The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersment that foreign policy decision makers generally respond to realis-
tic appraisals of situations and act within the available constraints
and opportunities. Thus given American reluctance to maintain
troops in Europe after 1918 and to submit national sovereignty to a
supranational league, Wilson's weakness was one of position rather
than personality. Even in the case of Hitler, the historian A. J. P.
Taylor (1961) argues, his foreign policy
was that of his predecessors, of the professional diplomats at the
foreign ministry, and indeed of virtually all Germans ... to free
Germany from the restrictions of the peace treaty, to restore a
great German army; and then to make Germany the greatest
power in Europe from her natural weight. (97)The scholarly terrain is defined by these two boundaries: on the one
hand is the naive view of political outcomes as merely the projection
of leaders' personalities, and on the other hand is the equally sim-
plistic view that individual personalities have no effect.
Charting a course between these extremes, Greenstein (1969,
chap. 2) suggests that a leader's personality may be especially impor-
tant under four conditions: when the actor occupies a strategic loca-
tion, when the situation is ambiguous or unstable, when there are no
clear precedents or routine role requirements, and when spontaneous
or especially effortful behavior is required. These conditions stress
the importance of the context in which the actor is operating,
observing that the impact of leader personality increases to the
degree that the environment admits of restructuring.
Among the many fields of politics, these conditions are perhaps
most often met in the arena of foreign policy. Included in the cir-
cumstances that Hermann (1976) has identified in which leader per-
sonality is most apt to affect foreign policy are the following: (i) in
proportion to the general interest of the head of state in foreign pol-
icy; (2) when the means of assuming power are dramatic; (3) when
the head of state is charismatic; (4) when the head of state has great
authority over foreign policy; (5) when the foreign policy organiza-
tion of the nation is less developed and differentiated; (6) in a crisis;
and (7) when the external national situation is perceived to be
ambiguous.
During the relatively stable era of the superpower rivalry, it often