Iron Triangles and Revolving Doors : Cases in U. S. Foreign Economic Policymaking

In a rapidly shrinking world, governments everywhere find themselves increasingly obliged to deal with international economic issues. When dealing with such issues, their processes of decisionmaking prove strikingly different from those employed in the handling of political or strategic problems. This unique volume by Raymond Vernon, Debora L. Spar and Glenn Tobin provides a close-up view of the decisionmaking process within the US establishment as it has wrestled with a series of greatly publicized economic issues in recent years. The book synthesizes a literature that has been accumulating over three decades, deriving from this literature a model of the processes of decisionmaking in the field of US foreign economic policy. Five detailed case studies are presented, each covering a major economic plan or agreement that raised significant controversy.