Introduction

Every president has a foreign policy doctrine, until they don’t. In this book, I have argued that in order to better understand foreign policy decision-making, we need to look beyond the material and ideational structures emphasized in conventional approaches to International Relations (IR) and zoom in on the discursive interactions that take place among foreign policy agents as they contest ideas in the construction of policy. This volume sought to answer the question: what explains variation in foreign policy decisions when the material and social conditions of state interests remain formally the same? The purpose was to show how different types of ideas see agents interpret interests in principled or cognitive ways. Specifically, I have sought to understand the seemingly confounding variation in decisions to use force in American foreign policy. In doing so, I turned to constructivist and discursive institutionalist insights to highlight the interplay between different types and forms of ideas within presidential administrations.

Developing these insights, I have offered a theoretical framework in an effort to provide a means for understanding how agents can interpret ‘interests’ – defined as ‘beliefs about how to meet needs’ (Wendt, 1999: 130) – in different ways. The basic notion that interests are interpreted in different ways is not a new claim, yet it is a claim that has been under-examined. The process by which foreign policy agents interpret state interests in varying ways has remained causally ambiguous. Understanding variation in foreign policy has been a challenging task for scholars of IR. In IR theory, in particular, scholars employing rationalist assumptions posit that agents can interpret information efficiently. More formally, these scholars assume that state interests remain formally the same in the absence of ‘exogenous shocks’ to the material and ideational bases of state interest. As such, while these approaches have provided important insights, there is scope for further understanding of the endogenous institutional dynamics by which different types of ideas are interpreted and deliberated among decision-makers.

In the next section, I highlight the theoretical implications and briefly speak to how this study lays the framework for potential future works. I then summarize the case studies and set out five key findings.