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This article employs newly declassified documents from the National Archives in Washington and London to re-examine foreign policymaking of the Nixon Administration during the Cienfuegos crisis of 1970. The article seeks to answer two fundamental questions with regard to policy decision-making during the crisis: why did the Administration pursue a public policy of 'business as usual' while cloaking the crisis in extreme secrecy, and how was this achieved? Answers to these questions can be found in the unique situation the Administration found itself during the 'Autumn of Crises', and in Kissinger's manipulation of NSC mechanisms and procedures, respectively. * I would like to thank Richard Aldrich and Helmut Sonnenfeldt for their insightful comments on earlier drafts, though I am alone responsible for any errors.

This paper assesses the role that analogical reasoning played in Israel's decision making during the 2006 Second Lebanon War with Hezbollah. Two analogies seemed to dominate internal deliberations: the “air power superiority” analogy which drew on more than a decade of developments in military theory and the air‐based campaigns of the two Gulf wars and the Balkan wars of the mid‐1990s and late 1990s; and the “Lebanese quagmire” analogy which drew on Israel's own traumatic experience of Israel following the its first war in Lebanon in 1982. The misuse of these analogies by the Israeli political–military leadership during the war produced a myopic approach which advocated an almost total reliance on air power rather than ground maneuver to win the war and refrained from using ground forces for fear of entering another bloody and unpopular war in Lebanon. The constraining power of these analogies prevented the consideration of alternative courses of action or the effective calculation of cost‐benefit analysis during the war. Whereas previous studies of the war provided various explanations to singular decisions or episodes, this paper shows that the air power and quagmire analogies contained the conceptual boundaries of Israeli decision making during the war and thus best explain its attraction and limitations.

According to Evans (2007, http://gevans.org/speeches/speech229. html), for political actors to be "good international citizens," they ought to recognize and promote respect for core human rights in their foreign policy, engage in vigorous multilateral cooperation, and contribute to positive change where possible. This study assesses this approach in the context of EU foreign policy, by asking two questions: (i) what sort of ethically oriented action should be expected of a foreign policy actor in the current global system?; (ii) what are the barriers to achieving such action that naturally arise in that system, given the way it is constructed? We argue that the answer lies in recognizing not only the practical challenges or constraints, but also the normative constraints facing such actors in a foreign policy framework. First, we apply a good international citizenship framework in the case of EU foreign policy. We then assess EU actions in the context of the Middle East peace process, focusing on the efforts the union has made, and ones it might make toward "punching its weight," consistent with good international citizenship. The assessment of the case, and the analysis of good international citizenship overall, highlight a gap between moral outcomes sought by many critics of EU foreign policy action and outcomes that should be routinely achievable in the present system. Securing much more robust moral outcomes, especially those advocated by cosmopolitan theorists, likely would require long-term movement toward system transformation consistent with "institutional global citizenship."

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