The Adequacy of Textbooks

viewed those textbooks which deal in large part with the formulation of American foreign policy. Although all of these works have their strong points, none of them adequately summarizes the state of our knowledge on this subject. I will support this assertion by determining to what extent five major findings and propositions of the foreign-policy-making literature are discussed in the textbooks. These findings and propositions are major ones because they deal with the most important aspects of the foreign policy process, and the way in which it differs from the domestic policy process. Three major findings are as follows: (1) the foreign-policy-making process in the United States is centered within the executive branch of the government;1 (2) the process is by nature a fragmented, decentralized one, in which no one executive agency or actor dominates;2 and (3) the occupants of the key formal statuses related to the formulation of foreign policy come very disproportionately from an upper economic class background.3 Two major propositions are as follows: (1) interest groups are less important in the determination of foreign policy than in the determination of domestic policy,4 and (2) different types of decisions in the foreign policy area are characterized by different types of power structures.5 The eleven textbooks examined here, with an indication of the extent to which they are devoted to the discussion of the making of foreign policy, are listed below: 1. Sheldon Appleton, United States Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 260 of 614 pages. 2. Michael H. Armacost, The Foreign Relations of The United States (Belmont, Cal.: Dickinson, 1969), 70 of 230 pages. 3. Cecil V. Crabb, American Foreign Policy in the Nuclear Age (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 110 of 480 pages

Foreign policy · Political science · Politics · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law