Foreign Policy Analysis and the Making of Plan Colombia

This article, through a Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) perspective, analyses the only long-term foreign policy decision ever made in Colombia. Since FPA portrays a theory of human political choice to analyse foreign policy behaviour, this analysis will specifically focus on Plan Colombia’s decision-makers as a case study using empirical examples. The purpose is to understand the specificity of this foreign policy decision-making process from an unexplored perspective, namely Groupthink theory. Although Janis has asserted that the process would negatively affect decision-making quality, this article contradicts this assumption based on both the boundaries and opportunities encountered when applying mainstream FPA to a non-US case study. As such, a major challenge remains when it comes to judging quality and, correspondingly, expecting certain outcomes. This article demonstrates that group cohesiveness and concurrence-seeking tendencies may be useful for explaining successful foreign policy decision outcomes.