Introduction

Upon assuming the presidency in 2009, President Obama outlined a foreign policy encompassed by restraint. The US was in the midst of an economic recession and struggling to exit two costly wars in the Middle East. Throughout the campaign, Obama had emphasized the need to reel in the crusading overstretch of the Bush administration. This theme of restraint carried through the early years of his presidency, highlighted at major international addresses at Cairo University, as well as his Nobel Prize Acceptance speech in 2009. During these engagements, Obama would stress the need for humility, multilateralism and burden-sharing in efforts to rid the world of evil (Obama, 2009a; 2009b). In this way, Obama sought to advance a foreign policy grounded in the premise that one of the jobs of the President is simply to ‘don't do stupid shit’ (Obama quoted in Goldberg, 2016). Despite these efforts, Obama's position on the use of force would vary through his presidency. Across the next two chapters, I examine the Obama's decisions concerning the use of force in Libya and Syria. These are important cases as they represent significant variation in decisions to use force in response to similar types of mass atrocities within the same administration.

In this chapter, I first outline the professed foreign policy set forth by the incoming Obama administration. Indeed, throughout the campaign of 2008, Obama made a concerted effort to distinguish his foreign policy from that of the outgoing Bush administration. Through continued appeals, Obama would argue that America was a force for good. However, there was a need to recognize the limits of US power, and that it was in the US's vital interests not to overstretch, but a reversion to isolationism was not the answer to America's security challenges. Furthermore, when democratic uprisings began in the Middle East in 2010, the administration would adopt this same restrained, cognitive approach.

Second, I show that despite attempts to reel in crusading impulses of the previous administration, when faced with the prospect of mass atrocity, Obama would succumb to principled types of ideas, becoming drawn into the conflict in Libya in 2011. Despite efforts to avoid entering another Middle Eastern conflict, the belief that Libya was on the verge of mass atrocity would see normative displacement allow more principled interpretations of the US's role to emerge.

A president's decision to use military force is among the most consequential that they can take. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has remained a great power and has enjoyed relative stability in coalitional alignments. Yet, these highly consequential decisions to use force in foreign military interventions in American foreign policy have been inconsistent. This is especially true across a range of key foreign policy issues, including humanitarian interventions and responses to acts of terrorism. When conflict erupted in the Balkans following the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991, and allegations of ethnic cleansing emerged, President George H.W. Bush cast the conflict as one based on ‘ancient, ethnic animosities’ as his administration argued the US didn't ‘have a dog in the fight’ (Baker quoted in Power, 2003: 267). While initially adopting a similar position, Clinton would decide to intervene following the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995 as Holocaust-like images emerged, prompting Al Gore's impassioned plea: ‘What should I tell my daughter?’

Similarly, even as Barack Obama called for restraint over the use of force in US foreign policy, he would succumb to calls for intervention in Libya in 2011 even though the US had ‘no interests in Libya’ (Baker quoted in Power, 2003: 267) as aides warned ‘this is like Rwanda’. Then, despite drawing a ‘red line’ (Obama, 2012), he would revert to restraint following the use of chemical weapons in Syria amid humanitarian conditions and powerful calls for intervention from international partners and domestic coalitions because ‘there was no Benghazi to be saved’. These puzzling variations in presidential positions on the use of force, sometimes under the same administration, poses an important question: what explains variation in foreign policy decisions when the material and social conditions of state interests remain formally the same?

This work offers an original theoretical perspective to help better understand variations in foreign policy decision-making. While there have been numerous efforts to explain foreign policy decision-making, rationalist approaches have typically pointed to moments of crisis, and exogenous shocks to explain shifts in foreign policy interests. Even as constructivist and ontological security perspectives offer a greater capacity to recognize how the competing material and identity needs of states influence foreign policy, their explanations remain incomplete.

Introduction

In Part V, I examine variations in decisions to use force in the Trump administration across the crisis in Syria and the escalating 2020 Iranian crisis. The foreign policy goals outlined by President Donald Trump have been markedly different to the post-Cold War presidents that came before him. Throughout the campaign, he had professed an ‘America First’ foreign policy promising to regain American dominance in the world. As a part of this vision, he sought to ‘rebuild’ America's military, renegotiate what he viewed as ‘unfair’ or ‘one-sided’ trade deals, and reassert a unilateral foreign policy, free from multilateral constraints. Yet, upon entering office in January 2017, an actual guide as to how such an ‘America First’ foreign policy might manifest remained unclear. To be fair, this lack of clarity surrounding Trump's foreign policy platform can be attributed, in no small way, to Trump's tendency to self-contradiction. Broadly speaking, however, ‘America First’ could be viewed as a revival of a Jacksonian foreign policy – a renewed yearning for an isolationist-style turn and a revival of American ‘greatness’.

Despite President Trump's somewhat unconventional, almost ‘kaleidoscopic’ statements around his foreign policy (Goldberg, 2017; Kagan, 2018), it is still possible to identify certain variations which do not neatly conform to his ‘America First’ worldview. In fact, there have been instances in which Trump has used force in ways very much counter to this doctrine. In some ways, this variation is more explicit.

In this chapter I show how Trump's decision to bomb Syrian airfields following the chemical weapons attack in Al Shayrat on 4 April 2017 marked a significant departure from his professed ‘America First’ foreign policy. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, I provide a brief background of the developments in the Syrian crisis after the 2013 attack and provide an overview of Trump's ‘America First’ foreign policy. In particular, I show that he would emphasize the need to put America's interests before that of other states, ignoring other states and multilateral treaties if they impeded the US's ability to realize its goals. In this vein, he would argue for the withdrawal of US troops from the Middle East, and, more broadly, from around the globe and focus on specific threats eradicating ISIS.

Introduction

Throughout the early 1990s, US policy towards the conflict in Bosnia varied significantly despite relative stability in material and coalitional alignments. In Part II, I trace the variations in America's policy towards ethnic cleansing in Bosnia across the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Specifically, I ask: why did both administrations seek to avoid military engagement in Bosnia, only for Clinton to have a change of heart in 1995? This is a significant case in US foreign policy decision-making regarding decisions to use military force abroad for the purpose of preventing mass atrocities. It spans two presidential administrations and given that national security arguments against the use of force remained fundamentally unchanged, it represents a ‘least likely’ case.

In this chapter, I examine the Bush and Clinton administrations’ early management of the crisis in Bosnia. I highlight the way in which cognitive repression saw more cognitive interpretations of US interests regarding the balance of power advanced as US interests were intellectually refined to avoid affective influences. In this way – even as the Vietnam-era hangover eased following early successes in the Persian Gulf war – the Powell Doctrine would become entrenched in the Bush administration's foreign policy.

In the second section, I show that even as Clinton appealed for greater US involvement in Bosnia, citing the need to exercise American leadership and a responsibility to our fellow human beings, the risks presented by taking action soon became overwhelming. When Clinton came to office, he would conform to a policy similar to that of the Bush administration. In doing so, he ‘repressed’ principled efforts by members of the administration – including Vice President Al Gore, and UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright – and his initial impulses to implement a ‘lift and strike’ policy. Instead, Clinton found himself siding with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell's more cognitive efforts to avoid a quagmire, just as his predecessor had done.

Cognitive repression in Bosnia: ‘We do deserts, not mountains or jungles’

Even as success in the Persian Gulf saw the Bush administration begin to move beyond post-Vietnam-era restraint, the administration remained cautious when it came to the use of military force in foreign interventions. Military force was not to be used unless there was a clear and present danger to the vital national security interests of the US.

Introduction

Outside of the crisis in Syria, Trump's ‘America First’ foreign policy has also seen some interesting and comprehensive deviations concerning Iran. Iran posed a unique challenge for Trump given his well-established disdain for the Iran nuclear agreement and his renewed framing of Iran as the ‘leading state sponsor of terrorism’, coupled with his caution at the prospect of escalation. As a result, Trump was almost consistently on the cusp of conflict with Iran following the decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCOPA) in 2018. These tensions would culminate in the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani and increase the presence of US troops in the region, following an Iranian missile attack against the K-1Air Base in Iraq which left an American contractor dead on 27 December 2019. While there is a clear distinction between the different types of ideas presented, the manner in which they present is slightly different compared to previous cases, yet the impact on foreign policy remains formally the same. Variation is still present and persistent despite relative stability in the material and ideational bases of state interests.

In this chapter, I work to show how tensions between principled and cognitive interpretations of US interests towards Iran saw the Trump administration on the brink of conflict as Trump struggled to reconcile his desire to re-establish US dominance, while at the same time avoiding war. I begin by providing a brief overview of the tensions that surrounded the construction of the JCPOA. I argue that Trump constructed a principled justification, drawing on existing domestic anxieties, to withdraw from the agreement, as he worked to displace the interest-based logic enshrined in the JCPOA. Trump would do this by issuing principled, communicative appeals characterizing Iran as the ‘leading state sponsor of terrorism’ and speaking to domestic concerns that Iran was violating the terms of the agreement, despite evidence to the contrary. In this way, Trump was able to weaponize principled arguments that Iran continued to be an irrational actor pursuing nuclear weapons to the detriment of US security interests.

Second, I show how the withdrawal from the JCPOA prefigured escalating tensions leading to prolonged contestation between different types of ideas as to whether or not to use force against Iran.

For the first time in a quarter of a century working with the problems of the arms race and arms control, I am beginning to get scared. These are not my words, but those of William Epstein, a disarmament expert, which he penned forty-five years ago.1 Epstein’s concern arose from an array of adverse circumstances. India had detonated a nuclear explosive device in 1974, becoming what he (wrongly) believed was only the world’s sixth nuclear-armed State (in fact, Israel had already produced nuclear weapons). Also in 1974, Britain had resumed explosive nuclear testing for the first time in a decade; the United States was increasing the sophistication of its manoeuvrable re-entry vehicles on its missiles in order to deliver multiple warheads while also engaging in the development of new nuclear-armed cruise missiles; and the Soviet Union was producing multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) of its own to equip its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

This chapter develops a theory of how local political exclusion drives ethnic riots in multiethnic countries during political transition. I discuss existing accounts of the onset of ethnic riots and their limitations in explaining why ethnic rioting rises and subsequently declines during political transitions in multiethnic countries. I argue that ethnic riots in democratizing countries are driven by local elites’ demands for inclusion in local politics. This deployment of ethnic riots as a form of political engagement is particularly prevalent in weakly institutionalized multiethnic settings, where institutions are less reliable and where available local networks tend to be ethnic-based. Once a group’s demands for inclusion have been met and violence has served its purpose, rioting will decline. I derive a set of observable implications and hypotheses I will examine in the subsequent empirical chapters.

This chapter discusses the specific relationships between Golkar’s entrenchment, the exclusion of local ethnic elites, and the mobilization of riots in two high-conflict Indonesian provinces, Central Sulawesi and Maluku. By comparing two pairs of districts – Ambon and Maluku Tenggara in Maluku province, and Banggai and Poso in Central Sulawesi province – I demonstrate the importance of local elites’ framing, mobilization, and organization of violence. Although the four districts are relatively similar in their religious and ethnic composition, level of economic development, and dependence on the state, Ambon and Poso experienced some of the most protracted and intense ethnocommunal violence in Indonesia’s recent history, while their two neighboring districts, Maluku Tenggara and Banggai, respectively, were relatively peaceful by comparison. Relying on interviews with bureaucrats, community leaders, and former combatants, I show that these diverging outcomes can be attributed to local elites’ initial political configuration at the onset of the democratic transition, and to their actions and responses to trigger events.

Despite claims to the contrary, general international law does not prohibit all and any use of nuclear weapons. That said, as this chapter explains, it does heavily circumscribe when use could ever be lawful. The chapter looks at State responsibility for the use and testing of nuclear weapons as well as individual responsibility for such acts under international criminal law.

This chapter provides a macro-historical context of Indonesia’s thirty-two years of authoritarian rule under President Soeharto and the country’s subsequent transition to democracy in 1998. Soeharto’s combined strategy of rapid development, depoliticization of the masses, and preferential treatment of specific groups carried important implications for the local political representation of ethnic groups. During Soeharto’s New Order regime, Golongan Karya (better known as Golkar), the political organization associated with Soeharto, developed a deep and dominant presence in villages throughout the country, effectively crushing alternative forces of political mobilization and engagement. Furthermore, in ethnically diverse areas, Golkar coopted and colluded with local members of certain ethnic communities while snubbing others. As such, even though Golkar was not an ethnic party in the traditional sense, in ethnically diverse districts Golkar officials who rose through the bureaucratic ranks appeared to come from one group at the expense of others, thereby exacerbating the politicization of ethnic identities over time.

In this chapter, I summarize my findings and discuss their implications and contributions to existing literatures. I discuss how the theory offered in this book travels to cases beyond Indonesia, such as Kenya and Kyrgyzstan. I identify remaining unanswered questions and outline possible trajectories of future research on political exclusion, institutional accommodation of excluded actors, and demobilization of participants in violence in countries in political transition.