Dissertation Defense: William Schlickenmaier
Candidate Name: William Schlickenmaier
Major: Government
Advisor: Anthony Arend, Ph.D.
Title: Playing the General’s Game: Superpowers, Self-Limiting and Stategic Emerging Technologies
This dissertation explores how states make foreign policy decisions by focusing on superpowers and their decision calculus over strategic emerging technologies. It brings together work on arms control, advanced defense technologies, and decision making theories to generate a new model—the ecosystem model—for decisions to pursue or self-limit technologies.
In the ecosystem model, tribes and free agents face off in bureaucratic competition to build policy coalitions that sell decisions to political leaders. In these contests, tribes—the deeply held cross-cutting institutions that transcend leadership changes—and free agents—the more weakly held, politicized institutions—use a mix of strategic assessments and rhetorical commonplaces to build their coalitions. Coalitions change over time, and the nature of a coalition will dictate the policy outcome in question.
In Cold War superpower contestation over strategic emerging technologies, three tribes were relevant in both the US and Soviet ecosystems—the military, bilateralists, and arms controllers. In case study research, I show that these tribes recurred and built coalitions with other components of the national security ecosystems to push their policy agendas. Within tribes and free agent institutions, bureaucratic entrepreneurs emerged to press for change from status quo policies both in favor of and against strategic emerging technologies.
Of the twelve Cold War strategic emerging technologies I identify, I select three for case study research—biological weapons, antisatellite weapons, and intermediate-range nuclear forces. Through both process tracing and the collection of causal process observations, I show how the ecosystem model better explains policy choices than alternatives based on the balance of power and technology, “classical” bureaucratic politics derived from the work of Graham Allison and Morton Halperin, and arguments based on regime type.
I conclude with implications for future superpower bipolar relations with China and today’s strategic emerging technologies, and explore whether the ecosystem model could serve as a more general model of foreign policy decision making.