From Chicken Kiev to Ukrainian recognition: domestic politics in U.S. foreign policy

• Main Author: Fink, Susan D.
• Other Authors: Roman Laba
• Language: en_US
• Published: Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School 2013
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/27064

This thesis uses original research to achieve two goals. First, it is meant to give the first analytical account of U.S. recognition of Ukraine, along with its political significance. Second, it proposes a new theory of ethnic groups in U.S. foreign policy. This thesis proposes that ethnic groups will have an increasing role in American foreign policy for three reasons. First, they have superior knowledge to elites who are encrusted in Cold War ways of thinking and divorced from their electorate. Second, Congress is more active in foreign policy and more permeable to the ethnic lobby. Third, the ethnic population of the United States is growing. The thesis works on at least five levels. First: the role of nationalism in world politics, especially in the collapse of the Soviet Union which now increasingly challenges the system of sovereign states. Second: the way in which foreign policy is made in Washington, including the roles of the President, his bureaucracy, Congress and the media. Third: the role of lobbies in the foreign policy making process. Fourth: electoral politics and its role in decisionmaking. Fifth: East European ethnics, Ukrainian-Americans in particular, and their role as subjects and objects in the struggle between Democrats and Republicans for the ethnic vote. Interest groups and U.S. foreign policy, Ethnicity and U.S. foreign policy, U.S.-Ukrainian relations, Bureaucratic politics, Domestic context of U.S. foreign policy