Rachel Whitlark’s All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation brings together two critical areas of international relations research: nuclear politics and the role of individual leaders. After the Cold War ended, many historians and political scientists turned their attention away from nuclear weapons—and even, for a few years, from international security more generally. During this period, the study of leadership in international relations was also largely dormant, as most scholars focused on structural forces or domestic institutions. More recently, both areas have seen a revival in scholarship.[1] Whitlark’s book is notable for making key contributions in both domains, teaching us much about the intersection of nuclear politics and leaders.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 16-21
Rachel E. Whitlark. All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation. Cornell University Press, 2021. ISBN: 9781501760341.
10 January 2025 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-21 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Danielle Lupton
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Katie A. Ryan
Contents
Introduction by Matthew Fuhrmann, Texas A&M University. 2
Review by Debak Das, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. 5
Review by Raymond Kuo, RAND Corporation. 8
Review by Sanne Cornelia J. Verschuren, Boston University. 11
Response by Rachel Whitlark, Georgia Institute of Technology. 15
Introduction by Matthew Fuhrmann, Texas A&M University
Rachel Whitlark’s All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation brings together two critical areas of international relations research: nuclear politics and the role of individual leaders. After the Cold War ended, many historians and political scientists turned their attention away from nuclear weapons—and even, for a few years, from international security more generally. During this period, the study of leadership in international relations was also largely dormant, as most scholars focused on structural forces or domestic institutions. More recently, both areas have seen a revival in scholarship.[1] Whitlark’s book is notable for making key contributions in both domains, teaching us much about the intersection of nuclear politics and leaders.
The book explains when and why world leaders consider and use military force to stop the international spread of nuclear weapons. This issue is certainly timely. For more than 20 years, policymakers in Israel, the United States, and elsewhere have called for preventive strikes against Iran to delay Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Yet we have seen variation in the intensity with which leaders have pursued the military option. The United States and Israel have taken various actions against Iran’s nuclear program, including the Stuxnet cyberattack, but neither has launched conventional airstrikes. With a focus on the beliefs of individual leaders, Whitlark’s book helps us understand why the situation has played out in this manner.
All Options on the Table has much to offer: a compelling argument; a well-thought-out qualitative research design; substantial archival evidence; and key implications for theory and policy. The reviewers of this roundtable highlight the book’s many strengths. Sanne Cornelia J. Verschuren writes that it, “deserves praise for identifying a precise set of beliefs that determines leaders’ preferences for preventive war.” Debak Das underscores that “the book adds depth and nuance to the literature on leaders and their role in international security outcomes.” Echoing this sentiment, Raymond Kuo states, “the book does what all great social science should do.”
The reviewers also highlight interesting questions raised by the book. Verschuren wonders about the universe of cases of preventive attacks against nuclear programs. She points out that there are some foreign policy actions not captured by Whitlark’s definition of preventive attacks, such as assassinations. Verschuren also writes that some attacks, including those that occurred during the Persian Gulf War, were in the context of a broader war. In these cases, stopping nuclear proliferation was not the only (or main) objective of using military force. Verschuren also draws attention to Whitlark’s two-part theory. In the first stage, leaders’ beliefs about nuclear proliferation and deterrence shape whether they will consider using military force. Then, operational feasibility and the wider context shape whether attacks are carried out. Verschuren suggests that the second stage, which is not about leaders, plays a big role in the outcome for some cases. She also wonders about the role of advisors: to what extent to their beliefs matter, in addition to the beliefs of the heads of government?
Das raises some compelling questions, too. He asks how leaders’ beliefs might influence other kinds of coercive enforcement of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), including economic sanctions. There are a range of policy tools leaders can use to curtail the spread of nuclear weapons. It is interesting to consider when leaders use one policy over another, and whether Whitlark’s theory can help us better understand the potential for foreign policy substitutability.[2] Das also raises the question of external validity. Most of Whitlark’s evidence comes from the United States and Israel, raising the issue of how well the theory applies to the behavior of leaders in countries such as France, the United Kingdom, China, India, or Pakistan. And how might leaders’ beliefs influence arms control, in addition to preventive strikes, Das asks.
Kuo raises some important issues about the theory’s microfoundations. He wonders where leaders’ beliefs come from, and whether they can change over time. The answers carry important implications. Kuo also asks whether there are any nuclear optimists—those who are relatively sanguine about the consequences of nuclear proliferation—left in government. Most US officials do indeed to be pessimistic these days, and they expend considerable effort to limit nuclear proliferation. Kenneth Waltz’s claim in 2012 that Iran getting the bomb would bring greater international stability has been met with considerable skepticism in the US government and elsewhere.[3] Kuo also raises the possibility that prior leaders might limit the choices available to their successors by creating precedents, citing the emergence of the “Begin Doctrine” after Israel’s 1981 attack against an Iraqi nuclear reactor.
In her response, Whitlark constructively engages with these points. She also raises several interesting avenues for future research. Her point about changing democratic trends in especially worth highlighting. Whitlark notes that today’s policymakers lack the nuclear-specific knowledge of many of their predecessors during the Cold War. Understanding the implications this carries for deterrence and nuclear security seems important. So too is a second demographic trend Whitlark highlights: an increase in the number of heads of government in nuclear-relevant countries who are women. In 2023, she points out, nearly one-quarter of leaders in NATO member states were women. This permits more analysis on how gender influences nuclear decisionmaking and policy, which is a promising area for further investigation.
Contributors:
Rachel Elizabeth Whitlark is Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense practice of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a Senior Fellow with the Bridging the Gap Project. Whitlark’s scholarship examines nuclear proliferation, counterproliferation, and foreign policy decisionmaking.
Matthew Fuhrmann is a Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University. He has held visiting positions at Yale University, Stanford University, Harvard University, and the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on international security, nuclear proliferation, alliance politics, and leadership. He is the author of Influence without Arms: The New Logic of Nuclear Deterrence (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2017, with Todd S. Sechser), and Atomic Assistance: How ‘Atoms for Peace’ Programs Cause Nuclear Security (Cornell University Press, 2012). His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, International Organization, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Politics, and others. He was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2016.
Debak Das is an Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. His research lies at the intersection of international security, nuclear proliferation, crises, and international history. His current book manuscript explores how states develop and acquire the means of nuclear delivery. He is also an affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University and the Centre de Recherche Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po, Paris.
Raymond Kuo, PhD, is Director of the RAND Corporation’s Taiwan Policy Initiative and a political scientist there. He is the author of Following the Leader: International Order, Alliance Strategies, and Emulation (Stanford University Press, 2021) and Contests of Initiative: Confronting China’s Gray Zone Strategy (Westphalia Press, 2021). His research has also been published in journals such as International Security, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Relations, Ethnopolitics, and International Migration.
Sanne Cornelia J. Verschuren is Assistant Professor of International Security at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. Before that she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po. She is in the process of finalizing her first book manuscript, entitled “Imagining the Unimaginable: War, Weapons, and Procurement Politics,” which is based on her dissertation, which received APSA’s 2022 Kenneth N. Waltz Outstanding Dissertation Award.
Review by Debak Das, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
When do leaders decide to use preventive military force to stop an adversary from building nuclear weapons? Does it matter if leaders in nuclear crises—and facing the potential proliferation of nuclear weapons—have certain preconceived beliefs about nuclear issues? Rachel Whitlark’s important new book, All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War and Nuclear Proliferation, answers these questions. The book posits that leaders come into executive office with divergent pre-existing views about the threat of nuclear proliferation by an adversary and that this leads them to have different and distinct responses to the option of using military force as a tool of counter-proliferation.
All Options on the Table emphasizes that the choice of preventive war for counter-proliferation by a state cannot be adequately explained by simple theories of potential power asymmetry between adversaries due to nuclear proliferation. Such analyses do not capture the complexity of nuclear decisionmaking on preventive war that involve a large role for the national executive. This is particularly important because leaders might have different political—and personal—experiences and beliefs that were formed prior to their tenure or early in their career as an executive that shape critical national security decisionmaking. The book shows us that counter-proliferation strategies of states depend on whether leaders are pre-disposed to be proliferation pessimists (i.e. leaders who harbor the belief that nuclear proliferation is destabilizing) or if they are proliferation optimists (i.e. those who harbor the belief that more nuclear weapons across states is stabilizing and do not lead to war). Whitlark argues that national executives might be likely to have prior beliefs about nuclear optimism or pessimism before they assume the highest office. This affects whether they are willing to consider a military strike to attack an adversary’s burgeoning nuclear program or not.
Whitlark’s book makes several important contributions to our understanding of nuclear decisionmaking. It puts forward a leader-centric model of preventive war decisionmaking that highlights the heterogeneity of the different beliefs that national executive might have (18). In doing so, the book adds depth and nuance to the literature on leaders and their role in international security outcomes.[4]
By bringing individual-level and personality-based factors into a larger theory about nuclear counter-proliferation, Whitlark’s book mounts an important critique of the structural realist black boxing of states as unitary actors.[5] The book presents considerable theoretical and empirical evidence to show that states do not behave consistently towards the same security threat and are hence not unitary actors. The most compelling evidence in this regard is the example of the difference in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in dealing with the threat of imminent Chinese nuclearization in the early 1960s.
The book uses an impressive array of rich archival evidence to make a substantial empirical contribution to the study of nuclear counter-proliferation. In particular, Whitlark provides fascinating historical evidence showing the difference in the pre-existing nuclear proliferation-related beliefs of leaders such as presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and how they affected the response of the United States to the nuclear programs of China, North Korea, and Iraq. Furthermore, the evidence from the preventive war decisionmaking considerations of Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, and Ehud Olmert with regard to Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria sheds new light and information on these events. In particular, I was struck by the book’s discussion of Israel’s cooperation with India to potentially conduct a counter-proliferation strike on Pakistan’s nuclear program in the 1980s, an issue that has to date been seldom discussed in any detail.
All Options on the Table prompts several important questions about the nature of counter-proliferation decisionmaking and the study of it. First, the wide time-period covered in the book gives us insights into the counter-proliferation behavior of states before the signing of the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and after it came into force in 1970. This raises a question about the potential tools that are available to leaders who attempted to stop other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons after the NPT was signed. Various scholars have argued that the United States and the IAEA have engaged in considerable post-NPT coercive enforcement of non-proliferation.[6] It would be interesting to see how leaders’ positions on nuclear pessimism and optimism affect their preferences for coercive enforcement versus preventive war. Do leaders’ beliefs about preventive war solidify if other means of coercion fail? While it is not possible to know the answer for this question in the Kennedy/Johnson case, one wonders if coercive enforcement of non-proliferation played any intervening role in the post-1970 cases of the consideration of military force in counter-proliferation.
Given the focus of the book on US presidents—along with the shorter case studies of Israeli Prime Ministers—can we expect similar outcomes in other countries like the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, China, and India? As the book highlights, the emphasis on leaders in the United States in this account might lead to a bias in our understanding of the role of leaders’ beliefs about nuclear weapons and likelihood of considering preventive war for counter-proliferation (11). While the book itself does not explore how leaders in other nuclear states might behave given their prior beliefs on nuclear issues, it lays the foundations of a research agenda on that front. Newly declassified archives in a number of different countries including the United Kingdom, France, and India will allow future researchers to investigate the question and to add comparative empirical material on the question of preventive war and counter-proliferation.
Another question, one which is admittedly outside of the scope of this book but is raised by it, is how the mechanism related to leaders’ beliefs works with regard to other forms of nuclear decisionmaking. For example, would it matter if a leader were a nuclear optimist or pessimist when it comes to sanctions on nuclear programs of potential proliferator states? How would such beliefs interact with the willingness of states and leaders to engage in arms control?
Ultimately, Whitlark’s All Options on the Table gives us a very important lens to understand military force and counter-proliferation outcomes in international security. As academics and policy-makers attempt to understand how states might deal with the potential building of nuclear weapons by countries like Iran or South Korea, and how states in the non-proliferation regime might react to such an event, the theoretical decisionmaking framework of how leaders consider preventive war and counter-proliferation choices that this book provides will be instructive.
Review by Raymond Kuo, RAND Corporation
Rachel Whitlark’s All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation is an excellent exploration of when states consider and launch preventive military action against an adversary’s nuclear program. The methodology is clever and exceptionally done, augmenting the narrative by focusing the reader’s attention on Whitlark’s specific variables. The book does what all great social science should do: Lay out a compelling theory, satisfy the reader’s questions, and inspire curiosity for further questions and insights.
In a progressive, tripartite theory, Whitlark argues that whether countries launch preventive attacks against nuclear programs depends foundationally on leaders and their beliefs. Those who are optimists and are relatively sanguine about the effects of nuclear proliferation are less likely to consider and launch strikes, especially if they also believe that the adversary can be successfully deterred. Whitlark’s examples include US presidents Lyndon Johnson in dealing with China in the mid-1960s, George H.W. Bush in dealing with North Korea in the early 1990s, and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in his confrontation with Iraq in the mid-1970s. Leaders who are pessimists, and believe that the acquisition of nuclear weapons directly threatens their country, are more likely to contemplate strikes, particularly if they think the adversary cannot be deterred and the operation has a high chance of success. Examples include US presidents John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, respectively facing the same opponents as the cases listed above.
The book’s methodology shines. Whitlark centers each case around a leader transition where the incoming and outgoing politicians had markedly different beliefs. This neatly controls for state- and system-level variables, buttressed by serious consideration and dismissal of alternative explanations using compelling evidence.
The narrative itself, which is richly detailed and compellingly told, is impressive. Drawing upon extensive archival research, interviews, memoirs and biographies, and secondary sources, Whitlark weaves leaders’ private decisions and dispositions with the public record of military coercion and preventive strikes. The Kennedy and Johnson comparison is particularly well done. As the book’s leading case, it cuts against expectations by highlighting how new leaders and their beliefs by themselves can tone down nuclear tensions rather than inevitably ratcheting them up.
The book overall contributes to a timely surge in work on nuclear politics. The older literature—including Robert Jervis’ The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, as well as work by Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, and Albert Wohlstetter—extrapolated policy insights from general International Relations theories, in many cases treating nuclear behavior as the phenomenon to be explained.[7] More recent studies examine how nuclear strategies influence wider state policy, including national security strategy, intra-alliance bargaining, proliferation/non-proliferation, and managing regional conflict.[8]
Whitlark adds preventive military action to this menu and integrates nuclear studies with research on leaders and foreign policy.[9] The book’s qualitative approach is particularly effective in going beyond leaders’ background experiences to finely trace their beliefs and the impact these have on their use of military force. But this leads to a few questions about the theory’s microfoundations.
First, where do nuclear beliefs come from? Is there something special about “nuclear” threats, or are they simply an edge-case manifestation of a leader’s wider fears? In a few cases it is difficult to determine whether a leader is concerned about nuclear threats specifically or simply threats more broadly.
Second, can beliefs change, and if so, how? Put differently, do leaders learn? For example, the book traces how 9/11 intensified Bush’s perspective on nuclear threats and non-state actors. But even that shattering event did not alter Bush’s views so much as increase the valence/salience of views he already held. Beliefs seem “frozen” once a leader leaves his/her formative period.
This affects the book’s policy implications. The final chapter briefly applies the theory to American and Israeli concerns about the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran. It also enjoins citizens and policy analysts to carefully consider potential leaders’ beliefs as a guide to their future policy on important questions about nuclear programs and the use of military force. But once in office, how can the public or even other countries prevent or encourage a preventive strike? The theory suggests that adjusting the likelihood of mission success is the best method. But might it be possible—or even better—to shift leaders’ nuclear beliefs instead?
Moreover, this cognitive question raises potential scope conditions for the theory. Does it hold only for a certain type of leader, one whose beliefs are relatively stable, who is perceptive enough to evaluate the likelihood of mission success, but simultaneously not willing to evaluate the foundations for his/her own beliefs? If former FBI Director James Comey is to be believed, President Barack Obama might confound the theory, as he could readily evaluate an issue from multiple angles. President Donald Trump, by contrast, may have presented the opposite problem, having few steady beliefs and somewhat erratic nuclear policy. Also, is there something about the US and Israel that creates leaders who are amenable to the theory?
Unfortunately, data availability understandably constrains the book to focus only on these two countries. Furthermore, these points about theoretical microfoundations should be taken as possibilities for future research, not critiques. The consistency in Whitlark’s concepts and variables is essential for the book’s excellent causal inference work. Similarly, I will highlight two additional areas for new analysis, both of which deal with path or time dependence. First, are there nuclear optimists anymore? With the possible exception of the first president Bush, the post-Cold War leaders the book highlights are pessimists, both in the US and Israel. If not dominant, optimists seem to have been more common in previous years. What caused this generational shift, and what does it augur about the preventive and counterproliferation missions going forward?
Second, do the actions of a country’s previous leaders shift what is politically possible for subsequent leaders? Begin, for example, may have established an Israeli norm that favored preventive strike. Did his example put pressure on subsequent Israeli leaders to “do something” against emerging nuclear problems? Alternatively, is there an expansion in the scope of preventive operations? Whereas only pinprick or single-location strikes were seriously contemplated in, say, the 1980s, do Israel or other countries now more readily consider strikes against nuclear facilities spread that throughout an adversary’s territory, against, for example, Iran?
Overall, All Options on the Tableis a methodologically rigorous and meticulously researched book. It offers a detailed treatment that connects leaders’ beliefs to preventive nuclear action and is based upon excellent qualitative methodology. It bridges two burgeoning literatures—nuclear strategy and leaders in foreign policy—and establishes the theoretical and empirical foundations for future work that can draw psychological studies into a deeper articulation of cognitive microfoundations. Finally, the book’s central question is of high policy value. Great-power competition and territorial aggression are back. Nuclear strategy is once again a critical focus for policymakers. As Whitlark demonstrates, the willingness to prevent adversaries from acquiring these weapons hinges upon leaders’ beliefs, even as such interventions raise the risk of wider escalation.
Review by Sanne Cornelia J. Verschuren, Boston University
In recent weeks, Iran is reported to have advanced its nuclear program.[10] North Korea, meanwhile, has intensified its missile testing program and has launched more than twenty missiles since January 2023.[11] As a result, nuclear proliferation is back in the news. One way in which states have sought to nuclear proliferation is by using preventive military force against an adversary’s nuclear program in order “to destroy or forestall it and remove the future possibility of fighting a nuclear-armed adversary” (15). Understanding when and why states resort to this potentially escalatory and thus risky tool is the subject of Rachel Whitlark’s new book, All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation.
Whitlark contends that the choice for preventive war is a function of leaders’ beliefs, specifically their beliefs about the consequences of nuclear proliferation (which she classifies as leaders being either proliferation optimists or proliferation pessimists) and their beliefs about the state’s ability to deter an adversary once it has obtained nuclear weapons (which is captured by leaders being confident or unconfident about deterrence). Accordingly, the book predicts that a leader will consider the use of preventive force when worried about the dangers of proliferation and thinks that a soon-to-be nuclear adversary cannot be deterred. Whether or not the plans for the use of such force are executed depends on the feasibility of these plans and the broader context in which they are contemplated.
Whitlark’s turn to the role of leaders and their beliefs is a welcome one. Leaders play a huge role in national security, including through the management of relationships with allies, partners, and adversaries, the pursuit or derailment of arms control measures, and decisions about the use of force against other states or non-state actors. Understanding how leaders perceive the world and what kind of actions they prefer is a crucial avenue for social inquiry. Building on a larger turn in IR scholarship towards the study of leaders, Whitlark’s book deserves praise for identifying a precise set of beliefs that determines leaders’ preferences for preventive war.[12]
To demonstrate the plausibility of the book’s theory, Whitlark deploys a clever research design. In a first step, the book examines how US presidents have responded to nuclear proliferators around the globe. In the earliest case study, the book employs extensive archival evidence to illustrate the divergent responses of presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to China’s nuclear pursuits. Whereas Kennedy—a proliferation pessimist and unconfident in the United States’ ability to deter a nuclear-armed China—contemplated the use of preventive force, Johnson did not. According to the book, Johnson was a proliferation optimist, who did not consider the threat from China to be imminent.
Drawing on an impressive number of primary and secondary sources, the book then compares US policy towards North Korea’s nuclear program under the leadership of President George H.W. Bush, a confident proliferation optimist, to that during the presidency of William J. Clinton, an unconfident proliferation pessimist. In line with the theory, the book finds that only the latter considered the use of preventive force. In the final set of case studies, preventive force was not just contemplated—it was actually used. Presidents George H.W. Bush, William J. Clinton, and George W. Bush were all unconfident about their country’s ability to deter Iraq if it were to acquire nuclear weapons. Each of them thus decided to undertake military action. In the final empirical chapter, Whitlark demonstrates that the theory is not limited to the United States. In doing so, the book outlines how different Israeli governments responded to the nuclear endeavors of Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan.
The central argument of All Options on the Table, that leaders’ beliefs, which are developed prior to or early in office, have a causal effect on states’ use of preventive force is persuasive. Still, like most good books, this one also raised some questions, specifically about what constitutes preventive force; the coding of cases in which attacking nuclear installations was not the sole goal; the availability of policy alternatives as another important factor to explain restraint; and the relationship between presidents and their advisors.
First, the book’s examination of the consideration of preventive force (rather than merely its use) is much appreciated. An outcome does not have to materialize in order to be interesting or have important consequences. In the realm of technological development, for example, decisions to construct military technology are significant—even if the weapons do not end up being built.[13] Already at an early stage, technology projects beget substantial investments in terms of research and development (R&D) and force planning, for example.
At the same time, it would be interesting to see how the book’s theory can be extended to related phenomena in this space. The book, for example, does not consider actions that are short of full-blown military force, even though such actions might be seen as less risky. Indeed, states frequently use sabotage, cyberattacks, and assassinations to undermine adversaries’ nuclear ambitions.[14] Likewise, the book does not theorize about threats of preventive force. Still, leaders may want to rely on the threat of preventive force to deter an adversary from continuing its nuclear pursuits or to nudge it towards negotiations.[15] This seems to have been the case with Operation Desert Thunder (1997), when the threat of preventive violence forced Iraq’s president Saddam Hussein to accommodate international inspectors (Whitlark 2022, 137).
Second, the coding of the cases may appear to be a bit more complicated in cases where attacking an adversary’s nuclear program is not the sole goal of a military operation. In fact, preventive force against nuclear installations has sometimes been entangled with other military objectives (for example, regime change in the case of the 2003 Iraq War) or has even been superfluous to other military objectives (for example, regional stability and protecting a state’s sovereignty in the case of the 1991 Gulf War). Especially in the latter case, one wonders whether this should still be classified as a preventive war, in line with Whitlark’s definition (15).
Third, the book’s second-stage variables—the feasibility of preventive force and the wider context—seem to play a crucial role in explaining the various outcomes under consideration. Turning to the Iraq case, the book details how Clinton first canceled Operation Desert Thunder in 1997, but then authorized a four-day bombing campaign against Iraqi targets a year later under the name Operation Desert Fox (137-140). Such divergent outcomes might pose a challenge to an explanation that focuses on leaders’ deeply-held and presumably stable beliefs. Indeed, Saddam Hussein’s decision to let the international inspectors resume their work—as captured by the book’s variable of the wider context—seems to be key.
Building on that, the availability of policy alternatives could be another important factor to understand restraint on the part of leaders who might have otherwise preferred the use of preventive force. Such alternatives include the pursuit of negotiations, the roll-out of various sanction regimes, and even the deployment of missile defenses. One could imagine that decisionmakers weigh the use of force against the availability and likely success of other policy options. In his response to North Korea’s nuclear pursuits, for example, George H.W. Bush’s had three options: stay the course, expand engagement, or employ coercion (105). Rather than coercion, Bush and his national security team opted for enhanced engagement, inter alia through direct dialogue, by moving forward with diplomatic relations, and by reducing US-South Korean joint military exercises. Even though the book attributes this choice to Bush’s low threat perception, one could also envision that the use of preventive force might not always be opportune. Preventive force, for example, might not make sense too early or too late in the development of a state’s nuclear program.
Fourth, even though no book can do it all, future work can explore the relationship between leaders and their senior advisors. Through the second-stage variables of feasibility and context, Whitlark’s book introduces the perspective of relevant agencies and individuals within the military and intelligence apparatus (28). Further theorizing about the role of such advisors would be fascinating. After all, heads of state do not make decisions on their own. They rely on the information and opinions provided by those around them, particularly senior advisors, the National Security Council, and representatives from various departments within the executive branch of government.[16] Sometimes referred to as “the Vulcans,” this group of advisors, for instance, was key in shaping George W. Bush’s perspective on missile defense.[17]
In sum, Whitlark’s book provides a thoughtful and thought-provoking account of an important phenomenon in international relations: leaders’ risky, yet impactful decisions to use preventive force against an adversary’s nuclear installations. In doing so, Whitlark’s turn to the study of leaders’ belief systems is not only a fruitful but also a necessary one. I expect that this book will give rise to many interesting debates about the role of leaders and their advisors in national security decisionmaking.
Response by Rachel Whitlark, Georgia Institute of Technology
The year 2023 reminds us of the importance of individuals in nuclear politics. From the Hollywood blockbuster showcasing the life and legacy of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,[18] father of the atomic bomb, to the saber-rattling of Russian President Vladimir Putin during his ongoing war in Ukraine, and the fear of Iranian leaders racing to a bomb under the cover of war between Israel and Hamas, individuals are routinely top of mind when nuclear matters are at play. The idea that leaders are consequential in nuclear politics should be obvious. However, reading the bulk of the nuclear scholarship suggests otherwise. Though once a locus of serious inquiry,[19] leaders fell out of fashion as a topic of study when theoretical preferences changed to privilege structural factors in international politics,[20] and methodological proclivities turned more quantitative. Both developments made leaders an infrequent focus of scholarly attention.
Over the past two decades, however, we have witnessed a return to the study of leaders and their role in international relations. Today, examinations of leaders’ positions and influence run the gamut in the study of world politics, with scholars interested in topics ranging from economic growth to dispute initiation and use of force proclivities. Many such studies analyze leaders’ experiences;[21] others investigate the role of personality or biographical factors.[22] Methodologically, these studies range from the quantitative,[23] to the qualitative and archival,[24] to those using text analysis.[25] Even the nuclear domain, which was once thought to be the exclusive purview of narrow national security or structural considerations, now showcases a role for leaders. Whether on proliferation[26] or arms control,[27] nuclear scholarship continues to develop, highlighting a causal role for leaders. In parallel, there’s been a larger renaissance of nuclear scholarship with academics focusing on new substantive questions,[28] and revisiting old questions in new light.[29]
Despite these significant advances in our understanding of nuclear politics writ large, there remain critical questions to explore at the intersection of nuclear issues and the role of individuals. My book, All Options on The Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation, testifies to the role that national leaders play in the nuclear domain by highlighting their importance in preventive counter-proliferation decisionmaking. At the request of RJISSF editor Danielle Lupton, three kind reviewers, Debak Das, Raymond Kuo, and Sanne Verschuren, took the time to thoughtfully reflect on the book’s content and execution. Matthew Fuhrmann was kind enough to tie this roundtable together with a considerate introduction. I engage many of the questions raised throughout the roundtable below and conclude with a discussion of future research the reviews and the book itself suggest should follow.
To begin, Sanne Verschuren’s review focuses on my examination of a single, old tool in the foreign policy toolkit. Indeed, All Options on the Table exclusively examines the use of preventive military force, which, while rare in counter-proliferation, has been relatively more common within international politics broadly. Regardless of its prevalence, preventive force is merely one tool in the foreign policy toolkit. Verschuren rightly notes that states often rely on a range of tools “to undermine adversaries’ nuclear ambitions.” In a similar vein, reviewer Debak Das wonders about a leader’s choice among potential counter-proliferation policies.
Of course, preventive military force exists alongside a spectrum of other foreign policy tools that leaders have in their arsenal, from “naming and shaming” in the diplomatic sphere to sanctions in the economic realm. Military force itself ranges from a single precision strike to the possibility of a full-scale ground invasion. Consequently, both reviewers question my choice to focus exclusively on the decision to consider and use the military option despite its being one tool among many. My objective was to focus on instances where those other tools might already have been tried or were not available for temporal or case-specific reasons. Under those circumstances, what is left is the use of force or allowing an adversary to acquire nuclear weapons. Moreover, the use of preventive military force is likely among the riskiest or most dangerous of available options and is thus of great substantive consequence. Finally, my distinction between considering and using preventive military force offers a novel contribution to the literature, which had heretofore ignored the division.
Verschuren also notes the novel tools that receive little mention in the book and that they may be both less well understood and more influential in international politics moving forward. She recommends that scholars investigate if or how cyber, for example, might be changing the current landscape. We have seen little mention of cyber in the counter-proliferation space since the discovery in 2010 of the Stuxnet virus and broader Olympic Games campaign that the US and Israel conducted against Iran’s nuclear program.[30] Nevertheless, cyber use may expand in the nuclear domain beyond counter-proliferation to include so-called “left-of-launch” missions, where one disarms an enemy missile before or seconds after it is launched at its target.[31] While I chose to focus only on preventive military force, future work should explore policy alternatives, including the novel tools available.[32]
Moving beyond the tools themselves, Das’s review explores a different set of questions and encourages us to think about the role of beliefs in the nuclear domain beyond those that I highlight in the book itself. My book argues that leaders have divergent nuclear beliefs—about the implications of nuclear proliferation for world politics and the likelihood of successful deterrence against a future nuclear-armed adversary. These beliefs are formed well before a leader enters executive office and shape whether that leader is inclined to use force to stop adversarial proliferation. Das goes further to ask, “How [this] mechanism related to leaders’ beliefs works with regard to other forms of nuclear decisionmaking. For example, would it matter if a leader were a nuclear optimist or pessimist when it comes to sanctions?” From my perspective, it stands to reason that preventive war decisionmaking is not the only aspect of nuclear politics where nuclear beliefs of some variety are likely to be consequential. There may be relevant beliefs on the nature of or metrics for nuclear superiority, the lessons taken from critical moments in the nuclear age, and beliefs about which leg or legs of the nuclear triad (bombers, submarines, or missiles) are most consequential for deterrence.
Relatedly, Das also asks, “How would such beliefs interact with the willingness of states and leaders to engage in arms control?” In the current environment, with the last vestige of Cold War arms control on life support and set to expire in 2026, understanding which leaders hold beliefs that are more or less favorable to arms control is of utmost importance. These and other possibilities are worthy of further investigation in order to determine what other nuclear beliefs might be consequential in international politics.
Raymond Kuo’s review pushes the discussion beyond the nuclear realm, questioning whether nuclear beliefs are different from more generic threats and fears. He asks, “Is there something special about ‘nuclear’ threats, or are they simply an edge-case manifestation of a leader’s wider fears?” Kuo’s trenchant question nudges us to consider whether nuclear issues are different in degree or in kind from one’s wider concerns in international politics. There are at least two characteristics of the nuclear domain that suggest that it may be different from generic fear. First, while this point is perhaps only implicit in my book, it is possible that nuclear issues are among a panoply of concerns classified as potentially existential. Research in political psychology tells us that when encountered, such challenges can distort otherwise rational decisionmaking through temporal discounting,[33] motivated reasoning,[34] or other cognitive limitations likely to arise during crises.[35] Though much recent work has been done in this vein on another existential threat—climate change[36]—researchers are pivoting to explore similar nuclear risks.[37] Second, decisionmaking under compressed timeframes—as would be the case following an enemy launch of nuclear weapons or other nuclear crisis—can lead to suboptimal outcomes.[38] Likewise, operating under significant uncertainty—here over what an enemy will do in the future when armed with nuclear weapons—further complicates the decision space.[39]
These characteristics of the nuclear domain—its potentially existential nature and condensed timelines for decisions—necessitate additional investigation to improve our understanding of how actors respond in these and similar circumstances. Doing so can help us disentangle where nuclear beliefs start and stop and where broader threats and fears reign. Just as with preventive war decisions, however, we can hypothesize that important individual variation should exist where existential threats are concerned. In the book, only a minority of cases can objectively be considered existential, as an enemy’s use of a single or even a few nuclear weapons are unlikely to literally bring about the end of most states. More cases may, however, be perceived as existential, bringing us back to the nuclear belief variation that the book highlights. In the end, more work is needed in international relations and thankfully underway in psychology and neuroscience to advance our understanding of nuclear decisions versus others.[40]
Last, Kuo raises important questions about belief change and the possibility of learning, both in the abstract and in the specific case of leaders’ learning in office. As I note on page 34, the book’s theory is agnostic as to whether beliefs can or do change (or under what conditions). But one case comes close: the experience of President George W. Bush and 9/11. Bush campaigned for, and entered into office with, a focus on the state-based threats and dangers that emanated from major powers like Russia and China. After the terrorist attack, however, salience in the security domain evolved to include rogue actors and nuclear terrorism with a heightened concern about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) more generally. Consequently, whereas Bush’s pre-presidential focus was centrally about deterring hostile states, after 9/11, his thinking evolved to also include preventing rogue-state WMD terrorism more specifically. This shift marks an evolution of salience, not a wholesale change of Bush’s views, even in the aftermath of a major exogenous shock like September 11th (144).
Beyond what I explore within the pages of my book, the reviewers all point towards fruitful arenas for new research. I highlight three below. First, continuing in the psychological vein, Kuo’s question about belief change invites consideration of where beliefs, including nuclear ones, come from. Though important, the disciplinary tendency is to hive off and not explore the source of peoples’ views, even while examining those views for their potential causal role. Similarly, it remains unclear and largely underexamined within international relations why some people learn some lessons from salient national experiences while others experiencing the same event draw different conclusions. New work in the nuclear domain is beginning to approach such issues and hopefully will continue to develop.[41]
Second, and related to if or how leaders might learn while in office, the role of advisors in foreign policy is an important vector of development, and one whose attention is long overdue. Elizabeth Saunders explores the role of presidential experience or the lack thereof and the concomitant role advisors can play in foreign policy decisionmaking, especially as relates to war.[42] Her forthcoming book should continue the conversation in important ways.[43] Though centrally about reputation in international conflict,[44] Keren Yarhi-Milo’s 2018 book also highlights the role of presidential advisors in shaping behavior.[45] These works and more should help advance our knowledge of, and catalyze further work on, the key role advisors, like leaders, play in international politics,[46] including eventually within nuclear decisionmaking. Especially since my theory is open to the possibility of belief change, there is room for outside observers or relevant stakeholders—advisors, lobbyists, etc.—to encourage or discourage the use of preventive force and more broadly provide new information to leaders once in office.
Third and finally, there are a whole host of critical questions necessitating further research that reflect the evolving international environment. Today, many people both inside and outside of government are asking what deterrence should look like in a world of multiple nuclear competitors instead of in the previous dyadic Cold War context. Especially as this new world has many more nuclear armed states than the early nuclear age, the importance of new scholarship exploring decisionmaking outside of the superpowers should be obvious. While my book examines Israel’s preventive decisionmaking in addition to that of the United States, Das wonders to what extent this behavior travels to India or even the United Kingdom. Broadening this issue out beyond preventive considerations, there is much more to know including about the evolving Chinese nuclear doctrine and arsenal and how North Korea could exacerbate a conflict between the United States and either Russia or China or both simultaneously.
There are also two demographic trends worth exploring. First, the rise in the number of nuclear-armed actors has been accompanied by a decline in foreign affairs knowledge among politicians.[47] Logically, this general decline should extend to nuclear knowledge specifically as recollections of the Cold War fade into the background and newer generations of leaders come into office. It is important to understand what this knowledge loss means for future decisions. Indeed, scholarship has demonstrated important variation results in use of force decisions when members of Congress and leaders in executive office either have prior military experience or do not.[48] It is similarly important to explore what it might mean when elected leaders are faced with nuclear decisions but lack the salient nuclear knowledge and experiences of their predecessors. Second, today more women than ever before are entering university and graduate school. Will more women consequently seek elected office? Historically, because of a small-n problem, it has been difficult to examine the role of gender in nuclear decisionmaking. But times are changing: in 2023, 7 of 31 NATO member states have heads of government who are women. The literature tells us that women may act more tough or may be more likely to initiate conflict[49] relative to their male counterparts. These findings can be expanded to examine the behavior of women in the nuclear domain.
To come full circle, global attention is refocused on nuclear weapons and their role in international politics. Though this salience is regrettable, not least because the risk of nuclear use has risen with the war in Ukraine,[50] it is not a bad thing per se for this salience to drive a new generation to focus on these critical issues that may have faded but never disappeared from view.
As we approach a new election cycle in the United States, the importance of these issues and the lack of foreign affairs expertise in the candidates are both apparent.[51] I am humbled that my book contributed to our knowledge on these most important topics and pleased that there is a vibrant community of younger scholars—the reviewers included—who are contributing to this growing space. As this roundtable makes clear, there is much nuclear work to be done and I’m hopeful that an even newer generation of more diverse scholars will pick up the mantle. The future depends on it.
[1]On leaders, see for example, Elizabeth N. Saunders, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Cornell University Press, 2011); Michael C. Horowitz, Allan C. Stam, and Cali M. Ellis, Why Leaders Fight (Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Michael C. Horowitz and Matthew Fuhrmann, “Studying Leaders and Military Conflict: Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 62, No. 10, 2072-2086. On nuclear security, relevant examples include Vipin Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014); Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Alexandre Debs and Nuno Monteiro, Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation (Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Rupal Mehta, Delaying Doomsday: The Politics of Nuclear Reversal (Oxford University Press, 2019).
[2] On the issue of foreign policy substitutability, see, Benjamin A. Most and Harvey Starr, “International Relations Theory, Foreign Policy Substitutability, and ‘Nice’ Laws.” World Politics 36: 3 (1984): 383-406.
[3] Kenneth N. Waltz, “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb: Nuclear Balancing Would Mean Stability,” Foreign Affairs 91:4 (2012): 2-5.
[4] Elizabeth Saunders, Leaders at War How Presidents Shape Military Interventions, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Cornell University Press, 2011); Danielle L. Lupton, Reputation for Resolve: How Leaders Signal Determination in International Politics, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Cornell University Press, 2020).
[5] Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 1st edition (Waveland Press, 2010); Alexandre Debs and Nuno P. Monteiro, Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation, Cambridge Studies in International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
[6] Or Rabinowitz, Bargaining on Nuclear Tests: Washington and Its Cold War Deals (University Press, 2014); Nicholas L. Miller, Stopping the Bomb: The Sources and Effectiveness of US Nonproliferation Policy , Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Cornell University Press, 2018); Reid B C Pauly, “Deniability in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime: The Upside of the Dual-Use Dilemma,” International Studies Quarterly 66, no. 1 (March 1, 2022): sqab036.
[7] Robert Jervis. The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1990); Thomas Schelling. Arms and Influence (Yale University Press, 2008); Herman Kahn. On Thermonuclear War (Princeton University Press, 1960); Kahn. On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (Routledge, 2010); Albert Wohlstetter. “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” RAND Corporation Document P-1472. (RAND Corporation, 1958).
[8] Matthew Kroenig. The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matter (Oxford University Press, 2018); Alexander Lanoszka. Atomic Assistance: The Alliance Politics of Nuclear Proliferation. (Cornell University Press, 2018); Vipin Narang. Seeking the Bomb: Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation. Princeton University Press, 2022). Vipin Narang. Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014).
[9] Michael Horowitz, Allan Stam, and Cali Ellis. Why Leaders Fight (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Horowitz and Stam, “How Prior Military Experience Influences the Future Militarized Behavior of Leaders,” International Organization 68:3 (2014): 527-559; Ellis, Horowitz, and Stam, “Introducing the LEAD Data Set,” International Interactions 41:4 (2015): 718-741; Elizabeth Saunders. Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Cornell University Press, 2014); Rose McDermott. Presidential Leadership, Illness and Decision Making (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
[10] Dalia Dassa Kaye, “Israel’s Dangerous Shadow War With Iran: Why the Risk of Escalation Is Growing,” Foreign Affairs, 27 February 2023, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/israels-dangerous-shadow-war-iran.
[11]Choe Sang-Hun, “North Korea Launches ICBM,” New York Times, 18 February 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/18/world/asia/north-korea-missile-launch.html.
[12] Elizabeth N. Saunders, “Elites in the Making and Breaking of Foreign Policy,” Annual Review of Political Science 25:1 (2022): 219-240.
[13] Sanne C.J. Verschuren, “Imagining the Unimaginable: War, Weapons, and Procurement Politics,” PhD Dissertation, Department of Political Science, Brown University, Providence, RI (2022).
[14] See, for example, Jon R. Lindsay, “Stuxnet and the Limits of Cyber Warfare,” Security Studies 22:3 (2013): 356-404; Ronen Bergman and Farnaz Fassihi, “The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine,” The New York Times, 18 September 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-fakhrizadeh-assassination-israel.html; X, “Iran Says it Thwarted Nuclear Site Sabotage it Ascribes to Israel,” Reuters, 14 March 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-state-tv-says-security-forces-thwarted-planned-sabotage-nuclear-site-made-2022-03-14/.
[15] Matthew Fuhrmann, “When Preventive War Threats Work for Nuclear Nonproliferation,” The Washington Quarterly 41:3 (2018): 111-135.
[16] See, for example, Elizabeth N. Saunders, “Leaders, Advisers, and the Political Origins of Elite Support for War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 62:10 (2018): 2118-2149.
[17] The Vulcans is a term used to describe George W. Bush’s foreign policy advisory team in the lead-up to the 2000 US Presidential Election. See for example, James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin Books, 2004). Particularly, I would suggest that the pursuit of national missile defense by George W. Bush and his close advisors could be interpreted as evidence that they were not very confident in the United States’ ability to deter Iraq. See, for example, President Bush’s speech regarding the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. George H. Bush, “U.S. Withdrawal From the ABM Treaty: President Bush’s Remarks and U.S. Diplomatic Notes,” Arms Control Association, 13 December 2001, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002-01/us-withdrawal-abm-treaty-president-bush’s-remarks-us-diplomatic-notes.
[18] Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan, Universal Pictures, 2023.
[19] Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1946); Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 1976); Elizabeth N. Saunders, “Transformative Choices: Leaders and the Origins of Intervention Strategy.” International Security 34: 2 (Fall 2009): 119-161, here 120.
[20] Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1979); Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (Columbia University Press, 2001).
[21] Among many others, Christopher Gelpi and Peter D. Feaver, “Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick? Veterans in the Political Elite and the American Use of Force,” American Political Science Review 96, no. 4 (December 2002): 779-93; Danielle L. Lupton, “Out of the Service, Into the House: Military Experience and Congressional War Oversight,” Political Research Quarterly 70: 2 (2017): 327-39; Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu, “The Economic Backgrounds of Politicians,” Annual Review of Political Science 26: 1 (2023): 253-70.
[22] See for example, Madison Schramm and Alexandra Stark, “Peacemakers or Iron Ladies? A Cross-National Study of Gender and International Conflict,” Security Studies 29: 3 (May 26, 2020): 515-48.
[23] Michael C. Horowitz, Allan C. Stam, and Cali M. Ellis, Why Leaders Fight (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
[24] Saunders, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Cornell University Press, 2011).
[25] Michael A. Goldfien and Michael F. Joseph, “Perceptions of Leadership Importance: Evidence from the CIA’s President’s Daily Brief,” Security Studies 32: 2 (March 15, 2023): 205-38.
[26] Christopher Way and Jessica L. P. Weeks, “Making It Personal: Regime Type and Nuclear Proliferation,” American Journal of Political Science 58: 3 (July 1, 2014): 705-19; Matthew Fuhrmann and Michael C. Horowitz, “When Leaders Matter: Rebel Experience and Nuclear Proliferation,” The Journal of Politics 77:1 (2015): 72-87; Jacques E. C. Hymans, The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
[27] James H. Lebovic, Flawed Logics: Strategic Nuclear Arms Control from Truman to Obama (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).
[28] Michael C. Horowitz, Paul Scharre, and Alexander Velez-Green, A Stable Nuclear Future? The Impact of Autonomous Systems and Artificial Intelligence (University of Pennsylvania, 2017).
[29] Matthew Kroenig, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters (Oxford University Press, 2018); Abby Fanlo and Lauren Sukin, “The Disadvantage of Nuclear Superiority,” Security Studies 32: 3 (May 27, 2023): 446-75; Vipin Narang and Scott D. Sagan, The Fragile Balance of Terror: Deterrence in the New Nuclear Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023); James H. Lebovic, The False Promise of Superiority: The United States and Nuclear Deterrence after the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2023).
[30] Jon R. Lindsay, “Stuxnet and the Limits of Cyber Warfare,” Security Studies 22: 3 (2013): 365-404.
[31] David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “Downing North Korean Missiles Is Hard. So the U.S. Is Experimenting.,” The New York Times, November 16, 2017, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/us/politics/north-korea-missile-defense-cyber-drones.html.
[32] Examples of new work in this domain include, Nadiya Kostyuk and Yuri M. Zhukov, “Invisible Digital Front: Can Cyber Attacks Shape Battlefield Events?,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 63: 2 (February 1, 2019): 317-47, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002717737138; Erik Gartzke and Jon R. Lindsay, Elements of Deterrence: Strategy, Technology, and Complexity in Global Politics (Oxford University Press, 2024); Jon R. Lindsay, Age of Deception: Cybersecurity and Secret Statecraft (book manuscript, 2023).
[33] Jennifer S. Lerner et al., “Emotion and Decision Making,” Annual Review of Psychology 66:1 (2015): 799-823.
[34] Richard K. Herrmann, “How Attachments to the Nation Shape Beliefs About the World: A Theory of Motivated Reasoning,” International Organization 71: S1 (April 2017): S61-84, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818316000382.
[35] Margaret G. Hermann, “Indicators of Stress in Policymakers during Foreign Policy Crises,” Political Psychology 1:1 (1979): 27-46.
[36] This interdisciplinary literature is voluminous. These two pieces provide useful entry points from different substantive perspectives. See Sabine Pahl et al., “Perceptions of Time in Relation to Climate Change,” WIREs Climate Change 5: 3 (2014): 375-88; Maria Ojala et al., “Anxiety, Worry, and Grief in a Time of Environmental and Climate Crisis: A Narrative Review,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 46:1 (2021): 35-58, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-012220-022716.
[37] Moran Cerf and Adam Waytz, “If You Worry about Humanity, You Should Be More Scared of Humans than of AI,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 79: 5 (September 3, 2023): 289-92; “NTI Seminar: Your Brain on Catastrophic Risk with Dr. Moral Cerf,” n.d., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKS1FdkZaVU.
[38] Ole R. Holsti, Crisis, Escalation, War (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972); Glenn Herald Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict Among Nations: Bargaining, Decision Making, and System Structure in International Crises (Princeton University Press, 1977).
[39] Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science 185: 4157 (September 27, 1974): 1124-31.
[40] Sarah Scoles, “Nuclear War Could End the World, but What If It’s All in Our Heads?,” The New York Times, August 21, 2023, sec. Science, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/science/nuclear-war-brain-neuroscience.html.
[41] Mark S. Bell and Nicholas L. Miller, “The Limits of Nuclear Learning in the New Nuclear Age” in Narang and Sagan, The Fragile Balance of Terror; Julia M. Macdonald and Rachel Elizabeth Whitlark, “Presidential Beliefs in the Efficacy of Nuclear Coercion,” Working Paper, 2023.
[42] Saunders, “No Substitute for Experience: Presidents, Advisers, and Information in Group Decision Making.” International Organization 71: S1 (2017): S219-S247; Saunders, “Leaders, Advisers, and the Political Origins of Elite Support for War.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62:10 (2018): 2118-2149.
[43] Saunders, The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace (Princeton University Press, 2024).
[44] Yarhi-Milo, Keren. Who Fights for Reputation: The Psychology of Leaders in International Conflict. (Princeton University Press, 2018).
[45] See Whitlark in, H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Review of Keren Yarhi-Milo, Who Fights for Reputation: The Psychology of Leaders in International Conflict 31 January 2019, https://issforum.org/to/ir11-10.
[46] Tyler Jost, Joshua D. Kertzer, Eric Min, and Robert Schub, “Advisers and Aggregation in Foreign Policy Decision-Making,” International Organization (2024): 1-37.
[47] James Goldgeier and Saunders, “The Unconstrained Presidency: Checks and Balances Eroded Long before Trump Essays,” Foreign Affairs 97: 5 (2018): 144-56.
[48] Gelpi and Feaver, “Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick?”
[49] Schramm and Stark, “Peacemakers or Iron Ladies?”
[50] The risk of nuclear use has not risen as much as doomsdayers might suggest. See Nick Ashdown, “Should Europe Worry About Nuclear Escalation in Ukraine?,” Green European Journal, July 12, 2022, https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/should-europe-worry-about-nuclear-escalation-in-ukraine/.
[51] Brad Dress, “Haley to Ramaswamy: ‘You Have No Foreign Policy Experience and It Shows’ | The Hill,” The Hill, August 23, 2023, https://thehill.com/homenews/4168168-haley-to-ramaswamy-you-have-no-foreign-policy-experience-and-it-shows/.