1869, Ep. 144 with Jeff Friedman, author of The Commander-in-Chief Test

7:54PM Dec 18, 2023

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Jeffrey Friedman

Keywords:

foreign policy

voters

book

candidates

presidents

war

leaders

hawkish

johnson

kennedy

china

strong

chief

image

united states

foreign policies

commander

rhetoric

foreign policy establishment

escalation

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Jeffrey Friedman, author of the new book, The Commander-in-Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image Making in US Foreign Policy. Jeffrey Friedman is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, and his research examines the politics and psychology of foreign policy decision making. We spoke to Jeff about why US Presidents of both parties tend to adopt more hawkish foreign policies than voters say they want, in public opinion surveys; what steps parties candidates and voters can take to prevent the commander in chief test from distorting US foreign policy; and, how Jeff thinks the commander in chief test will play out in the upcoming presidential election. Hello, Jeff, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Well, I'm excited to talk to about your new book, The Commander-in-Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image Making in US Foreign Policy, tell us how this book came to be?

Sure. So first, let me just say what the book is, it's about how voters decide which leaders are fit to be commander in chief. And then I argue that that conversation steers US foreign policy in a direction that ends up being more hawkish than what voters want. So that's, that's probably what the books about it's about the relationship between foreign policy and presidential elections and how that affects foreign policy choices. And they're basically two ways in which I came to that. One is that in pretty much every presidential election, we hear pundits and candidates and colleagues talking about who's fit to be commander in chief. And I always thought it was kind of strange that we talk about this test a lot. But there isn't a whole lot of research explaining how it is that voters actually make those choices, and to what extent they actually matter at the ballot box. So So I sort of was looking for a book on what the commander in chief test is, and didn't find one and thought thought I would write it. And then the second motivation for the book is that I think there's been a lot of frustration in recent years among American voters about the content of their country's foreign policies that we look at things like rising defense budgets, were open ended military interventions, or unilateral diplomacy, these are all things that voters consistently say they don't want. But that for decades, leaders have consistently done, there's been a lot of scholarship recently on the origins of what's often called a foreign policy disconnect. And as I was studying this commander in chief test, I realized that I think that has a lot to do with explaining why it is that Americans are so consistently frustrated by their country's foreign policies. And the book tries to explain why that's the case.

Interesting, interesting. So what they've, what they've determined, and what your research shows is that voters generally want presidents to have two attributes. They want to have a strong leader who promotes the US. And then they also want someone who shows good judgment. So strength in judgment. Sounds pretty reasonable. But tell us how this test kind of skewers things and and with voters ended up with presidents and presidential candidates who are more hawkish than than the voters actually want?

Yeah. So if you ask voters, what it is that they're looking for, and a commander in chief, exactly as you said, their answers tend to cluster on these two dimensions. One is that they want a strong leader who can vigorously advance US national interests, stand up to adversaries, and essentially, be tough and strong, and advocating for the United States on the world stage. But they don't want reckless warmongers. And so they also want presidents who have good judgment in the sense of not taking unnecessary risks. That in principle, you could say that those things kind of balance out and would favor candidates who take middle of the road positions on things. But these two attributes play out in very different ways in the electoral arena. The problem with good judgment is it's just so hard to signal good judgments inherently context dependent. A decision that makes sense in one context could be too reckless or too cautious in another. And there are people who spend their entire careers trying to figure out what exactly good judgment entails in any foreign policy decision context. So I don't think we can expect voters to have particularly strong intuitions about that. By contrast, it's much easier for candidates to present themselves as being strong leaders that the more you stand up to adversaries, the more you resist making consent tends to other states, the more military force you use, the more money you promised to spend on defense, that pretty reliably helps candidates to create images, that they're strong and tough and able to serve that dimension of being a commander in chief. And because that connection between hawkish foreign policy, an image for being strong leader is relatively clear in voters minds. That's I argue why candidates spend so much effort skewing foreign policy and hawkish directions in order to convince voters they'd be an effective commander in chief. Interesting.

Now, is this something that has just happened relatively recently? Or is this been happening in the US politics for a long time?

It's been happening for a long time. In the book, I describe how I think the origins of this start with John F. Kennedy in 1960. Let me just give you a brief backstory to why that's the case. So it's not really until the Korean War, that the United States takes this mantle of global militarized leadership. And then after the Korean War, the next two presidential elections are won by Dwight Eisenhower, who doesn't have to do anything to convince Americans he's fit to be commander in chief. I mean, he's, he's Eisenhower. But then after Eisenhower, starting with John F. Kennedy, in 1960, most presidential candidates and most people actually elected to the White House, really have no high level military experience. And so they have to do something besides rely on their track record, to convince voters that they're, you know, fit to put their finger on the nuclear button or lead troops into war, and all that sort of thing. So this is the context that Kennedy finds himself in 1960. And he's trying to figure out how we will handle that. And as advisors are really explicit about how Kennedy's central challenge here is not to adopt policies that voters support on their merits, but rather to create an image of being strong and tough. So just just one example, I quote from the book, one of Kennedy's advisors, writes, In a memo that I found in the archives, quote, particular postures on issues will not directly affect many voters. The primary objective in dealing with foreign affairs is to enhance Kennedy's image by demonstrating his competence. So I mean, they're just saying it behind closed doors, don't don't worry about voters preferences, create an image that resonates with them. And the way that he does that, is by proposing a military buildup. So you, many listeners probably recall a famous line from Kennedy's inaugural address where he promises to pay any price, bear any burden, to support liberal internationalism, and in the context of the campaign that referred to a very specific promise Kennedy was making to expand the US defense budget, and particularly to spend more on nuclear weapons. And what's interesting about that is at the time, it was super unpopular, less than one quarter of Americans actually thought the defense budget was too low. But as I talked about in the book, that the explicit reason that Kennedy thought this would be a good thing for him electorally was it helped him to show that he was vigorous, and that he was going to confront the Soviet Union and that the incumbent Republican administration had been complacent and letting the Soviets catch up to the United States. And indeed, even now, I suspect that at least polls show that most Americans don't want to raise the US defense budget today, either. But still Kennedy's rhetoric about paying any price and bearing any burden. I mean, it resonates with us, it sort of tugs on our heartstrings. And it's a great example of this tension between doing what voters want on the substance and creating an image that they associate with leadership strength.

I like that. So after Kennedy, you have Johnson and Johnson's going up against Barry Goldwater Goldwater takes it too far. I guess. People thought he was a little bit maybe overly expressing strength or maybe unhinged. Tell us about that.

Yeah, so in 1964 Barry Goldwater is the Republicans presidential nominee, and he's sort of the classic case of how you can take hawkishness too far. And that the so called commander in chief test isn't isn't all about leadership strength, and in particular in for Goldwater, Goldwater had had made several comments about using nuclear weapons that suggested he would just be too reckless that he couldn't be trusted with his finger on the nuclear button. The Johnson campaign runs a famous ad, which is now known as the daisy ad, which, if your listeners haven't seen this, I recommend going to YouTube. There's a girl plucking daisies in a field and she gets enveloped by a mushroom cloud. It's really over the top, but it captures this idea that Goldwater was going to blow up the world. So in the context of the 1964 campaign, Johnson runs on that as part of his qualification for being a more sensible candidate. But Nevertheless, the book also talks about how during the election, Johnson was worried that Goldwater was successfully portraying him as being too soft on Communism. And in particular, in 1964, the United States is kind of involved in fighting the Vietnamese insurgents, but it's staying out of direct combat. And Goldwater portrays this as a quote, why win strategy, he says Johnson is being too timid, he's being too complacent, and that America needs a more decisive president. Johnson runs a series of private polls, which I document in the book, which show that this is by far his biggest liability, at least in the policy sphere of all the policies he's got. This is the one voters trust the least. Johnson, therefore, it looks for some way that he can essentially ramp up the hawkishness of his policy in Vietnam. In order to convince voters he's strong enough to remain as commander in chief. And the way that he does that is by asking Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which in August 1964, gives Johnson open ended authorization to use force in Vietnam. At the time, part of the way Johnson convinced Congress to authorize that, given that voters didn't want to go to war in Vietnam. And given that many congressional leaders were suspect, that Johnson told Senate leaders, this was nothing more than a campaign Gambit, that he was going to use that in order to just bolster his reputation for strength. And then if he ultimately decided to use force in Vietnam, he would go back to Congress to get new authorization. He later breaks that promise, much to the chagrin of congressional leaders who had backed him on that. So again, go back to your original question, the Goldwater case shows that you can you can take auctions too far and that voters don't just vote for the most hawkish candidate. But even in the case here, where the so called dove wins with Johnson, the politics of image making still force him to take US foreign policy in a direction that's to the right of what voters want. And in this case, leads him and Congress to authorize open ended use of force that will lead to a pretty disastrous next few years in Southeast Asia.

I like this one section of the book, you say, "As I conducted my research for this book, I was surprised at how sensible voters foreign policy preference often seemed, consider for a moment what the history of US foreign policy might look like, if leaders had no incentives to craft their political images and instead pursued policies backed by a clear majority of voters." Then you go on to show that we most likely wouldn't have gotten into half the wars we got into, and we would live in a more peaceful world. So with that, in mind, know, what what can we do to reduce this, this tendency, you know, even though voters don't want the military budget to be expanded, it's keep it keeps on expanding. And we even though the US public prefers not to be in wars, we seem to be in these endless wars, or if there is once one as we started another one. How do we get out of this cycle?

Yeah, thanks for asking that. That was, that was a big takeaway I had from the book, too. So I'm glad you highlighted that passage, particularly in essentially all the cases where the book documents, leaders, deliberately pursuing unpopular policies to bolster their personal images, I was sympathetic with the voters. And that gave me a sense that there's at least a little bit of urgency and figuring out how to minimize these incentives to sacrifice voters policy preferences for the sake of passing the so called commander-in-chief test. And maybe in a moment, we could talk about how they do that. But in terms of what this bodes for the future of US foreign policy, I don't necessarily think that this condemns presidents to always waging open ended wars, but I mean, it certainly makes them more likely. To the extent that presidents have this incentive to adopt hawkish confrontational positions towards adversaries and other states. That definitely makes escalation more likely in the international arena. I mean, today, the most obvious example of this would be US relations with China. Even though if you look at public polling, Americans are not particularly antagonistic towards China, less than one quarter actually think of China as an enemy. The rhetoric that comes out of political leaders suggests something that's far more austere than that. And I think part of the reason is that, you know, even if maybe behind closed doors, leaders don't quite know exactly how confrontational they want to be towards China. It's just electorally risky to seem as though you are making concessions towards a potential foe, and it's a lot more rewarding. To be big and bold and confronting potential adversaries. And in the you know, in the short run, does this mean we're going to have a war with China next week? Probably not. But if this cycle of hostility keeps escalating and ratcheting up, certainly in the medium term, you can get to a place that is much more hostile than than anyone would choose in advance. Similarly, I'd say the kind of logic that it talks about the book makes it much harder for presidents to exit spirals out of hostility once they're in them. I think the best example of this would be the war in Afghanistan. Since President Obama's second term, it appears most presidents were aware, the United States wasn't going to achieve major strategic gains in Afghanistan. But it was so so painful to make a deal with the Taliban that could be used by your political opponents to say that you had not done your best to stand up for the United States. So I think that can help to explain why that Ken was kicked down the road for several years in Afghanistan, just as several US presidents prolonged the war in Vietnam. And when President Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, at the start of his presidency, he bore a huge cost to that, with his his approval rating, dropping several points overnight, even though polls showed that most voters were sympathetic towards what he was doing on the merits.

Yeah. I lived in I lived in DC for a while. And I do remember, whenever a new war was started, the graffiti on buildings would say, Polls drop, Drop bombs, I kept on seeing that over and over. So we're seeing this in US politics. But I would assume it's human nature to also do this, that other countries are doing this as well that their electorate also wants to strong leader and the leader who goes to war as the great leader. So that you talked about I like that term spirals of hostility or spirals of conflict, then then then we get into an escalation on both sides. Can one can one side unilaterally step down? Or once they get into it, that's hard to disengage?

Yeah, I think that in terms of the policy space, I think it is possible to disengage from spirals of hostility if leaders want to probably the the best example of this from US foreign policy would be after the Cuban Missile Crisis, where I think the United States and the Soviet Union were just so spooked, or at least their leaders were so spooked by how close they had apparently come to nuclear war that that sort of gets people into a state where they're willing to cool off and lays the groundwork for what will become detente at the end of the decade and in the 1970s. But I think part of what the logic in the book helps to explain is why those moments are rare. That, you know, ideally, you wouldn't take some near apocalyptic event, like the Cuban Missile Crisis to open opportunities for de escalation. And I think part of the reason why the United States and many other countries get sucked into words that last much longer than their strategic value would indicate is because there are real political consequences to making concessions and leaders know this. And they want to defer those costs as long as possible. And that's partly to protect their political image. Just to go back to Vietnam on that for a moment. One of the cases in the book that I found most vivid when I was researching it, was how President Nixon deals with the politics of Vietnam, heading into the 1972 election. So basically, what happens here is that by the fall of 1972, Richard Nixon and the National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, have reached the parameters of a deal with the communists in Vietnam. That will be essentially what they sign on to in the following year. And critically, the terms that Nixon and Kissinger have obtained from Hanoi are much better than what the Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern has promised to do. So it turns out McGovern has promised to make all these concessions to North Vietnam, that Nixon will not have to make. And Nixon knows that. And you would think in principle, this would mean Nixon had every incentive to get this deal done before the election so that he could show that his handling of the Vietnam War was objectively better than what his opponent had proposed. But Nixon doesn't want to do that. And the reason he doesn't want to do that, is because he's worried that if he's if he goes through with this deal, voters will then question whether the war had been worth four years of fighting on his watch. And so even though on the merits, his again, is objectively better than what his candidate his opponent is proposing, Nixon still thinks that the cost of his image is going to be too high to go through with it. So he deliberately defers until after the election that creates a escalation of the war called the Christmas bombings, which was quite brutal. and controversial is just another example of how hard it is to find avenues for escalation if you feel like your personal image is at stake and doing that.

So your book eloquently lays out this test and is distorting elements on foreign policy, what actual steps can parties or candidates or even voters do to prevent this distortion from happening in the first place?

That's a good question. I thought about that a lot, especially as I was writing the final chapter of the book. I can just take each of those actors in turn, what can parties do to prevent the commander in chief test from distorting the politics of US foreign policy, I think the obvious thing there is to nominate presidential candidates with substantial military experience. So as I mentioned, particularly with respect to the John F. Kennedy example, the main reason many political leaders have to do this thing in which they adopt overly hawkish foreign policies to build up their credibility as commander in chief is because they don't have other resources to draw on. Specifically, they don't have a track record that will convince voters they're an effective commander in chief. Eisenhower had that track record. And that's part of why he was one of the most restrained foreign policy presidents in modern history. He was quite aggressive at limiting the rise of defense spending. He kept the United States out of Foreign Wars. He took a lot of criticism for that, but that criticism couldn't really dent his image or his military reputation, because that was so well established. So I think I think parties have an incentive to do that, particularly Democrats have an incentive to do that if they want to avoid hawkish foreign policies. What can candidates do? I think candidates have two ways that they can try to redirect some of these distortions. One of them is that what I call rhetorical bellicosity in the book. One of the innovations that Donald Trump brought to us politics was that even though he departed from the foreign policy establishment views in many ways, he couched that in this super hostile rhetoric about how two generals didn't know what they were talking about, and foreign policy establishment was corrupt. And that allowed him even when he was breaking from certain orthodoxies on let's say, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to couch that in a very aggressive rhetoric that I think helped him to maintain his reputation for leadership strength and doing that. Contemporary progressives do a lot of this as well. So if you if you listen to Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders talk about foreign policy, they also have this, like quite sharp hostility towards the foreign policy establishment. So I think if you don't want to orient your foreign policy around confronting other states, confronting the foreign policy establishment, you got to confront somebody, voters, voters need to see that. Another example I talked about in the book comes from George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, in which he critiqued Bill Clinton, for having conducted a disorganized and undisciplined foreign policy, in which he argued that Clinton had just sort of gotten sucked into all these ad hoc conflicts around the world, particularly in the Balkans, because he didn't have a clear idea for what he wanted to do in foreign policy, and therefore, he kept taking his eye off the ball and quote, so I think that that argument could be useful to the notion that continually expanding American foreign policy isn't leadership strength, it's weakness, it's it's a lack of discipline. That was a pretty successful argument for Bush in 2000. Now, obviously, Bush ends up radically expanding US foreign policy after September 11. But without that, it's you know, it's possible he would have been able to rein that in. And then last McCain, what could voters do to prevent these distortions? I think there are two things there. One is to ask for the details on what candidates actually intend to do. So particularly When candidates talk about confronting other states like China, it's really easy to let them be vague about that. And they want to be vague about that, because they don't want to go into details that could alarm the public. And I think that kind of lack of investigating the details allows candidates to make these sort of vague, generic seeming postures that can end up having real consequences, but don't necessarily expose them to challenges for lacking good judgment. So simply asking follow up questions. Asking for details later is important. Finally, just honestly, the most fundamental thing voters can do to reduce these biases is to stop personalizing foreign policy issues. I it totally makes sense as to why voters would want a competent commander in chief. And frankly, it's it makes for good TV to talk about, you know, who's, who's strong and who's weak and who's up and who's down. But I don't think it's particularly productive. And I think part of what the book does is hopefully what it does, is to show that this guy of personalizing foreign policy into turning policy issues into referenda on presidential candidates personal traits, has some real underappreciated consequences that should make us think think a little bit more carefully about whether we should keep our conversations more oriented towards substance.

Interesting, yeah, these are great recommendations. I really liked what you said about all these, the parties and the candidates, it sounds like part of the issue was just that the candidates, it is image over substance, but if they actually have substance, they don't have to put on these airs of I'm a strong person, and also liked how you give them another enemy. Rather than, you know, a foreign enemy is like there's an enemy within our own foreign policy or the military industrial complex, whatever. That's not as dangerous. And you're right. As far as voters and the media, the media loves this horse race. And it feels like we're all being underserved by this, unfortunately. But we're in that horse race right now. And it seems like we're never it's never ending. It seems like as soon as that President gets in, they're already talking about the next election. But clearly, we're on the homestretch of keeping with that metaphor. Now we have a presidential election next year, and it's getting crazy. What are your insights and thoughts on what's going on right now?

Yeah, you know, and when I was writing this book, I really wanted it to come out during a presidential election cycle. And one of the one of the risks of that, of course, is you never know how these things are going to play out and whether they're going to look resemble the dynamics in the book. I think that uncertainty, I got resolved when, when I noticed how many Republican presidential candidates were threatening to attack Mexico. For I don't know, for those listeners who haven't been following the GOP debates, the top four ranking Republican presidential candidates all say they will use direct military force against Mexico to combat drug cartels and stop the supply of fentanyl into the United States. Let me just sort of say the least, that is an unusual escalation of hostility towards a neighbor. It doesn't look like voters actually want this. polling suggests that voters would be highly skeptical of any military action towards Mexico that doesn't have that government's consent, which is almost impossible to imagine. So And moreover, President Trump, seven years ago captured the Republican Party's base by saying he wanted to stay out of new military adventures. So I think this one is really hard to explain, unless you take account of the incentives that these candidates all have to bolster themselves up to strong leaders who could be effective commanders in chief and that allows them to present the Biden administration as being complacent and not doing enough with the cartels and the fentanyl threat. And by militarizing the response to that is, I guess, voters don't actually think that's a good idea on the merits, but they like how candidates sound when they talk about it. And that allows candidates, particularly those without military experience, to look to look strong and tough. And that's just the book's argument in a nutshell. But to go back to something that we talked about earlier, I think the real stakes of this election for US foreign policy is it has to do with China. And the the rhetoric coming out of Republican candidates there is also quite alarming. Nikki Haley, has said that China is leading a new global axis of evil, Vic Ramaswamy, has labeled China as our top enemy. Ron DeSantis, says he wants to treat Beijing the way the United States treated the Soviets. And these are amazing things, you just would not think that you would associate US foreign policy with the term Axis of Evil like that. And that's a term that's directly associated with the war in Iraq. That is That doesn't sound like something the United voters in the United States want to do. Polling shows the United States don't want to wage a new cold war with China. So I mean, just holding aside the question on the merits of what US policy towards China should be it is just quite striking. how aggressive this rhetoric is, how much it seems to depart from what voters say they want. And I think a large part of that has to do with candidates playing this image making game trying to pass that so called commander in chief test, and we can see sort of right before our eyes, how that steering US foreign policy in a direction that should give us this gift give some of us some pause. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I want to thank you so much for reading this book and showing us the answer to this test. Because it is this and you mentioned you know, the games that politicians are playing, unfortunately, it's to coin a phrase that's already been said, but you know, this is the most dangerous game that we're playing with with with a war in Ukraine, the Israel Hamas war and now potential conflict with China. This is not boding very well. So I would strongly encourage everyone who's listening to this to get Jeffrey's new book, The Commander-in-Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image Making in US Foreign Policy to really digest all the stories that Jeff uncovers in his research. So we can really see this upcoming election with open eyes. So I really appreciate you reading this stuff.

Hey, thanks. It was fun talking with you.

Great talking with you, take care. That was Jeffrey Friedman, author of the new book The Commander-in-Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image Making in US Foreign Policy. You can purchase the hardcover or ebook at our website and use the promo code 09POD to save 30% off. If you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined academic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast