Understanding foreign policy decision making / by Alex Mintz and Karl DeRouen Jr.

Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making presents a decision making approach to foreign policy analysis. The benefits of such an approach are its ability to explain not only outcomes of decisions but also the processes that lead to decisions and the decision dynamics. The book includes a wealth of extended real-world case studies and examples of decisions made by leaders of the United States, Israel, New Zealand, Cuba, Iceland, United Kingdom, and others. In addition to coverage of the rational actor model of decision making, levels of analysis, and types of decisions, the book covers alternatives to the rational choice model, the marketing and framing of decisions, cognitive biases and errors, and domestic, cultural, and international influences on decision making in international affairs. If we are to understand decision making, we need to understand how information processing and various biases affect decision making. Existing textbooks do not present such an explicit approach to foreign policy decision making, American foreign policy, and comparative foreign policy.