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Traditional descriptions of state behavior (and, in particular, realism) focus on power and national interests as explanatory variables. Constructivists take a different view, looking at how state interests and identity are constructed and communicated. This paper looks at a difficult case for realists ? large-scale superpower military failure ? and answers the question: How do superpowers explain failure? The paper discusses the cases of two failures: the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. How do leaders of superpowers present a lost war, and, in particular, how do they use television to tell the story? The answer to this question involves understanding why leaders believed they had to explain anything at all, and how they shaped the manner in which the story was told. This, then, directly addresses the literature on constructivism and international relations. What is particularly interesting about these cases is how similar the stories were, despite the differences in political and media systems. The paper covers the time periods associated with the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam (January 20, 1969 until March 29, 1973) and Soviet troops from Afghanistan (between Gorbachev’s announcement on February 8, 1988 to February 15, 1989). Extensive use of American archival data and memos, including daily news summaries completed by White House staff member Patrick Buchanan with handwritten comments and orders by President Nixon, give a fascinating picture of the American President’s media strategy and rationale. The Soviet case incorporates information obtained from interviews with Soviet leaders and television officials, recent archival data, and content analyses of Soviet television. The paper argues that leadership communication strategies, including how leaders frame the story of withdrawal from a failed war, must be understood by focusing on both domestic political considerations and concerns about international identity and the ability to project power. Policy legitimacy, public opinion, and elite bargaining are certainly important, but do not entirely explain why and how leaders account for failure. For example, leaders must balance domestic considerations with perceived international imperatives; Soviet and American leaders alike believed they had particular responsibilities related to interests and power in the international system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper aims to explain the causal factors behind the changes in the behavior of radical Islamist groups towards hegemonic powers during and after the Cold War era. This should be achieved by comparing and analyzing the responses of the radical Islamist trend (the Salafi-Jihadi Current) in the Middle East to the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan (1979-1989) during the Cold War and to the US military presence in the Arabian Peninsula (1991-Present) in the Post-Cold war era. The research question in this paper is: : In their declared ?war? against foreign military presence in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia as well as on the ruling regimes of the two states, why did radical Islamists internationalize their operations against the Post-Cold War hegemon and its allies as opposed to confining their operations to the local theatre during the Cold-War era? In other words, why were Washington and New York City targeted in the Post-Cold War period during the American presence in the Arabian Peninsula, but neither Moscow nor Dushanbe (Capital Tajikistan soviet socialist republic?close to the Afghan borders) were targeted during the Cold War? To answer that question, I shall focus on three independent variables. The first is the international political context and how the changes within it affected the radical Islamists? behavior and strategies. The second is the changing regional contexts, which involves the changes in the policies of Middle Eastern and South Asian regimes towards the ex-combatants of the Afghan conflict as well as the impacts of the Second Gulf War on the Middle East region. The third variable is the ideological one pertaining to an evolution in the Jihadi ideology leading to its radicalization and internationalization. The expected findings of the research will relate the post-Cold War regional and international changes to some of the causes of the conflicts between hegemons and radical Islamists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem, though it is only seldom recognised, for a great many teachers, commentators and those who regard themselves as members of the informed public, is that the United States of America is too much with us ? economically, culturally and strategically. It is, in brief, understood (where it is understood at all) commonsensically ? which is to say with a tolerance erring on indulgence and certainly without the rigorous and undiscriminating criticism which would have attended our analysis of the former Soviet Union, or even of our current attempts to make sense of, for example, the politics of Argentina and Zimbabwe. Lost in this disposition is the comprehension of the shadows mutually cast by the USA and war on each other since the advent of European settlement. Accordingly, this paper takes its general bidding from Bruce Cummings’ injunction that, with neo-liberalism’s denial of the value of understanding the diversity of human experience, we need to restore the relevant idiosyncrasies and details which differentiate areas or countries from each other. For the good of both our besieged academic disciplines, and, more ambitiously, global governance, we need to conduct our research on the USA as an area study, just like any other. More specifically, given the present hyper-power status of the USA, this paper will be concerned with a focus on the USA as an historical and contemporary actor via its theories and practices of war and peace ? thus taking into consideration its strategic culture and distinctive ways of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of WWII, US policymakers were concerned about both the security of the United States as well as the stability of the international milieu. To achieve these ends Washington pursued a mix of institution- and polity-building at the international and domestic level, including the reform of the education systems of Japan and Germany. Yet we cannot infer that the latter necessarily followed from the former especially if we take into account the radically different policies toward education reform in Central and Eastern Europe engineered by the Soviet Union, whose general concerns for security and stability arguably mirrored those of the United States. The puzzle is to explain the variation in the character and scope of education reforms which cannot be clearly determined from the antecedent interests in security and stability. This paper claims that the causal mechanism accounting for the movement along the path from broad interests to specific policy outcomes is ideational: contrasting ideas about the purpose, content and structure of education explain not only why the reforms pursued by the Soviet Union and the United States differed, but also why, internally, they took the shape they did. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the conference paper "Reagan and Gorbachev: Altercasting at the End of the Cold War" presented at the "46th Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association" in Honolulu, Hawaii in March 2005. The author analyzes the relations of Soviet Union and the U.S. in the transforming security environment at the end of cold war. He argues that politician Mikhail Gorbachev disapproved the implications of strategic rationality.

October 11-12, 1986 marked a seminal event in United States-Soviet relations. For these two days, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev held meetings in Reykjavik, Iceland for what became one of the most remarkable meetings ever held between the two superpowers. The tangible product of the meeting was the basis for the INF Treaty and START, however, it is the proposal which failed to reach written form that sparks the most interest. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev engaged each other in a negotiating session in which the ultimate proposal was the elimination of all nuclear weapons. The Cold War was still in full force and although Gorbachev possessed lofty domestic goals, the domestic climate in both nations was not favorable to the abolishment of nuclear weapons. How and why this dramatic proposal was made, and ultimately rejected, is the focus of this paper. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two ways of looking at Sovereignty. Realists make sovereignty a near-synonym of statehood and the axiomatic basis of the theory of international anarchy. By contrast, constructivists tend to view sovereignty as a norm, a social construction. Krasner’s a modified Realism accepts the notion that sovereignty is a construction but denies it constraining power as a norm, functioning only as hypocrisy. Alexander Wendt accepts it as a weak norm internalized only to the second degree in some aspects and in other respects accepts with Realists that sovereignty is a definitional attribute of statehood. Some constructivists emphasize its normative role further while post-modern constructivists emphasize its ephemeral value in a system of arbitrary symbols. The authors argue that state behavior demonstrates that sovereignty is a norm of the international system but that states regularly seek to evade or test its constraints. The task is to build a framework that can specify: 1. What constitutes behavior that demonstrates recognition of sovereignty as a norm 2. Which states act within the constraints of the norm of sovereignty and which do not 3. When states act within the norm and when they do not. This paper distinguishes the material contours of sovereignty from its normative and socially constructed features to show how leading powers shape the normative features of Sovereignty to construct an international system. We will look at Britain following the Napoleonic Wars, the Great Powers at Versailles, The US and the Soviet Union after WWII as a basis to understand the problems confronting the institutionalization of US hegemony today. A self-help system is constrained only by the gradient of power relations among states. Normative restraint is a direct alternative to reliance on one’s own power and that the context for normative restraint is a form of social knowledge based on the expectation of reciprocal restraints on the part of other actors. Powerful actors in the international system have the least incentive to prefer normative restraints to self-reliance. Preponderant power gives little incentive to respect the sovereignty of smaller, weaker states absent a powerful countervailing coalition. Ikenberry shows that the organization of a system of mutual restraints falls to leading powers at the time of post-War settlements and that these orders are designed to maximize the long-term advantages of leading states (Ikenberry 2001). Ikenberry suggests that the norm of sovereignty became to postwar order under Westphalia, but this was a limited European system. Little and Buzan show however, that the sovereign state became the norm of the international system only following decolonization after the Second World War. Ikenberry’s methodology suggests that the norm of sovereignty and institutional binding are alternative forms of system and international order, whereas the chronology developed by Little and Buzan (2000) suggests that sovereignty becomes universal only with the emergence of embedded liberalism in the post WWII era. In the post cold war era a new challenge to the universality of the norm of sovereignty has emerged with the twin projects of humanitarian intervention and the deliberate pursuit of a ‘democratic peace’ contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the US. Is universal democracy displacing sovereignty as a universal norm? Great power disunity surrounding the Iraq war is seen as conflict over competing norms as the basis of the international system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diehl and Goertz (2000) and Valeriano (2003) have investigated certain types of rivalry linkages. Diehl and Goertz (2000) focus on rivalries that are linked through a common foe or a common alliance partner. Valeriano (2001) investigates the impact of simultaneous rivalries on the severity of conflict within a rivalry. What is left is to look at rivalry groups. Some rivals are not dyadic, but groups of actors inter-linked together. For example, the rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union is deeply linked with China. This paper will identify which groups of states make up a complex rivalry; or those rivalries that include more than two interstate actors. Once the initial dataset is created, this analysis will allude to the dynamics of conflict within complex rivals. Do these types of rivalries experience war more frequently? Do they last longer than other types of rivalries? Are they more severe than other types of rivals? Not all rivals are strictly dyadic and the interactions of complex rivals may suggest that these types of rivals have significantly different conflict propensities and foreign policy practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the relationship between the United States and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. This paper examines the growth of American economic, political, and strategic influence in the region. Economically this region is important because of its natural resources. Political and strategically it is important in American counter terrorism policy as well as supporting the military effort in Afghanistan. It also remains a dynamic of American-Russian relations as Moscow attempts to maintain and reassert its influence in the region. The thesis of this work is that increased American involvement in the region weakens these states and draws the US into supporting dictatorial regimes. In addition this could cause the US being drawn into conflicts in Central Asia further extending its military, economic, and political resources. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enemy images were mostly an object of study during the Cold War and especially in the context of American-Soviet relations. With the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet threat, it was assumed that enemy images have lost their bases. But enemy images have not disappeared, and their foundations remain active. While factors of identity, perception, socialization and group processes play a continuing role, the focus of enemy images has shifted. After a pause of some years, academic literature is beginning to catch up with the new developments of enemy images. This paper takes stock of what the current academic literature tells us about enemy images and their dynamics. Trends are extracted and gaps pointed to. The paper also includes results of an empirical study on enemy images in current American foreign policy. In the study, qualitative content analysis and interviews were combined with a social constructivist lens. Proposals are made on how to constructively deal with images of enmity. The paper closes with recommendations on how to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of enemy images in today’s context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the late 1970s, nuclear war no longer seemed to be an option for either Washington or Moscow, and the arms race was transformed into a competition of conventional force multipliers and innovative military concepts. Western doctrines, based upon scientific-technological developments, capitalized on precision guided munitions for destroying Soviet echelons deep in the rear. The search by Soviet military theoreticians for new methods of warfare to counteract the West, stimulated the debate over the Military-Technical Revolution (MTR) ? a conceptualization of the changing nature of warfare under the impact of the emerging technologies. Unlike the West, which focused on the narrow implications of the weapons in question, the Soviet conceptualizations regarding the MTR claimed that the new range of innovations constituted a fundamental discontinuity, which would substantially change the operational vision of the nature of war. Following almost a decade of Western conceptual myopia, the Soviet MTR vision was adopted and adapted by the US, designated as the Revolution in Military Affairs and disseminated to modern armies all over the world.Although, this conceptual confrontation produced breakthroughs in military thought, provided a striking example of rivals' adaptive learning and illustrated the diffusion of military ideas from West to East and back again, little attention has been devoted to it in the professional literature. The research in this field has failed to address crucial questions such as: How can one explain the different ways in which military innovations, based on similar technologies, developed in different countries? How does conceptual military knowledge diffuse through the international system? Why did the Soviets prevail qualitatively over the West in conceptualizing military-technological realities? Why did it take the US defense community close to a decade to realize the correctness of Soviet assumptions?Utilizing declassified Soviet sources in tandem with American archival materials, this paper seeks to bridge the gap between the significance of this conceptual military interaction, on the one hand, and the inadequacy of the academic debate about how it actually took place on the other. The paper argues that although the Americans were the first to incorporate state of the art technologies into the new concept of operations, the Soviets eclipsed them in realizing the revolutionary essence embodied in the military-technological shifts. Only in the early 1990s, by analyzing how American military power was reflected in Soviet eyes during the previous decade, were US strategists fully able to comprehend the significance of what they had produced. The paper elaborates on theories of 'strategic culture' in order to suggest a plausible explanation for the vastly different intellectual approaches of the West and East. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the physical aspect of human territoriality with respect to the exploration of outer space. The desire for space exploration was competed between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Information on the use of the technology for the exploration of space as a tool of national interest, sovereignty and national security is also presented.

The spring of 1984 witnessed a major confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over Iran, as the Iran-Iraq war moved to a flashpoint. The United States successfully deflected a Soviet attempt to draw Iran into its orbit and preserve western access to the Iranian oil fields, and opened the door for an attempt by the Reagan administration to improve relations with Tehran. The Soviet failure, on the other hand, produced a crisis of strategy and a change of leadership, eventually paving the way for the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev to power. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, the world has little balanced against the newly "hegemonic" United States in ways many balance-of-power theorists anticipated, prompting a variety of explanations for the apparent anomaly. While scholars wedded to materialist concepts of power little question whether the United States has the military dominance necessary to prompt balancing behavior, many actual and potential American adversaries note that U.S. military strengths, although real, are narrowly focused on winning mid-intensity conventional battles and little affect much of the expanding scope of political/military conflict that determines the outcomes of wars. Adversaries have learned to avoid U.S. military strengths, to exploit American political-military vulnerabilities like aversion to casualties, and to turn misused American material military assets against U.S. interests. Because the United States for most of the world neither credibly threatens nor deters a wide variety of political/military actions, and because even "weak" actors retain opportunities to defy or beat the United States, it is politically and economically costly but unnecessary to balance the limited range of functions the U.S. military performs well. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can international crises help to push long-term rivals toward peace? If so, how and under what circumstances are such crises likely to promote rivalry de-escalation or termination? In an effort to address these questions, I examine an understudied but highly volatile Cold War crisis. Precipitated by an ambitious NATO military exercise, the Able Archer 83 crisis, like the Cuban Missile Crisis 21 years earlier, appears to have pushed the superpowers to the brink of nuclear warfare. Information revealed by Soviet defectors about Moscow's anxiety and possible nuclear response jarred U.S. President Ronald Reagan, altering his understanding of Soviet threat perceptions and pushing him toward negotiation, arms control, and peacemaking with what he had dubbed the "evil empire." By revealing information, the Able Archer 83 crisis had a profound impact on a key individual, cracking mirror images and triggering a reevaluation of attitudes and policy orientation toward the Soviets that may have constituted the very first step toward a thaw in Soviet-American relations. The case illustrates how volatile, sudden events can act as catalysts of rapprochement between rivals, helping to address the question of timing of initial moves toward peacemaking. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses arguments about how realism views the management of power. It explains the strategies implemented by states to gather sufficient military assets including external balancing, internal balancing, bandwagoning, buck-passing and appeasement. It cites that realists ridiculed the claim that appeasement will moderate the dispute in hand and will make the threat recede because they assume that states seek power. It examines the policies of the Soviet Union and the U.S. on the Cold War.

Discussions of the Carter administration’s human rights policies tend to fall into two main camps. One group of scholars sees the policies as idealistic and naﶥ while other scholars and critics generally view them as inconsistent or even dangerously misguided. More general analyses of Carter’s foreign policies have argued that he was acutely aware of limitations in the wake of the Vietnam war and that his policies were either “a pragmatic strategy of adjustment to declining US global power,” or an attempt to move away from a focus on the Soviet Union in a “quest for a global community”. These arguments often do not appreciate Carter’s own rationale for morality in politics. A careful analysis of his early political career and the context of his policies reveals that Carter conceived of morality as of a power resource and that, far from approaching US foreign policy from an idealistic perspective, he endeavored to add different instruments to the arsenal at his disposal and, ultimately, enhance American power. Jimmy Carter came to associate morality with power early in his political career and, perceiving that the US image abroad had been tarnished after Vietnam and Watergate, sought to strengthen the position of the United States by taking a moral stand in international affairs, notably through the introduction of his human rights policy. Carter chose to enhance the visibility of intangible power resources (morality, superior ideology, national unity) when material resources appeared inadequate. Carter’s human rights policies represented a fundamentally realist approach to the relations between the two superpowers as well as to the need to repair and enhance US prestige in the world. To demonstrate that Carter had a pragmatic, rather than an idealistic approach to politics, I first examine his early political career and his record on civil rights. That record indicates that despite his personal preferences Carter did not take a public stand on racial issues and, in fact, cast himself as a racial conservative when it was politically prudent to do so. In the second part, I examine the 1976 presidential campaign and demonstrate that Carter argued for the need to reshape US-Soviet relations in American favor. To that end, he developed a rationale for morality in politics that was fundamentally power-centered. He consistently spoke of morality as of a power resource on par with other, material resources. Third, I examine the way the new human rights policy was applied by the Carter administration and conclude that it was almost exclusively directed against the Soviet Union. Other aspects of Carter’s foreign policy confirm a confrontational approach to the other superpower. Finally, I examine the application of the human rights policy towards allies and demonstrate that important allies were not significantly affected by it and that Congressional activism largely accounts for turning Latin America into a target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1991, the United States has sponsored the Nunn-Lugar program to assist the states of the former Soviet Union in the dismantlement of their weapons of mass destruction, secure their weapons of mass destruction materials, technology, and expertise, and convert their WMD facilities to other purposes. Does the Nunn-Lugar program have international security applications beyond the existing U.S. initiatives with the states of the former Soviet Union? Given that the United States has conducted a threat reduction program in several states of the former Soviet Union since 1991, it may be possible to define a Nunn-Lugar model for international security cooperation that generalizes the existing program’s concepts and lessons learned. Whether or not the existing program has been a success, modifications to the concept might allow Nunn-Lugar to be applied in other regions and to other types of security threats. The possibility of geographically expanding Nunn-Lugar beyond FSU’s strategic weapons of mass destruction complex has become a hot topic within the U.S. and abroad. While elements of this study may be largely speculative, its foundation will rely on the experiences gained in the FSU and the lessons from historical precedents such as the Marshall Plan. The evidence to support this analysis is expected to be anecdotal. However, initiatives are already underway in Congress and foreign legislatures to begin this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposes an alternative explanation for why China decided to be aligned with the Soviet Union even at the cost of friendly and beneficial relations with the U.S. Formation of the Sino-Soviet alliance; Implication of the victory of the Chinese Communists for the Soviet Union; Consequence of the poor relations between Moscow, Russia and Beijing, China.

The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed in 1963, was the first arms control agreement signed between the two Cold War superpowers. Yet, despite a broad consensus in the United States, a stated desire by the Soviet Union, and worldwide support to reach an agreement, nearly ten years passed between the initial proposal for a the ban and its actual signing. This paper explores the causes of this delay during the Kennedy administration. President Kennedy was confident that he could come to a swift agreement when he came into office, but it took most of his truncated presidency to reach just a partial agreement. Again and again Kennedy believed he was close to reaching an agreement with his counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, only to have his hopes dashed. Khrushchev’s repeated actions caused Kennedy to stop viewing the negotiations as a way to reach an agreement, but instead as a propaganda platform where he could show the world it was Soviet intransigence that blocked agreement. Interestingly, the Cuban Missile Crisis and its aftermath spurred both sides to finally reach an agreement. Examining these negotiations in detail can provide lessons for contemporary negotiations over nuclear programs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a mathematical model of international system that I published in Kybernetes (Vol. 31, Issue 7/8, pp. 1073-1098)I used the mathematical formula of entropy in order to evaluate the degree of structural organization and several main properties of international systems.On the basis of this model I show in the paper that it is probable that the achievement of power equality among the main actors of an international system decreases the international tension regardless of the system's nature (bi-polar or multi-polar).This theoretical conclusion is at the same time consistent with an empirical observation. Two of the most important disarmament/arms limitation agreements between the United States and the former Soviet Union were concluded at the points in time in which the best fitted lines describing the trends of their military expenditures intersect. What means - when each perceived the other as an equal power. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will attempt to explain the adoption of "extreme measures" as methods of interrogation by intelligence organizations. I will use a "most dissimilar systems" design comparing the use of torture by the United States and the Soviet Union. I will present a comparative data analysis of the interrogation methods used to establish the basis for comparison. I will use Butte's method of comparing paralell historical sequences to test a series of hypotheses concerning the decision to adopt torture as a method of interrogation. Specifically, I will explore the role of leadership styles in political time, responses to political crises, and the creation of accomodating informal institutions as determinants of the adoption of torture as a method of interrogation by security personnel. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]