived from observations of states interacting with other states. This study examines how foreign policy decision-making during crisis differs when it is directed toward violent non-state actors. A crisis is defined as an event in which a state perceives a threat to one or more of its basic values, along with an awareness of finite time for response, and a heightened probability of engaging in military hostilities. Violent non-state actors are those non-state groups that pursue their political goals through the use of or threat to use violence. Additionally, the non-state actors of interest are those that threaten an external state's national interests in such a way that it represents a crisis for that country, necessitating some form of foreign policy response. This study argues that because non-state actors lack many of the structural characteristics associated with a state, such as a recognized foreign ministry or the lack of trust states have in a non-state leader's ability to enforce agreements, states respond to these crises more violently than they do when responding to crises triggered by states. International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data confirms that the major response by states toward crises triggered by violent non-state actors are more violent than responses to crises triggered by states. Empirical results also show that non-state groups with more pronounced political and military structures are less likely to be responded to violently. Other factors, such as the nature of the value threatened and type of violence used to trigger the crisis, do not have a significant impact on how states respond. This study argues that a set of international norms have emerged that help mitigate the level of violence between states and that these norms do not apply as strongly to these violent non-state groups. However, non-state groups that are able to establish institutional structures similar to those of states are more likely to lessen the level of violence directed toward them.Item Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975-2000(2004-05-19) Martini, Edwin Anton; Lounsbury, Myron; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the construction of United States policy toward Vietnam from 1975-2000. Whereas the period since 1975 has traditionally been relegated to the epilogues of historical narratives about American-Vietnamese relations, this study moves that era to the center of the story, employing an interdisciplinary methodology to explore the intersections of diplomatic history, cultural representation, and international political economy. In the years following the withdrawal of its military forces from Southeast Asia, I argue, the United States continued to wage economic, political, and cultural warfare against the nation and people of Vietnam. In particular, I examine the ways in which cultural representations intersected and interacted with the formation of foreign policy. Both of these activities, I argue, were driven by the same cultural logic of "normalizing" the historical memory of the war, reinserting recuperative American narratives at the center of public discourses about the war while marginalizing and silencing Vietnamese voices. What I call "The American War on Vietnam" was thus as much a battle for the cultural memory of the war in American society as it was a lengthy and bitter economic, political, and diplomatic war against the nation and people of Vietnam. I use a range of primary sources to reconstruct the policy history of this period, including many previously overlooked Congressional hearings. I also bring together a large body of secondary literature from a wide array of fields, including cultural and diplomatic history, cultural studies, political science, and economics. Pieced together from these disparate sources, I trace the changes and continuities in the American War on Vietnam over its twenty-five year course, from the initial imposition of an unprecedented and ill-conceived program of economic sanctions in 1975 to the final ratification of a bilateral trade agreement between the two nations in 2000.