Deconstructing and reassembling the politics of American foreign policy: The US, Libya and Syria, 1980-1988

Debates about the sources of foreign policy, and the appropriate level of analysis have occupied international relations theorists extensively since World War II. Realism, one of the most influential types of approaches, explains events as outcomes of disputes between individual nation states pursuing national interests in an anarchical system. A post-structuralist critique of Realism is offered in this dissertation. The hypothesis is that there are important strategic political calculations implicit in the American foreign policy discourse. These concerns, in addition to geopolitical strategy, condition the intellectual environment in which what Realists call national interests are constructed. The real roots of foreign policy may not be understandable or explainable without a rigorous examination of this process of interest creation. I propose to show the limitations of Realism and offer a method to complement such analyses.; The White House, the media, and the Congress, and their respective roles in the foreign policy making process are the focus of this study. The analysis concentrates largely on America's policy toward Libya during the Reagan administration, with a secondary, comparative focus on Syria. I trace the development of political discourse in the media, Congress, and the White House and examine how this affected the way Libya and Syria were generally constructed within it. This facilitates an analysis of the mechanism by which foreign policy discourse as a whole is created and changed. An important objective is to show that so called national interests result from complex, contingent information filtering processes which involve strategic, tactical and political choices.; If political analysts are to explain foreign policy making in a rigorous, theoretical manner, they must address themselves to the basic building blocks of policy; they must examine how our unavoidably politicized understanding of the world is affected by and affects the intellectual process of debating and making foreign policy.