Great Power responses to threat transitions and the legitimacy burden: U.S.-Soviet relations 1943--1950

This dissertation seeks to explain the linkages between domestic beliefs about foreign policy and state behavior when a great power is confronted with an adverse threat transition. States have a range of strategic logics to deal with threats but on occasion their societies will have a strategic inhibition against one or more logics. The central question is: under what conditions, if any, does societal strategic inhibition affect state behavior? This dissertation argues that it depends upon the extent to which foreign policy decision-makers have to legitimate their strategic choices domestically. If the risks of a strategy are high and if there are significant political hurdles to its implementation, decision-makers will be unable to adopt a strategic logic that is rejected by their society unless all other options are exhausted.;This argument is tested against an alternative---structural adjustment theory---for U.S. strategy towards the USSR between 1943 and 1950. Despite the enormous scholarly attention paid to this relationship, there is still much that is unexplained and puzzling. The United States initially operated on the assumption that Soviet postwar intentions would be benign and eschewed a hedging strategy as favored by Britain. As new information became available to the effect that the Soviets posed a threat to U.S. interests, the executive branch of government was extremely slow in adopting a strategy of containment. When containment was finally adopted, the United States made a series of strategic choices that escalated the rivalry in some important ways. This dissertation's empirical argument is that the United States had a strategic inhibition against traditional European "balance of power equilibrium" diplomacy and the influence of Congress on postwar planning ensured that this inhibition had real political power. The effect was that the United States could not hedge against the possibility of Soviet revisionism during World War II and it could not be seen to be replacing Britain as the "keeper of the balance" afterwards. Domestic beliefs about foreign policy constrained America's strategic choices because of the extent to which a strategy had to be legitimated domestically.