In this article I explore the propensity of democracies to use military force when involved in international disputes. I argue that the use of force by democracies in large part results from the domestic circumstances confronting their chief executives and that those circumstances vary predictably across democracies based on the structure of their domestic institutions. For example, U.S. presidents must garner public support before elections and maintain widespread congressional support if they involve the country in long-term military conflicts. Conflicts are risky without either of these domestic prerequisites. Consider President Lyndon Johnson's decision to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Johnson and his advisors reached their decision in 1964 but waited until early 1965, after the November 1964 national election, to announce this decision publicly and implement it on the ground. President George Bush's 1990 decision to double the number of troops deployed to Kuwait and move from deterring an attack on Saudi Arabia to compelling an Iraqi withdrawal was made in a similar manner. The Bush administration decided on its new policy in early October but announced that decision only after Congress recessed and the midterm elections were completed.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is the most robust and deeply institutionalized alliance in the modern world, yet it has faced significant problems in running the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. Specifically, the coalition effort has been plagued by caveats: restrictions on what coalition militaries can and cannot do. Caveats have diminished the alliance’s overall effectiveness and created resentment within the coalition. In this article, we explain why ISAF countries have employed a variety of caveats in Afghanistan, focusing on the period from 2003 to 2009. Caveats vary predictably according to the political institutions in each contributor to ISAF. Troops from coalition governments are likely to have caveats. Troops from presidential or majoritarian parliamentary governments tend, on average, to have fewer caveats, but specific caveats depend on the background of key decision makers in those countries. To demonstrate these points, we first review key limitations facing military contingents in Afghanistan. We then compare the experiences of Canada, France, and Germany and find that our institutional model does a better job of explaining the observed behavior than do competing explanations focusing on public opinion, threat, or strategic culture. We conclude with implications for both research and North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s future.
Conventional wisdom holds that the President of the United States has a high degree of autonomy over U.S. foreign policy. Such autonomy is said to stem in part from his ability to confront the Senate with the either‐or choice of accepting or rejecting treaties. In this article, we take issue with this characterization and explore how the Senate uses treaty “reservations” to alter ratification documents and advance Senate policy views. We find conservative Senates and pivotal senators systematically exploit the right to add reservations, and thus limit the President's autonomy in his conduct of foreign affairs.
This study explains the behavior of democratic states during wars of choice using an integrated decision model. Integrated models are an attractive choice for explaining multifaceted decisions, particularly when simpler, existing theories have an uneven or only partial ability to explain conflict behavior. To illustrate these points, this study assesses the behavior of key NATO members during the 1999 intervention in Kosovo. I compare the behavior of France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S. with the expectations of theories of collective action, balance of threat neorealism, public opinion, and government institutional structures. As an alternative, I introduce a simple, integrated, decision-making model that incorporates the core concepts from the other explanations in a staged, conditional manner. The integrated model does a better job of explaining state behavior in Kosovo than do existing theories. The integrated model also is applicable to other conflicts. The results of this study, and the potential of integrated models, have implications for our thinking about foreign policy analysis, for behavior during military interventions and the fight against terrorism, and for future U.S. leadership of alliance and coalition war efforts.The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. opened a new chapter in NATO alliance history. For the first time, NATO enacted Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, which specifies that an attack on one NATO member represents an attack on all alliance members. 1 As positive a step as that was, Article V does not require that NATO members contribute actual military assets to alliance defense, much less participate in interventions outside NATO auspices. 2 Indeed, we have already witnessed significant alliance disagreements over NATO's role in Afghanistan and the U.S. decision to launch the 2003 Iraq war. As a result, no one can know with certainty the extent to which NATO members ultimately will contribute to the fight against terrorism, to say nothing of NATO member contributions to non-Article V conflicts around the world.
The strategic problem for the United States during the lead‐up to a potential military clash is maintaining the executive's ability to respond internationally while not abrogating legislative oversight of the use of force. In light of this dilemma, congressional leaders have an incentive to engage in “stage management”: establishing short‐term contracts with the executive that shift political risk during conflict onto the president while maintaining a final check on presidential policy. The War Powers Resolution is a useful test of the stage management model and an alternative model that derides congressional involvement in the use of force as nothing more than symbolic politics. We find that the War Powers Resolution changed the process by which Congress opposes the presidential use of force, easing congressional collective‐action problems and minimizing the electoral repercussions associated with said confrontation. Moreover, presidents have used force differently since the resolution's passage. By changing both process and outcomes, the War Powers Resolution fulfills all the requirements of a stage management contract.
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