'Clearer than truth': Determining and preserving grand strategy. The evolution of American policy toward the People's Republic of China under Truman and Nixon

This dissertation attempts to establish a theoretical bridge between international explanations and domestic political explanations for how and why nations determine, sell, then modify, their core grand strategies. It is a two-level approach to explain why leaders manipulate low-level conflicts to mobilize popular support for expensive, long-term security strategies, and then once the grand strategy is established and the mobilization underway, how and why leaders adapt policies that support it. The interaction between international circumstances and domestic politics is crucial to determining how and why leaders manipulate conflict and ideology—either by stressing or de-stressing them—in order to mobilize support at home for the grand strategy or to preserve that support when it appears threatened.; The evolution of U.S. policy toward the PRC during the Truman and Nixon administrations offers insight. The research was undertaken with two main objectives: (1) to advance a modified bridge theory of foreign policy that takes into account international and domestic political effects, and (2) to offer an original and comprehensive study of the 1972 China initiative, how it was affected by domestic politics, how it was sold to the American public, and its effect on and connection to other policies.; The Nixon case—the centerpiece of the dissertation—shows (1) that the interests of at least one dominant power can affect the system and that the system can also affect those interests; (2) that cooperation may result from an increase in the number of players (or at least an increasing of importance of one of the players, i.e. China); and (3) that domestic politics may figure significantly into a decision to reverse earlier policies.; This dissertation offers an integrated approach connecting shifts in the international environment, the creation and sustaining of long-term grand strategy, problems of generating and sustaining domestic support, and the manipulation of ideology and conflict.