A local artist's rendition of the Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu, Somalia. Photo Credit: Peter Tobia. Image above obtained from the Smithsonian Magazine.
"We started this mission for the right reasons, and we're going to finish it in the right way. In a sense, we came to Somalia to rescue innocent people in a burning house. We've nearly put the fire out, but some smoldering embers remain. If we leave them now, those embers will reignite into flames, and people will die again. If we stay a short while longer and do the right things, we've got a reasonable chance of cooling off the embers and getting other firefighters to take our place."
-- President Bill Clinton, October 7, 1993 Address on Somalia
For as long as it takes? Time horizons and foreign policy termination
Survey respondent time horizons following a culpability treatment (public backlash) for both military intervention and economic sanctions policy scenarios.
Despite the importance of time preferences on resolve and commitments in international relations, few works address the origins of these preferences or directly test their impact on decision-making and policy outcomes. This problem is apparent when we consider the analysis of coercive foreign policies: why do leaders uphold policies that do not have a track record of success? When do foreign policies end? I address this by considering the conditions under which leaders have preferences for long- versus short-time horizons. To systematize the origins of time horizons, I offer a theory of policy termination by identifying the conditions under which time preferences (long vs short) emerge: leader satisfaction with the policy and their culpability for the policy outcome. Leaders are culpable if international or domestic audiences hold them responsible for the policy by credibly threatening their political survival (through elections or regime change). This situational condition influences the structural costs associated with pursuing a certain policy and the political consequences generated by deviating from the status quo. Leader satisfaction, on the other hand, is a dispositional condition that captures individual incentives to continue implementing a foreign policy, including ideological, reputational, and personal motivations. I argue that leaders possess short time horizons when they are not culpable and are dissatisfied with the existing policy. In turn, these short time horizons result in policy termination. I test this theory using survey experiments to isolate the direct effects of these conditions on time preferences for policy commitment, structural models to extract a cross-national measure of time horizons, and archival research on US presidential decision-making. This project contributes directly to how international relations scholars understand commitment problems and specifies the mechanisms by which leaders are constrained in foreign policy decision-making. Longer-time horizons may not necessarily produce policies that are geared towards conflict resolution, and the threshold to break path dependency in foreign policy is much higher than previously considered. In the absence of critical internal and external incentives to change time preferences, states should be prepared to be in it for the long haul, not necessarily due to the costs of war, but due to the absence of incentives to withdraw.
A New York Times report on President Reagan's decision to extend the intervention in Lebanon (September 21, 1983).
Cases of Presidential Decision-Making Examined Using Archival Records
