The Last Episode. Elizabeth Saunders on How Democracies Wage War and Make Peace

Elizabeth Saunders is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University as well as a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is also an editor of The Good Authority Blog formerly known as The Monkey Cage Blog. Her most recent book is The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace.

Proudly sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Learn more at https://kellogg.nd.edu

Proudly sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Learn more at https://carnegieendowment.org

We’ve often compared democratic national security and autocratic security making in terms of autocratic elites and democratic voters. My argument is not that all democracies are the same, but I do think we ought to be thinking about autocratic elites and democratic elites and voters.

Elizabeth Saunders

Key Highlights

• Introduction – 0:20
• How Foreign Policy Works – 3:30
• Politics at the Water’s Edge – 18:13
• Parties and Foreign Policy – 27:09
• Contemporary Politics – 41:28

Podcast Transcript

I published the first episode of this podcast in June of 2020. That was four years ago. Since then, I have published a new episode every week for 208 weeks. But this is my last week. This is my last episode. I want to thank everyone who has listened to the podcast along the way. I also want to thank the hundreds of guests.

I was fortunate to develop partners and sponsors with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard, International IDEA, and the Andrea Mitchell Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Thank you so much to the partners, sponsors, and donors who allowed the podcast to last as long as it did.

But I still have one more interview to share. This conversation with Elizabeth Saunders was recorded last month when she was in Indiana for a speaking event. I was fortunate to sit down with her to discuss her new book The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace.

Elizabeth Saunders is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University as well as a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is also an editor of The Good Authority Blog formerly known as The Monkey Cage.

I felt this conversation got at the heart of a central theme of the podcast. Is democratic governance truly democratic when elites shape decisions as important as war and peace? Like always, the answer is more complicated than a straight yes or no answer. But what I hope to do is to test our assumptions about the meaning and purpose of democracy.

The Democracy Paradox is proud to count as one of its sponsors the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Their Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program is a leading source of research and ideas about supporting democracy globally. You can learn more at ceip.org/programs/democracy.

The podcast is also sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. The Kellogg Institute was founded by Guillermo O’Donnell, one of the giants of democratic thought, more than 40 years ago. It continues to sponsor research on democracy and human development. Check them out at Kellogg.nd.edu. You’ll find a link in the show notes to their website.

As I bring this project to a close, I hope you’ll reach out. You can reach me at democracyparadoxblog@gmail.com. Whether you are listening to this today or in the future, please stay in touch. But for now… This is my conversation with Elizabeth Saunders…

Well, I think this is one of the real paradoxes… if you want to talk about a democracy paradox, right? We have theories going all the way back to Immanuel Kant and others who think of the public as a real constraining force on the ability of democratic leaders to go adventuring overseas and to engage in the use of military force. I think that view has really dominated a lot of theorizing in political science and international relations for a long time. Then there are those who have thought about why that might not be the case and like what’s the matter with Kansas, but applied to like democracies and war. Why isn’t public opinion constraining the way we think it’s supposed to? Why are leaders not feeling the heat from the voters?

So, there have been various explanations for this and some of it is maybe elites are hiding things. Maybe the leader is just telling lies or doing everything in secret. But a lot of what leaders do in the United States with respect to war is all out in the open. It’s not really very secretive. So that didn’t seem satisfying. Then there’s another genre of explanation that says it’s a shared mindset. That in Washington everybody just reaches for the military tools first. There’s just a bias in the way we think about handling problems. But the problem with that argument is anyone who’s ever read a case of American foreign policy decision making knows that even inside a single White House, you often have leaders at each other’s throats.

There are some great examples in the book. George Shultz and Cap Weinberger really did not get along and disagreed vehemently about Reagan’s intervention in Lebanon. We also saw obviously just massive conflict internally in the George W. Bush administration. So, it’s really important to not reach for a simple explanation because we have to remember these are politicians and some of them are elected politicians like the president and members of Congress. But even those who serve the president inside the administration are political actors.

So, I wanted an explanation that took account of those politics. We also see lots and lots of people with very strong misgivings about the use of force who sign on to these projects, so there had to be a way in which somehow the dovish voices were getting muted and the hawkish voices were getting elevated. But there was still a diversity of views, which I think is true empirically. So, I started with that and it led me to think about why we are assuming it’s the public in the first instance that’s constraining leaders and why not think about what the elites are doing.

Well, it’s funny you asked this because in one of the very early presentations I made when I was starting out in this project, somebody said, does this apply to tax policy or local budget policy? And I said, I don’t see why not because a lot of the theory that I’m drawing on and bridging or bringing into the international security and foreign policy domain is drawn from American politics and the scholarship on how people vote. It sort of arose from the 2008 primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

I would have lunch with my colleagues who study American politics, and they’d be talking about how people vote. They would say things like – not for the presidential candidates, but for some of the other races – the person at the top of the ballot gets more votes, just alphabetically, and so that had led to reforms where they randomized the ballot order. Most people use partisanship as sort of a shortcut. Then I began to think that’s not how my IR colleagues think about this. They think about it more like a scorecard on foreign policy. You go into the voting booth and you’re literally thinking about all the foreign policy decisions the president made. That’s clearly not right, but I think domestic politics is really complicated.

The way I think about this is it’s not so much that foreign policy is different. It’s that we’re all busy people. If you’d invited me on this podcast to talk about healthcare policy, I would have said that’s a waste of your time. You should call my friend who actually knows about healthcare policy. We all follow some things closely and we turn to trusted, not necessarily elites, but people we know who follow these things. They probably get their information at some point from elites, whether it was the newspaper or things they listen to and so forth.

So, I think that is what all these issues have in common. I don’t even follow all the issues that encompass American foreign policy. I really could not do a good podcast on trade policy, for example. So, I don’t think it’s unique to foreign policy at all. It’s that we’re all human and we need to make sense of a complicated world.

That’s a great question and I spent the whole conclusion basically looking at that question, because it feels sort of normatively icky. It definitely feels not great to be saying it’s all up to the elites. But then if you go back and you think about what a representative democracy is, there are too many issues for everyone to pay attention. There are even too many issues for members of Congress. They tend to specialize. Especially in the Cold War, there was the nuclear weapons guy, Sam Nunn in the Democratic Party when the Democrats still had Southern Democratic hawks. You had people who specialize in healthcare. People who were focused on tax policy. Their colleagues would look to them and then that would bring along a chunk of votes, if not the whole party.

That’s another way in which people make sense of a complicated world. They invest in knowledge. That’s what we pay elites for, so that we can go about our lives and they can tell us when it’s time to pay attention. There’s this concept in political science of pulling the fire alarm. That’s when things get politicized, but in a way that it’s helpful for democracy because it means the voters tune in. I think we can’t sweep elites under the rug. It’s not enough to just say the public should have more of a say. There’s no way that you can achieve that on every policy dimension, even something as hugely consequential as decisions about war and peace.

It’s not an indictment of the public. It’s not that the public can’t become informed. There’s data in the book that shows they absolutely can. But politics is a competition over time and energy and focus and what issues get on the table and what are kept in the background, on the back burner. Foreign policy is no different and I think we have to start from a place where we assume that no one issue is going to be really dominant unless something like 9/11 happens that just completely focuses everyone’s attention and provokes a very visceral response.

But I think we have to start from that place and take the public’s inattention as a natural part of democracy and not a pathology. Delegation to elites is a natural part of democracy and not a pathology. This is how democracy works. If we want to improve it, we’ve got to improve that instead of focusing on more public engagement or more public education and so forth.

Still, it feels like foreign policy is very different. It feels like it’s far more elite driven than any other political issue that I can think of. For instance, when I read Foreign Affairs, it does feel like there is a view of the way foreign policy should be done that’s almost like an establishment view that the majority of writers in that publication believe. And when the administration departs from that, there’s a lot of criticism from a number of different voices.

Even more than that, the writers and the people that talk about foreign policy give the impression that everybody should be on the same page on a lot of these issues. It doesn’t feel like that’s the case in tax policy. It doesn’t feel like that’s the case in environmental policy. People expect there to be a diversity of views. In foreign policy, it feels like on some critical key issues that everybody really should be largely in agreement.

I think that’s a fair critique. But we have to think about where that consensus comes from. The idea that everybody’s got a warmonger mindset is papering over a lot of really serious differences, even if you end up in the same place. I think it’s important to remember that in the Cold War, which we think of as the bygone, wonderful time of bipartisan consensus where everybody agreed, which is clearly wrong, there were intense disagreements going all the way back to the immediate post-World War II period where you had McCarthyism and really vicious attacks on people for their foreign policy views.

But the quote unquote consensus that emerged out of that was forged in politics. It was a political compromise. It was forged by people like Arthur Vandenberg, who’s now famous for having said “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” He played plenty of politics with national security all the time. There’s a sense in which there’s all this deal making going on and then it seems like everybody agrees. So, I’ll give you an example. The Iraq War is commonly cited as like the heyday of this blob interventionist mindset. All the Democrats signed on and this is just evidence of the Washington mindset. But one of the things I do in the chapter that deals with Iraq is I go back through what happened to the Democrats who were really uncertain about this.

It’s not intended to absolve them of responsibility, but I do think that if you want to prevent something like this from happening again, you have to get the diagnosis right. So far from being eager to go to war, they were looking at Bush, who was using a lot of political capital in the run up to the 2002 midterm elections to really push hard for a vote and to paint anybody who didn’t vote for authorizing the use of force as unpatriotic. The absolute pinnacle of this was the Saxby Chambliss attack ad on the senator from Georgia, Max Cleland, who was a multiple amputee in Vietnam. It was absurd to paint him as unpatriotic, but he voted for the war and he still got attacked by the administration and Saxby Chambliss, his Republican opponent.

So, when it came time for the vote, Dick Gephardt, who had opposed the 1991 Gulf War and who was considered very liberal, but wanted to run for president in 2004, did an end run around many of his Democratic colleagues who were trying to make some kind of deal with Bush that would actually constrain him. He made a deal with Bush very much angering some of the Senate Democrats like Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, and then Senator Joe Biden and so forth. He made a deal with Bush. He got the Rose Garden ceremony photo where he’s standing there with Dennis Hastert and Trent Lott and not Tom Daschle, who wasn’t there, and the president, because that was what he expected would be the winning side.

That doesn’t absolve Gephardt or any of the other presidential candidates, wannabe presidential candidates from the Democratic side in 2004, who voted for the war. But I think it’s a better explanation for why there’s this sort of veneer of consensus. It came from political bargaining. That means that if you could change the incentives or if you could have improved elite debate, you actually could get a different bargain. I think the appearance of establishment consensus is we’re still dealing with the post-World War II architecture that the so called liberal international order has adapted in many ways, but that still defines the boundaries of what a lot of people in the foreign policy world think of as acceptable.

You also don’t have regular political debates about these things anymore. That’s a function of declining expertise in Congress, increasing partisan polarization, which is not symmetric. But I do think that healthy partisan debate and elite debate that stakes out positions and over which elites bargain is the way it is supposed to work. Those processes have broken down to the point where they’re not actually providing much oversight, questioning, and I think that’s contributing more to the appearance of consensus than any sort of like blob mindset.

I think it’s both. I think scholars have already debunked the idea that politics does stop at the water’s edge. There are certainly times where there’s bipartisanship. That’s not to suggest that it’s always politicized, but Vandenberg himself, as I said, played politics with national security all the time and then would go on the Senate floor and say politics must stop at the water’s edge. In the book, I have the stories of how he shoehorned John Foster Dulles into this position inside Harry Truman’s State Department. There was all kinds of partisan haggling because Dulles had run for a Senate seat as a Republican. He’d attacked Truman’s foreign policy, but then he was being asked to go in and bless and give legitimacy to Truman’s foreign policy.

So, he wanted a really fancy title and it was really the language of political bargaining when you read the cables and the memoranda of conversations. So Vandenberg was no dummy. He understood that politics did not stop at the water’s edge, but it would sound great if he said that it should stop. So, I think it’s always been a bit of a red herring. I think politicians love to accuse each other of quote unquote playing politics with national security. It’s a bit of a pearl clutching phrase to throw around. But they know that politics is how you make decisions about most difficult problems in a large, multifaceted society. You want to bring big questions that affect the whole nation into the political arena.

I think the problem has been partly because, as I said, the decline of congressional expertise, the growth of presidential power, partisan polarization, those decisions have essentially been taken out of the public sphere and put in the hands of the president. Presidents don’t just decide to let the elites say what they think about his or her policy with no pushback. They do a lot to try to shape the ground. That’s also politics. They can be good at that or they can be bad at that. It’s not a foregone conclusion and the costs of doing that may also come back to bite them. Bush was very successful in getting his vote in 2002. But the price of that is once things went sour in Iraq, then the people who signed on was kind of last in first out.

I think for presidents, it’s a matter of like how do they think of their scarce time and resources. He decided to put a lot of energy into getting this authorization. He achieved it, but elites are actually a very important source of constraint. They don’t just ease the path, they pay attention, especially if they put their vote on the line. They want to make sure that things are going okay. But when there’s no possibility of having oversight hearings that are real… you know, really engaged with knowledgeable people who are asking questions in good faith, when budgets are approved as a matter of routine without a whole lot of debate, bringing it in at least to the elite sphere in a wider way would be an improvement.

That’s one reason why the article basically makes the case that we need more politics. We need more people who care about these issues, who know a lot about them and are willing to kind of make trades and do deals. I think that the recent example that was promising until it collapsed was the border security deal that would’ve had aid for Ukraine and so forth. But that’s a good example. You have somebody who cares about one issue. Somebody else who cares a lot about foreign policy or national security. They hash it out in a national representative institution. It’s not going to be perfect.

There’s always going to be people who disagree with it, but that’s democracy. The fact that it was called off because of the former president’s position that’s also politics, but it’s not really helpful. In the end, it sort of came down to Mike Johnson and that feels to me less democratic than if you actually had this hashed out, even if it was behind closed doors where not that many people were paying attention.

I think to do that, we have to go back a step. One of the things that I try to do in the book is to make the case that we can’t treat the parties equally. This is a pox and both your houses kind of story. Both parties come in for things that they do well, but also they have their own built in biases. They are different and they have different preferences and different needs or problems or hurdles to overcome. So, the Democrats are always living in fear of this idea of the wimpy doves, weak on national security, goes back at least as far as Harry Truman and the who lost China debate.

Harry Truman was the one who dropped the atomic bomb. The only president to have done so, and yet immediately is sort of tarred in the early 50s with this who lost China. You’re a wimp. You didn’t stand up to the communists. That has really stuck and these party images or party brands are very, very, very sticky. Democrats fight a lot of wars and that’s a puzzle to me. Why is it they’re still constantly fighting against this image? Republicans have a different problem, which is that they worry about being seen as warmongers, overly bellicose. So that part has been understood for a while.

But one of the things that I get into in the book is the politics of those things are not symmetric. It’s not as though the Republicans have got to worry about the warmonger problem, the Democrats have to worry about the weakness problem, and they both converge or go a little bit more towards the other in an equal way on both sides. The net effect is to cancel it out. My argument is that the Republicans have an easier time being themselves. They worry about the warmonger thing, but they worry less about it than the Democrats worry about the weakness charge. This is the idea of acting against type or true to type. If you’re a dove, then you fight a war. That’s acting against type.

The Republicans do worry about that, but they’re the party of national security. They want to talk about national security. They tend to be more hawkish. It doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily better at national security, but it’s clear the voters treat them as the party of national security. So, one reason why it’s easier for them to be themselves is because the things you need to give the doves to get them to sign on, like to get Dick Gephardt, Bush had to get him the Rose Garden picture. To get Colin Powell to go make the presentation to the UN and back the war, Bush made a procedural concession to go to the UN. These are not things that fundamentally change… They didn’t stop the course of the war.

So, when I was first working on this, I was treating it all as symmetric and somebody said Colin Powell didn’t actually do a whole lot to stop the war and then it dawned on me that that was a feature, not a bug. What you had to pay, in the sort of really crass political term, to get those more restrained actors to sign on to the war is less for a Republican who wants to do what they naturally are inclined to do. That is why the Republican pathological outcome is a hawk’s misadventure. They can more easily get around the constraints up front with elites and get into a war more easily. The constraints they face tend to be after they get in, because once they get in, this is their thing. They better perform well.

The flip side of that is what I call the Dove’s Curse. So, if you’re a Democrat and you want to follow your naturally dovish inclinations, you might want to get a hawk to endorse your policy. Think if you’re a Democrat and you have John Bolton in your administration, what’s it going to take to get John Bolton to say I don’t think we should fight this war. John Bolton is a hawk. You’d have to give him a lot. So, what you’d have to do to get the hawk to support a dovish position is a lot more than what you’d have to do if you’re a hawk and you want to get a dove to sign on to your war.

Yeah. These are the guys that you always see on Face the Nation. You always see them on Meet the Press. They’re the Republicans that step up and they’re always supportive of Ukraine. They’re supportive of Israel. They’re supportive of US involvement in pretty much every different conflict around the world. But there is a growing number of republicans that are increasingly isolationist, particularly in terms of Ukraine. But there are even a lot of Republicans that came out after October 7th saying, why should we be supporting Israel either? We shouldn’t be involved in any of these different campaigns around the world, any of these different conflicts. It feels like that’s coming much stronger from the right in terms of getting out of everything than it is necessarily from the left.

So, are we seeing any kind of different realignment in terms of those issues? I do know that there’s a lot of hostility on the left in terms of involvement in Gaza and supporting Israel. But it still feels like it’s more likely that you’re going to see Democrats who are supportive of America’s different allies and involvement in conflicts than you’re necessarily going to see it in the right these days.

So, I do think that Israel is a really complicated issue for so many reasons. But in terms of American politics, it’s particularly complex because you’ve always had Democrats who have been highly supportive of Israel, Chuck Schumer, Bob Menendez. There have always been Democrats who have been staunchly pro-Israel. Then you also have the evangelical support for Israel on the right. So, I do think that one is also changing in interesting ways, but it’s a pretty unique issue. Let’s leave that aside from this larger question, where I think you’re absolutely right. There is a real shift. You were seeing it before October 7^th with the response to Ukraine.

I mean, watching the Republican primary debate that took place in Simi Valley at the Reagan Library, which has been a rite of passage for Republican primary candidates now for a couple of decades. They all go out to Simi Valley and they have to touch base with the ghosts of Ronald Reagan. The idea that you would have multiple front runner candidates all suggesting that the Republican Party would not take a hardline stance on Russia, not take a tough stance on Russia, really is just so jarring, which isn’t to say, going back to your point about continuity, sometimes continuity is continuity because that’s what the parties want. The Republican Party has been very much the more hawkish party and I think this is where you really have to point to Trump.

If you look at the data on Republican voters views on Russia and Vladimir Putin, you see a dramatic change. There are not too many public opinion graphs that have moved in a way that forms an X where they cross over. This is one of them. The crossover point is when Trump gets the Republican nomination in July of 2016 and it continues and diverges even more after he wins the election in November of 2016 and Republicans become much, much more favorably inclined. Putin is still underwater, but he used to be underwater by 60 points and now he’s underwater by 10ish.

I think that is a really good example of this phenomenon that American political behavior scholars have documented where people don’t think I have my stances on these 10 issues. I’m going to go find the candidate who has the closest mix. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some people who have a very strong issue base. I think abortion is one where it can be a deal breaker for people one way or the other. But foreign policy is typically not like that. So instead, what they do is they pick the politician first and then they adopt that politician’s positions.

This is a really clear example where Trump really has had an effect on the Republican voters and then you see it trickling down into GOP politicians where even the ones who don’t have strong national security feelings or backgrounds, they’re inclined to just do what they think is politically the most beneficial, which is to align themselves with Trump.

So, you see the Gallaghers, McCalls, Lawlers, these are people who have an interest in this and they form their own judgment. Maybe they would follow Trump on some other issues. Not that they’re so virtuous. It’s just this is their issue. It’s really interesting though that Gallagher retired. He calculated could no longer participate. I think that’s an example of where the consensus that we all see is coming from the absence of political debate. We need the Gallaghers in order to provide a different perspective.

But I think sometimes people say there’s always been a strain of isolationism. It’s not all Trump. That is true. It’s absolutely true. But that view has always been dominated politically by the more hawkish view inside the GOP. The voters have their say and the Pat Buchanans have never really broken through. So, when Trump won the election, not really because of this isolationist strain, he got the big prize. It’s never been the case that the isolationist candidate won the whole shebang. That has allowed him a platform to really change the nature, to take that relative minority but well defined tradition and elevate it to GOP policy.

I think that’s exactly right. It reinforces the point that Republicans just have more leeway on national security than Democrats. Democrats have more leeway on issues of social policy, compassion. It’s not as though the Republicans don’t have their baggage. But the baggage for them is not really in my book. So, I think Republicans have more room for maneuver on national security. That’s exactly right that Trump is sort of riding the coattails of the very sticky national security brand.

There’s a chart in the book that takes the Gallup question that they’ve asked for a long time on which party do you trust on military threats and international terrorism. There’s one point, maybe two points, where the Democrats tie the Republicans because the Republicans go down and the Democrats go slightly up. One is the nadir of the Iraq war and the other is in 2010. That one’s always puzzled me a little bit, but the Democrats never overtake the Republicans and they never crack 50%. It’s pretty wild. That isn’t to say that the Democrats are so great, but you would just expect there to be more variation, and there just isn’t. There’s been a lot of dramatic events in the period covered by this graph. So, it’s remarkable how little punishment they get for inconsistent foreign policy or national security stances.

I think it’s because this is their issue and people just defer to them more. It isn’t until you get into a war like Iraq or even Reagan in Lebanon where things are going badly on the ground that they start to realize that’s a performance on our main issue kind of problem. What you see Republicans do is gamble for some kind of decision. Reagan just decided in the end, even though he wanted to stay in Lebanon, that it wasn’t worth it and it was time to cut losses. He ended the mission under a lot of pressure from inside his own administration and his own party in Congress. Again, that’s that elite constraint kicking in. That’s the flip side of elites making things easier. They’re the ones on the front lines of accountability.

George W. Bush fought for a long time to keep the coalition together, but eventually the voters sent a signal in the 2006 midterms and he ignored it. He went for the surge against many of his own elites because he was looking for some way to turn this into something he could call, if not a victory, a decisive conclusion. There’s debate about whether it was that or the Sunni awakening. But from a political perspective, he arguably succeeded. So, it’s easier for Republicans at the start or in crises to do what they need to do or do what they want to do. I think that helps explain Trump.

Now, I do think that we are at a moment of flux. I think the retirements in the Senate… I mean, Mitch McConnell stepping down from leadership. He is one of the last of the really old guard conservative hawks who very staunchly supported Ukraine and has been pushing for this. He went to Kiev to basically say, ‘I want to show you that this wing of our party still exists.’ But the fact that he had to do that was pretty telling in itself. It could be that this is a moment of flux or it could be that when we emerge from this period, that brand will still be there to provide Republicans cover and they’ll quickly take back the mantle of hawkishness if they decide that’s what they want. But the point is they’ve got the leeway to do it in a way that Democrats just don’t.

Let’s go back to that example that you just brought up. You brought up two different examples actually. One was where Reagan pulls troops out of Lebanon because he realizes that he needs to cut his losses. The other is where George W. Bush tries to double down on Iraq through the surge. What’s interesting about the surge is in a lot of ways it ties Obama’s hands, because as a Democrat, he’s going to have a much harder time pulling troops out without looking incredibly weak in terms of foreign policy.

That comes back to what you’re describing in the book that Democrats have a harder time being able to lean into their dovish inclinations. And Barack Obama clearly had more dovish inclinations. I mean, he campaigned on pulling troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. He kind of pulled troops out of Iraq before putting significantly more troops back in.

Well, he could rely on the status of forces agreement that Bush sort of bequeathed him, but then he still got criticized for not changing it. The other big thing is what I call agenda costs. Both parties, both types of presidents, Republican and Democrat, come into office with a bunch of things they want to do. But the Democrats typically come in with big ticket things. Think Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, Harry Truman and the Fair Deal going back even further. Health care policy was Obama’s. That was his goal. They don’t really want to get derailed by national security crises if they can avoid them.

But of course, presidents don’t get to pick their crises and Joe Biden is the poster child for this. Ukraine and October 7^th, those distracted from the one national security thing he did want to talk about, which is the pivot to Asia, but that’s another story. So, Democrats have complicated legislation that they want to pass. Again, presidential time is very scarce. Presidential political capital is scarce. They don’t want to be spending it on security crises that they don’t consider to be their top priority.

Often, they get into this trap where they think, ‘I don’t really want to fight this war or increase the troop levels or whatever the issue at hand is, but if I don’t do that, I’m going to be attacked as weak and it’ll make it harder for me to do this other thing that I really want to do. So, I’m just going to fight a little bit, neutralize the issue, put it on the back burner.’ Then they get trapped in a Dove’s Curse because the little escalation becomes a bigger escalation because the people who demanded those things, the hawks inside the administration, the military folks, the hawks who are watching from the outside, suddenly say, ‘You’re not doing enough. You’ve got to put in more.’ This is the dynamic that led Lyndon Johnson to escalate the Vietnam War to 500,000 troops.

So, I think Biden is really interesting case. I think Biden is well aware of this dynamic because he had a front row seat to the Obama Afghanistan decision and it’s well known that he opposed the troop increase that Obama decided on in November. It was announced, December 1, 2009 at a nationally televised speech at West Point and it was quite deliberate. He wanted all his national security team in the front row: Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates, a Republican who’s serving as Secretary of Defense, Petraeus, who is still riding high from the surge, et cetera. It was national prime time and was intended to be ‘I’m dealing with Afghanistan and then we can go do healthcare,’ which is of course not what he said, but that was an important symbol.

Apparently, Bob Woodward has this vignette in his book where he says it totally freaked out the Secret Service because they don’t like it when the whole national security team goes on the helicopter all together. But that was what the president wanted. So, Biden observed this and considered that the military pressured him and Obama kind of got rolled into doing this and was determined to get out of Afghanistan. He was for a much smaller presence back in 2009. In the beginning, he appoints people like Lloyd Austin instead of Michèle Flournoy, who he knows and trusts and believes will carry out his desire to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. Of course, things have been made much easier for him because Trump negotiated the deal with the Taliban. Trump also wanted to get out of Afghanistan. Elite opinion, public opinion was all ready for this.

Of course, he didn’t really anticipate that Kabul would fall so quickly and I think it would have been pretty easy for him to give in to the instinct to say leave 2000 troops or keep Bagram Air Base or keep them at the airport in a Beirut style mission like Reagan’s where the Marines were literally at Beirut International Airport. But he didn’t do it. He came out and said, ‘I will not be the fifth president to hand this war off to the next president and this is tragic but necessary and we’re going to stay the course and no troops will stay.’ I think for him, he was getting out of Afghanistan and was prepared to absorb even the unexpected costs.

The dove’s curse is not inevitable. The dove can choose. It’s a dove’s choice to just be dovish. I think interestingly, for all the storm of criticism, there was very little internal criticism from within his administration. Very few recriminations, which for a foreign policy debacle that played out on national television is pretty rare. I think they all were just on the same page and he engineered it that way. So, when you think about Ukraine and Gaza, you have two situations that are very different from Afghanistan, which was in the beginning, of course, was the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but after a while it became really the United States that was perpetuating war because its goals were so expansive.

These were crises that were not on the radar of the incoming administration. Russia, maybe, but up until the last minute, many people did not really think that Putin was going to do this. I think that they’re different in the sense that there was never any real sense that we would be sending troops because the nuclear escalation risk is so high. So, he had that as a backstop. But I think presidents with dovish instincts feel that the threshold is overcome and they have to take a stronger stance. So what has Biden done? He’s used the weapons of diplomacy and intelligence and selective disclosure of intelligence in the run up to the war to convince other countries that were still skeptical of US intelligence after the Iraq war.

\I think was a very interesting move, consistent with dovish policies, but also if you’re the US president in this situation, you’re just not putting troops on the ground in Ukraine.  So, the hawkish position is a little hard to know. It’s basically giving lethal assistance to Ukraine. Gaza, I think, is again, you go back to Israel being a strange and cross cutting issue. Right before this, with the Netanyahu judicial reforms and the protests against Netanyahu, there had been a rift already between Biden and Netanyahu, both of whom have been around the political scene forever, it feels like, in their respective countries. So, I don’t necessarily think that he’s being sucked into a dove’s curse in this situation. I think he’s in a situation where he can’t put troops on the ground.

It’s giving him more maybe leeway than he would otherwise have because he’s not being pushed to do that. He’s made very clear from the Afghanistan case that he’s prepared to do what it takes, including absorb the costs if he chooses to do a more dovish move. I think the fact that the US is not going to become involved on the ground really changes the dynamic.

One of the big takeaways from the book is that you’re not just looking at American foreign policy, you’re asking the question how is foreign policy created within a democratic context as opposed to a more autocratic one? But I can’t help but think as I was reading your book that the United States feels like a very special case. It is a country that has maneuverability, has options within foreign policy that other countries just don’t have, because it’s a great power and through a couple decades was even a hegemonic power. Most other democracies can’t approach foreign policy quite that way.

They have more external constraints, whereas the United States really just has internal constraints on its foreign policy. We constrain ourselves through constitutional governance, through the democratic process, and different things like that. Very few countries are capable of telling us what our country has to do in situations. Smaller countries oftentimes are reacting to what larger countries are forcing them to do, so it raises the question to me, if we put this in the context of other democratic governments, that don’t have the same power that the United States does, does that completely change the model that you’ve created in terms of how those democratic governments would approach foreign policy?

This is a great question and I wrestled with it. for basically the whole time I was writing the book and still do. Instinctively, I felt it was an argument about democracies. That was in part because some of the origins of my interest in this topic came from a slew of findings around 10 years ago by other scholars, mostly who did work on autocracies, that suggested that autocracies could get to similar outcomes in terms of the rate of winning wars or being selective, how often they went to war as democracies. Before it had been a democratic advantage. They win the wars they fight, because of public debate. They’re much more likely to choose wars that are prudent and avoid the misadventure.

Then you had a slew of findings that said, no, autocracies can do that too because some autocracies are constrained by their elites. That struck me as fascinating. But also not quite… I couldn’t get my mind around the idea that you could close a gap that quickly. It seemed to me you had to shift your understanding of autocracies to being more constrained than we thought. Then you also had to shift your view of democracies to being less constrained than we thought. So, I definitely thought of the book in that set of debates, democracies as a group. But it is a book about the US and it’s a book about the US in part because you have to focus on one country to hold a bunch of things constant so you can wrap your mind around the theory.

But as you put it very well, the US is the country that gets to make these decisions, has to make these decisions, chooses to make these decisions often when nobody else wants them to. This isn’t an endorsement of US power, but it’s just reality that the US is really the country that has the power projection capabilities to intervene around the world. So, is this a book about US elites or is it a book about democratic elites? I think it’s both. Throughout the book, I point out what you’d need to do to adapt this to different settings and I do think that institutional settings like parliamentary systems complicate the story. I talk a bit about the German coalition right now with respect to Ukraine and the Greens.

But I do think that the thread they have in common is, one, they all have publics that are busy. Even if you live in a democracy like Israel or a democracy like Ukraine, you have other things you care about besides national security. So that’s a common thread. They all have military and bureaucratic advisors, cabinet officials that they have to rely on. There’s internal disagreement in all of these cases, in all of these countries about what to do. So, the elites may be slightly different. They may have different incentives, different institutional rules, but they are still there, and the leaders of these countries have to play those politics in order to make national security policy.

I do think that the details will be different and that’s for somebody else to pick up the ball and run with it, I hope. But we’ve often compared democratic national security and autocratic security making in terms of autocratic elites and democratic voters. My argument is not that all democracies are the same, but I do think we ought to be thinking about autocratic elites and democratic elites and voters. But we can’t leave the democratic elites out because they change the story.