U.S. Presidents and Foreign Policy Mistakes [Hardcover]

Mistakes, in the form of bad decisions, are a common feature of every presidential administration, and their consequences run the gamut from unnecessary military spending, to missed opportunities for foreign policy advantage, to needless bloodshed. This book analyzes a range of presidential decisions made in the realm of US foreign policywith a special focus on national securityover the past half century in order to create a roadmap of the decision process and a guide to better foreign policy decision-making in the increasingly complex context of 21st century international relations.Mistakes are analyzed in two general categoriesones of omission and ones of commission within the context of perceived threats and opportunities. Within this framework, the authors discuss how past scholarship has addressed these questions and argue that this research has not explicitly identified a vantage point around which the answers to these questions revolve. They propose game theory models of complex adaptive systems for minimizing bad decisions and apply them to test cases in the Middle East and Asia. Depth-breadth trade-offs are unavoidable in all scholarship: but not here. This book does a superb job of integrating historical, game-theoretic, and psychological approaches and deepening our understanding of how to avoid miscalculations that can cause grievous harm on a massive scale. In this book, the authors offer a map for diagnosing foreign policy mistakes and a compass for steering clear of them. In this impressive research, Walker and Malici address the serious consequences of US presidents' foreign policy mistakes that proved costly to the US in terms of lives and money. . . Recommended. Walker and Malici have produced a rich study that reviews a wide range of US foreign policy mistakes over the past century . . . The real strength of the Walker and Malici analysis is in the typology of mistakes along two different dimensions: failures of analysis and of prescription anl'