DAVID, C. P., CARROL, A. N., and SELDEN, A. Z (1993). “Foreign policy failure in the Whitehouse: Reappraising the fall of the Shah and the Iran-Contra Affair”. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. (original) (raw)
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This paper reviews the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra scandal by approaching it from Kenneth Waltz' Three-Level Analysis. First, a brief contextualization of the developments in Nicaragua are provided. Then, the International System at the moment of the Affair is described. This is then followed by a review of the US’ situation as a State, including its forms to exercise power and its decision-making model on the matter. After that, the individual dimension is taken into account, analyzing Reagan’s persona, his style of leadership and the psychological techniques that may have been used in the Iran-Contra scandal. This includes an interpretation of the most important documents released so far by the US government about the subject, which give unique information from the president’s inner circle.
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The US policy toward the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua represented one of the most complex and most controversial chapters in the history of American foreign policy. The tiny Nicaragua, a nation of 2.5 million, retained the complete attention of a superpower 100 times larger. In fact, few foreign policy issues commanded the attention of the foreign policy establishment as much as the Nicaraguan Revolution. For over a decade, US policy makers directed an exceptional amount of human and intellectual energy to design the lines of a complex policy. US efforts to contain the Nicaraguan revolution took the shape of an extended low-intensity conflict based on diplomatic pressure, economic pressure, intelligence operations, and a covert counter-revolutionary war, mixed with a colossal public relations campaign. The US-Nicaraguan relations stimulated severe political debates in Washington, caused one of the most noticeable Executive-Legislative disagreements, and even led to one of the most delicate presidential scandals in the political history of the United States. But why was Washington so worried about the Nicaraguan Revolution? Why did such a tiny country with no vital strategic resources, and with less than one percent of total US foreign investment, warrant so much attention from the American power elite? This article tries to offer some answers to the Nicaraguan issue through a description of the various strategies and instruments of policies used by the Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations. 1
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Journal of World Sociopolitical Studies, 2021
The anti-American inclination of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s foreign policymaking is well established, and the bitter aspects of the two nation’s history well known. However, to assert a simple causal relationship between history and foreignpolicy structure portrays the Islamic Republic’s anti-Americanism as inevitable, eternal and unrelated to actors’ agency. This article disputes this simple structural understanding by drawing on Greener’s method of applying path-dependency theory to political science. We first identify the ideas and structure of revolutionary Iran, benefiting in particular from the complementary insights of postcolonial theory. Following, we examine US policy choices in the Islamic Republic’s formative period of 1978–79—specifically those related to human rights, the shah and direct US intervention—and how these were perceived and acted upon in Tehran. Our findings indicate that American actions and Iranian decisions both influenced the establishment of a path-dependent process of perception and perpetration that continues until today. Successive Iranian governments have asserted that America ignores Iranian’s human rights, supports their enemies, and pursues direct intervention, while successive US government actions, motivated by Iranian counteractions, have generated ample evidence to validate such claims. This can explain how a spiral of distrust emerged between the two nations. Keywords: Ayatollah Khomeini, Foreign policy, Iran-US relations, Islamic Revolution of Iran, Jimmy Carter, Path dependency, Postcolonialism