Graham Allison's Conceptual Models Assessing Term Paper

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Thus, foreign policy decisions are not actually decisions at all, but rather unplanned outcomes that result from "compromise, coalition, competition, and confusion among government officials who see different faces of an issue" (708). Though Allison once again uses the analogy of players to illustrate this model, these players are not all on the same team. Instead, the players are political bureaucrats attempting to win the game by getting the best solution to their problems without loosing their own world interests.

A variety of theories about the decision to go to War in Iraq suggest that the Bureaucratic Politics Model may be an excellent fit to the foreign policy decision. The most prominent is the theory that the War in Iraq was essentially a war for oil. According to Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve and a conservative, in his 2007 biography, the United States went to war in Iraq in order to protect U.S. oil interests that were threatened by Saddam Hussein (Paterson). Whether or not this motivation for the foreign policy decision is legitimate is a question that must still be tested, but the proposed motivation would resemble an application of the Bureaucratic Policy Model. At the top of his country, bureaucrat George W. Bush failed in negotiation with bureaucrat Saddam Hussein. The failure of this negotiation resulted in a military struggle instead of a peaceful solution, which may have been accomplished if the bureaucrats had found common political ground.

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In this model, therefore, the War in Iraq was not a solution to a rational problem, a threat from Iraq, but was, instead, the political result of a foiled negotiation between bureaucrats.

IV. Evaluation and Conclusion

In 1969, Graham Allison shook the world of foreign policy and the fledgling school of International Relations by storm with his monumental essay on three conceptual models. In order to test these models, Graham used the most significant foreign policy decision of his day, the Cuban Missile Crisis. In order to determine whether or not the conceptual models are still relevant, pairing each with the most significant decision of our day, the decision to go to war in Iraq, was necessary. Although each model does offer the best explanation to the foreign policy decision, each offers a plausible solution. Because the war is a subject of such recent history, and a variety of debates exist as to its actual cause, the conceptual models prove extremely useful in organizing and evaluating many of the war's proposed motivations. Although they were conceived over three decades ago, therefore, Allison's conceptual models remain relevant to today's foreign policy world.

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