Risk and Resolution

America repeatedly finds itself mired in military interventions long after public buy-in to the national interest has waned. Why is the timely disengagement of military forces so difficult to achieve? Traditional international relations theories diminish the role of the individual leader in favor of the state or international institutions. Behavioral science theories have in recent years experienced a resurgence. However, the dominant behavioral explanation of foreign policy decision-making, prospect theory, while it focuses on how people tend to make decisions under risk, still minimizes the influence of the individual president. Decisions to disengage military forces are presidential decisions, just like the decisions to commit forces to foreign interventions. If we accept this, then it is important to understand if, and if so why, some presidents inherently are more or less acceptant of the risks disengagement presents. This book operationalizes a competing personality-based model of decision-making under risk. Referred to here as the trait-based model, it is assessed using disengagement opportunities in three varied levels of military intervention across four presidencies: humanitarian relief turned nation-building under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton in Somalia, compellent air campaigns turned peace-making/keeping in Bosnia and Kosovo under Clinton, and major combat operations turned irregular warfare in Iraq under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Data for the model predominantly comes from existing presidential personality profiles based on the dominant model of personality theory, the five-factor model, augmented by Myers-Briggs Type Inventory data from public sources. This study aims to explain the roughly 30 percent of cases which defy prospect theory's predictions and to better explain those cases where prospect theory might heretofore have sufficed. The results suggest specific personality traits do in fact point to presidents' predispositions toward risk, which in turn help explain their disengagement decisions. This work may be only the second to apply the five-factor model to presidential foreign policy decision-making and is the first to do so in the context of disengagement decisions. Hopefully it will foster further work in both areas.
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