Beyond the Reagan doctrine: Frameworks, legitimacy and leadership in inter-American relations in the post-Cold War era

With the end of the cold war, the central principle behind the tenets of U.S. foreign policy, including the Reagan Doctrine, disappeared. No longer did it serve the president to organize foreign policy around the containment of communism. Along with these changes came the challenge to George Bush to forge a new paradigm for inter-American relations. In doing so, he faced several challenges including a dynamic international context and a bureaucracy used to functioning under the standard operating procedures developed during the cold war. However, George Bush also had many resources available to him to overcome these challenges. These included the ability to forge a policy framework to guide him in both establishing policy legitimacy and using the administrative tools of the executive to their full potential.; Expanding on Alexander George's work on operational codes and policy legitimacy and incorporating the literature on bureaucratic politics and the administrative presidency, this dissertation examines the use of the above resources by both Ronald Reagan and George Bush and argues that George Bush did not effectively use them to forge a paradigm shift in inter-American relations in the post-cold war.; Using government documents, interviews with policy makers and secondary sources, the author analyzes the policy areas of democracy, human rights, narcotics and economics, in three cases: Nicaragua, Chile and Peru. She compares the stature of these policy goals in the policy framework of the Reagan administration to those of the Bush administration and concludes that while some changes in the framework for policy toward Latin America did occur, it was not sufficient to complete a paradigm shift in inter-American relations, leaving the task to subsequent post-cold war presidents.