The United States military is more than a tool of hard power. It provides the United States with a suite of diplomatic tools and is itself an important producer of American soft power. Though the many repertoires of American defense diplomacy have been carefully studied and the overall phenomenon has been theoretically investigated, their origins have not received similar attention. This research aims to uncover the causes of American defense diplomacy through an account of the American military's institutional development. It is common for defense diplomacy to be presented either as an outgrowth of 9/11 when the United States was engaged in globe-spanning irregular warfare or as part of a drive for global hegemony after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, this research finds otherwise. A key factor in the development of contemporary defense diplomacy was the suite of institutional changes in the American national security apparatus in the 1980s. In particular, the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 reconfigured the power relationships and interests of key elements of the US military thereby overdetermining the development of defense diplomacy. With this finding, this research centers Congress as a key driver of American foreign policy and highlights the sub-state institutional dynamics within the foreign policy apparatus that produced, and reproduce, defense diplomacy as an enduring habit of American statecraft. / Doctor of Philosophy / Using a broad array of archival documents, interviews, and other sources, this research investigated the (unintended) consequences of the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. Those reforms reconfigured the power relationships, incentives, and preferences of the US foreign policy apparatus which in turn yielded new habits of American statecraft. Foremost among these new habits was "defense diplomacy" which, beginning in the late 1980s, became a common, enduring, and popular American foreign policy repertoire. This dissertation focuses on Goldwater-Nichols, the emergence of defense diplomacy, and its institutionalization. This project places special emphasis on the US military's central and eastern European state-building and democratization efforts during the twilight of the Cold War and the dawn of the New World Order. This is a historical institutionalist account contributing to the literature on both the "militarization" of foreign policy as well as the "civilianization" of the military.

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