Purposes and Interests in American Foreign Policy: The FRUS Series as Data

• In Event: Text-as-Data, Archives, and Diplomacy

Abstract

This paper uses the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series documents as data to analyse change in interests and purposes in U.S. foreign policy over the post-Second World War era. Purposes are the ends to which state power is expected to be used and include broad goals such as security and economic growth. Interests are more specific goals that serve broader purposes, such as containment or free trade. We use the FRUS texts-as-data to map change in these goals over time and speak to two debates. First, picking up a neglected theme from Rosecrance, we discuss the relative weight of security versus economic purposes in American foreign policy over the period. Second, there is currently a debate among Cold War historians about whether the U.S. sought hegemony, primacy, or simply security and so succumbed to the security dilemma. We use the data to evaluate these questions empirically.

The data was collected by web-scraping the State Department website to collate all of the FRUS documents from 1945 to 1993 (Truman through Bush). These text-as-data were then cleaned and structured into a publicly queryable format for use by future scholars. We next subjected our formatted text data to a three part process. First, we applied a combination of inductive human coding and unsupervised topic modeling to a random sample of documents from our full FRUS corpus (stratified by administration), so as to build series of dictionaries related to each of the foreign policy constructs mentioned above. Second, we applied these dictionaries to the full set of documents within our FRUS corpus, allowing us to identify and test for relative changes in U.S. foreign policy interests and purposes both across documents and over time. Third, we selectively analysed documents to trace the processes by which some major shifts happened.

Authors

• Bentley B. Allan, Johns Hopkins University

• Benjamin E. Bagozzi, University of Delaware