Presidential Hedgehogs: Perception and Misperception in U.S.-Russia Relations, 1993-2008

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, there has frequently been a gap between the expectations of American foreign-policy decision-makers and the reality of subsequent events. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush entered office with a high degree of optimism about the United States’ capacity, as the world’s sole superpower, to usher in changes in international politics that would create a freer, safer, and more prosperous world. However, policy choices made in pursuit of this goal often produced unintended, unanticipated, and sometimes counter-productive results. One area in which this was the case was the United States’ relationship with Russia. Between 1993 and 2008, the Clinton and Bush administrations led efforts to “reset” the bilateral relationship, and build a new partnership that transcended the Cold War’s legacy of confrontation and distrust. In both cases, the policies pursued by the United States tended to reinforce Russian suspicion, resentment, and hostility towards American foreign policy and its goals, leaving the Russo-American relationship even worse off.1 This study seeks to examine one cause of the disconnect between the anticipated and actual results of American foreign policy choices with regard to Russia during the Clinton and Bush presidencies. The investigation adopts as a model what Keren Yarhi-Milo called the selective attention thesis. She posits that leaders, in their effort to predict the future behaviour of other states, tend to weigh various sorts of information differently. Psychological biases such as confirmation bias and vividness bias tend to cause people to pay more attention to information that supports their existing beliefs and less attention to conflicting information, especially in cases when there is a difference in vividness between these sorts of information.2 The available evidence in public statements, government records, and the memoirs of the presidents and their key advisors shows that information which supported Clinton and Bush’s liberal interpretations of international politics received more attention than did information that challenged their assumptions, which was sometimes ignored, misinterpreted, or dismissed. In this sense, they were what Isaiah Berlin called “hedgehogs,” i.e. the type of person who seeks to relate everything to a central organizing principle. This pattern of behaviour repeatedly resulted in misperception of their Russian counterparts’ own worldviews, priorities, and concerns. Such misperception contributed to the selection of policies that further strained, rather than improved, relations with Russia, and also led to American administrations being more surprised by Russian reactions to US policy than they might otherwise have been.

Angela E. Stent identified the reset-disappointment cycle in her book The Limits of Partnership: U.S.- Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Keren Yarhi-Milo, Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). “Vividness” refers to the degree to which information is emotionally weighty, concrete, proximate in time and space, as well as easily imaginable. For example, dramatic, first-person experiences are highly vivid, while information acquired by reading a technical report tends to be less so.