In an image from Robert Putnam’s two-level-game metaphor, “national political leaders” from nation-states engaged in international negotiations, sit astride two game boards to balance the requirements of playing the international and domestic games simultaneously and effectively. The constraints and interests at one game can be at odds with those of the other, and the overlap or win-set of what is negotiable at the international level and ratifiable at the domestic level has implications for how the leaders play the two games. This dissertation seeks to present an extension of Putnam’s two-level-game framework to comprise not only the inter-state negotiations but any interactions between the two nation-states, including conflict behavior. It also adds a third board to the metaphor for the national political leaders to play another game, the transnational game.
The study examines the three-level-diplomacy of Iran-U.S. conflicts for the period between the winter of 1979, when American officials of the Embassy in Tehran were taken hostage by Iranian students and the spring of 2003, when a coalition of U.S. British and a number of other countries toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq by military force.