In the Event of a North Korean Missile Crisis

Recommendations

Info

Abstract Although President Donald Trump’s hardline rhetoric has stymied diplomatic talks with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, the President is not the sole actor in international relations. Whether the two leaders are rational or emotionally intelligent will not bear as decisively on the simmering crisis as one may expect. Government actions and decisions are largely determined by existing organizations and bargaining among relevant players. In pinpointing the various factors that will influence American foreign policy with North Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis is analyzed using the three conceptual models outlined in Graham T. Allison’s Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis and "Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Though most analysts explain occurrences in foreign affairs as the rational and deliberate acts of united national governments, the Organizational Process Model (II) and the Bureaucratic Politics Model (III) offer more insightful and comprehensive explanations. Both Models II and III hold substantial predictive and explanatory power; using these two models, key lessons are extrapolated from the failures of the Kennedy administration and solutions to the North Korea crisis are proposed. 2
Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un’s reckless personalities have certainly escalated tensions between the US and North Korea. Fortunately, Graham T. Allison’s “conceptual schemes” extrapolate lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis, which can help the US avoid a war on the Korean peninsula. Whether the President is rational, irrational, emotionally wise or emotionally immature, is less important than the outputs of standard organizational processes. Leaders can only make decisions based on the information that organizations provide them. Governments “perceive problems through organizational sensors” and they “define alternatives and estimate consequences as organizations process information” (Allison 1969, 698). Presidents rarely make decisions on a clean slate because organizational outputs determine the menu of options available to the President during a nuclear crisis. Temperamental fitness helps to avert major crises only to a small extent. As Allison observes, “if one understands the structure of the situation and the face of the issue—which are determined by the organizational outputs—the formal choice of the leaders is frequently anti-climactic” (Allison 1969, 699). In addition to the Organizational Process Paradigm (Model II), the Bureaucratic Politics Paradigm (Model III) views international occurrences as the outcomes of “bargaining games” among major players. In other words, the actions and decisions of governments result from “compromise, coalition, competition, and confusion among government officials who see different faces of an issue” (Allison 1969, 708). Both models put little emphasis on rationality and presidential character, in contrast to the Rational Policy Paradigm (Model I) and Fred I. Greenstein in The Presidential Difference. In examining the factors that might bear decisively on the simmering crisis, this essay will focus on the importance of emotional intelligence, the greater importance of organizational outputs and bureaucratic decision-making, and possible solutions to the simmering crisis. 3
Page 1: In the Event of a North Korean Miss
Page 5 and 6: efforts are no longer seen as repre
Page 7 and 8: earlier. As Allison puts it, the
Page 9 and 10: a decision, and I’d hear absolute
Page 11 and 12: problem upon which the analyst focu
Page 13 and 14: of major individual players in Nort
Page 15: References Allison, Graham T., and

In the Event of a North Korean Missile Crisis

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?