Introduction

As commitments in Libya wound down, Obama would revert to his initial preference of restraint in matters of foreign policy. However, he would be faced by another, much more complex situation as Syria, too, entered into civil war in March 2011. By 2012, the civil war was in full swing. Casualties began to mount as did the number of civilians seeking to flee the violence. Within a matter of months, the Syrian civil war became one of the most pressing threats to peace and stability within the region. As the war escalated, concerns emerged over the growing humanitarian crisis and fears that the Assad regime might resort to using chemical weapons against rebel forces and civilians began to grow.

The potential threat of the use of chemical weapons would prompt Obama to declare a ‘red line’, stating that if Assad used such weapons, this would change his equation of the use of force (Obama, 2012). Nearly one year after making this declaration, the world witnessed the deadliest chemical weapons attack since in the Iran-Iraq war. The attack took place in Ghouta, in the eastern suburbs of Damascus on 21 August 2013. Early estimates suggested that over 1,400 people were killed (White House, 2013). Many of the victims were women and children. Images and videos of the dead, dying and maimed spread around the world, sparking both horror and outrage. Despite the horrific nature of the attack, Obama backed down from the threat of military force, fearing entanglement. What makes this stand-down particularly puzzling is that there was broad support from both Republicans and Democrats, as well as from military leaders advising the administration, for the use of force.

In this chapter, I work to explain this stand-down, arguing that in contrast to Libya, Obama ‘repressed’ principled sources of information following the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta. In the first section, I provide a brief background of the Syrian conflict as well as the Obama administration's early response. In doing so, I highlight some of the early debates that emerged concerning the potential use of force in Syria.

Introduction

When Bush took office in January 2001, he was generally restrained in his approach to the outside world. There was little interest in becoming embroiled in foreign conflicts. While promising to bolster America's defences during the campaign, military expenditure, which had fallen significantly during Clinton's presidency, remained at its lowest level since Pearl Harbor. However, the events of 11 September 2001 would fundamentally change the course of Bush's presidency. In this chapter, I show how the failure of existing risk assessment frameworks led to a principled reinterpretation of US foreign policy interests following the attacks of 11 September resulting in normative displacement. This reinterpretation would lay the principled foundations for the construction of the War on Terror and the subsequent decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

First, I show how uncertainty consumed the administration following the attacks. Coupled with vision of the Pentagon surrounded by burning wreckage and the smouldering remains of the WTC in downtown Manhattan, such uncertainty lent itself to emotional, principled reactions as Bush cast the terrorists as the ‘heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century’. He declared a ‘War on Terror’ which would be a ‘lengthy campaign’ that would leave the terrorists ‘in the unmarked grave of discarded lies’ (Bush, 2001c). Where early consensus saw intervention in Afghanistan to remove the Taliban regime, Colin Powell argued against more principled impulses of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to expand the war into Iraq. Initially, Powell's approach would be successful in advancing more cognitive interpretations.

Second, I work to show how ongoing uncertainty led Bush to justify an expansion of the War on Terror to include Iraq. Even as the initial emotion from the 9/11 attacks had subsided, the long-running suspicion regarding Saddam Hussein's state sponsorship of terrorism, and the regime's ongoing defiance of multiple UN Security Council resolutions to provide proof of disarmament would lay the foundations for further principled justifications for the use of force. While the decision to intervene was not clear-cut, with Colin Powell advancing clear warnings – ‘if you break it, you own it’ – Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz's principled warnings of Hussein's potential aggression would prove too powerful in the context of post-9/11 uncertainty.

Introduction

In Part II, I trace variations in decisions to use force in response to acts of terrorism across the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. While the 9/11 attacks serve as a ‘most likely’ (Odell, 2001: 166) case, they clearly show the shift between principled interpretations and the more refined cognitive interpretations as the forms of ideas changed. Unlike attacks on foreign embassies or military vessels, an attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) in the middle of Manhattan using passenger aircraft as flying bombs was bound to spark a more principled response. In this chapter, I first examine the responses to the rising threat of terrorism across the Clinton administration. I show how the Clinton administration adopted cognitive types of responses to acts of terrorism from the bombing of the WTC in 1993, to the 1998 Embassy bombings, and the bombing of USS Cole. During this time, the potential threat posed by al-Qaeda largely went unnoticed by the public. This lack of public attention limited the administration's scope, and perceived need for action despite vocal principled appeals by the PNAC, a neo-conservative think tank, calling for a more ‘forward-leaning’ foreign policy, particularly in relation to Iraq, a leading state sponsor of terror.

Where Clinton did respond to the Embassy bombings, he was accused by some members in Congress of ‘bombing sand’ as a ‘diversionary tactic’ (Gugliotta and Eilperin, 1998) in a ploy to distract from his impeachment woes. Overall, the administration responded to the attacks with regard to utilitarian styled concerns for ‘what works’, taking action only in a limited way upon the acquisition of ‘actionable intelligence’. As such, the fight against terrorism was broadly cast as a second-tier threat and not a global problem that the US was, or should be, responsible for fixing. In this way, the administration largely ‘repressed’ any call for a more expansive foreign policy to target potential threats including going after state sponsors of terrorism, specifically, Iraq, instead favouring more restrained approaches to global challenges. As such, the attacks against the WTC in 1993, US Embassies in Africa in 1998 and the bombing of USS Cole in 2000 failed to gain traction with the American public as they were, for the most part, in ‘faraway lands’.

Introduction

The decision to mount an armed intervention is one of the most consequential decisions a president can make. Over the decades following the end of the Cold War, the US has remained a great power and has enjoyed relative stability in coalitional alignments. Yet, since this time, decisions to use force in American foreign policy have varied significantly. Notably, inconsistency has been prevalent not just between administrations, but also within the same one across key cases of humanitarian crises, and responses to the threat of terrorism. Yet, explanations for this variation remain murky, leaving persistent questions regarding how and why decisions to use force, given the enormity of the decision, could vary so significantly. Explaining this remains a key challenge for scholars of foreign policy decision-making and International Relations theorists.

When conflict erupted in the Balkans following the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991, allegations of ethnic cleansing spurred calls for the US to intervene (Chicago Tribune (Pre-1997 Fulltext), 1992; The New Republic, 1992; The New York Times, 1992). President George H.W. Bush declared that the conflict was fuelled by ‘ancient, ethnic rivalries and hatreds’ (Bush, 1992c) concluding that the US did not ‘have a dog in the fight’ (Baker quoted in Power, 2003: 267). Despite early optimism, President Clinton initially adopted a similar position with regards to Bosnia. Yet, following the massacre in Srebrenica in 1995, which saw the systematic slaughter of 8,000 men and boys, Clinton's position shifted as he demanded new policy ideas, stating, ‘This has got to stop. We’ve got to find some kind of policy and move ahead’ (Clinton quoted in Halberstam, 2001: 317). Following sustained aggression from Serbian forces, Clinton, in conjunction with the US's NATO allies, initiated Operation Deliberate Force on 30 August 1995. This bombing campaign would lead to peace talks at Dayton, Ohio, and a negotiated end to the Bosnia war. But why did intervention occur at this time when acts of ethnic cleansing had taken place in Bosnia for several years? What was it about the massacre at Srebrenica that motivated this reinterpretation?

Similarly, when Obama assumed the presidency in January 2009, he was averse to foreign interventions following drawn-out conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Introduction

For the first two and a half years of Clinton's presidency, conflict raged in the Balkans. Atrocities continued to mount. Despite growing increasingly frustrated by his administration's inability to come up with a palatable solution to the crisis, the notion of using military force continued to be cast as intangible. However, following the massacre of 8,700 Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica in June in 1995, the administration's Bosnia policy underwent a major shift. In this chapter, I examine Clinton's shift from restraint towards limited intervention through Operation Deliberate Force. In doing so, I show how the massacre at Srebrenica rekindled narratives likening the atrocities to the Holocaust. In this way, I argue that the massacre changed the way in which the conflict was viewed. Images of the atrocity, along with vision of dead and dying Bosnians gave these narratives tremendous power. I argue that the revived power of these narratives enabled a normative displacement leading Clinton towards a more principled interpretation of the conflict as he interpreted US interests in a new light. Such principled ideas were driven by Madeline Albright, Anthony Lake and in particular Al Gore's powerful, symbolic appeal: ‘What am I supposed to tell [my daughter]?’ if the US were to maintain a position of indifference (Gore quoted in Harris, 2006: 196). This encapsulated these principled interpretations in a powerful form, acting to displace the entrenched notion advocated by Colin Powell that the use of force in Bosnia was neither in the US strategic security interests, nor feasible.

The massacre made it clear that US policy towards Bosnia had not only become ineffective but was doing significant damage to the administration's credibility, undermining their capacity to manage other foreign policy issues. Such normative displacement would see the administration's policy shift towards a more interventionist approach, yielding early successes and eventually, the cessation of hostilities culminating in the signing of the Dayton Accords in Dayton, Ohio. While demonstrating the power of the different forms that ideas take in shaping interpretations, this case also serves to highlight that the repression of principled influences from the policy-making process prior to the massacre at Srebrenica had resulted in a stagnant policy which ultimately served to limit the US's capacity to pursue their interests, even in issues beyond Bosnia.

Introduction

Every president has a foreign policy doctrine, until they don’t. In this book, I have argued that in order to better understand foreign policy decision-making, we need to look beyond the material and ideational structures emphasized in conventional approaches to International Relations (IR) and zoom in on the discursive interactions that take place among foreign policy agents as they contest ideas in the construction of policy. This volume sought to answer the question: what explains variation in foreign policy decisions when the material and social conditions of state interests remain formally the same? The purpose was to show how different types of ideas see agents interpret interests in principled or cognitive ways. Specifically, I have sought to understand the seemingly confounding variation in decisions to use force in American foreign policy. In doing so, I turned to constructivist and discursive institutionalist insights to highlight the interplay between different types and forms of ideas within presidential administrations.

Developing these insights, I have offered a theoretical framework in an effort to provide a means for understanding how agents can interpret ‘interests’ – defined as ‘beliefs about how to meet needs’ (Wendt, 1999: 130) – in different ways. The basic notion that interests are interpreted in different ways is not a new claim, yet it is a claim that has been under-examined. The process by which foreign policy agents interpret state interests in varying ways has remained causally ambiguous. Understanding variation in foreign policy has been a challenging task for scholars of IR. In IR theory, in particular, scholars employing rationalist assumptions posit that agents can interpret information efficiently. More formally, these scholars assume that state interests remain formally the same in the absence of ‘exogenous shocks’ to the material and ideational bases of state interest. As such, while these approaches have provided important insights, there is scope for further understanding of the endogenous institutional dynamics by which different types of ideas are interpreted and deliberated among decision-makers.

In the next section, I highlight the theoretical implications and briefly speak to how this study lays the framework for potential future works. I then summarize the case studies and set out five key findings.