U.S. Foreign Relations: Conflict, Cooperation, and Attribute Distances

R. J. Rummel

Jan 1970 · University of Hawaii, Department of Political Science

About this ebook

The foreign relations of the United States are considered in terms of six hypotheses based on a linkage pre-theory, a social status theory, a distance theory, a power transition theory, integration-regional findings, and propositions about geographic distance. These hypotheses are linked together by the notion of a distance vector, interpreted in terms of the constructs of attribute space, behavior space, and dyads, and developed within a geometric framework called field theory. To test this field theory and hypotheses subsumed by it, data on nineteen foreign relations and actions of the U.S., ranging from tourists and treaties to negative communications and sanctions, toward 81 object nations were correlated with the distances between the U.S. and other nations on economic development, size or power bases, political orientation, socio-cultural dimensions, and geographic distance. (Author).