Elite Politics & the Hawkish Bias in US Foreign Policy

Power Problems

Elite politics shape and constrain democratic leaders in decisions about the use of force and tend to induce a hawkish bias into war-time foreign policy. So says Columbia University professor Elizabeth N. Saunders in her forthcoming book The Insider's Game: How Elites Make War and Peace. She explores how elite politics influenced presidential decisions in U.S. wars including Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. She also discusses the problems of the public's rational ignorance of foreign policy and the tensions between an elite-centric foreign policy and democratic values, among other topics.

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• Elizabeth N. Saunders bio
• Elizabeth N. Saunders, The Insider’s Game: How Elites Make War and Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024). Forthcoming.
• Elizabeth N. Saunders, “Elites in the Making and Breaking of Foreign Policy,” Annual Review of Political Science 25 (May 2022): pp. 219-240.
• Chaim Kauffman, “Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War,” International Security 29, no. 1 (Summer 2004): pp. 5-48.

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