In the aftermath of the June 1967 Six-Day War, both the United States and the Soviet Union had powerful incentives to achieve a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli dispute. With each superpower concerned that the conflict’s continuation would jeopardize its regional interests and, more significantly, worried that it could ultimately lead to a direct U.S.-Soviet confrontation that might conceivably escalate to the nuclear level, strategists in Washington and Moscow were intensely interested in solving the problem via negotiation. Moreover, the superpowers wielded substantial influence with the parties to the dispute. From a power political standpoint, thus, one would expect that the two sides would have cooperated to settle the matter. Yet, in the end, precisely the opposite occurred. This deeply puzzling outcome is the heart of this dissertation; in its simplest terms, my goal is to show what prevented Washington and Moscow from working together to solve the Arab-Israeli problem and, in so doing, I use the Middle East as a window to explain what drove the continuation of the Cold War as a time when a lessening of superpower tensions seemed possible. Utilizing a mass of primary source—and especially archival—evidence, I show that this result was primarily attributable to two variables. First, American domestic political factors consistently constrained U.S. decision-makers in their formulation of Middle East policy and thereby limited their ability to pursue a cooperative approach with the Soviets on the issue. Second, it turns out that the United States was simply not interested in settling the conflict in conjunction with Moscow. Despite the Kremlin’s willingness to contribute helpfully to the achievement of a stable Arab-Israeli settlement, U.S. officials’ deeply anti-Soviet views led them to eschew superpower collaboration and, in fact, resulted in their making the reduction of USSR influence in the Middle East a top priority. In short, the United States throughout this period pursued a strategy in the region that was profoundly inconsistent with power political considerations, an approach that was bound to contribute to the undermining of d?tente in the late 1970s.

Why and under what circumstances do people support aggressive action in the international system? And can political psychology actually give us insights into state behavior? This dissertation argues against conventional accounts that hold that the public is rational and strategic with the regards to the use of power. Relying on the concepts of the cognitive miser and rational ignorance among the voting public, the author uses experimental methods to show that with regards to foreign policy individuals are motivated by the same prejudices and moral intuitions that guide domestic political behavior. The first chapter argues against folk realist theories and shows that constructivist theories based on the need to maintain a positive self-image do a better job of predicting when Americans support the use of force abroad. Another chapter shows that when Americans consider altruistic policies, hearing that the policy in question can financially benefit the United States makes them less likely to support it. Furthermore, the implications of differences between conservatives and liberals are explored. When conservatives are considering whether to support humanitarian intervention, they show a bias towards helping Christians over Muslims, but no racial prejudice. Liberals, in contrast, show little to no religious prejudice but are more likely to want to intervene in the scenario where whites are oppressing blacks rather than the other way around. Prejudice can even influence more abstract moral values, as when conservatives heard about Christians being killed by Muslims, they were not only more likely to support humanitarian intervention, but also to say that the United States had a general moral obligation to help foreign populations facing government persecution. The final chapter explores whether psychological differences between conservatives and liberals matter with regards to the making of foreign policy. Relying on measures of affinity, or S-scores, the author uses United Nations General Assembly voting data from six Anglophone democracies to show that in each of these countries conservative governments vote less in line with the rest of the world. This work hopes to inspire future research that can continue to establish a link between political psychology and research on state behavior.