Staging Foreign Policy
A conversation with Dartmouth political scientist Jeffrey Friedman about American foreign policy and presidential image-making
These interviews are usually subscriber-only content. However, I decided that my conversation with Jeffrey Friedman, an Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, was so relevant to the 2024 election that everyone had to have access to it. Friedman’s new book, The Commander-in-Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image-Making in US Foreign Policy (Cornell, 2023) makes a compelling argument about why progressives in the Democratic Party, or even isolationist American Firsters in the GOP, have had such a difficult time blunting interventionist foreign policies.
If you prefer to listen, there is an edited sound file below (for clarity, I edited this text a bit more.) And readers—in the last part of the interview, Jeff and I briefly touch on the conflict in Gaza. Neither one of us disclosed to the other, or to you, our positions on the war, or on the Biden administration’s current policies towards Israel, Hamas, or Palestinian civilians. Rather, we sought to explain how The Commander-in-Chief Test illuminates the salience of that ongoing conflict to the election.
If receiving content like this regularly appeals to you, I would love to welcome you as a paying subscriber: all new annual subscriptions come with a free copy of my book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.) If you are interested in a readable history of how political images proliferate across our media landscape, this is the book for you!
Claire Potter: Jeff, can you sketch the arc of your argument for us?
Jeffrey Friedman: Sure. The book asks how voters in the United States decide who is fit to be commander-in- chief, and how that debate tends to shape the politics of US foreign policy. I think when most people think about that question, they would say the public plays a relatively limited role in that, because so many areas of US foreign policy don't seem to align with what voters say they want.In fact, rising defense budgets, or open-ended military interventions, or unilateral diplomacy are consistent features of US foreign policy that violate voters' longstanding policy preferences.
Yet, what the book argues is that, while voters do care to some degree about whether presidents and presidential candidates adopt policies they support, they pay much more attention to whether those candidates seem like strong leaders who would do a good job of sticking up for the United States on the international stage.
We often hear this described as the so-called “commander-in-chief test.” What the book explains is that there are many policies that leaders use to bolster their images as strong commanders-in-chief that happen to be things voters don't support on the merits.
So, the basic argument of the book is that these are areas of US foreign policy in which leaders are deliberately doing things voters say they don't want. Why? Because it helps them to create an appealing image that resonates with those same voters, makes a president seem like a strong commander-in-chief, and therefore, helps that person win votes.
The United States is perhaps one of the only industrialized countries that's never had a female leader. And one of the things that's often talked about is that women do not project the sense that they will be strong commanders-in-chief. Now, you're a very research-based writer, but can you extrapolate from the work you did whether it's possible to elect a woman president in the United States under the circumstances you described?
It's a great question. One thing is quite clear from the research I did for the book, which involved asking voters what they're looking for in a commander-in-chief, looking at traits that presidential candidates possess that allow them to win the White House, and looking at the ways that campaigns behind the scenes attempt to create images that will help them win the White House. What I found was that presidential candidates believe they need to project a stereotypically masculine image to voters in order to play the part of a commander-in-chief.
Now, the question is: can female candidates project that kind of image? After all, it’s not unusual for female candidates to score well on attributes like leadership strength. Hillary Clinton is a good example of that. When Clinton ran for president in 2016, and voters were asked to say whether she appeared to be tough, she scored as well as many other male candidates had in the past.
So, that is potential ground for optimism. I think the downside of that though, is that if Clinton scored quite high on what we might call stereotypically masculine attributes, voters did not think she scored well on other attributes, like compassion or warmth. It is quite possible that women have an unusually difficult time maintaining both of those kinds of traits and projecting them to the public, perhaps because they have to go so far out of their way to fit this masculine image of a commander-in-chief.
I mean, obviously, we don't have enough historical experience to know for sure what these guardrails look like. But my sense is that all of the dynamics I describe in the book—for example, candidates feeling pressure to convey this image of leadership strength—may, in fact, be more difficult for women because they may have a harder time projecting that image. Therefore, they may have to go more out of their way in order to give voters what they want. In a more cultural sense, someone like Hillary Clinton has to be a man and a woman at the same time.
Whereas being a compassionate man doesn't gender exactly the same way, right?
That's right. There's a lot of research indicating that when people try to project traits that go against expectations, such as a female candidate projecting strength, that imposes costs on them. It kind of shakes people's expectations in a manner that they find jarring in a way that they don’t experience, let's say, in a tall man with a strong jawline who is acting according to type.
So, again, I think it is fair to say that those constraints apply particularly to women, which may actually mean that women have more incentive than men to adopt policies voters don't like in order to project those images of strength. And of course, Hillary Clinton was an unusually hawkish Democratic candidate. There was some speculation that she very carefully constructed that image over time, precisely in order to convince voters she'd be a competent commander-in-chief.
You know, I'm thinking about the ways in which military service is often something that a candidate brings to the table. And one of the things that was remarkable about Bill Clinton was that not only had he done no military service, he also actually left the country. As many men did, he also stayed in school.
But part of what this book implies is that actually military service may not be the thing voters are looking for. They prefer lip service, at least, to very hawkish policy promises, and these promises are ultimately a problem for the United States.
In terms of military service, I think it can matter. That’s particularly true for presidential candidates who can credibly show the public that they have made command decisions that would translate into the ability to be a competent commander-in-chief.
The best example of this is Dwight Eisenhower. No one questioned whether Eisenhower was fit to be the country's commander-in-chief, and I think that's actually one reason why he was able to be so restrained in many elements of his foreign policy. When hawks critiqued him, he didn't really run a risk of sacrificing his reputation for national security competence. However, almost no presidential candidates since Eisenhower have come anywhere near that in terms of military experience, even candidates who have served in the military.
For example, in the 2020 election, Pete Buttigieg had very limited experience at relatively low levels: that doesn’t necessarily translate into an obvious reputation for national security competence. And part of the challenge that presidential candidates face is trying to find some other way to convince voters that they can do this job—when they have no track record of doing that job! Really one of the only ways that's open to them for doing that is by designing a policy platform that suggests they will be strong, tough, capable leaders.
Trying to fill that role, looking for strategies that can credibly convey to voters that these leaders have the right stuff—it’s exactly why presidential candidates feel so compelled to stick to a hawkish playbook. And I think that's one reason why Democrats and Republicans for the last six decades have mainly agreed on a fairly hawkish set of policies, even if many voters disagree with that.
Well, and you really examined how presidents made the decision to pursue certain kinds of policies.
Can you talk to us a little bit about one example? A moment in which a president had a choice whether to pursue a hawkish policy or not and goes with a hawkish policy because it promotes the larger sense that he's in charge?
There are so many examples of this. I think the most vivid one in the book is Richard Nixon's handling of Vietnam, heading into the 1972 election.
The brief backstory to this is that in October of 1972, Nixon negotiated with the Vietnamese Communists what would become the Paris Peace Accords. That deal can be critiqued in many ways, but it was objectively better than the terms that Democratic nominee George McGovern was proposing to give the Vietnamese if he was elected president. In particular, Nixon was able to avoid concessions like removing the South Vietnamese president from power and removing U.S. bases from throughout the region.
So, in some sense, while it is rare to say that one presidential candidate's foreign policy is clearly better than another, this is a case in which that was true. Ordinarily, you would think that means Nixon would have an incentive to make this deal public, and to show that he was able to achieve peace in Vietnam on terms better than his opponent.
Then, Nixon worried that if he implemented that agreement before the election, voters would criticize him for maybe not achieving a good enough deal on his watch. They would question whether the last four years of fighting had been worth it. And Nixon therefore quite deliberately decided to kick the Paris Peace Accords down the road until after the election. In the book, I draw on both archival records and tapes of discussions in the Nixon White House to show that they were quite clearly thinking along those lines.
That's a moment where there was an obvious escalation, or at least a prolongation of an open-ended and unpopular military intervention, because Nixon worried that doing the dove-ish thing would hurt his image.
I'll just give you one other more recent example. In the 2004 election, of course, the Iraq War played a very prominent role in questions about George W. Bush's foreign policy. Heading into 2004, a majority of Americans thought Bush had not handled the Iraq war particularly well. Ordinarily, you'd think that means Bush would either have an incentive to change course, or to try to lower the salience that the Iraq war played in that election.
But in fact, this campaign did exactly the opposite. They crafted a narrative that was explicitly based around Bush staying the course, or sticking to his guns, in Iraq. Political criticism of his views is exactly why they portrayed him as being someone who was tough enough and confident enough to be the country's commander-in-chief. And so, here you have this very counterintuitive notion that a candidate is deliberately highlighting an unpopular policy in order to convince voters that he’s got the right stuff to be in the Oval Office.
There's just no clearer example of someone who's using a nominally unpopular policy in order to win votes.
Let's fast forward, because of course, militarily, the United States has never left the Middle East since 2001. And we are now enmeshed in a hot war in Israel-Palestine that most people are connected to in some way, whether ideologically or personally. It's a very difficult moment, certainly for Democrats, because the party is very divided over what Biden should do.
So let me ask you two questions about Biden. The first is about his withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the time, Democrats had a meltdown, or at least the Democrats I knew, and they were saying, this is terrible, he's never going to get reelected. But this book, I think, would argue that making the decision to withdraw—and actually doing it, regardless of the consequences—was probably more important than the consequences of the act itself.
Yes: I think Afghanistan has been a case that very much fits with the book's argument about the politics of U.S. foreign policy.
Under President Biden, if you looked at public opinion polls, voters were ambivalent about withdrawing from the country. Prior to the withdrawal, a slight majority of voters said that was the right idea. Of course, after withdrawal, they kind of flipped against it. But at the very least, there was no clear push for staying there. And I think it seemed as though voters were quite receptive to getting out.
Nevertheless, the fact that Biden left Afghanistan, and especially the fact that the withdrawal went so poorly, and the Taliban took control of the country so quickly, enabled Biden's critics to portray him as a weak leader who was backing down. I suspect that President Obama and President Trump both understood that. Even if continuing the US occupation of Afghanistan was not a particularly rewarding experience from the standpoint of advancing the US national interest, they realized it could be quite costly to their images to withdraw. So, I think that's a case where Biden bit a bullet that predictably harmed his image, even if it was doing something that voters seemed to be quite open to on the merits.
Now, the fact that I think he did it early was smart and potentially gave him as much time as possible to recover. But he was definitely willing to take a political risk there that neither of his predecessors was willing to do.
Second question: has Biden handled the contemporary crisis in the Middle East in a way that is consistent with successful image making?
In terms of Gaza, I don't think that a crisis in the Middle East, or frankly anywhere, is a particularly good look for Democratic presidents. In the public mind, Republicans, for better or for worse, tend to have an image of being more capable of handling foreign policy, or at least being tougher when it comes to standing up to global threats.
So, the fewer threats there are in the world, the more advantages Democrats have in setting their reputation as a party aside. Therefore, Biden's choice to be quite hawkish when it comes to supporting Israel in Gaza is almost certainly, I would argue, the correct move for him politically. Because if he were to do something different, if he were to look like he was encouraging Israel to back down in the face of Hamas's attacks, that would give his opponents a very easy opportunity to craft an additional narrative about him: that he is not sticking by allies and is willing to make concessions to terrorist groups.
And even though Biden's facing quite a bit of pressure from his left flank when it comes to his policy with respect to Israel and Gaza, I think the blowback with the median voter would almost certainly be much higher if he went in a direction that allowed voters to question his leadership strength.
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Most insulting campaign ad—ever?
Historians around the internet exploded on social media last night during the Super Bowl when American Values Super PAC, which supports RFK Jr.s demented independent presidential run, ran a $7 million ad ripping off Uncle Jack’s 1960 campaign. Kennedy cousin Bobby Shriver was particularly enraged at the unauthorized use of family faces in the ad, particularly that of his mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver. She “would be appalled” by Bobby Jr.’s “deadly health care views,” Shriver fumed. “Respect for science, vaccines, & health care equity were in her DNA.” The candidate, who never takes responsibility for anything, apologized for hurting the family, and then invoked FEC rules that would have prohibited him from knowing anything about the ad if, in fact, he followed them.
Short takes:
The NFL could learn something from Taylor Swift. The singer gave a squad of truck drivers and crew members $100k bonuses each at the end of the first leg of her Eras Tour last August. In contrast, at last night’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas where the median ticket price was $9000, some workers at the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium made as little as $14.25 an hour, $2.75 less than the price of a beer and a few cents over minimum wage. “In 2016, Nevada lawmakers voted to spend a record-breaking $750 million in taxpayer funding to help build the new arena and relocate the Raiders from Oakland,” writes Julia Lurie at Mother Jones. “Advocates estimated the stadium would bring 14,000 permanent jobs and $39,000 annual salaries.” In Oakland, Raiders stadium employees were all unionized. In Las Vegas, “1,500 of Allegiant’s 2,200 employees are nonunion and working part-time and low-wage jobs” that require, for some, require public assistance to make ends eet. (February 11, 2024)
Finance and health writer Helaine Olen, formerly of the Washington Post and now a regular at MSNBC, has a terrific piece up about the success of GoFundMe, a crowdfunding platform that has raised billions for people in need. But anyone who has ever chipped in to help a friend, family member, or stranger with sudden medical expenses, college tuition, or a disaster may have wondered: why don’t we have publicly-funded national healthcare, higher education, housing, and disaster recovery that meets people’s real needs? “Americans like to congratulate themselves on the fact that they give more to charity than other nations,” Olen writes; “but GoFundMe’s success is directly attributable to our refusal as a nation to grapple with why so many Americans are having trouble paying for everything from children’s cancer treatments to school lunches.” And the $30 billion GoFundMe raised last year? It’s less than 10% of what Americans actually spent on what are often ruinous out-of-pocket health costs alone. (February 9, 2024)
On Wednesday, the Alabama Department of Labor fined Apex Roofing & Restoration LLC $117,175 after a 15-year-old tumbled off a roof and died. It was his first day on the job. Yet, although the Fair Labor Standards Act forbids hazardous employment under the age of 18, Alabama plans to make employing them easier. According to Patrick Darrington of The Alabama Political Reporter HB102 “would eliminate the requirement for 14 and 15-year-olds to obtain an eligibility to work form,” issued by schools to certify that a student is in good academic standing. The right-wing Alabama Policy Institute, which wrote the bill, maintains that “Learning new skills and building a strong work ethic from an early age is a benefit to not only Alabama’s children but can also provide additional laborers to the state’s workforce, improving the quality of life for all citizens.” In fact, it will give employers access to a large pool of malleable, minimum wage labor from poor families, and insure that those children do not get an education. (February 8, 2024)