Abstract
War policy was defined in the last chapter as a policy under which the use of organized military violence plays the central role in achieving political objectives. National will is the stability of war policy. A failure of will is characterized by a discontinuous change in war policy. A discussion about the American national will in war, therefore, is rightly focused on the output of the U.S. domestic policy process in the production of war policy. Instead of limiting the discussion to a discrete decision in time, as do many studies concerning the decision to go to war, I enlist relevant theories of the policy process to examine the course of war policy over time. In this chapter I develop the theoretical structure for my argument and its central component, the war narrative.
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Notes
Graham Alison’s book Essence of Decision represents the touchstone work on the foreign policy decisions that become the output of the U.S. foreign policy process. Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, 1971). Critical analysis of Allison’s model can be found in Jonathan Bendor and Thomas H. Hammond, “Rethinking Allison’s Models,” American Political Science News 86, no. 2 (1992).
Michael J. Mazarr, “The Iraq War and Agenda Setting,” Foreign Policy Analysis 3, no. 1 (2007): 9–10.
J. L. True, B. D. Jones, and F. R. Baumgartner, “Punctuated-Equilibrium Theory,” in Theories of the Policy Process, ed. Paul A. Sabatier (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2007), 155.
Baumgartner and Jones admit that the term equilibrium is actually somewhat misleading because, as has been noted by Riker, “Disequilibrium, or that the status quo be upset, is the characteristic feature of politics.” See Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 13.
Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential leadership, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1997).
Richard N. Haas, “Keynote Address: Is Policy Planning Possible at the Present Moment?” Presented at The Past, the Present, and the Future of Policy Planning, Fletcher School, Tufts University, Medford, MA, April 17, 2008.
Ronald R. Krebs, “Rhetoric, Power, and the Making of US Security Policy” (paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, August 31, 2007).
For a thorough explication of this process using case studies of the Reagan Doctrine, see James M. Scott, Deciding to Intervene: The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
Alexander L. George, “Domestic Constraints on Regime Change in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Need for Policy Legitimacy,” in American Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays, ed. G. John Ikenberry (New York: Longman, 2002);
R. Smoke, “On the Importance of Policy Legitimacy,” Political Psychology 15, no. 1 (1994). See also Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1973);
Miroslav Nincic, Democracy and Foreign Policy: The Fallacy of Political Realism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
This discussion regarding the levels of legitimacy is drawn primarily from work by Timothy Lomperis. In his analysis of Cold War Marxist insurgencies, Lomperis develops a more detailed understanding of legitimacy, accompanied by a useful framework that allows legitimacy to be differentiated and compared in an environment in which there is a struggle for legitimacy. This will be useful in later discussions regarding when and why opposition to a policy arises and who wins the competition. See Timothy J. Lomperis, From People’s War to People’s Rule: Insurgency, Intervention, and the lessons of Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Lawrence Freedman, The Transformation of Strategic Affairs (New York: Routledge for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2006).
Richard K. Herrmann et al., “Images in International Relations: An Experimental Test of Cognitive Schemata,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 3 (1997): 405.
These assertions are supported by an ever-increasing literature on the role played by problem representation in the policy process. See especially Donald A. Sylvan and James F. Voss, Problem Representation in Foreign Policy Decision Making (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
David A. Rochefort and Roger W. Cobb, The Politics of Problem Definition: Shaping the Policy Agenda, Studies in Government and Public Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Weiss, “The Powers of Problem Definition”;
Jonathan Keller, “Problem Representation and the War on Terror: Alternative Visions, Clashing Policies” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, September 2, 2004); Keller, “Problem Representation and the War on Terror”; Michael Connelly, “Dueling Definitions: A Nation at Risk and Responses Thereto,” Knowledge 12, no. 2 (1990); Krebs, “Rhetoric, Power, and the Making of US Security Policy”; Richard R. Lau and Mark Schlesinger, “Policy Frames, Metaphorical Reasoning, and Support for Public Policies,” Political Psychology 26, no. 1 (2005); Stone, “Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas.”
Several works deal with this controversial topic. One of the most thorough and thoughtful pieces is included in an examination of American foreign policy traditions by Walter Russell Mead. Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).
See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution, 2nd Harvest/HBJ ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991). With regard to war, this also must include the precepts of just war theory.
Historian Michael Hunt highlights three tenants of what he sees as American ideology as it plays out in its foreign policy: visions of greatness, a hierarchy of races, and the perils of revolution. See Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
For an outstanding discussion of how people professing commitment to similar values can be almost irreconcilably different in behavior, see David Hackett Fischers discussion regarding the problems General Washington had in building the Continental Army in 1776. David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, Pivotal Moments in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 13–30.
For a thoughtful analysis of how strategic adjustment of U.S. foreign policy occurs, see Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Robert M. Entman, Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy, Studies in Communication, Media, and Public Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004);
W. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz, Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Robert Entman, cited in Philip J. Powlick and Andrew Z. Katz, “Defining the American Public Opinion/Foreign Policy Nexus,” Mershon International Studies Review 42, no. 1 (1998): 36.
For public-opinion theory, see John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For policy-analysis theory, see Stone, “Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas”; Sylvan and Voss, Problem Representation in Foreign Policy Decision Making; Weiss, “Powers of Problem Definition.”
Henry R. Nau, At Home Abroad: Identity and Power in American Foreign Policy, Cornell Studies in Political Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 5.
Jeffrey W. Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 30.
John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1995), 166.
James F. Voss, “On the Representation of Problems: An Information-Processing Approach to Foreign Policy Decision Making,” in Problem Representation in Foreign Policy Decision Making, ed. Donald A. Sylvan and James F. Voss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11.
Erik Voeten and Paul R. Brewer, “Public Opinion, the War in Iraq, and Presidential Accountability,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 6 (2006): 811.
The candidates for president in 1952 had virtually identical positions on the Korean War. Although both were frustrated by the lack of progress in the talks, both fought off calls for escalation and suggested only minor modifications to strategy. See Eric A. Beene, Jeffrey J. Kubiak, and Kyle J. Colton, U.S., Russia, and the Global War on Terror: “Shoulder to Shoulder” into Battle?, (DTIC Document, 2005), 329–31.
Cited in E.A. Stanley, “Ending the Korean War: The Role of Domestic Coalition Shifts in Overcoming Obstacles to Peace,” International Security 34, no. 1 (2009): 69.
John E. Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: Wiley, 1973), 41.
Miroslav Nincic, “The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Politics of Opposites,” World Politics 40, no. 4 (1988); James A. Stimson, Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings, 2nd ed., Transforming American Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998);
James A. Stimson, Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Emery Roe, Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), especially chapter 2. For theoretical support, see Jeffrey W. Legro, “Whence American Internationalism,” International Organization 54, no. 2 (2000).
Alan C. Lamborn, “Theory and the Politics in World Politics,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1997): 195.
Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders; Voss, “On the Representation of Problems.” On stickiness of ideas, see also Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, Cornell Studies in Political Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
Robert S. Billings and Charles F. Hermann, “Problem Identification in Sequential Policy Decisions Making: The Re-Representation of Problems,” in Problem Representation in Foreign Policy Decision Making, ed. Donald A. Sylvan and James F. Voss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Research on framing provides insight. See James N. Druckman, “On the Limits of Framing Effects: Who Can Frame?,” Journal of Politics 63, no. 4 (2001): 1045.
Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Iheory Development in the Social Sciences, BCSIA Studies in International Security (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 206.
For justification of these data sources as valuable reflections of public/elite in the public space, see A. G. Nikolaev and D. V. Porpora, “Talking War: How Elite U.S. Newspaper Editorials and Opinion Pieces Debated the Attack on Iraq,” Sociological Focus (Ohio) 40, no. 1 (2007). See also the methodology of W. Ben Hunt, Getting to War: Predicting International Conflict with Mass Media Indicators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
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© 2014 Jeffrey J. Kubiak
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Kubiak, J.J. (2014). War Policy Stability and Change—The War Narrative. In: War Narratives and the American National Will in War. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410146_2
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