Few systematic studies of US uses of force treat the inherent attributes of presidents as the key causal factors; nonetheless, the fact that individual leaders matter is evident to the public, the media, and foreign policymakers in other countries. This study advances the development of First Image explanations of conflict by empirically investigating the relationship between presidential personality and the variation surrounding foreign policy decision making. The importance of this type of variance has been understudied in international relations, and the consistency of leaders' policy decisions has important strategic implications for interstate conflict. Relying on Big Five measures of US presidents' personality traits, we find that leaders who have a high tendency toward Excitement Seeking are more likely to use force to carry out their foreign policy objectives, while those who are more Open to Action exhibit a greater variance around their foreign policy decision making. In sum, the personality traits of individual leaders influence not only the choices they make, but the consistency of their choices, which has important consequences for US foreign policy.

Globalization, whatever else it may mean and however thoroughgoing, involves increased levels of contact with the unfamiliar, the ‘foreign’. According to Jan Aart Scholte (2005, 20), rising globality is about a ‘growth of transplanetary and more particularly supraterritorial social relations’. These increased relations arguably breed more familiarity, making the ‘foreign’ appear less ‘foreign’ and thereby reducing the role for ‘foreign policy’ as such.1 However, what I’m more interested in here is the idea that this rising contact with the unfamiliar has coincided with the end of the Cold War to incite discussion about precisely how we ought to relate to the foreign. In other words, foreign policy is engaging ethics, which Peter Singer (1994, 1) has argued are always a question of ‘ought’. While the issue may never have in fact gone away (see, for example, McElroy, 1992), since the 1990s we have seen a rising interest in the possibilities of ethics in foreign policy. As Gelb and Rosenthal (2003, 2) have observed, Something quite important has happened in American foreign policymaking with little notice or digestion of its meaning. Morality, values, ethics, universal principles — the whole panoply of ideals in international affairs that were once almost the exclusive domain of preachers and scholars — have taken root in the hearts, or at least the minds, of the American foreign policy community.

Journal Article Cool Hand Nuke: Lessons From the Quiet Diplomacy of the Cienfuegos Non-Crisis Get access Dennis A. Crall, Dennis A. Crall United States Marine Corps Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Thomas M. Martin Thomas M. Martin Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Foreign Policy Analysis, Volume 9, Issue 2, April 2013, Pages 189–201, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-8594.2012.00184.x Published: 17 April 2013

The Tea Party is a powerful new force in American domestic politics, but little is known about its supporters' views on foreign affairs. New survey data indicates that supporters of the Tea Party exhibit attitudes on international relations consistent with the Jacksonian tradition in American political thought but not, as some have maintained, isolationist opinions of the Jeffersonian variety. Jacksonians are supporters of a strong defense and a large military presence abroad and are opposed to Wilsonian global idealism. The article operationalizes support for these three different foreign policy traditions by connecting them to previous findings on the structure of American foreign policy. The effect of Tea Party affiliation on foreign policy attitudes is severely weakened, however, once we control for political ideology, particularly economic conservatism. As is the case in domestic politics, Tea Party sympathizers seem to be somewhat ordinary conservatives, not a completely new breed. There is a direct parallel between their domestic attitudes and their foreign policy attitudes. Their lack of support for idealistic policies abroad, their most prominent set of attitudes, is part and parcel of a lack of social solidarity indicated in their more economically libertarian position at home.

For a long time, the People's Republic of China was known to be prone to use military force to settle foreign policy crises or interstate disputes. Extending Alexander Wendt's analysis of different cultures of anarchy, I argue that Beijing's famed violence proneness—that is, its propensity to use force—was historically a product of the militarized or Hobbesian worldview held by China's leaders during Mao's reign, when the PRC acted as a revolutionary challenger against the international system. Since Mao's death, however, China has been increasingly integrated into the system and, consequently, has experienced a Lockean turn in its worldview, which softens its predilection for violence. A systematic, quantitative test of my theory provides strong evidence that the evolution of China's militarized worldview, rather than its expanding relative power, played a key role in driving Beijing's resort to force between 1949 and 2001.

The adoption of international norms by a state depends on the active support of decision makers in key gatekeeping positions. Yet, political change does not inevitably follow the initiatives of norm entrepreneurs. The literature on norm dynamics has largely focused on successful norm change. This focus on cases that support the notion that norms matter constitutes selection on the dependent variable. To more fully grasp the role and limits of gatekeepers, it is important to also investigate cases where political resistance prevented the domestic adoption of international norms. This study uses an illustrative case study in which circumstances appeared ripe for a new policy direction but where change failed to materialize. The study concludes that gatekeepers matter, but also that norm change crucially, depends not only on gatekeepers' ability to frame norms in terms that resonate domestically but also on their ability to build coalitions with other relevant political actors.

We argue that role theory offers the possibility of integrating Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) and International Relations (IR) theory. While role theory was originally adapted for use by U.S.-based FPA scholars, it was later picked up by European scholars as well as the Constructivist IR community. The ISA Workshop that generated this special journal issue was designed to bring together scholars from these various research traditions to pursue integration and synthesis. The resulting papers contained in this issue have set the stage for a productive conversation that has continued well beyond the initial workshop. Role theory does appear to offer the possibility of integration and even synthesis across FPA and IR as demonstrated in the following papers. We believe that this special issue highlights numerous avenues to continue the fruitful development of this research program.

The article brings together two cognitive approaches to the analysis of foreign policy: salience and metaphor analysis. Issue salience and metaphors relate to cognitive heuristics that speak to different aspects of the cognitive representation of foreign policy problems which complement each other: the concept of salience looks at the priming of issues in the foreign policymaking environment; metaphors relate to the framing of these issues. The article shows how both cognitive concepts can help the other address individual blind spots. While analyzing the salience of foreign policy issues tells us what issues actors attend to, metaphor analysis can shed light on how they frame these issues and indicate what policy options are made possible. At the same time, salience can help metaphor analysis identify why certain metaphors resonate better in public discourse than others. To briefly illustrate the potential of thinking salience and metaphor analysis together, the article looks into the British public debate about international terrorism and the “war on terror”.

Journal Article Contributors Get access Foreign Policy Analysis, Volume 7, Issue 4, October 2011, Page 447, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-8594.2011.00149.x Published: 10 October 2011