CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Hunt, Alexander Michael |
|---|---|
| Title | United States Cultural Diplomacy in the post-9/11 World: Crafting a Grand Strategy in the War of Ideas |
| Summary | Deemed an indispensable soft power instrument in stemming the spread of communist ideology and contributing to the end of the Cold War, cultural diplomacy was integrated into a balanced grand strategy that relied on all four tools of statecraft – diplomatic, economic, military, and ideational. In the decade after the Soviet threat had dissipated, policymakers saw little need for such programs and the cultural diplomacy apparatus was disassembled, leaving the United States without a coherent strategy to face the imminent struggle of ideas in the Islamic world. At the onset of the Global War on Terrorism (GWT), military action was justified as a reasonable, but sufficient response to the 9/11 attacks on American soil and the sudden emergence of another ideological threat. Relying on an intensive case analysis of the GWT, the present study aims to solve the empirical puzzle that emerges from the decision to reduce reliance of cultural diplomacy – a mechanism expressly forged to assist in defeating such ideological adversaries – in the formation of a grand strategy to combat Islamic radicalism. Taking a political science approach, I apply Graham Allison’s three models of foreign policy analysis in an effort to understand these policy outcomes. My findings show that the policy outcomes were primarily a product of a misunderstanding of the adversary, institutional mismanagement, and bureaucratic rivalry with an ultimate increase in the political bargaining power of top leaders of neoconservative persuasion whose influence permitted them to craft a grand strategy that heavily emphasized military tools of statecraft. |
| Supervisor | Jenne, Erin |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/hunt_alexander.pdf |
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