Geographic Mental Maps and Foreign Policy Change

15Conclusion

In the preceding chapters, I have presented an alternative explanation of the Carter Administration’s Middle East policy and the development of the Carter Doctrine. While the chapters do not settle the matter of why the Administration’s policy changed, they do seriously refute the conventional accounts of how policy changed. More precisely, they challenge traditional accounts which implicitly employed rationalizations based on the principles of punctuated equilibrium and planned change models.

Punctuated equilibrium emphasizes discontinuous episodic change (Romanelli and Tushman, 1994). The general assumption is that organizational activities evolve through reasonably long periods of stability (i. e., equilibrium) that are interrupted ...