Structures, Processes, and Communication in the Transformation of the Carter Administration’s Foreign Policy

The enunciation of the Carter Doctrine has been considered a momentous shift not only in the Carter presidency, but also in contemporary U.S. foreign policy.¹ While the Middle East had been viewed as a region of strategic interest for the United States by prior administrations, President Carter, for the first time, committed the United States to assuming the responsibility of upholding on its own, and militarily if necessary, American interests and the security of the region against further Soviet encroachment. Many authors have recently emphasized that the Carter Doctrine has served to rationalize and justify increasing American military involvement in the Middle East and continues to dictate America’s strategy for the Persian Gulf region.² Numerous studies have sought to explain the reasons underlying the change in the Carter administration’s foreign policy, but few have identified the mechanisms driving the change process.

Over the past few decades communication has become a central feature in the research agenda on change. Research in the fields of Organizational Development and Social Psychology has increasingly emphasized the role of communication in developing and transforming organizational outputs. Communication is deemed essential in creating shared mental models for helping groups and organizations make sense of the world.³ In particular, communication is considered a key factor driving change.⁴ As Ford and Ford have pointed out, “Change as an organizational phenomenon necessarily occurs in a context of human social interactions, which constitute and are constituted, by communication.”⁵ Therefore, communicative interactions in decision-making groups and organizations allow existing beliefs to be challenged and transformed by continuously creating and recreating their social reality. Change is therefore increasingly viewed as a continuous quality of organizations.⁶

Despite the growing influence of research applying constructivist and discursive approaches, Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) has been slow to associate communication with foreign policy change. In fact, most of the research on foreign policy change continues to accentuate the episodic nature of change.⁷ Adopting the basic tenets of the communication paradigm would imply a reinterpretation of foreign policy change. In particular, it would involve acknowledging foreign policy change as a more frequent phenomenon than is traditionally accepted.

However, communication is highly contingent on the decision-making structures and processes of each particular political organization. There is no universally accepted “best” structure for decision-making and presidents tend to adapt their advisery system to their particular needs.⁸ In addition, it has long been accepted that the relationship between a president and his advisers is dynamic. In time, interactions between the organizational actors and the President will lead to a transformation of the decision-making processes.⁹ In other words, Presidents will eventually adapt their advisery system in order to try to deal more effectively with the challenges presented by the multiple policymaking constraints. These structures and processes will ultimately influence communication within an administration and consequently affect the rate and magnitude of foreign policy change.

In this article, I analyze how the foreign policy decision-making structures and processes affected the communicative interactions in the Carter administration’s foreign policy decision-making process. In particular, I assess how the decision-making structures and processes influenced communication among the upper echelons of the administration and contributed to a change in policy and the development of the Carter Doctrine. More precisely, I demonstrate that the Carter Doctrine resulted from the cumulative and continuous communicative interactions among the administration’s top decision makers. These continued interactions ultimately contributed to a wholesale transformation of the administration’s mental maps of the Middle East.

The article is divided into four sections. The first section attempts to bridge organizational theory and social cognition theory with foreign policy research in order to illustrate the role of communication in catalyzing foreign policy change. I then devote the following two sections to identifying the initial interagency structures and processes in the Carter administration and the changes they underwent throughout the presidency. The concluding section incorporates theoretical assumptions and insights from organizational theory and social cognition in order to assess the communicative...