| Leaders at times select policies that pose significant long-term strategic risks. In order to explain why decisionmakers knowingly pursue policies that pose a security risk over time, this dissertation uses process tracing to examine instances in which leaders chose to discount the future strategic risks associated with nuclear assistance, state-sponsored terrorism, and arms transfers to recognized adversaries. In pursuing these policies, decisionmakers risked that the client would: 1) use received weapons, training, or technology against its former patron (“boomerang”); 2) change its future policies and align with a patron's enemies (“betrayal”); or 3) no longer be susceptible to pressure from its former patron (“emancipation”). Risks could also stem from a third party that sought to stop the flow of assistance to an enemy (“revenge”).;To explain these behaviors, this dissertation develops a theory of risk in international politics that links threat perception to risk tolerance: drawing on the concepts of heuristics and intertemporal choice, it argues that when a decisionmaker believes that threats are acute and immediate, his time horizon contracts and he becomes more willing to pursue policies that pose long-term strategic risks. The principal finding of this study is that adverse shifts in the balance of threat lead a decisionmaker to discount future strategic risks: when his state faces an immediate and acute threat, a leader becomes more willing to run long-term risks. A secondary insight centers on the idea that a decisionmaker becomes more willing to pursue policies that pose strategic risks over time when he believes his state can manage the risks associated with such policies.;This dissertation examines six case studies, which vary in geographic location, regime type, time period, and type of long-term risk. A process-oriented schema supplements this strategy and demonstrates that temporal considerations and shifting time horizons best explain why policymakers discount long-term strategic risks. By moving beyond traditional approaches to risk in international politics, this study provides scholars and policymakers with a better understanding of risk perception and time horizons in international relations. |
