Testing Models of U.S. Foreign Policy: Foreign Aid during and after the Cold War

Abstract

The end of the Cold War has provided scholars of international relations with a unique opportunity to evaluate the explanatory power of their models in a rapidly changing environment. We provide a preliminary, exploratory test of the system-level, societal-level, and state-level explanations of U. S. foreign policy behavior during and after the Cold War We seek to determine which among the foreign policy goals suggested by these approaches best explains one important aspect of U. S. foreign policy-the provision of foreign assistance The hypotheses are tested on a pooled, cross-sectional, time series of U. S. foreign aid allocation from 1977 through 1994 While we find a great deal of similarity in the relative importance of the three approaches in explaining U. S. behavior in both eras, we also show that the security-driven goals of the systemic approach have become less critical and the ideological goals of the state-centered model more important with the passing of the Cold War.