| With the waning of the Cold War, the management of ethnic and regional conflicts has come to play a role of ever-increasing importance in American foreign policy thinking. The past decade has witnessed the largest American military interventions abroad since the Vietnam era. In such places as Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and most recently, Kosovo, the United States has Proven willing to use military force on an overwhelming scale in pursuit of foreign policy goals. At the same time, several Administrations have drawn harsh censure for the failure of intervention in some of these crises, or the failure to intervene earlier in others. Increasingly, observers of American diplomacy are bewildered by the seeming arbitrariness exhibited by the United States in choosing where, when, and how it will utilize military force in response to regional crises. This thesis explores the selective use of military intervention by the United States in the post-Cold War world. Taking an inductive approach, it examines how the Administration of President George Bush arrived at the decision on whether or not to use force in response to six regional crises. Making use of a variety of primary source materials, including interviews with a number of senior Bush Administration officials, the thesis reconstructs crisis management in the Bush White House, and retraces the process by which specific decisions on intervention were reached. Particular attention is paid to the belief systems of leading decisionmakers and the impact of these beliefs on crisis management strategy. The resulting work will furnish both a useful history of crisis management by the United States in the first years of the post-Cold War era, and a contribution to the burgeoning corpus of research on cognitive processes in foreign policy decisionmaking. |
