The changing strength of ideology in United States foreign policy: Case studies of United States China policy

The issue of the role of ideology in U.S. foreign policy making has always drawn the attention of scholars, because this issue is significantly related to the explanation and prediction of U.S. foreign policy behavior. In reviewing the two contemporarily predominant approaches to the study of this issue--the "constant" approach and the "separative" approach, however, one finds that neither appears to adequately explain the role of ideology in U.S. foreign policy. Each of these approaches ignores either the various impact of objective conditions on ideology (the "constant" approach) or the changing impact of ideology on U.S. foreign policy behavior (the "separative" approach). In addition, both of them pay no attention to the variable nature of the strength of ideology in foreign policy.; This study is devoted to the exploration of a new, yet better analytical approach to the study of the role of ideology in U.S. foreign policy via case studies of U.S. China policy. Three policy periods are analyzed: 1949-1953, 1969-1972 and 1980-1982. The central notion of this new approach is that changes in objective conditions determine change in the strength of ideology; change in the strength of ideology causes fluctuations in U.S. foreign policy behavior. In other words, this new approach postulates two causal relationships among the variables: one is between objective conditions and the strength of ideology, where the former are independent variables and the latter is a dependent variable; the other is between the strength of ideology and foreign policy behavior, where the former becomes an independent variable and the latter is the dependent variable.; The causal relationships among the variables are dramatically illustrated by the cases in this study. The findings of the case studies strongly suggest that this new approach provides a promising direction for inquiry into the role of ideology in U.S. foreign policy. This direction is defined mainly by the two causal relationships as a basic analytical context and by a set of measurements to detect the changing strength of ideology and its variable impact on foreign policy.