The Interface Between Beliefs and Behavior

Abstract

This paper examines the interface between Henry Kissinger's operational code and his bargaining behavior during the Vietnam conflict. Kissinger's position at the pinnacle of the American foreign affairs hierarchy, amidst the existence of competing policy recommendations, may be regarded as necessary conditions to test the impact of his operational code upon American foreign policy. A comparison of his academic writings and his conduct of the Vietnam negotiations reveals a congruent relationship between his operational code and his bargaining behavior. Taken collectively, the code's components approximate game theory's “prisoner's dilemma” description of politics and specify a “general preference relation” that prescribes a consistent, predictable, metagame repertoire of responses.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 137 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.