The US Government's Crisis Decision-making After The "9.11" Incident

Taking the opportunity of the 15 th anniversary of the “9·11” terrorism attack,this dissertation attempts to make a judgment on whether the crisis decision-making of “9·11” event was a success or not.In the literature review,it found that though there were a great number of crisis decision-making studies on the case of “9·11”,seldom had they focused on a long-term crisis decision-making process.To define the concept of crisis decision-making,this dissertation uses the crisis management theory of Paul't Hart by introducing three pairs of concepts,which are respectively the perceived time pressure(high or low),the flexibility of the governmental power structure(mechanistic or pragmatic)and different levels of crisis management(strategic or operational).It holds that the “9·11” event crisis decision-making extended from the occurrence of the attack to the end of George W.Bush's presidency.Meanwhile,it refers the diplomatic decision-making mode theory of Graham T.Allison,which are respectively Rational Actor Mode and the Bureau-politics Mode,and suggests that the studies on “9·11” crisis decision-making could be divided into centralized decision-making mode under high time pressure and decentralized decision-making mode under low time pressure.Thus,this dissertation puts forward a possible standard for judging a successful crisis decision-making,i.e.whether the decision makers were able to achieve their goals or not through properly using different crisis decision-making modes in different situations.It argues that after the “9·11” terrorism attack,the Bush government realized its objective of avoiding terrorism from happening again,by using the centralized decision-making mode at first and the decentralized decision-making mode in the longer term.As for other problems like American's trapped itself in the “anti-terrorism wars”,or the destroyed state power,these were the results of its outdated national security strategy before “9·11” rather than the failure of the crisis decision-making.