Steven Hurst

The Rhetorical Strategy of George H. W. Bush during the Persian Gulf Crisis 1990–91: How to Help Lose a War You Won

Public perceptions of the relative failure of the first Bush administrations policy in the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990–91 can be attributed in large part to its failure both to remove Saddam Hussein from office and to eliminate Iraqs nuclear weapons programme. Those objectives were not, in fact, among those that the administration initially set out to achieve. Midway through the crisis, however, it altered its rhetorical strategy in a fashion that helped to emphasize their significance in the public mind. This rhetorical shift resulted from a belief that its primary objectives were failing to maintain public support for its policies. However, the evidence for such a decline in public support is ambiguous at best, and there is no evidence that the change of rhetoric had any effect upon public support. The Bush administration unnecessarily drew attention to objectives that it could not achieve and helped to ensure public disillusion with the eventual outcome of the conflict.

The Carter administration and Vietnam

List of Tables - Acknowledgements - List of Abbreviations - Introduction - United States, Vietnam Relations 1975-77 - Changing Vietnamese Policy: January 1978-July 1978 - The American Response to the Changed Vietnamese Position - The Retreat from Normalisation - Human Rights and Policy towards Vietnam - Conclusion - Footnotes - Bibliography - Index

The Iranian Nuclear Negotiations as a Two-Level Game: The Importance of Domestic Politics

ABSTRACT In July 2015, after more than a decade of negotiations, the international community and Iran finally reached agreement over Iran’s nuclear programme. All of the work that produced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA] was nearly undone, however, by the United States Congress, which came close to killing the agreement. This episode emphasises the fact that international negotiations are “two-level games” in which policy-makers must take into account not only their own objectives and those of their interlocutors but also the interests of domestic constituencies if they are to secure the “ratification” of an agreement. In many cases, securing the consent of those constituencies is unproblematic, whether because the matter at hand is uncontroversial, domestic interests are disengaged, or policy-makers have sufficient autonomy from them to ignore their objections. In other cases, however, the domestic game can play a huge part in determining the eventual outcome of the negotiating process. As the intensity of the debate within the United States in 2015 and the narrowness of the margin by which the JCPOA survived suggest, the American–Iranian dimension of the nuclear negotiations falls into the latter category.

Regionalism or Globalism? The Carter Administration and Vietnam

In January 1977 normalization of relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) was a significant element in the Carter administrations effort to reorient American foreign policy away from its previous preoccupation with containment. For Jimmy Carter, normalization was a symbolic means of ending a disastrous and debilitating episode in American foreign policy. For other policy-makers in the administration it was also the basis upon which to build a new American foreign policy in South-east Asia. In the first six months of 1977, the administration accordingly took a number of initiatives designed to overcome the remaining obstacles to normalization. When these efforts failed to achieve their desired effect, the pace of events began to slow and a further round of negotiations in December 1977 brought no progress. Nevertheless, contacts continued in 1978, and in September of that year the two governments finally agreed terms for the normalization of relations. By that time, however, a number of developments had begun to undermine the administrations initial strategy in South-east Asia, and in December 1978 US-Vietnamese normalization was postponed indefinitely. Only now, nearly two decades later, is normalization with Vietnam once again on the US foreign policy agenda. In the light of contemporary developments it is worth re-examining the reasons for the rise and fall of normalization during the Carter years. Accordingly, the aim of this article is to highlight some of the flaws in existing explanations of the above course of events and, in particular, of the decision-making process within the Carter administration in the last three months of 1978.

Obama and Iran: Explaining Policy Change

The American decision to ratify the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, abandoning the demand that Iran forego the right to enrich uranium, represented a significant change in US foreign policy. We seek to explain that change, employing a theory derived from the Foreign Policy Analysis literature on policy change. Having explained the lack of change in US policy from 2003 to 2013 as the effect of a number of “inertial” factors, we go on to argue that the Obama administration’s decision to change course can be explained by the combination of four factors: repeated policy failure (and the imminence of major losses resulting from that failure), Obama’s recognition of that failure, the availability of an alternative policy and the “multilateralization” of US policy toward Iran.

‘Present at Disintegration’: The United States and German Unification

To this day historians continue to debate the origins of Germany’s division after World War II, and whether or not it was the inevitable and logical consequence of the war itself, the product of communist intransigence or, as has recently been argued, the result of an ‘American decision’ to secure the more important Western part of the country against Soviet influence (Eisenberg, 1996). What they do not seem to question however is that once the country had been divided, there seemed to be little inclination thereafter to undo what had been done in the critical years between 1945 and 1949. Indeed, each time it looked as if the new status quo was under threat — as it certainly appeared to be in 1953 when workers rose up in the East, and then later in 1961 when East Germany began to haemorrhage badly — the Western powers appeared to be far more concerned to shore up the situation than to challenge it. Of course, as John Lewis Gaddis has pointed out, there were a number of reasons why the main powers were unwilling or unable to reunite Germany, one being the logic of the superpower conflict itself (Gaddis, 1997: 113–51). However, there were also historical considerations. While Germany’s division could easily be explained and justified in terms of Cold War realities, policy-makers privately agreed that underlying their attachment to the new arrangement was a concern to prevent Germany rising up again and threatening the peace. Some policy-makers did not even bother to hide their true feelings, and at times influential Americans such as Dean Acheson, George Ball and Henry Kissinger openly conceded that Germany’s division and West Germany’s integration into NATO was the only basis upon which to build a new European order; and those like George Kennan who challenged this essential truth were simply utopian schemers with little understanding of the real world.

The American Response to the Changed Vietnamese Position

The Vietnamese leadership wasted no time in translating their decision to accelerate the normalisation process with the United States into action. Even before the critical Central Committee meeting in June, Hanoi had begun to send up trial balloons to test the American response. The Inquirer of 13 May 1978 noted an article in the Far Eastern Economic Review which claimed that, ‘in a discreet message to Washington … Hanoi has expressed its willingness to shelve the issue of American aid in healing the wounds of war and to proceed with normalisation of diplomatic and commercial relations.’1

The Retreat from Normalisation

From the previous chapter it is clear that Zbigniew Brzezinski returned from Beijing at the end of May 1978 confirmed in his opinions that Vietnam was a Soviet ‘proxy’ and that China would view American moves towards normalisation with that country very unfavourably. His tendency, as President Carter put it, to ‘exalt’ the relationship with China,1 which was premised upon his preoccupation with the Soviet Union and how to contain it, added to his view that there was nothing to be gained from normal relations with Vietnam, led him to become increasingly vocal in his opposition to improved Vietnamese-American relations for fear of damaging the normalisation process with China.

Changing Vietnamese Policy: January 1978–July 1978

Following the failure to make substantial progress in the December 1977 Paris talks and the controversy surrounding the ‘Spy-Ring’ affair, significant contact between the American and Vietnamese governments ceased for a number of months. The Carter Administration, backed into a domestic political corner by Vietnamese intransigence and its own, somewhat clumsy, handling of the normalisation issue, felt unable to pursue further negotiations without a clear prior indication from Hanoi that it was ready to drop the aid precondition. The Vietnamese for their part, were engaged in the process of reviewing their entire range of foreign policy options in the face of rapidly escalating conflicts with their neighbours in China and Cambodia.

United States-Vietnam Relations 1975–7

Before discussing the policy of the Carter Administration towards Vietnam, it is necessary to establish the historical context within which that policy was initially formulated. In particular, it is necessary to understand the status of the Vietnamese-American relationship as inherited by the Carter Administration from the preceding Ford Administration. This is therefore the initial task of this chapter. In addition, an examination of the policy of the Ford Administration not only facilitates an understanding of the issues that stood between Vietnam and the United States and normalisation. The perspective and orientation of the Ford Adminstration’s policy, informed largely by the thinking of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, also provides a valuable example against which to contrast the initial policy of the Carter Administration, and to which may be compared any subsequent reorientation of US foreign policy.