The Presidential Manipulation of Inherited Wars of Choice: Barack Obama's Use of Nixonian Methods as Commander in Chief

Bringing the boys back home: Campaign promises and US decision-making in Iraq and Vietnam

“…These cases are not exhaustive of the range of foreign policy decisions a president is faced with, nor can they be fully representative of the behaviour of all political leaders, each of whom bring particular beliefs and personalities to any given problem. Yet they do stand out as particularly instructive since, like the present incumbent, both Obama and Nixon gained office in part thanks to their opposition to overseas conflict, and both also took far longer than expected to extricate US forces from the battlefield (Boys, 2014;Boys, 2015). By focusing on decisions concerning a conflict in which US forces are already committed, moreover, this article builds on recent attempts to shift existing scholarly attention away from initial decisions to use force and towards in bello decision-making (Payne 2019/2020).…”