A Study Of Ernest R. May’s US Diplomatic Decision-Making Research

Ernest R. May is a famous historian of American Foreign Relations in 20 th century in America, who was honored as one of the most important scholar of American foreign relations by his counterparts. Ernest R. May studied many domains in American Foreign Relations by Level-of-Analysis Approach with inter-disciplinary methods, which is deserved to be learned by Chinese scholars. Ernest R. May also called for the practicability of history discipline, which is really instructive.In this paper, I would introduce Ernest R. May’s study on US Diplomatic Decision-Making, summarizing whose characteristics, contribution and weakness on the basis of reading through his books and papers.In the paper, the body structure will be divided into following chapters.Chapter 1, introduces Ernest R. May’s academic experience and research output. To learn Ernest R. May’s academic experience, we can get from his roles as a student, a professor working in the Harvard University and active in various academic activities, a consultant for American government, a good teacher in the campus. To have an overall understanding of Ernest R. May’s study, I will introduce his major books and articles according to theme and content.Chapter 2, introduces Ernest R. May’s US Diplomatic Decision-Making study on the role of interaction among countries, bureaucratic politics in government, public opinion and idea of major decision-makers in shaping diplomatic decision-making with his major books and papers.Chapter 3, introduces Ernest R. May’s study on decision-makers’ use of historical analogy when making diplomatic decisions. With documentation full of historical detail, Ernest R. May found that decision-makers sometimes use historical analogy exactly while misuses also exist. Ernest R. May put forward several steps to make fair use of historical analogy.Chapter 4, summarizes the characteristics, contribution and weakness of Ernest R. May’s study. Ernest R. May’s characteristics are use of Level-of-Analysis Approach and inter-disciplinary methods with making full use of available documentary. He also stand out by calling for the practicability of history research. With regard of his contribution, he shows how to study American Foreign Relations. His weakness is that the relation between historical analogy and final decision was less persuasive.In the epilogue, the author will summarize Ernest R. May’s major research perspective in American foreign relations, his historical analogy and decision-making, characteristics, contribution and weakness. He explored various perspectives of diplomatic decision-making ranging domestic and foreign levels, which needed borrowing methods from other discipline and using historical documentation both home and abroad. As the way Ernest R. May studied is where the American foreign relation history study is going in recent years, younger scholars can learn a lot from him. Ernest R. May’s study on historical analogy bridged the distance between academic research and the real world politics.