Bruce W. Jentleson

The Pretty Prudent Public: Post Post-Vietnam American Opinion on the Use of Military Force

This article identifies a “post post-Vietnam” pattern in recent American public opinion on the use of military force. Data is drawn from eight cases of limited military force in the 1980s and the 1990–91 Persian Gulf war. Although other factors enter in, particularly the “halo effect” of quick-strike successes, the variations in public support are best explained by differences in principal policy objectives between force used to coerce foreign policy restraint by an aggressor state, and force used to influence or impose internal political change within another state. Distinctions are made both among and within the cases, showing the American public to have been much more supportive of the use of force when the principal objective was to restrain rather than remake governments. These findings have theoretical implications for the analysis of public opinion, prescriptive implications for U.S. foreign policy strategy, and normative implications for views of the role of the public in the foreign policy process.

Still Pretty Prudent Post-Cold War American Public Opinion on the Use of Military Force

Extending and further testing the theory advanced by Bruce Jentleson with post-cold war data, variations in U.S. public support for the use of military force are shown to be best explained by the principal policy objective for which military force is being used, with a third category of “humanitarian intervention” added to the previous two of “foreign policy restraint” and “internal political change.” The principal policy objective theory is shown through a series of tests, including regression and logistic analyses, to offer the most powerful and parsimonious explanation, both directly superseding and indirectly subsuming such other alternative variables as interests, elite cues, risk, and multilateralism. These findings support the broader theoretical view of a rational public purposive and not purely reactive in its opinion formulation and have important implications for the basic dispositions of the types of military interventions the American public will and will not support in the post-cold war era.

Who 'Won' Libya? The Force-Diplomacy Debate and Its Implications for Theory and Policy

The debate over credit for Libyas shift away from rogue state policies, most especially by settling the Pan Am 103 Lockerbie terrorism case and abandoning its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, is lively politically and challenging analytically. It has important implications for theories of force and diplomacy, particularly coercive diplomacy, and policy debates including such cases as Iran and North Korea. U.S. coercive diplomacy against Libya can be divided into three phases: the Reagan strategy of unilateral sanctions and military force, which largely failed; the mixed results from the more multilateral strategy of the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations; and the substantial success achieved through the secret direct negotiations initiated along with Britain in the latter Clinton years and furthered under George W. Bush, which culminated in Libya closing down its WMD programs. These differences in success and failure are principally explained by (1) the extent of balance in the coercer states strategy combining credible force and deft diplomacy consistent with three criteriaproportionality, reciprocity, and coercive credibilitytaking into account international and domestic constraints; and (2) target state vulnerability as shaped by its domestic politics and economy, particularly whether domestic elites play a circuit breaker or transmission belt role in blocking or carrying forward external coercive pressure.

The Need for Praxis: Bringing Policy Relevance Back In

eign policy colleague asked, which of your models and theories should I turn to now? What do you academics have to say about September 11? You are supposed to be the scholars and students of international affairs—Why did it happen? What should be done? Notwithstanding the surly tone, the questions are not unfair. They do not pertain just to political scientists and international relations scholars; they can be asked of others as well. It falls to each discipline to address these questions as they most pertain to its role. The Need for Praxis

Foreign military intervention : the dynamics of protracted conflict

Foreign Military Intervention brings together prominent scholars in an ambitious and innovative comparative study. The six case studies-the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Syria in Lebanon, Israel in Lebanon, South Africa and Cuba in Angola, and India in Sri Lanka-constitute a diverse set, involving superpowers and regional powers, democracies and nondemocracies, neighboring states and distant states, and incumbent regimes and insurgent movements.

Tough Love Multilateralism

Proponents need to apply some tough love to multilateralism to develop policies for when, why, who decides, and how to use military force. Otherwise, it will remain weak analytically, vulnerable politically, and unable to gain the mantle of leadership of U.S. foreign policy.

American commitments in the Third World: theory vs. practice

Amidst their other differences, the defeats suffered by the United States in Vietnam, Iran, and Lebanon have a common explanation. In all three cases American strategy was based on “global commitments theory.” Interests were to be defended and global credibility strengthened by the making, maintaining, reinforcing, and sustaining of American commitments to Third World allies. However, the core assumptions on which the logic of global commitments theory rests are plagued with inherent fallacies. These fallacies can be identified analytically as patterns of dysfunction along four dimensions of foreign policy: decision-making, diplomacy, military strategy, and domestic politics. They also can be shown empirically to have recurred across the Vietnam, Iran, and Lebanon cases. The central theoretical conclusion questions the fundamental validity of global commitments theory as it applies to the exercise of power and influence in the Third World. Important prescriptive implications for future American foreign policy are also discussed.

The Obama Administration and R2P: Progress, Problems and Prospects *

This article examines the policies of the Obama administration relevant to ‘Responsibility to Protect’ along four dimensions - core doctrine, as established in key foreign and national security policy statements and documents; executive branch institutional changes, focusing particularly on the 2011-12 Presidential Study Directive-10 (PSD-10) and the State Department’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR); actual policy in key cases; and particular focus on the Libya case - to assess the progress made, problems that have arisen, and prospects going forward. I argue that the Obama administration is to be credited for shifting the US R2P debate from “if” to “how” and “which”: i.e., no longer if the United States should adopt R2P as an international norm and genocide and mass atrocities prevention as a priority US policy objective but how best to do so and in which cases to do so. This by no means resolves all the issues; indeed it opens up many, domestically and internationally, that were less pressing when we still were at if. And much remains to be seen.

Discrepant Responses to Falling Dictators: Presidential Belief Systems and the Mediating Effects of the Senior Advisory Process'

Cognitive and advisory process theories usually are cast as competing explanations of decision-making in U.S. foreign policy. They are more appropriately approached as complementary components of a single explanation, in which the independent variable of the Presidents belief system is mediated by the intervening variable of the senior advisory process. The extent of the mediating effect is afunction of the degree and nature of senior advisor unity: weakest when there is senior advisor disunity, and strongest when there is dissenting unity. The cases of the Carter administration policy toward the Shah of Iran and the Reagan administration policy toward President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines bear out these hypotheses. In the CarterIran case the initial dissenting unity of Carters top advisors caused support for the Shah to be much greater than predicted by the presidents belief system propensities. The senior advisor disunity which emerged as the crisis worsened had much less of a mediating effect, and thus decisions came to more closely reflect the non-interventionist strategic view at the core of Carters belief system. In the Reagan-Philippines case, initially the presidents propensities to support Marcos were reinforced by the unanimity of his top advisors. The key decisions in 1985-86 which culminated in abandoning Marcos were the result of the transformation of the advisory process to dissenting unity and the consequent strong mediating effect. In thus demonstrating the interactive relationship between beliefs and process, these cases help establish the need for integrative theory.

From consensus to conflict: the domestic political economy of East-West energy trade policy

Changes in the domestic politics of East-West energy trade policy indicate a more general transformation of the domestic politics of American foreign policy. In the postwar period the basic, consensual pattern of congressional bipartisanship, executivebranch unity, interest-group collaboration, and a supportive public has been replaced by the conflictual pattern of an assertive Congress, a fragmented executive branch, antagonistic interest groups, and a divided public. These contrasting patterns are manifestations of structural changes in the domestic political economy. Along both political and economic dimensions, and differentiated according to whether the locus of pressure was group-specific or more general, what had been basic foundations of consensus became by the early 1970s fissures of conflict. Of particular significance were the weakening of the macropolitical foundations (the basic accord on foreignpolicy objectives and strategies) in the wake of both Vietnam and detente and the increased marginal value of the economic costs, both diffuse (macroeconomic) and particularistic (microeconomic), to be paid for economic coercion. In this transformed context, the states support-building instruments of ideology and economic compensation were insufficient to build consensus. As a result, in this issue area and perhaps more generally, high levels of domestic constraints on the conduct of American foreign policy have become the rule rather than the exception.