Stephen Benedict Dyson

The Blair Identity: Leadership and Foreign Policy

1. Blairs wars 2. Neoclassical realism and leader psychology: A theory of foreign policy 3. Tony Blairs worldview and leadership style 4. The Kosovo and Sierra Leone interventions 5. September 11th and the war on terror 6. Iraq - Blairs war 7. Postwar Iraq 8. The Blair balance sheet Index

Cognitive Style and Foreign Policy: Margaret Thatcher's Black-and-White Thinking

Margaret Thatcher was a key late-20th-century political figure, with a major part of her influence felt in international affairs. Her colleagues and interlocutors agree that Thatcher was a distinctive and forceful individual. Yet, few studies have sought to systematically investigate her worldview and leadership style, and evaluate their impact upon her policy choices. Here, I apply Hermanns conceptual complexity content analysis scheme to the entirety of Thatchers responses to foreign policy questions in the House of Commons, finding that she scores significantly lower in complexity than both the average world leader and the average post-1945 British prime minister. This aspect of cognitive style, which has been associated with stark, black-and-white worldviews, is shown to have strongly conditioned Thatchers foreign policy decisions in the Falklands crisis, her relationship with Ronald Reagan, her evaluation of the Soviet Union and of Mikhail Gorbachev, and her attitude toward German reunification. I conclude, then, that Thatchers personality is key to understanding her time in office, and that she presents a vivid example of how individuals matter in politics.

Drawing policy implications from the ‘Operational Code’ of a ‘new’ political actor: Russian President Vladimir Putin

The task of both foreign policy makers and foreign policy scholars is complicated by the appearance on the international stage of a ‘new actor,’ about whom little information is available. The lack of information concerning such ‘new actors’ makes the job of explaining, predicting, and influencing that decision-maker’s choices many times more difficult. It is the argument of this paper that a multi-disciplinary approach, combining the political-psychology concept of an individual’s ‘Operational Code’ with the policy tasks of formulating guidelines for those who must deal with such ‘new actors,’ offers a way to overcome this problem. The case of Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation and a classic ‘new actor,’ is explored in depth on these terms.

Chronic Misperception and International Conflict: The U.S.-Iraq Experience

Why did the United States and Iraq find themselves in full-scale conflict with each other in 1990–91 and 2003, and in almost constant low-level hostilities during the years in-between? The situation was neither inevitable nor one that either side, in full possession of all the relevant information about the other, would have purposely engineered: in short, a classic instance of chronic misperception. A combination of the psychological literature on perception and its pathologies with the almost unique firsthand access of one of the authors to the decisionmakers on both sides—the former deputy head of the United Nations weapons of mass destruction inspection mission in the 1990s, the author of the definitive postwar account of Iraqi WMD programs for which he and his team debriefed the top regime leadership, and a Washington insider in regular contact with all major foreign policy agencies of the U.S. government—reveals the perceptions the United States and Iraq held of each other, as well as the biases, mistakes, and intelligence failures of which these images were, at different points in time, both cause and effect.

Text Annotation and the Cognitive Architecture of Political Leaders: British Prime Ministers from 1945–2008

ABSTRACT While differences in the personalities of leaders dominate popular discussion of politics, the systematic academic study of these factors has long been beset by problems of conceptualization and measurement—difficulties that have led many in political science to conclude that such studies are not worth the effort. In this light, one of the most exciting recent developments in political psychology has been the emergence of text analysis schemes, and accompanying automation software, that offer the possibility of treating what leaders say as indicative of how they think. In this essay, I consider a text analysis protocol designed to isolate the cognitive architecture of political leaders, in particular their characteristic information processing propensities, and apply the protocol to a comprehensive set of text: the universe of prime ministerial responses to foreign policy questions in the British House of Commons from 1945–2008. The resulting data, encompassing twelve separate prime ministers, shows that the technique can discriminate reliably between individuals and exhibits promising signs of validity.

Public and private beliefs of political leaders: Saddam Hussein in front of a crowd and behind closed doors

We ask if the public speech of political leaders is diagnostic of their private beliefs, and investigate through content analysis of the rhetoric of Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq. We collected Saddam’s public speeches and interviews on international affairs from 1977–2000, producing a data set of 330,000 words. From transcripts of Saddam speaking in private, we garnered a comparison corpus of 58,000 words. These text-sets were processed to locate markers of conflict, control and complexity. We find that Saddam’s hostile, conflict-oriented worldview and his perception of himself as a significant political actor was consistent across public and private domains. The major difference between these spheres was his more complex private view of international affairs compared to his more definitive public stance. Our evidence supports the notion that private beliefs can be inferred from the public speech of political leaders.

New Labour, Leadership, and Foreign Policy-making after 1997

How did Tony Blair and Gordon Brown see the world, and how many of their actions were driven by their personal constructions of the reality of foreign affairs? Was British foreign policy from 1997–2010 decisively shaped by the belief systems of the two Prime Ministers? The two were from the same political party, shared an ideological construct — ‘New Labour’ — and dealt with many of the same international issues, particularly the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq bequeathed by Blair to Brown. A comparison of Blair and Brown comes tantalizingly close, then, to a natural experiment in which many factors potentially significant in shaping foreign policy (notably political party, ideology and external situation) are held within a tight range of variation, while the key variable of interest (the identity of the Prime Minister) changes. On that basis, this chapter tests the hypothesis that British foreign policy across the Blair and Brown eras can be at least partly explained with reference to their subjective internal representations of reality and the manner in which this shaped what they believed to be possible and desirable.