Thesis advisor: Seth Jacobs / The Middle East was a tense place in 1976. In the past thirty years, Israel had fought four wars with its neighbors. President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger helped negotiate three partial settlements, two between Egypt and Israel and one between Syria and Egypt. But Israel maintained control of most of the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and most of the Sinai when Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976. One of his first actions as president was to embark on a course to attempt to bring peace to the region. He began with a plan for a comprehensive settlement between Israel and all its neighbors, but left office after only achieving a single peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. This thesis will examine the successes and failures of Carter’s foreign policy to bring peace to the Middle East. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: History Honors Program. / Discipline: History.

Degree awarded with distinction on 8 December 1993. Johannesburg 1993. / This dissertation begins with an examination of the salient principles and doctrines that have shaped American foreign policy. Since the end of the Second World War, the doctrines of American foreign policy have all been manifestations of the concept of containment that constituted the bedrock of U.S. policy towards its principal adversary the soviet Union. The Reagan Doctrine exhibited many of the traditional characteristics of its predecessor but, in reflecting shifting global realities, the Reagan Doctrine was also innovative and represented a new policy direction. Through the two selected case studies (Nicaragua and Afghanistan) the application of the Reagan Doctrine is evaluated with a view to determining its objectives, successes and failures.

This thesis examines America's post-Cold War relations with China in the context of the neoliberal vs. neorealist debate. It concludes that neorealism - the dominant school of thought in the international relations literature - is incapable of explaining America's response to China's rise in the post-Cold War era. Because America was the leading global power and China was its most obvious potential rival, a neorealist theory that prioritized the distribution of relative power would anticipate this relationship to be a most-likely case for American policymakers to pursue containment and prioritize relative gains. However, I leverage insights from more than 100 personal interviews to demonstrate that in reality American leaders have overwhelmingly preferred a strategy of neoliberal engagement with China that has remained decidedly positive-sum in nature. My explanation for this consistent, bipartisan preference is that American policymakers have not adopted the neorealist assumption that conflict is inevitable between existing and rising great powers. As a result, policymakers have not focused exclusively on how to minimize the relative costs of a potential conflict with China by trying to contain China's relative power and limit America' exposure to China (as they did with the Soviet Union in the Cold War). Instead, policymakers have subscribed to the neoliberal belief that conflict can be avoided, and that increasing engagement and interdependence is the best strategy to maintain peace. They have pursued this strategy despite acknowledging that engagement and interdependence have increased the costs of a potential conflict by helping to facilitate China's rise in both an absolute and relative sense, and by increasing America's exposure to China. This thesis helps to define the differences between hedging and containing strategies. It argues that while relative material power is often important in deciding whether to hedge or not hedge, these purely material calculations play no role in decisions of whether to pursue containment or engagement. Instead, the decision to contain or not hinges on the target state's behavior and what that reveals about the regime's underlying intentions. Within this new framework, I argue that American policymakers' strategy has been to engage China economically while simultaneously hedging militarily. Furthermore, to the extent that American policymakers have expressed increased concerns about China in recent years, this has been primarily a consequence of China's increased assertiveness - not changes in its relative power.

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The early September day in 1951 that brought the Pacific War to an official end, with the signing of a treaty of peace, concluded as representatives of Japan and the United States signed the Bilateral Security Treaty. The security treaty symbolized new realities of international relations, just as the peace treaty had buried the old. By cementing into place a strategic alliance between the former Pacific antagonists, the treaty represented the great and lasting achievement of postwar American diplomacy in Asia. Nevertheless, the treaty was both the outcome and the perpetuation of a stereotyped and lopsided relationship, now fixed firmly into place, as a Japan diminished by defeat acceded to the necessity of a security embrace with its former conqueror, and the United States enlisted a most valued, albeit a most reluctant ally for the ongoing struggle to meet and defeat the Soviet threat. At the end of the Pacific War such an outcome had been beyond the pale. The security treaty was the product of years of crisis adaptation. Hopes that the U.S. could make China the great power of Asia were dashed by revolution. As cherished verities of U.S. diplomacy fell by the wayside, new truisms, based upon strategic interests inherited from victory in the Pacific and the cold war policy of containment, staunchly rose to assume their place. As a result, U.S. attitudes towards Japan underwent a tortuous reassessment. The initial occupation policies of disarmament and reform were replaced by the urgent need to enlist Japan as a vital cold war asset. However, this reorientation was not easily accomplished. Competing interests within the U.S. Government clashed over the means necessary to insure Japan's security and stability, while also guaranteeing the creation of a reliable ally -- a debate that became ever more heated as the cold war intensified. The Japanese, at great disadvantage, skillfully attempted to negotiate a role for themselves in the postwar world, eager for an alliance, yet fearful of domination. The goal of this thesis is to chart and document the evolution of this policy transformation, in all its twists and odd turns. To accomplish this task I turned to an older tradition of political science, one widely practiced at the dawn of the discipline. To be sure, judicious use was made of many of the theories and methodological approaches prevalent currently. Yet while useful at times, these methods often failed to adequately explain those indeterminate moments of idiosyncratic chance and contingency of events upon which so much, to my mind, the final outcome depended. I turned therefore to a more historical approach. My primary sources became the diplomatic record as revealed in the Foreign Relations of the United States and the memoirs of those who participated in the fashioning of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. By the time the security treaty was concluded, the agreement reached was not one of shared joint purpose, but one which defined and gave sanction to diverging national aims that could not, nonetheless, be realized in isolation. The continued U.S. military presence in Japan had been the goal of a policy process ultimately defined in military terms, as the final bastion of cold war containment on the rim of Asia. The Japanese understood the need for security in a volatile world, but not the necessity of providing it for themselves, as the postwar political system slowly organized around emerging economic priorities. It was an odd arrangement, but one which met respective needs and desires. Yet its lack of reciprocity and mutual commitment has ensured through the years the continuation of an ambiguous and uncertain alliance.

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