شایان افراسیابی

The US foreign policy in the post-World War II has been marked by periods of unilateralism, while in other periods, multilateralism has been more prevailing. The existing works, while explaining certain periods of unilateralism by various domestic and international factors, such as neo-conservative ideology and superpower rivalries in the Cold War, are unable to explain the reason for which in some periods, the US foreign Policy has been more dominant. This article seeks to explain the difference by referring to the conceptual complexity of US presidents. We analyzed the content of news conference transcripts for 11 post-WWII US presidents using the Flesch-Kincaid text readability index to measure presidents’ conceptual complexity. We used the index in our previous study to explain the unorthodoxy of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. Findings suggest with statistical significance that Presidents with low levels of conceptual complexity do not consider many factors as important and prefer unilateral actions by emphasizing short-term achievements. On the contrary, presidents with complex cognition are less likely to believe that the US can solve critical or long-term international issues alone.

In many aspects, U.S. President Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy-making was in sharp contrast with that of his predecessors, particularly post-WWII presidents. His hostility toward the long-lasting liberal international order that was crafted and maintained by former presidents, his eccentric ways of solving foreign policy issues, and his unusual rhetoric regarding U.S. allies and adversaries, are all indications of his “unorthodox” foreign policy approach. In an attempt to explain this unorthodoxy, in this article we aim to examine Trump’s cognitions and compare them to those of his post-WWII predecessors. In particular, we have measured the cognitive complexity score for each of these presidents to determine Trump’s position among them. In order to do so, we have calculated the Flesch-Kincaid readability score of the presidents’ verbal statements, assuming that the complexity of the statements indicates the complexity of their author’s thoughts. The results have clearly demonstrated that Trump was at the lowest level of cognitive complexity among the presidents under examination, and since a low level of cognitive complexity pertains to viewing the situation from limited perspectives, a low need for broader information, adhering to a limited number of policy options, ignoring advice, and decisiveness, we may reasonably infer that his cognitive simplicity played an important role in the unorthodoxy of his foreign policy approach.