The end of Cold War thinking: Change and learning in foreign policy beliefs and identities

This dissertation investigates the changes in the foreign policy belief set of the U.S. Department of State that occurred with the ending of the Cold War. Employing a content analysis methodology, I inquire into both the extent and the cause of the shifts in the dominant foreign policy ideas and identities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I find that new interpretations of Soviet intentions, not changes in Soviet military capability, were crucial for the end of Cold War thinking about the Soviet Union. The revised understanding of Soviet intentions was in turn due to a combination of changes in Soviet foreign policy and extensive domestic reforms. Of these two explanations, I argue that the process of internal liberalization was more causally significant for the shift in perceptions of the Soviet Union not only because the U.S. in part had attributed Soviet intentions to its anti-liberal institutions, but also because the process of democratization gave normative meaning to Soviet international behavior.; I also find that U.S. Cold War identities and interests were completely revised with the ending of the East-West conflict. This case of “complex learning” illustrates the importance of social interactions between states at the systemic level to foreign policy identities and ideas. That the more generalized American internationalist role-identity did not evolve, however, can be taken as evidence of the presence of more fundamental, or universal, beliefs that were not constituted within the context of the Cold War social system.