EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

U.S. Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis. By David Patrick Houghton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 270p. $64.95 cloth, $22.95 paper

Marc Lynch

American Political Science Review, 2002, vol. 96, issue 3, 690-691

Abstract: David Patrick Houghton's U.S. Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis explores the power of historical analogies in foreign policy decision making, offering along the way an engaging, thought-provoking account of decision making during the Iranian hostage crisis. Posing the question “How do decision makers reason when confronted by a problem which seems almost entirely novel in character and therefore without precedent?” (p. 19), Houghton follows Khong's Analogies at War in arguing for the centrality of analogical reasoning. The seizure of the American embassy by Iranian student radicals presented a genuinely perplexing problem for decision makers on all sides, and Houghton captures their uncertainty well. Since decision makers can rely on different historical analogies, and even the same historical analogy can offer competing lessons or be subject to divergent interpretations, Houghton focuses attention upon the interpretive interplay of analogies. As the crisis unfolded, decision makers deliberated, directly and indirectly, over the most relevant and useful analogy. These analogies, according to Houghton, are not merely justifications for strategies chosen for other reasons but directly affect individual policy preferences by shaping beliefs about the nature of the problem. Houghton convincingly establishes the prevalence and power of historical analogies in shaping the response of policymakers to unfamiliar situations. His efforts to construct generalizable theoretical propositions about their relative causal weight are somewhat less successful but are consistently thought-provoking.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:96:y:2002:i:03:p:690-691_24

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:96:y:2002:i:03:p:690-691_24