1.1The General Argument

The Carter Doctrine has received widespread scholarly attention over the last three decades. Nevertheless, research has focused almost exclusively on explaining why the Carter Administration radically altered its foreign policy, particularly regarding the Middle East. Numerous accounts have emphasized the systemic and domestic forces underlying such change. Most conventional accounts tend to point out a series of events arising midway throughout the Carter Presidency, – that is, fall of the Shah, the Iranian hostage crisis, and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – as responsible for the change in foreign policy.

While there are many different theses regarding why the Carter Administration’s foreign policy changed, few attempts have been made to explain how it changed. In fact, when foreign policy analysis (FPA) has considered foreign policy change, it has fundamentally concentrated on explaining the causal factors contributing to that change (c. f., Gustavsson, 1999; Hermann, 1990; Rosati, 1994; Welch, 2005). In addition, the majority of the studies in FPA evade theoretical considerations regarding foreign policy change (Rosati, 1994). Therefore, most accounts of the emergence of the Carter Doctrine do not provide a precise theoretical framework for understanding its origins and development. The lack of an adequate conceptual and theoretical framework ultimately limits our understanding of the complex dynamics involved in foreign policy decision-making.

Accordingly, the argument developed in this study can be summarized in three broad and provocative propositions:

1.While not explicitly acknowledging it as such, the majority of the accounts explaining the change in the Carter Administration’s foreign policy and the development of the Carter Doctrine use theoretical assumptions intrinsic to punctuated equilibrium and planned change models.

The core rationale of punctuated equilibrium is that political institutions, once established, tend to endure undisturbed over long periods of time (Krasner, 1984). According to punctuated equilibrium, foreign policy is characterized by long periods of stability which are abruptly disrupted by some sort of external shock. In order to deal with the perturbation, foreign policy is altered to meet the new challenges and, subsequently, the new policy is consolidated, creating a renewed period of stability (Diehl and Goertz, 2001; Goertz et al., 2005; Rosati, 1994). Schraeder (1994) contends that continuity and change in US foreign policy can generally be conceived as a process in which extended periods of bureaucratic stability are briefly interrupted by presidential and domestic politics only to have bureaucracies subsequently restore rigid policy routines.

From this perspective, it is generally argued that the Carter Administration came to office with an initial foreign policy agenda, which was abruptly and radically transformed by a series of crisis situations. As a response to these events, the Administration responded by engineering and implementing a new foreign policy that was more adequate for facing the increasing Soviet activities in the Third World. The Administration’s initial focus on military retrenchment, international cooperation, preventive diplomacy, and multilateralism gave way abruptly to an assertive and military-oriented foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East region. In addition, the Middle East was placed at the forefront of the renewed US–Soviet conflict. Détente would, therefore, give way to a renewed policy of containment and confrontation, which would allegedly become the cornerstone of US foreign policy in the region for the years to come. However, the plethora of evidence available in declassified documents, memoirs, oral histories, and official statements and records, challenge the punctuated equilibrium and planned change thesis.

2.The development of the Carter Administration’s Middle East policy and the emergence of the Carter Doctrine is best understood using an emergent (continuous) change approach, which highlights the continuous and cumulative policy adaptations and adjustments that decision makers enacted to try to deal with their perceived international environment since the beginning of the Carter Presidency.

Although episodic and planned change approaches have dominated scholarly thinking on foreign policy change, they tend to conceal many complex dynamics involved in the policy process. Recent research in organizational theory has emphasized the continuous and open-ended process of organizational adaptation to changing circumstances and environments. In contrast to approaches centered on episodic and planned change, emergent change is the outcome of the improvisation, adaptation, adjustment, and learning that results from the recurrent interactions among individuals.5 Above all, emergent change repudiates accounts of change which focus exclusively on sporadic, stage-centered processes by arguing that individuals, groups, and organizations do not achieve change only through planned and structured stages of intervention. On the contrary, change can also be understood as an ongoing, improvising enterprise, which produces observable and prominent transformations in groups and organizations’ actions and behaviors through adjustments, adaptations, and revisions of their existing problem representations and policy practices. While not always discernible, emergent change can lead to wholesale policy changes, but without the dramatic flair of revolutionary episodic change models such as punctuated equilibrium.

In the following chapters, I will argue that the Carter Doctrine and the importance it attributed to the Middle East was not an abrupt and radical break with the Administration’s policies prior to crises arising in 1979. On the contrary, the Carter Doctrine was the result of the continuous and cumulative policy adaptations and adjustments that the Administration’s key decision makers enacted to try to deal with their perceived international environment since the beginning of the Carter Presidency. Therefore, the change in the Administration’s foreign policy resulted from the incessant dynamics involved in foreign policy decision-making. Hence, it was the product of intentionally planned endeavors, as well as of the unexpected opportunities and consequences ensuing from the continued interactions between decision makers.

In fact, as this analysis shall demonstrate, the Middle East was a region of central concern to the Carter Administration from the outset of the Presidency. Because it recognized the potential threats to US national interests in the region, the Carter Administration dedicated considerable time and effort to attempt to defuse various sources of conflict in the region. However, the understanding of the region’s relationship with the US and with other international actors, particularly the USSR, was in constant reconstruction throughout the Carter Presidency. Accordingly, the Administration tried to develop and implement the policies that they believed best suited the political challenges facing the US at each particular instance. The cumulative effect of these policy adjustments and adaptations ultimately led to the rise of the Carter Doctrine.

3.Considering the well-defined spatial nature of the Carter Doctrine, geographic mental maps provide the most appropriate conceptual framework for identifying and assessing the emergent dynamics of the Carter Administration’s foreign policy decision-making process.

Albeit avowing that geographic mental maps are well suited to the increasingly fluid context of international politics (Henrikson, 1980a), seldom have they been empirically applied to grasp the shifting character of the environments within which foreign policy is conducted. Rather, geography’s intransience has a long tradition in political thought. All the classic geopolitical theoreticians would wholeheartedly subscribe to Spykman’s (2008: 41) assertion that “Geography is the most fundamental factor in the foreign policy of states because it is the most permanent.” In fact, Schulten (2001: 240) has suggested that “geographical knowledge – in its resistance to change and its effort to make sense of the world – has operated conservatively.”

While I agree that many geographic features have a lasting effect on our cognitive representations, several studies have revealed the variability of particular spaces and places in foreign policy-making. O’Loughlin and Grant’s (1990) analysis of the political geography of the State of the Union addresses of post-war US presidents reveals the diversity of the geographic distribution of speech content in each different Cold War American Administration. Assuming that the amount of attention that the State of the Union Addresses have attributed to particular places represents a valid indication of the geopolitical outlook and political agenda of an Administration at that particular point in time, we can conclude that the decision makers’ geographic mental maps are anything but fixed. However, geographic mental maps do not just change following the succession of Administrations. Even within a particular Administration existing mental maps are susceptible to change, as the research carried out by Flint et al. (2009a) demonstrates.

There are several reasons for the shift verified in the preceding studies. Evolving challenges and opportunities certainly contribute to refocusing decision makers’ mental maps. Saarinen’s (2005) extensive work on mental maps has demonstrated that current events are usually important in including or omitting certain places in an individual’s mental maps. These events provide mental maps with a temporal dynamic since “in different time periods one might expect different places to be highlighted” (Saarinen, 2005: 158). Different places can attract decision makers’ attention due to some particular geographic features, which are more “salient” in the environment (Henrikson, 1980a). Above all, the political context in each particular moment can be reconstructed, leading to a new understanding of the problems facing decision makers as well as the policy options available.

In light of this, I posit that the Carter Doctrine resulted from the continuous reconstruction of the Administration’s geographic mental maps. As international and domestic events compelled decision makers to evaluate the political environment, the Administration’s problem-defining representation of the Middle East was in constant flux. While the Middle East was initially viewed optimistically as a place of cooperation and reconciliation, the continuously changing nature of the Administration’s mental maps ultimately charted a region fraught with danger and conflict.

1.2Developing the Argument

The following chapters argue that the Carter Administration’s Middle East policy and the development of the Carter Doctrine was the result of the continuous reconstruction of foreign policy decision makers’ geographic mental maps throughout the Presidency. I argue that the Administration’s mental maps changed due the communicative interaction between the key foreign policy decision makers. The continuous interaction process allowed the decision makers shared problem representations to be constantly reevaluated and reconstructed. As the problem representations changed, so did the policy recommendations perceived to best deal with the situation at hand.

Accordingly, in order to assess the dynamic and emergent nature of the Carter Administration’s geographic mental maps of the Middle East, the current case study uses a process-tracing method, framed within a constructivist perspective. Due to the inherent research question’s explanatory nature, that is, how did the Carter Doctrine emerge?, the use of a case study is judged the most adequate approach. As Yin (1994: 6) has stated, questions dealing with why and how “deal with operational links needing to be traced over time, rather than mere frequencies or incidence.” Case studies allow us to concentrate on the longitudinal analysis, which can help reveal the evolution and transformation of organizational activities and policies over time (Pettigrew, 1990). In addition, given the focus of this study on the different actors involved in influencing the decision-making process (i. e., the units of analysis), namely at the individual, group, and organizational level, the use of a case study is once again deemed the most appropriate approach. In fact, George and McKeown (1985: 21) have argued that “case studies of organizational decision making have long been one of the most important methods by which researchers have investigated organizational behavior and improved their theoretical understanding of that behavior.”

The use of a case study also allows the researcher to employ a historical analysis method of causal assertion that differs significantly from the method of causal inference used in statistical–correlational research (George and Bennett, 2004). Since this study focuses exclusively on the Carter Administration’s Middle East policy, a within-case approach is essential since I seek to identify the causal path in a single case. I have opted to employ process-tracing because it does not rely on the comparison of variations in variables to make claims about the causal processes involved (George and McKeown, 1985). Process-tracing techniques are used to identify the causal mechanisms implicit in the relationship between the independent and dependent variable(s). More precisely, process-tracing seeks to break open the “black box” of the decision-making process by focusing on the multiple factors and dynamics influencing the choices and behaviors of decision makers (George and McKeown, 1985).

Causal mechanisms offer more detailed explanations than general covering laws because while laws offer static correlations (i. e., “if X, then Y”), mechanisms provide insight into processes (i. e., “X leads to Y through steps A, B, C”) (George and Bennett, 2004: 141). The use of this method is particularly important to this study because tracing processes allows us to deal with equifinality, that is, consider alternative paths, which could lead to a similar outcome (George and Bennett, 2004). As I have claimed above, the change in the Carter Administration’s Middle East policy and the development of the Carter Doctrine can be explained by processes other than those envisioned by punctuated equilibrium and planned change models.

Process-tracing, therefore, relies heavily on a careful description of the trajectories of change and causation (Collier, 2011). This feature gives process-tracing many similarities to historical explanations (Gaddis, 1997; George and Bennett, 2004). In fact, as Bennett (2008: 704) suggests, the process-tracing method “seeks a historical explanation of an individual case.” This implies favoring a qualitative interpretation of the Carter Administration’s historical record in the service of theory development and testing. In particular, I make use of numerous primary and secondary materials, which have been acquired and collected from a wide array of sources.

Evidently it is impossible to analyze all the primary sources available. To begin with, the amount of documental sources is too vast to be completely assessed in a functional manner. Additionally, many of the relevant documents are not yet available to the public and many of the interaction processes were not recorded for post facto analysis and research. It should also be noted that many of the declassified documents are subject to redaction and sanitization in which much of the sensitive and classified information has been deleted. Moreover, even when many of the documents pertaining to a specific policy are available, the possibility and the need to consider them in toto should be weighed in order to determine their utility in effective scholarly research.6 Accordingly, I have used the available sources which I believe best represent and embody the general interactions taking place within the Carter Administration. Therefore, the primary historical sources used in this study refer predominantly to memoirs and biographies, Presidential Directives, Policy Review Memoranda, official minutes or records, memoranda, official public statements, official transcripts, oral history transcripts, letters, official publications (e. g., Department of State Bulletin), research reports produced by individual officials or official departments or agencies (e. g., NSC and CIA), and newspapers and magazines.7 These documents were collected from various institutions and entities. In particular, many of the official documents were acquired at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.8 Other official and declassified primary documents were acquired from the following printed and electronic sources:

–American Foreign Policy Basic Documents, 1977–1981;

–Central Intelligence Agency website;9

–Commission on Presidential Debates website;10

–Foreign Relations of the US, 1977–1980 (Volumes II, VI, and VIII);

–Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum website;11

–Miller Center of Public Affairs website;12

–Office of the Historian of the US Department of State;13

–The American Presidency Project;14

–The National Security Archive at the George Washington University;15

–The Public Papers of the Presidents of the US;16

–The White House website.17

Employing these documental sources, along with other corresponding secondary material, I use process-tracing to identify the casual mechanisms driving the Carter Administration’s foreign policy. I specifically demonstrate how the Administration’s Middle East policy was in a state of emergent change throughout the Carter Presidency due to the incessant construction and reconstruction of the decision makers geographic mental maps. Obviously, a document has little explanatory value on its own. If we want to assess change, we must understand the relation to other documents and texts. Therefore, it is important to “recognize that, like any system of signs and messages, documents make sense because they have relationships with other documents” (Atkinson and Coffey, 2004: 67). This relationship is established by recounting how the various documents and texts regarding a particular historical episode created a forum for decision makers to interact and influence the policy process. By analyzing the assortment of documental records associated with these historical episodes, the communicative interaction process within the Administration can be discerned. The collection of documents and other informational materials allows me to identify the ongoing interaction between the foreign policy decision makers, creating a narrative of how they created and re-created the definition of the situation and the adequate policy response at each particular moment.

For analytical purposes, this narrative is divided into several discrete policy debates, which occurred within the Carter Presidency regarding the Middle East. By breaking down the communicative interactions into distinct foreign policy episodes we can better appreciate how the Administration’s mental maps were reconstructed as well as their relationship to other interaction processes.

However, as Ng and De Cock (2002: 27) contend, “Most narratives do not just lie around in organizational situations, nor do documents wait to be related.” From this perspective, historical accounts – that is, historical narratives – are naturally subjective interpretations, which, much like a collage, are constructed from multiple sources. The authors acknowledge the unavoidable selective and biased nature of these historical accounts. More precisely, they point out that the narratives researchers present “must ultimately be construed as factive fictions crafted from numerous sources and methods, influenced by the availability and quality of different materials, and designed to please both the researchers and the researchers’ audiences” (Ng and De Cock, 2002: 27).

This interpretation and use of historical records is still viewed with mistrust in many domains of IR. In fact, the relationship between History and IR is long and complex (Gaddis, 1997; Thies, 2002). Over the years, many IR scholars have accused historians of studying international affairs merely for gaining an understanding of a particular historical period or event. In other words, historians, contrary to political scientists, do not seek to advance any particular research program, improve an existing theoretical body, or generate new and competing theoretical knowledge (Elman and Elman, 2001). Levy (2001: 41) has attributed this distinction to the traditional ideographic and nomothetic orientations of the two disciplines: “the primary goal of historians is to describe, understand, and interpret individual events or a temporally and spatially bound series of events, whereas the primary goal of political scientists is to generalize about the relationships between variables and, to the extent possible, construct law-like propositions about social behavior.” As a result, while IR has used historical records compulsively, History has generally been used as static background for IR theorists’ numerous experiments. As a matter of fact, as Lawson (2010: 207) has pointed out, most mainstream IR research does use historical research, but “Although ‘history’ as a point of data collection may be present, Historicism – an understanding of the contingent, disruptive, constitutive impact of local events, particularities and discontinuities – is absent.”

From this perspective, IR scholars tend to employ history and historical analysis as a means of collecting mere “facts,” which can be used in their theoretical descriptions and explanations (Reus-Smit, 2008; Thies, 2002). In their study of diplomatic history and IR, Haber et al. (1997) confirm the validity that this outlook still maintains in IR research. More precisely, while acknowledging the interpretative dimension of history, the authors censure researchers studying “formerly neglected person and groups” for departing from the “more traditional forms of history [which] sought to address questions whose answers could be determined by recourse to bodies of documentary evidence that diminished uncertainty – ideally to the vanishing point” (Haber et al., 1997: 38–39). Therefore, historical records, such as primary and secondary sources, are thus deemed bona fide testaments of past “realities.”

This observation is extraordinary considering that historians have long acknowledged the interpretive dimension involved in historical analysis. In fact, since the 1960s there has been a widespread recognition within the disciple of History “that history is not so much discovered as invented” (Trachtenberg, 2006: 7). The idea that direct observation leads to facts, which, once discovered, can no longer be disputed, is no longer sacrosanct. The traditional confidence in historical objectivity has, therefore, given way to a more interpretive approach of historical events. The aim of historical analysis is thus to reach an understanding of the past, that is, see how things fit together, rather than uncovering the “Truth” (Trachtenberg, 2006).

The key to understanding past events, according to Trachtenberg (2006), lies in applying a conceptual – that is, theoretical – framework in historical interpretation. The use of a theoretical framework by itself does not provide answers, but rather serves “as the basis for interpretation” (Trachtenberg, 2006: 30). Therefore, using theory provides researchers with a conceptual lens and a host of assumptions with which they can observe and interpret historical problems. This is operationalized in Trachtenberg’s (2006: 45) view by taking “some major theoretical claim, bring it down to earth by thinking about what it would mean in specific historical contexts, and then study those historical episodes with those basic conceptual issues in mind.”

In light of this rationale, I have adopted numerous theoretical concepts and assumptions from the fields of Human Geography, Organizational Development, and Social Psychology to guide my research. In particular, the precepts of emergent (continuous) change and social cognition theories are central to my argument. They have been applied and adopted when necessary to help explain the process of foreign policy change during the Carter Presidency.

In addition, I have espoused a constructivist perspective in this study.18 Constructivism is concerned with the normative and ideational structures involved in the creation of meaning (Guzzini, 2000; Reus-Smit, 2005). This does not imply that constructivist research does not take into consideration the physical world, external to thought. It does, however, dispute acknowledging it as existing independent of language. In this sense, we can only understand the world meaningfully as a socially interpreted construct. As Guzzini (2000) has pointed out, constructivism’s hermeneutical tradition makes the construction of social reality the central focus of analysis, particularly the construction of shared systems of meaning through social practices.

Moreover, a constructivist perspective is particularly well suited to study change. While constructivists are interested in ideas, their specific emphasis is on understanding ideas in history, that is, constructivist research is “interested in ideas as constitutive forces in history, forces that give meaning to historical processes, forces that warrant, justify, and license certain forms of action” (Reus-Smit, 2008: 408). In this regard, interpretative historical analysis assumes an important role in constructivism (Guzzini, 2000; Reus-Smit, 2008). This is because, as Lawson (2010: 209) suggests, “constructivism is propelled towards accounts of time and place specificity, context and change which render the approach necessarily historical in orientation.”

However, adopting an interpretive approach does not signify that we cannot understand past events. Rather, as Reus-Smit (2008: 405) has pointed out, “the test of historical knowledge must be plausibility not infallibility.” In this case, the use of the primary sources allows me to present evidence that sustain my claim that the Carter Doctrine was the result of an emergent change process. As Beach and Pedersen (2013: 121) analogize, “The overall process of evaluating evidence is in many respects analogous to how evidence is admitted and evaluated within the US legal system.” In this respect, researchers produce different observations to make inferences about how historical events played out. It is up to the academic judges and/or the juries to evaluate the evidence and to decide on the final result. The critical test is, as in the legal system, on assessing reasonable doubt, that is, “a doubt based upon reason and common sense – the kind of doubt that would make a reasonable person hesitate to act” (Weinstein and Dewsbury, 2007: 171). I am confident the evidence put forward in the following pages creates enough reasonable doubt to question the conventional explanations and accounts of the advent of the Carter Doctrine based on punctuated equilibrium and planned change models.

1.3Mapping of the Argument

In order to illustrate the argument presented above, the book is divided into three distinct parts. The first part analyzes the traditional accounts of the development of the Carter Doctrine. Resorting to the literature on the Carter Administration’s foreign policy, Chapter 2 puts forward the divergent accounts explaining the reasons for the policy transformation and the development of the Carter Doctrine – that is, why foreign policy changed. Due to the enormous volume of research on the Carter Administration and its foreign policy, the overview of the works does not pretend to be comprehensive in scope, but is, inevitably, merely representative.

Chapter 3 looks to demonstrate that while there is considerable disagreement regarding why foreign policy changed, there is substantial concurrence as to how it changed. In particular, emphasis will be placed on the dynamics involved in punctuated equilibrium and planned change approaches to foreign policy, highlighting their influence in traditional explanations of the Carter Administration’s foreign policy change. The limits of these explanatory models will also be discussed, particularly regarding their application to the explanation of the development of the Carter Doctrine.

Chapter 4 puts forward an alternative approach to understanding foreign policy change based on the concept of emergent (i. e., continuous) change. It highlights the main contrasts between traditional accounts of episodic, planned change and continuous change, emphasizing the latter’s value in understanding the dynamics involved in contemporary foreign policy decision-making. The chapter ends by enumerating some of the inconsistencies underlying the traditional approaches explaining the advent of the Carter Doctrine.

The second part of the book is essentially theoretical in nature. It aims to identify and develop the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings surrounding the application of geographic mental maps in the study of foreign policy. Chapter 5 begins by defining the concept of geographic mental maps, differentiating it from other similar analytical concepts, namely by emphasizing its geographic character and its importance to the study of international politics. Finally, Chapter 5 argues in favor of applying a social psychological approach to mental maps in order to better understand the complex dynamics involved in foreign policy decision-making, particularly its social dimension.

The social dynamics of geographic mental maps are presented in Chapter 6. Contrary to traditional accounts of aggregation of individual representations, this chapter focuses on the shared nature of collective representations. More precisely, I present a more detailed re-conceptualization and re-theorization of how collective geographic mental maps are constructed and shared among group members. Specifically, it highlights the process by which shared mental maps are created and re-created.

The theoretical development culminates in Chapter 7, which identifies the mechanisms of change in a group’s mental maps. I argue that it is the process of communicative interaction which allows for the creation of new realities and, ultimately, new policies. While the process is continuous, for the sake of theoretical clarity, the mechanism of communicative interaction is parsed into several distinct stages in order to illustrate the change process.

Having provided a set of conceptual tools and a theoretical framework for the analysis of change, the third part of the book returns to the Carter Administration’s foreign policy and the development of the Carter Doctrine. Drawing on the theoretical hindsight presented in part 2, the remaining chapters of this section examine in considerable detail the actual processes through which the Carter Administration’s geographic mental maps of the Middle East changed throughout the Presidency. Each individual chapter (Chapters 8 through 14) demonstrates how the Administration’s internal and external communicative interactions enabled the continuous reconstruction of its mental maps of the region.

While the events are generally approached in a chronological order, the overlap of events throughout the years compelled me to also take into consideration the separate policy issues in delineating the change process.

In Chapter 15, I conclude my argument by briefly detailing the overall process of emergent change leading up to the Carter Doctrine. I also identify some of the implications of adopting an emergent change approach framed in a mental map conceptual outlook for FPA. Finally, I raise questions, which continue unanswered and may guide future research in both foreign policy change and geographic mental maps.