American foreign assistance to the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in South Vietnam was a controversial issue during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, straining the executive-legislative relationship and provoking discord within Congress. For Dwight D. Eisenhower, the programme was the best means of containing communism, short of ordering American forces to the region. Both major parties were divided on the issue. Conservatives and liberals in each party perceived foreign aid differently. / Old Guard Republicans and southern Democrats were skeptical about the expensive assistance programme. They contended that the "give-away" legislation would undermine Saigon's resolve to attain economic and political autonomy. Generally suspicious of America's allies, conservatives were especially critical toward Diem since they considered him an unproven ally who could take advantage of United States' generosity. Liberal Republicans and Democrats, who harboured an internationalist perspective, acknowledged foreign aid as a legitimate means of countering communism. Perceiving Diem as an alternative to Ho Chi Minh's leadership and Bao Dai's incompetence, liberals supported the Premier's pro-democratic aspirations. / The French reversal at Dien Bien Phu, the "fiasco" of the Geneva Conference, and the subsequent foreign assistance investigations by the legislative branch brought about a tenuous truce between conservatives and liberals. Although fundamental differences remained, both groups were convinced that a reappraisal of the aid programme was needed before the President committed America too heavily in Vietnam. The increasing commitments by Eisenhower's successor and his lack of co-operation with Capitol Hill solidified the conservative-liberal entente. Diem's assassination in November 1963 sobered Congress and strengthened its disapproval of America's assistance policy. Such congressional activism peaked by the late 1960's and early 1970's. The experience acquired during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years allowed Congress, not the President, to oppose United States military intervention in Vietnam during the Nixon Presidency. It also provided the initiative to rationalize the foreign aid legislation, favoring economic and technical development rather than military commitments.

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There is no abstract available for this thesis.

United States-Venezuelan Relations during the Dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jimenez explores both United States government and private business dealings with the Venezuelan dictator.The thesis centers first on the political philosophy and government of Perez Jimenez detailing to a limited extent government expenditures as well as some analysis of the regime's financial priorities. The third chapter deals with the repressive practices of the Perez Jimenez government with specific references to labor, press, and the political opposition. The next section discusses United States government and private business relations with Venezuela, such as military assistance, Export-Import Bank loans, and private investments. The following chapter deals with trade and tariffs with special emphasis on oil import quotas. Throughout the thesis, the nature of the regime and United States relationship with the dictator are examined.

This thesis has explored the early United States policy towards Indochina (later Vietnam), traced that policy through the World War II years, and evaluated how clearly that policy was established. Emphasis was placed on an evaluation of the trusteeship proposal of President Roosevelt, for it is held that that policy position demonstrated a rare insight into the course of history long before the rest of the world would come to accept the inevitability of nationalistic movements in the colonial world. With Roosevelt's death, the loss of this insight among high level policy-makers played a significant part in putting the United States on the road to Vietnam.

This dissertation seeks to expand our understanding of variation in foreign policy. Although we have a series of large, extant literatures dealing with the sources of foreign policy, there has been less attention paid over the last decade to understanding why states change their behavior. At the same time, the thesis argues that foreign policy change is best understood as a result of the role of individual decision-makers and the role that emotion plays in their foreign policy calculations. / Foreign policy depends on the decisions made by individual leaders. The type of individual thus determines the specific policy. Here individuals are categorized as ideological or adaptable. Ideological individuals are more rigid in their belief structures, are more likely to select policies that fit with their extant understandings of the world and the position of their state in it, and more likely to rely on the emotional or affective appeal an object or issue holds for them. Adaptable leaders are more flexible, not tied to specific ideologies or reliant on emotion to guide their thinking, and thus more likely to choose or learn ideas that best respond to changing environmental conditions. At the same time, how a state's decision-making institutions are structured tells us how likely it is that an individual's own predilections matter. In polities where decision-making is centralized (e.g., in the office of the prime minister), individuals have greater leeway to put their ideas (whether based on their ideological outlooks or shifting environmental circumstances) into practice, while in de-centralized polities other actors constrain the leader from autonomous decision-making. In such cases, it is likely that an individual's ideas will conform to those of the constraining actors. Finally, the role of ideas is taken into consideration, as the dominant national ideas about foreign policy regarding a specific issue-area help us better understand the context in which individuals make (or change) foreign policy. / This model is tested against alternate explanations---systemic imperatives, Constructivism, public opinion, poliheuristic theory, and prospect theory---in two case studies: the Israeli decision to pursue and sign the 1993 Oslo Accords, and the 2002 decision by the Islamist government in Turkey to actively lobby for membership in the European Union. Both foreign policies represent significant variation, and both provide important theoretical and empirical puzzles for scholars.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the United States to dominance marked the start of a new era in international relations. The need to study accommodation as a security strategy in the developing world stemmed from this major development. In this context, this thesis attempts to add to the growing literature on accommodative strategies by analysing the dynamics of accommodation in protracted conflicts in the developing world. The specific case selected in the search for insights is the evolution of Syrian policy towards Israel in the post-Cold War era. Three instances of attempted accommodation are studied: the Madrid Peace Conference (1991), the Wye Talks (1995), and the Shepherdstown Talks (1999). This thesis argues that the main explanatory factors for accommodation in this case are to be found in the external politico-military sphere. On the objective level, the role of powerful third parties and the changes in the opponent's policies particularly stand out. On the subjective level, external politico-military concerns, in the desire to avoid potentially permanent losses, appear to be the prime generator of accommodative moves.

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What explains the lack of normalized relations between Egypt and Iran? Despite mutual potential benefits Egypt and Iran could have gained from normalized bilateral relations over the past several decades, a range of factors prevented them from doing so, including personality politics, domestic political and economic considerations, as well as regional and external alliances and competing visions of regional order. Accordingly, the trajectory of modern Egyptian policy toward Iran has been non-linear. Realist and constructivist schools of International Relations theory, on their own, cannot adequately explain how Egypt's foreign policy toward Iran varied from times of hostility, friendship, stagnation, and openness under Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and Muhammad Morsi. As such, neoclassical realism - with its emphasis on the interaction between geopolitical structural conditions and the roles of leadership and domestic politics in shaping a state's foreign policy - offers the best framework for analyzing Egypt's foreign policy behavior toward Iran.