Since the Egyptian protests began, we have heard a lot about President Obama’s response and whether the administration could have handled the crisis differently. Newt Gingrich “has argued”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/02/when-ronald-reagan-built-the-pyramids-he-beat-up-kublai-khan/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+matthewyglesias+%28Matthew+Yglesias%29 that Ronald Reagan, for example, would have taken a different approach. Ross Douthat “asserts”:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/opinion/07douthat.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss that Egypt has “crystallized” Obama’s “entire foreign policy vision” around “cold-blooded realpolitik.” Others have argued that the administration’s response was inevitable given the circumstances, implying that other presidents would have followed a similar course. Does the U.S. response to the protests have anything to do with President Obama’s views? Would the U.S. response have been different if the protests had erupted on another president’s watch? Or is U.S. policy constrained by the circumstances of the crisis or more generic U.S. interests? This post will lay out a way to answer this question from a political science perspective. The next post will apply the logic to Obama and the Egyptian crisis.
As regular readers of The Monkey Cage know, the news media tends to put the sitting president at the center of its narratives, attributing decisions to the particular views, idiosyncrasies, and choices of each leader. Political scientists frequently take the opposite view, usually leaving leaders out of the equation on the grounds that it is difficult to determine how individuals shape political events. But this debate is unsatisfying. We don’t have to believe that leaders matter in the “great man” sense of one individual affecting the course of events in order to investigate how leaders matter, and if they do so in a regular pattern.
My research finds that when leaders confront international threats, they tend to hold one of two views. “Internally focused” leaders attribute the threat to the way states are organized internally, while “externally focused” leaders assess the threat based on states’ foreign and security policies. These categories are generalizations, but still useful rules of thumb (and more general than simply asking whether a leader is a “realist” or a “liberal”).
These two different beliefs affect how presidents confront international crises, by shaping the way they see the benefits of transforming other states’ domestic institutions, and by affecting how much they prepare to use U.S. resources to bring about such internal change. As a result, internally focused leaders are more likely to seek to transform another state’s domestic institutions. In the case of a full-scale military intervention, for example, an internally focused leader would be more likely to pursue a strategy like nation-building. By contrast, an externally focused leader would be more likely to go in, try to fix the problem, and get out with minimal impact on the target’s internal affairs. Kennedy, Carter, and Reagan fall into the former category, and tended to press for domestic reform (with notably little success). Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and George H.W. Bush were much more cautious about pursuing domestic transformation. Other factors, of course, influence how presidents approach crises, but their beliefs act as a thumb on the scale as they weigh costs and benefits.
How do we sort presidents into these two categories? It is difficult to draw conclusions from publicly available information, because leaders may say and do things during a crisis that may not actually reflect what they really believe. In my research, I look at the statements and actions of presidents before they took office to show that they were elected with a set of beliefs already in place. This method works best when there is a long paper trail of documents and historical evidence, especially private statements or communications. Obviously we don’t have that luxury when assessing a sitting president like Obama, or even a recent president like George W. Bush.
Nevertheless, we can make some informed speculation about Obama and the crisis in Egypt. That will be the subject of my next post.