Presidential Decision Making and the Political Use of Military Force

During the Cold War American presidents have used military force in support of U.S. foreign policy over 200 times (Blechman and Kaplan, 1978; Zelikow, 1986). In order to explain and predict this activity, I develop a model of presidential decision making that incorporates the concept of an “opportunity to use force” which most previous research has neglected. I hypothesize that presidents are led to use greater levels of military force the greater the threat to the nation's overseas defense commitments and their own domestic reputation for taking forceful action, and the less likely the threat of confrontation with the Soviet Union. I examine 458 international crises from 1948 through 1988, and using tobit analysis I find that most of the hypothesized relationships are statistically significant. The findings support the value of using opportunities to use force as the unit of analysis and the greater impact of international versus domestic conditions in presidents' decision making.