Abstract
The previous chapter focused primarily on the impact of “domestic institutions,” examining the institutional context in which dual containment policy was made. This chapter plays a complementary role, examining interest groups within society at large that interacted with these structures to shape and influence dual containment. It examines the role of “policy coalitions”—those constellations of forces within a society that use political influence to affect policy in different ways, in a manner determined both by their own influence and the opportunities offered to them by the political system in which they operate. Specifically, organized interest groups espousing a variety of causes and interests fre- quently seek to insert their preferences and policies into the policymak- ing process by lobbying legislators and executive branch officials. While the institutional context of the state in which they operate determines how effective they can be (depending on the relative autonomy of poli- cymakers and the accessibility of the policymaking process to outside interest groups), it is the degree of influence these forces wield and the nature of their preferred policies that determine specific outcomes. In the American case, interest groups are able to influence policy despite holding no formal power by lobbying legislators and officials, though their influence varies from issue to issue and from group to group.
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Notes
Norrin Ripsman, “Neoclassical Realism and Domestic Interest Groups,” in Steven Lobell, Norrin Ripsman, and Jeffrey Taliaferro (eds.), Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 170–93.
For example, see George Kennan, The Cloud of Danger: Some Current Problems of American Foreign Policy (London: Hutchinson, 1977); Charles Matthias, “Ethnic Groups and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 59, no. 5 (1991–92): 975–98; Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 2.
Samuel Huntington, “The Erosion of American National Interests,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 5 (1997): 29.
Lester Milbrath, “Interest Groups and Foreign Policy,” in James Rosenau (ed.), Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy (New York: Free Press, 1967), pp. 231–51.
David Paul and Rachel Paul, Ethnic Lobbies and US Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009), p. 203.
Paul Watanabe, Ethnic Groups, Congress, and American Foreign Policy: The Politics of the Turkish Arms Embargo (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), pp. 21–22.
David Howard Goldberg, Foreign Policy and Ethnic Interest Groups: American and Canadian Jews Lobby for Israel (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990), p. 11.
Rebecca Hersman, Friends and Foes: How Congress and the President Really Make Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2000), pp. 3–5.
James Rosenau, “Introduction,” Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 4.
Ralph Carter and James Scott, Choosing to Lead: Understanding Congressional Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 15.
Hossein Alikhani, Sanctioning Iran: Anatomy of a Failed Policy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), p. 177; figure drawn from AARP official website, http://www.aarp.org/about-aarp/press-center/info-2007/rx_bargaining_power.html, accessed June 1, 2012; Burdett Loomis and Allan Cigler, “Introduction: The Changing Nature of Interest Group Politics,” in Allan Cigler and Burdett Loomis (eds.), Interest Group Politics, 7th edition (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2007), p. 13.
The best known and most controversial is Mearsheimer and Walt. See also, George Ball and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
Some authors also argue that support for Israeli foreign policy among Jewish Americans has also decreased substantially in recent years. For instance, see Norman G. Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel Is Coming to an End (New York: OR Books, 2012).
Mitchell Bard, The Water’s Edge and Beyond: Defining the Limits to Domestic Influence on United States Middle East Policy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991), p. 13.
Camille Mansour, Beyond Alliance: Israel in U.S. Foreign Policy, translated by James Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 240–42.
Christopher Hill argues that it has “no rival” in this regard, The Changing Politics of Foreign Policy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 253.
Ball and Ball, Passionate Attachment, claim these figures as 90 percent and 40–50 percent, respectively; Unslaner, “American Interests in the Balance,” p. 307; Mitchell Bard, “The Influence of Ethnic Interest Groups on American Middle East Policy,” in Charles Kegley and Eugene Wittkopf (eds.), The Domestic Sources of American Foreign Policy: Insights and Evidence (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), pp. 58–59; Nimrod Novik, The United States and Israel: Domestic Determinants of a Changing U.S. Commitment (Boulder, CO: Westview/Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, 1986), p. 59.
Ian Bickerton, “America’s Israel/Israel’s America,” in John Dumbrell and Axel Schäfer, America’s “Special Relationships”: Foreign and Domestic Aspects of the Politics of Alliance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), p. 176; Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 249.
Bickerton, “America’s Israel/Israel’s America,” p. 176; Ball and Ball, Passionate Attachment, pp. 202–3; Thomas, American Policy toward Israel, p. 30; Watanabe, Ethnic Groups, Congress, and American Foreign Policy, p. 10; Bernard Reich, Securing the Covenant: United States-Israel Relations after the Cold War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), p. 68; Goldberg, Foreign Policy and Ethnic Interest Groups, Chapter 3.
Shai Franklin quoted by Thomas Ambrosio, “Entangling Alliances: The Turkish-Israeli Lobbying Partnership and Its Unintended Consequences,” in Thomas Ambrosio (ed.), Ethnic Identity Groups and U.S. Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), p. 156.
Shigeo Hirano et al., “Primary Elections and Partisan Polarization in the US Congress,” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 5, no. 2 (2010): 184.
Paul Latham, Selling AWACS to Saudi Arabia: The Reagan Administration’s Competing Interests in the Middle East (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), p. 67.
Michael Mezey, Congress, the President, and Public Policy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989), p. 127.
Kenneth Rodman, Sanctions beyond Borders: Multinational Corporations and U.S. Economic Statecraft (Oxford, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), p. 190.
Terence Lau, “Triggering Parent Company Liability under United States Sanctions Regimes: The Troubling Implications of Prohibiting Approval and Facilitation,” American Business Law Journal 41, no. 4 (2004): 414.
Sasan Fayazmanesh, The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars, and the Policy of Dual Containment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), electronic edition, Chapter 5.
AIPAC, “Comprehensive US Sanctions against Iran: A Plan for Action,” April 2, 1995, cited in Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 187.
For a detailed account, see Paula Stern, Water’s Edge: Domestic Politics and the Making of American Foreign Policy (Greenwood, CT: Greenwood, 1979).
Thomas Franck and Edward Weisband, Foreign Policy by Congress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 200–209.
Robert Litwak, Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Containment after the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 107.
Meghan O’Sullivan, Shrewd Sanctions: Statecraft and State Sponsors of Terrorism (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003), p. 23.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower (New York: Basic Books, 2007), p. 102.
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© 2014 Alex Edwards
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Edwards, A. (2014). “Mischiefs of Faction”: Interest Groups as an Intervening Variable. In: “Dual Containment” Policy in the Persian Gulf. Middle East Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137447241_7
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