The Influence of Public Opinion on Post-Cold War U.S. Military Interventions

Helene Dieck, Kenneth A. Loparo, Richard J Finneran

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349704651
  9781137519221
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137519238
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Based on interviews with political decision-makers involved in post-Cold War case studies, this research reassesses the prevalent conclusion in the academic literature, according to which American public opinion has limited influence on military interventions, by including the level of commitment in the study of the decision-making process.

PART I

The Influence of Public Opinion on Military Interventions: Concepts and Theoretical Approaches

Introduction

After the Cold War, successive presidents often intervened in conflicts in which the public was ambivalent to say the least. Shall we conclude that public opinion had no impact on military interventions? As stated before, in order to answer this question, this research focuses on the way the choice of a specific military option is influenced by the perception of anticipated support and the way this perception influenced the final decision to intervene or not to intervene. First of all, it is important to clarify a term frequently used: “public opinion,” “influence,” “strategy,” and “decision.”

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In 1774, Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the term “public opinion” for the first time, describing it as “an opinion widespread among the public.”¹ Today, “public opinion” refers to public preferences about issues that deal with societal life. Polling is the primary method used for measuring public opinion. However, this method has several limitations. Political scientist Lindsay Rogers and sociologist Herbert Blumer were the first to criticize polls as misrepresenting public opinion in the 1940s. According to Herbert Blumer, the democratic rule of “one person, one vote,” which was also present in a poll, couldn’t represent public opinion.² Like the Founding Fathers, he believed that each person’s opinion wasn’t necessarily part of the public opinion.³ Indeed, those opinions also needed to be debated and conveyed to officials. As a matter of fact, representatives in Congress, for instance, trust what political scientists sometimes call “the vocal public,” meaning the sentiments expressed by constituents in their letters and phone calls or during formal and informal meetings, over polling results. Many leaders believe in their “guts” to anticipate what their constituency is likely to support in the future. As a result, the perception of the public’s preferences is subjective and public opinion only exists in political leaders’ imagination. During the 1960s, V. O. Key advanced a definition that took into account these characteristics and which is widely referred to today: public opinion is “those opinions held by private persons which governments find it prudent to heed.”⁴

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According to Talcott Parsons, “an actor has influence when he orients the opinion of others in a way or a direction that he or she chose beforehand.”⁵ Influence is conceived as one way to change somebody else’s behavior or thoughts. Another way an actor can prevail is by having legitimate power to impose a certain behavior. In order to influence another actor, one can use persuasion through relevant facts or logical information. Trust between the two actors is a condition for this attempt to be successful.

There are different types of influence. When researching which actors have influence in the city of New Haven, Robert Dahl distinguished between direct and indirect influence.⁶ People have direct influence when “they successfully initiate or veto proposals for policies.”⁷ On the contrary, elections have indirect influence on leaders’ policy choices because it provides them with information about what the constituents want. In New Haven, only the leaders have a great deal of direct influence, while subleaders enjoy some direct influence. The citizens who vote or influence voters have indirect influence because “elected officials keep the real or imagined preferences of constituents constantly in mind in deciding what policies to adopt or reject.”⁸ Subleaders have greater indirect influence, and leaders have even greater indirect influence on one another. When political leaders disagree with each other, however, it becomes harder to use pressure and persuasion to influence the public’s preferences.⁹ Robert Dahl also noted that it was sometimes difficult to evaluate whether leaders respond to the public’s preferences or whether they were the ones shaping the public’s preferences.

As the case studies will demonstrate, public opinion can have indirect influence over the president’s policy on the use of force not only through presidential elections, but also through evaluating his overall job performance and through members of Congress. Indeed, presidents and their advisers understand that Congress can make it more difficult to wage a war when the public doesn’t support it. Also, an unpopular war can harm the political capital needed to carry out other items on the president’s agenda.

In this research, I will sometimes look at the influence of public opinion through a different angle: the president’s margin for maneuver. The concept of “margin for maneuver” refers to the level of freedom to design and implement a policy without constraints. One of these constraints is public opinion. This approach will allow me to look at public opinion as a variable in competition with other variables in the decision-making process. This notion is similar to the notion of leeway except for the implicit nuance that assumes that the president is not a victim of these constraints and can manage them by maneuvering. Moreover, the term seemed even more appropriate as it belongs to the vocabulary of military campaigns, commonly referring to a military movement or exercise.

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Another important concept is strategy, which originates from the Greek word stratēgía, meaning “generalship.”¹⁰ The scope of this concept can be defined very strictly or very broadly. British military strategist Basil Henry Liddell Hart defined strategy as “the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy.”¹¹ Simply put, strategy is a plan detailing the means to achieve political objectives. Although the classic definition refers strictly to military means, we believe that these means should include the communication strategy, or rhetoric, for an intervention. This inclusion can also be found in the study of the impact of public opinion on the strategy in Vietnam by Leslie Gelb in 1972¹² and corresponds to the opinion of contemporary military thinkers. For instance, a French military thinker, Vincent Desportes, believes that because communication provides greater political freedom of action, it is an inherent part of strategy.¹³ Other important elements of the strategy that the political leadership especially cares about are the level of troops and their composition, how long the operation might take, the probability of the enemy fighting back and killing American soldiers, and the possibility to obtain a multinational mandate to share the burden, among others.

Although the concept of strategy is originally intended for the political-military level, this concept is also used at the operational and tactical levels. Strategy can in that case be offensive, such as Marshal Joffre’s battle of the Marne during World War I, or defensive, with the construction of the Maginot Line before World War II, for instance.¹⁴ As a result, the boundaries of this notion are fluctuating. When appropriate, I will refer more specifically to the format of the intervention or the implementation of the decision to use force. An intervention, in this research, refers to the use of military means in a given crisis, from the moment the troops are sent on the ground to the moment they are sent back home.

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Finally, referring to a “decision” implies a choice between alternative courses of action.¹⁵ Until recently, authors such as Descartes have assumed this choice was driven by a linear rationality.¹⁶ Lucien Sfez argued that decisions are more complex than that. They don’t necessarily lead to progress and more efficiency. The study of decision-making first in the field of public policy unveiled several limits to this rationality. From psychology, for instance, Lucien Sfez showed the cognitive limits to decisions, such as the process of transfer. From the study of history, he further criticized the notion of linearity by pointing to the absence of continuity of events. According to him, decisions are multilinear, multirational, and can be motivated by several goals.¹⁷

In the same way and although the current literature typically limits the choice to the option of using force or not using force, I will argue that the administration disposes of myriad possible courses of action. The role of public opinion in the decisions to use force will be studied in two different ways: first as a constraint and second as a factor in the decision-making process leading to the initial use of force or a military escalation.

* * *

Understanding public opinion’s influence on military operations requires covering different academic literature, including public opinion, international relations theory, foreign policy decision-making theory, presidential and leadership studies, as well as military strategy. Each of these fields provides an important facet of the president’s leeway with regards to public opinion. Combining them will allow me to develop a new approach to better evaluate the influence of public opinion. This approach will be applied in the following parts, which will analyze different case studies representative of the post–Cold War era.

CHAPTER 1

The Influence of Public Opinion on Military Interventions: Theoretical Approaches and Their Limits

The role of domestic politics in the formulation of foreign policy in general and the initiation of war in particular has long been debated in the field of political science. Although military thinkers such as Clausewitz understood that “war was the continuation of politics by other means”¹ and most historians look at the internal causes of war,² the predominance of realism in the study of international relations after World War II led to the belief that the study of public opinion was irrelevant.

This chapter will look at the current academic literature. Political scientists study the influence of public opinion through different prisms. International relations theories debate whether public opinion and other domestic factors matter in the study of international politics. Public opinion research attempted to define public opinion about foreign policy issues and its influence on military interventions. Finally, recent studies unveiled factors determining the influence of public opinion on military interventions in an attempt to better understand the conditions under which public support might matter.

I will then draw some theoretical limits from the literature, and first and foremost the lack of consideration for the implementation phase of the decision to use force.

I. Theoretical Approaches

Several academic fields have provided conclusions about the role of public opinion on military interventions. While some theories still debate whether it plays any role at all, some others attempted to move away from this debate and look at factors contributing to its influence. These factors will be particularly important to the study of our cases of interventions and escalations.

1. Public Opinion in International Relations Theory

Realists and liberals disagree over the r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   The Influence of Public Opinion on Military Interventions: Concepts and Theoretical Approaches
• Part II   Public Opinion and the Initial Decision to Use Force
• Part III   Changing Strategy for Military Operations: The President’s Room for Maneuver
• Conclusions and Implications
• Annex: Conducting Interviews
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Interviews
• Index