9514921 Holsti This project, the sixth phase of a long-term collaborative project, will seize the opportunity offered by the dramatic developments that have transformed world politics in the years since the end of the Cold War. The purpose is to advance understanding of the dynamics whereby the United States responds and adapts to a world that is no longer marked by the euphoria of the Cold War's end. While Phase VI of the Foreign Policy Leadership Project (FPLP) is partially designed to assess the stability of earlier findings, its primary intent is to explore how the belief systems of American leaders have been affected by the continuing disarray of world affairs and the diminishing prospects for a new global order founded on multilateral principles. The earlier studies of the American leadership community found that a) a pre-Vietnam foreign policy consensus had been replaced by several internally consistent, largely mutually exclusive and durable belief systems; b) for the most part these sharp cleavages were not bridged in the face of numerous challenges; c) discernible ideological and partisan differences prevail between the foreign and domestic policy belief systems of leaders; and, d) nonetheless certain issues, notably those involving Israel and trade, stand out as anomalous with respect to the overall findings. Using the same survey methods employed in the earlier research, this project applies and tests a theory of political adaptation designed to account for 1) any major changes that have occurred in leadership belief systems as a result of such seminal events as the recent failures of the United Nations, the intensification of tensions with Russia, the outbreak of conflict in Chechnya, and the advent of tensions over trade with Japan; 2) how the long-standing habits of thought developed during the decades prior to the collapse of the USSR have been affected by the end of the Cold War; 3) the degree to which unilateralist and isolationist tendencies have been fostered by dis appointments abroad as well as domestic terrorism and mounting tensions over the country's social and economic agenda; 4) those dimensions of the various belief systems that have remained stable in the face of changes in world and national politics; and, 5) the ways in which the transformations at home and abroad may have induced tendencies toward a more widespread consensus or toward ever deeper cleavages within the American leadership community. This is a data resource that will be used widely by scholars interested in the topic. ***
