Three Approaches to Presidential Foreign Policy-Making in the Twenty-First Century

While many of the president’s supporters hailed his more assertive approach to North Korea, others grew increasingly concerned that the situation might escalate into a military confrontation (Baker, BIB_ch01_0003; Baker and Sang-Hun, 2017). South Korean and Chinese leadership urged both sides to show restraint and find a diplomatic solution to the impasse. U.S. allies such as Germany’s Angela Merkel and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) pressed Trump to roll back the belligerency (Idem). Even within the administration, there were different assessments of the president’s pugnacious rhetoric. For instance, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), General H. R. McMaster, encouraged the president’s aggressive approach. In contrast, the Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, was concerned that such truculent posturing by both sides could potentially spiral out of control and lead to war (Woodward, 2018: 279).

Therefore, when on March 8, the South Korean national security advisor came to the White House to inform the administration about his recent meeting in Pyongyang, no one could imagine the ensuing volte-face. That day, Trump had met with representatives from the video game industry and had announced a round of new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The president was not scheduled to meet the South Korean delegation. However, after a brief exchange with McMaster, Trump decided to organize a brief meeting with the delegation in the Oval Office. Eui-yong informed the president, McMaster, Mattis, and the White House Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, about how in his recent meeting with Kim Jong Un the North Korean leader had expressed a “commitment to denuclearization” and extended an invitation to meet with the American president (Fifield, Nakamura, and Kim, 2018). To the surprise of all of those in the room, Trump immediately agreed to meet with Kim Jong Un to discuss an agreement on denuclearization (Cook, Johnson, and Lima, 2018; Liptak, 2018).

After the meeting, administration officials did not provide details on the upcoming talks. Over the next few days, the president’s aides were shy on specifics, but did indicate that Trump would lead the negotiations, expressing confidence in the president’s ability “to make deals” (Fifield, Nakamura, and Kim, 2018). Several commentators attributed the lack of information to the fact that Trump’s impulsive decision confounded his own administration and caught them unprepared (Bennett, 2018; Cha, 2018). As an example, many critics pointed out that the day prior to the announcement, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had told reporters that the U.S. and North Korea were still far from commencing negotiations (Sonne and Hudson, 2018). Administration officials countered saying that Trump’s decision to accept the invitation to the talks was part of a broader strategy and not an impromptu response (Mann and Lubold, 2018).

Regardless of the motives, Trump’s decision upended decades of U.S. policy (Nakamura, 2020). Since the North Korean nuclear issue made it onto the U.S. security agenda in the 1980s, American presidents had followed a similar policy, disavowing direct negotiations between the two countries’ leaders.

The Clinton administration was the first to deal with the threat of North Korea’s nuclear program. While military plans were being developed for a preemptive strike on Pyongyang’s nuclear facilities, former President Jimmy Carter informed the White House that he had reached an agreement for negotiations with the regime’s leader Kim Jong Il (Chollet and Goldgeier, 2008). After several months of negotiations, on October 1994, both parties signed the U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework. Under the accord, the North Korean regime committed to suspend its nuclear program and allow for UN inspections in exchange for two light-water reactor nuclear power plants and the delivery of heavy fuel oil (Chanlett-Avery et al., 2018). While the agreement was met with skepticism by many in Washington, it allowed Clinton to claim that it was “a good deal for the United States” and shift his focus to other policy challenges closer to his heart (Clinton cited in Riding, 1994). Over the next few years, the administration tried to secure an additional agreement which would curtail Pyongyang’s missile program and stop it from selling its missile technology to other countries. Despite a moratorium in 1999 on halting its long-range missile tests, no formal agreement was achieved (Chanlett-Avery et al., 2018).

Upon arriving at the White House, the Bush administration showed no urgency in negotiating with North Korea. Believing that the previous agreement was flawed, and that time was on America’s side, the administration initiated a policy review in its first months in office (Martin, 2007). The review’s proposals were quickly relegated to a secondary position as the September 11, 2001, attacks refocused U.S. policy. Formal contacts were only re-established between the two countries in late-2002 as the U.S. denounced Pyongyang for breaching the Agreed Framework by maintaining a secret uranium enrichment program. When North Korea responded by abandoning the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), President Bush took a hard line on North Korea until it would agree to complete, verifiable, and irreversible disarmament. The administration sought to isolate Kim Jong Il’s regime by refusing to negotiate directly with Pyongyang and offering no concessions until North Korea complied with its demands (Idem). In the summer of 2003, in an attempt to further pressure the regime, the U.S. pressed forward with the “Six-Party Talks” which, besides North Korea and the U.S., included China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. After months of negotiations, in September 2005, Pyongyang agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program in exchange for economic aid, as well as an American guarantee that it would not attack or invade North Korea, and a pledge to begin negotiations over the normalization of relations with the U.S. (Chanlett-Avery et al., 2018). However, North Korea’s missile tests in July 2006 and its nuclear test in October of that same year derailed further progress and led to the unanimous condemnation of the Kim Jong Il regime in the UN Security Council (Martin, 2007).

The Importance of Presidential Leadership in Foreign Policy-Making

Our research seeks to build and extend on the previous work on presidential management of foreign policy decision-making. While several studies have broadened the original case studies conducted by Richard Tanner Johnson and by Alexander George by encompassing other presidents, few attempts have been made to identify the advisory systems of the American presidents of the twenty-first century – i.e., George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. The studies that have been published on these presidents tend to diverge in their assessments and, in many cases, fail to employ a coherent systematic approach that can illustrate more than discrete instances of foreign policy decision-making and, therefore, hinder the development of a more robust profile of each presidents’ management style. As a result, we can find studies characterizing President Bush’s decision-making style as conforming with the formalistic model (Mitchell and Massoud, 2009) and others that reject the analogy (Pfiffner, 2004a). Similarly, different researchers have claimed that President Obama’s style is analogous both to the competitive model (Rudalevige, 2012) and the collegial model (Pfiffner, 2011). Likewise, some scholars portray President Trump’s style as meeting the standards of the competitive model (Lewis, Bernhard and You, 2018), while others counter by claiming that his unconventional style departs significantly from the traditional models of presidential decision-making (da Vinha, 2019a). The purpose of our research is to try to surmount these shortcomings and provide a more comprehensive and systematic assessment of the management of the foreign policy decision-making processes in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations and provide a more complete and representative profile of each presidents’ management style.

Comparative Case Studies and Presidential Foreign Policy-Making

This aim of this book is didactic. Both of the authors have dedicated their academic careers to teaching. While each of us maintains an active research agenda, our main focus is on engaging students in the classroom and helping them succeed academically. Between us, we have taught a broad array of courses on American Government, the American Presidency, American Foreign Policy, American History, and International Relations. In these and other courses, we have always emphasized the role of political leaders in defining and shaping policy. True to our grounding in the humanities, we appreciate the differences amongst individuals and how each one brings their own unique personal experience to everything they do. Naturally, in teaching political science courses we discuss with students how each president and their administrations are unique in the way they interpret, define, and implement policy.

However, finding resources that will allow students to compare and contrast presidential decision-making can be an elusive enterprise. Our predicament is not the lack of bibliographic resources. Quite the contrary. There are numerous excellent monographs on almost each one of the individual cases we analyze in this book, and they are amply referenced throughout. These scholarly texts provide rich and detailed accounts of the main actors, processes, and dynamics underlying some of the most relevant foreign policy decisions in recent American history. However, while rich in detail, most of these books are unsuitable as ancillary texts for undergraduate courses that seek to balance disciplinary breadth with analytical depth. Asking students to read and analyze thousands of pages of bibliographic material to identify and understand the differences in the way presidents make foreign policy is not feasible considering the manner most courses on American government are structured and organized. The discussion of presidential decision-making usually encompasses only a modest portion of a course and, therefore, requires concise and elucidative comparative studies. Accordingly, this book seeks to fill that void and provide students and instructors with an assortment of cases that allow for appraising and comparing the similarities and differences among the twenty-first century American presidents.

In order to assess the management styles of these three presidents, we employ a cross case comparison method. Due to the inherent research question’s explanatory nature – i.e., how did each respective president manage his foreign policy advisory system? – , the use of case studies is the most appropriate approach. According to Yin (1994: 6), questions dealing with why and how “deal with operational links needing to be traced over time, rather than mere frequencies or incidence.” Therefore, comparative case studies allow for a longitudinal analysis of each administration and can reveal any evolution or transformation of a president’s management style over time. This is particularly important since most studies on presidential decision-making tend to focus on discrete policy events or on comparative events in different administrations and, thus, are unable to identify any potential organizational variations over time (Burke, 2009). Moreover, considering the variety of actors involved in the U.S. foreign policy decision-making process, the use of case studies is equally pertinent because, as George and McKeown (1985: 21) argue, “case studies of organizational decision making have long been one of the most important methods by which researchers have investigated organizational behavior and improved their theoretical understanding of that behavior.”

By employing case studies, we can use a historical analysis of causal assertion. Historical analyses of political phenomena have raised concerns for many political scholars (see Lawson, 2010; Vaughan-Williams, 2005). Political scientists have been particularly critical of the fact that historical case studies “do not lend themselves readily to strict comparison and to orderly cumulation” (George, 2019: 198). However, over the years, historians and political scientists have increasingly used multiple case studies to conduct controlled comparisons (George, 2019; Haney, 2002; Mitchell, 2005b). These cases are constructed and compared using the structured-focus method. As George and Bennet (2005) point out, the method is “structured” because a set of general and standardized questions are used to analyze each individual case and, subsequently, systematically compare the findings of the different cases. The method is “focused” to the extent that it concentrates the analysis only on certain aspects of the cases, namely the interactions and dynamics involved in the decision-making processes.

The questions framing the analyses are:

1) What is the role of the president in the advisory system?

2) What is the role and relationship amongst the advisors in the advisory system?

3) What are the procedures for managing the advisory system?

4) What is the general dynamic of the decision-making process – i.e., what is the overarching pattern of interaction among the decision-makers over time?

These questions provide an opportunity to focus on the central theoretical framework underlying this study and assess the management models employed by each president in formulating his administration’s foreign policy. The first question seeks to assess the style and the level of involvement of each president. In particular, the question seeks to assess if the president centralizes the decision-making process on himself or if he delegates significant functions to his advisors. The question also intends to evaluate if the president encourages any competition or collaboration among his advisors or if he prefers a division-of-labor, leaving the intellectual synthesis of the specialized policy inputs to himself. The second question focuses on the relationship amongst the president’s main foreign policy advisors in an attempt to gauge if they contend for the president’s attention, cooperate in the deliberation process, or if they insulate themselves in terms of the functional expertise of their respective department or agency. The third question analyzes the procedures characterizing the deliberations, namely identifying if main processes involve formal or informal channels of communication and advice. The final question endeavors to identify the overarching pattern of interaction amongst the president, his advisors, and any other individuals or groups providing input for the final decision. In particular, the question provides an opportunity to determine if there were any changes to the president’s decision-making processes over time.