Jonathan Monten

The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy

mocracy is central to the George W. Bush administration’s prosecution of both the war on terrorism and its overall grand strategy, in which it is assumed that U.S. political and security interests are advanced by the spread of liberal political institutions and values abroad. In an approach variously characterized as “democratic realism,” “national security liberalism,” “democratic globalism,” and “messianic universalism,” the Bush administration’s national security policy has centered on the direct application of U.S. military and political power to promote democracy in strategic areas. In a summer 2004 interview, Bush expressed his “deep desire to spread liberty around the world as a way to help secure [the United States] in the long-run.”1 According to Bush, “As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.”2 This generic statement of cause and effect is also applied speciacally to terrorism: “democracy and reform will make [Middle Eastern states] stronger and more stable, and make the world more secure by undermining terrorism at its source.”3 More broadly, the Bush administration proposes a liberal international order grounded in U.S. military and political power; as its 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) contends, the unparalleled U.S. position of primacy creates a “moment of opportunity to extend the beneats of freedom across the globe . . . [the United States] will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.” This view appears to be contingent on the belief that U.S. power is “the sole pillar upholding a liberal world order that is conducive to the principles [the United States] believes in.”4 The Roots of the Bush Doctrine

Without Heirs? Assessing the Decline of Establishment Internationalism in U.S. Foreign Policy

Is establishment internationalism in decline? Conventional wisdom is becoming that structural shifts in the international environment along with generational, demographic, and cultural changes within the United States are inexorably leading to the decline of the broad, post-war internationalist consensus that dominated American foreign policy after 1945. Despite the frequent assertion that this change has taken place, very few studies have analyzed the extent to which establishment internationalism is in fact in decline. To answer this question, we first track trends in congressional foreign policy votes from the American Conservative Union (1970–2004) and Americans for Democratic Action (1948–2004). Our second set of indicators tracks the state of birth, educational profile, and formative international experience of a cross section of the U.S. foreign policy elite. Our third and fourth sets of indicators track elite attitudes as represented by presidential State of the Union addresses and major party platforms. We find support for increasing partisan polarization in Congress on foreign policy as well as increasing regional concentration of the parties. However, there is only mixed evidence to suggest that internationalism has experienced a secular decline overall. Support for international engagement and multilateral institutions remain important parts of elite foreign policy rhetoric. Moreover, we find that social backgrounds of U.S. foreign policy elites—save for military service—have not substantially changed from the height of the internationalist era.

Theater Missile Defense and Japanese Nuclear Weapons

Abstract The development of a joint US-Japan theater missile defense system could have significant ramifications beyond the defense of Japan and of American forces in the region. A growing debate within Japan on its international security position, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and questions about the role of the United States in the region conspire to create conditions for significant changes in Japans conception of its security status and its long‐term political-military calculations. By upgrading Japans strategic responsibilities, theater missile defense could inadvertently induce a reassessment of many of its national security policies, perhaps even the decision to forego nuclear weapons.

Does Kant Justify Liberal Intervention

The recent US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have renewed the debate over whether military interventions intended to impose democracy in a foreign state are consistent with liberal principles. The liberal political tradition within the United States has often been divided over this question. At issue is what place, if any, military force should have in a foreign policy dedicated to promoting goals such as the spread of electoral democracy, respect for human rights, and the rule of law.

Models of Crisis Decision Making and the 1990–91 Gulf War

The 1991 Persian Gulf War is a “most likely” case for several crisis decision-making models. It commanded presidential attention, arose when bureaucrats were fighting over post-Cold War budgets, and evoked the strong organizational cultures of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. We use this case to assess the contexts, decision stages, and issue areas in which alternative crisis models have the most explanatory power. We find that presidents are most powerful in agenda setting, choosing among options, crises, and high-politics issues. Bureaucratic politics diminishes in crises and best explains the behavior of mid-level careerists, the formulation of options, and the shaping of post-war budgets. Most striking, even in crises organizational cultures strongly shape tactical military decisions, choices among weapons systems, and the willingness of officials to risk their careers on behalf of their organizations’ values. Overall, these findings argue for greater attention to the influence of organizational cultures in crises.

Intervention and State-Building Comparative Lessons from Japan, Iraq, and Afghanistan

Since 2001, international attention has focused on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and specifically on the question of whether external intervention can assist weak or fragile states in successfully making the transition to stable democracies. This article analyzes the U.S. occupations of Japan beginning in 1945, Afghanistan beginning in 2001, and Iraq beginning in 2003, and uses these cases to review and critique the literature on why some interventions have been more successful than others in building robust and effective state institutions. The comparative analysis suggests that external interveners face substantial barriers to state-building in circumstances that lack favorable domestic preconditions. The United States has been more successful when preserving existing state capacity than when attempting to build state strength where it did not previously exist.

Reevaluating Foreign-Imposed Regime Change

Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten’s article “Forced to Be Free? Why ForeignImposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization” offers important contributions to the study of foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC).1 The authors should be commended for their use of advanced empirical methods to tackle such an important substantive question. According to Downes and Monten, past research on the democratizing effect of foreign-imposed regime change has overemphasized the characteristics of the intervener and underemphasized the existing preconditions for democracy in the state targeted for intervention. Rather than the FIRC itself, it is these preconditions, Downes and Monten suggest, that explain whether a given state will or will not democratize. That is, their argument posits that targets of FIRC that democratize would have done so independently of the foreign intervention. Although Downes and Monten offer promising results in support of their hypotheses, two factors should make scholars skeptical of the conclusions drawn from their interpretation of the evidence. First, even though Downes and Monten duly explore the efacacy of varieties of FIRC, they omit the most critical analytical category related to the dependent variable. In evaluating the ability of FIRC to produce democracy, one should focus on cases of foreign-imposed democratization (FID) where the intervener intended to replace a nondemocratic regime with a democratic one. Second, the nature of FIRC operations has changed over time in ways unaccounted for by Downes and Monten. For historical and theoretical reasons outlined in this letter, FIRC carried out before World War I looks signiacantly different from FIRC carried out since 1918. A closer examination of the targets of FID after World War I reveals a fairly remarkable success rate: thirteen out of seventeen targets transitioned to consolidated democracies within ten years of the intervention (see table 1). Such a record should give us pause before concluding that FIRC has little or no independent effect on a state’s democratization prospects. Correspondence: Foreign-Imposed Regime Change