| What drives the foreign policies of autocratic states? Structural realists argue that, like all states, autocracies pursue their national interest by balancing power or threats in an anarchic world, defined by the distribution of material capabilities. Liberals believe that domestic character influences international relations, but have drawn few conclusions as to the impact of non-democratic governance on foreign policy. This dissertation moves toward resolution of this puzzle, arguing that leaders' pre-existing strategies of regime survival help to determine variation in foreign policy, across states and time. Autocratic leaders subordinate foreign policy to the overriding goal of maintaining power, choosing regime survival strategies to preserve their dominant positions within the state. These strategies target preferred winning coalitions (which may include support of the masses, elite supporters, and/or foreign backers), and the autocrat will use foreign policy to please his winning coalition, subordinating national interest to regime survival. To aid inductive theory development and perform initial plausibility checks, the dissertation examines Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian foreign policy decision-making in two Gulf wars (1990-91 and 2003). In a unipolar world, the structural realist approach fails to explain the alignment behavior in question, while the regime security strategies adopted by the autocrats shed far more light on decision-making. Methodologically, the study takes a qualitative approach, drawing on elite interviews in each of the case study countries, along with local press accounts, memoirs, datasets on regime type, and available foreign aid and polling data. |
