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Explaining Foreign Policy: U.S. Decision-Making and the Persian Gulf War. By Steve A. Yetiv. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 288 pp.
In Explaining Foreign Policy, author Steve Yetiv seeks "to develop and apply an integrated approach that generates and integrates insights from multiple perspectives for explaining government behavior" (p. 1). The perspectives-the rational actor model, cognition, domestic politics, groupthink, and government politics-are evaluated using evidence from August to November 1990 leading to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Yetiv's conclusion is that luck and George H. W. Bush the person were the critical factors in the decision to go to war; yet these elements are added onto rather than developed from the five-perspective framework.
Yetiv's portrait defies the conventional wisdom that the first President Bush was a multilateralist who led a unified, reinvigorated United Nations, while the second President Bush is a unilateralist who deals in absolutist terms ("You're with us or with the terrorists") and cast the United Nations aside as irrelevant. Explaining foreign Policy presents the first President Bush as prepared to launch war against Iraq with or without the rest of the world-and even without...