Foreign Policy Elites: Individuals Who Matter 183The example of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev illustrates the fact that indi-
vidual leaders can effect real change. After coming to power in 1985, he began to
frame the challenges confronting the Soviet Union differently, identifying the
Soviet security prob lem as part of the larger prob lem of weakness in the Soviet econ-
omy. Through a pro cess of trial and error, and by living through and then studying
failures, Gorbachev realized that the economic system had to be reformed to improve
the country’s security. He then took action to implement major reforms. Although he
eventually lost power, he is responsible for initiating broad economic foreign policy
change, including extricating the Soviet Union from its war in Af ghan i stan. Con-
structivists who also recognize the importance of individuals credit the changes not
only to Gorbachev as an individual but also to a network of Western- oriented policy
entrepreneurs who promoted new ideas, which were then implemented.^1
For realists, individuals are of little importance. This position comes from the
realist assumption of a unitary actor. Thus, states are not differentiated by their
government type or the personalities or styles of the leaders in office but by the
relative power they hold in the international system. Hans J. Morgenthau explained
as follows:
The concept of national interest defined as power imposes intellectual
discipline upon the observer, infuses rational order into the subject
matter of politics, and thus makes the theoretical understanding of poli-
tics pos si ble. On the side of the actor, it provides for rational discipline in
action and creates the astounding continuity in foreign policy which
makes American, British, or Rus sian foreign policy appear as an intelli-
gible, rational continuum, by and large consistent with itself, regardless
of the diff er ent motives, preferences, and intellectual and moral qualities
of successive statesmen.^2Realists see individuals as constrained by the state they inhabit, and neorealists see
them as constrained by the international system. Those are the most relevant levels
of analy sis. Radicals see individuals as constrained by the international system, namely
international capitalism, and, for them, there is really only one relevant level of analy sis.
Yet, sometimes, individual motives and preferences seem to make a difference.
Gorbachev introduced glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union beginning in
- The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping established himself as the architect of the
new China after 1978. Under his socialist market economy, the state permitted lim-
ited private competition and gradually opened itself eco nom ically to the outside
world. Were these individuals in fact responsible for these major changes, or did indi-
vidual leaders just happen to be the right (or wrong) people at the time? Given the