(Page 4 of 49) - U.S. Presidents and Foreign Policy Mistakes in the Exercise of Power: Conceptual and Empirical Perspectives authored by Walker, Stephen. and Malici, Akan.

1965, Ronald Reagan in Nicaragua in the early 1980s, and George Bush in the Persian
Gulf War in 1990. In turn, each of these crises has acquired their own historical status
and led to new lessons or modified previously held beliefs. The “lessons of Korea”
influenced American political discourse about Indochina, and the “lessons of Vietnam”
were brought forth in debates about crises in the Persian Gulf and in Bosnia.

In a subsequent collaborative work with Richard Neustadt, Thinking in Time

(1986), May explored further the actual applicability of these analogies. The basic
premise of the book is that many policymakers do “not know any history to speak of and
[are] unaware of suffering any lack” (p. xi). As the authors see it, “usual” decision-
making practice is flawed in several ways. Two of them stand out. First, decision making
is plagued by a tendency towards hasty action, that is, responding to a challenge with
“what do we do?” rather that “what is the problem?” (p. 38). The second main problem
concerns the failure to question key assumptions, especially about desirable goals and
likely consequences.

Neustadt and May caution that decision makers should focus on explaining why a

decision seems to be called for and on identifying the objectives they hope to achieve.
The first step in making foreign policy decisions should involve discriminating the
“known” from the “unclear” from the “presumed.” History then can become useful in
determining what the nature of the issue is, whether and how the situation has changed
from the status quo ante, and what action has been taken in similar situations, in pursuit
of what objectives and to what effect. The odds for mistakes can be minimized further by
subsequently asking, “What new Knowns would bring you to change items Presumed?
When? And Why?”(Neustadt and May 1986: 152-156).

In Analogies at War (1992), Yuen Foong Khong shares the assumption that

leaders frequently turn to historical analogies for guidance when confronted with novel
foreign policy challenges and problems. Like May and Neustadt, Khong focuses on
mistakes in the Vietnam War caused by misapplications of the lessons of Munich and
Korea. Khong also shares the conclusion that leaders often pick inappropriate analogies,
and make mistakes as a result. However, Khong also moves beyond the work of May and
Neustadt. His efforts are concentrated towards identifying the actual cognitive
mechanisms leading to faulty analogical reasoning and resulting in foreign policy
mistakes (see also Hybel, 1990)

At the center of Khong’s analysis is the fundamental recognition that human

beings are “creatures with limited cognitive capacities.” Therefore, they tend to rely on
analogies understood as cognitively-stored knowledge structures. These knowledge
structures are of enormous cognitive utility because they provide ready answers to
fundamental questions about the political world. They help leaders “order, interpret and
simplify, in a word, to make sense of the world” (Khong, 1992: 12; see also Tetlock,
1998: 876; Hybel, 1990: 29-31). The dilemma is that people tend to “access analogies on
the basis of surface similarities” leading to inferential steps that may, in turn, lead to
simplistic and often incorrect interpretations of the incoming stimuli (Khong, 1992: 14).
The result often is a foreign policy mistake.