Within the past decade, the scholarly literature on the Richard M. Nixon administration's foreign policy has begun to explode. The ongoing declassification of critically important archival materials, such as the notorious Nixon tapes, along with the appearance of numerous relevant volumes in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, has helped fuel this mini-boom. Not surprisingly, much of the new literature has trained a critical eye on the peculiar partnership forged by President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, the two men who dominated the administration's foreign policymaking process to an unparalleled extent.

Asaf Siniver's ably crafted monograph takes a somewhat different tack. As a political scientist, Siniver is less concerned with personalities than with the roles of structure and process in foreign-policy decision-making – and with the interrelationship between the two. He looks to the Nixon administration as a fruitful laboratory for investigating how highly formalistic, hierarchical decision-making machinery, such as that installed by Nixon and Kissinger, performs during international crises. The Washington Special Actions Group (WSAG), which was the principal interdepartmental committee charged with providing the President both with essential intelligence and with alternative policy choices, constitutes the main focus of his research scheme. Utilizing the method of structured, focussed comparison pioneered by Alexander George, Siniver examines the performance of Nixon, Kissinger, and the WSAG over the course of four major crises: the Cambodian incursion of May 1970, the Jordanian–Palestinian crisis of that same year, the Indo-Pakistani war of December 1971, and the Arab–Israeli conflict of October 1973.

What he finds is that, in spite of the rigid bureaucratic structures and procedures instituted by the Nixon White House, the “personality traits and cognitive schemes” of the President and his national security adviser nonetheless exerted a powerful – even determinative – influence on decision-making in each of these four episodes (69). Repeatedly, Nixon and Kissinger circumvented the very system that they had put in place. Time and again, they made decisions based on instincts, biases, personal anxieties, and unexamined assumptions about the behavior of powers great and small. They reached the most important of those decisions, moreover, during informal deliberations conducted outside the WSAG system.

In the two most egregious cases – the Cambodian incursion and the Indo-Pakistani war – the author argues that Nixon and his chief aide deliberately insulated themselves from expert views that clashed with their own gut instincts. Policymaking during the Cambodian crisis represented the very antithesis of order and formality; it became, instead, “a charade of secrecy, back-channelling, exclusion, and evasion, orchestrated from the first day by Nixon and Kissinger” (109). During the South Asia crisis precipitated by Pakistan's brutal crackdown against independence-seeking East Bengal, they acted on hunches, assumptions, and prejudices that put them severely at odds with their own bureaucracy. Siniver attributes the deeply flawed decision-making in that case to the “excessive secrecy” favored by Nixon and Kissinger, their instinctive distrust of State Department professionals, and “their predisposition to view what was in essence a regional crisis in terms of a realist, power-centered triangular politics, thus unnecessarily bringing China and the Soviet Union into the equation” (148). Those criticisms, consistent with the bulk of the scholarly literature written about these two episodes, are rendered very effectively here.

The Jordanian and Yom Kippur war cases serve as counterpoints for Siniver. In each of those Middle East flash points, Nixon and Kissinger did utilize the WSAG in an appropriate manner. The policy machinery proved adaptive and effectual, he insists, operating much as its designers had intended; the President and US policy interests were thus well served. Those cases represent for the author a vindication of the formalistic decision-making apparatus installed by the Nixon White House, just as the President's end-run around the system in the other two cases justifies Siniver's condemnation of overly informal, personalistic approaches to policymaking.

The conclusions of this study may strike many readers as too schematic, and too neat. Presumably, a President who uses formal decision-making structures can achieve fruitful policy deliberations; one who subverts them, however, can fall prey to ungrounded or distorted cognitive assumptions. Four cases drawn from one of the most dysfunctional of presidential administrations hardly provides a sufficiently robust base on which to build such broad generalizations.

The strengths of this book, nevertheless, far outweigh its limitations. Unlike many political scientists, Siniver embraces archival research in a manner that should satisfy the most exacting of historians. He narrates each of the four crises that he covers with admirable succinctness and analytical rigor. For anyone interested in the foreign policy of the Nixon administration, this book will yield fresh details, perspectives, and insights. It is highly recommended for diplomatic historians and scholars of international relations alike.