| Description |
The ability to determine the entire country's foreign policy is perhaps the single greatest power given to the President of the United States. Because of this power, the decision by a president to shift the country's foreign policy from its previous positions are especially significant. In this paper, I propose a new explanation based on political polarization for these shifts in foreign policy. By comparing the polarization theory to structural realism, often seen as the default explanation for state behavior in international relations, I highlight how political polarization is able to explain shifts in foreign policy much better than structural realism, specifically because of the nature of recentlyinaugurated presidents to make decisions that contrast themselves with the positions of their opposite-party predecessors. This paper introduces structural realism and the polarization theory and applies both theories to the Obama and Trump administrations' interactions with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the People's Republic of China. While structural realism is unable to explain the decision of the Trump administration to pull out of the Iran Nuclear Deal predominately due to a lack in the change of the international order, the polarization theory explains that this change was easily predicted by the ideological gap between the Republicans and Democrats concerning the issue of Iran nuclearization. Likewise, the difficulty in falsifying the notion of interest defined as power under structural realism makes explaining Trump's decision to shift from a strategic partnership with China in favor of the institution of economic tariffs. However, the polarization theory explains this shift as a result of the Republican Party shifting position and polarization against Democrats, as well as promises made by candidate Trump. |
