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Because of his personality, had Donald Trump won the 2020 election the remarkable and unexpected united response by NATO allies to the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine would not have happened. Relying on leader personality research in foreign policy, we demonstrate this by using the counterfactual method of analysis. Specifying key differences between Biden's and Trump's personalities in terms of their experiences, traits and beliefs, we explicitly show that president Trump would have been very unlikely to share US intelligence, rally NATO allies in support of Ukraine or challenge Vladimir Putin. In contrast, these responses fit very well with Joe Biden's personality. We first present counterfactual analysis as a method before comparing Biden and Trump along personality characteristics known to significantly influence foreign-policy decisions. Through our case-study, we demonstrate the value of using systematic and theoretically grounded counterfactual methods for assessing the importance of individual differences between leaders and emphasizing their impact on international affairs.

This article considers how leaders' personality traits change over time. I focus on how leaders become more authoritarian, overconfident and more mistake-prone; how, when and why do leaders ‘break bad’? Temporal evolution of leaders is an important topic given the long tenure of many political leaders and the influence these leaders have over policies, including foreign policies. There is very little work on how leaders' personalities develop and how they interact with changing constraints and opportunities. This article is an agenda-setting review, designed to push foreign policy analysis in new directions. This is especially important given the resurgence in research on personalities and the renewed interest in leaders. Drawing on diverse and multi-disciplinary scholarship on the psychological effects of aging, experience, learning and power-holding, this article develops expectations about leader personality change. I discuss challenges for research in this area, focusing on how ‘bad’ can be conceptualized, and offer specific avenues for future investigations.

It is often noted that former US President Donald Trump brought unpredictability to Washington’s relationship with China. This may appear intuitively true, but in what ways was Trump actually ‘unpredictable’ towards China? We show that the most unpredictable feature of Trump’s approach was his rhetoric, strongly defined by impulsivity, emotion and provocation. This generated rhetorical unpredictability which was regularly seen in inconsistent and contradictory statements. Using political psychology and leadership personality approaches, we further demonstrate that this unpredictable rhetoric can be traced to Trump’s psychological profile. We argue that while the composition of Trump’s China rhetoric was often difficult to anticipate, as a component of his US China policy it was predictable to the extent that it was grounded in his personality. Trumpian China policy broadly followed longer-term trends, but the president’s erratic rhetoric had domestic and international consequences for the relationship. The article further contributes to work on unpredictability in international relations (IR), and on leadership personalities and foreign policy.

Research on international relations of the Middle East (IRME) has suffered from a schism between International Relations (IR) theory and regional particularities. To address this, scholars have offered corrective accounts by adding domestic factors to IR structural approaches. Studies on IRME thus reflect the turn to decision-making and domestic politics that has recently occurred. This article develops a critical analysis of the domestic politics orientation in IRME. We argue that this scholarship ignores work in foreign policy analysis (FPA) with its psychological-oriented and agent-based dimensions and that this constitutes a missed opportunity for the study of the region. The article offers suggestions for incorporating FPA research into IRME and argues that an FPA perspective offers an alternative and complementary approach to the eclectic frameworks predominant in the scholarship on IRME.

British foreign policy stands at a turning point following the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum. Drawing on role theory, we trace the United Kingdom’s efforts to establish new foreign policy roles as it interacts with the concerned international actors. We find that the pro-Brexit desire to ‘take back control’ has not yet translated into a cogent foreign policy direction. In its efforts to avoid adopting the role of isolate, the United Kingdom has projected a disoriented foreign policy containing elements of partially incompatible roles such as great power, global trading state, leader of the Commonwealth, regional partner to the European Union (EU) and faithful ally to the United States. The international community has, through processes of socialisation and alter-casting, largely rejected these efforts. These role conflicts between the United Kingdom and international actors, as well as conflicts among its different role aspirations, have pressed UK policies towards its unwanted isolationist role, potentially shaping its long-term foreign policy orientation post-Brexit.

This paper contributes to current debates on the politicization of international politics by examining party-political contestation of peace and security missions. It is guided by two inter-related questions, (a) to what extent deployment decisions are contested amongst political parties and (b) what drives such contestation. We examine data from a new data set on parliamentary votes on deployment decisions in France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom and from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. Against conventional wisdom and in an effort to address the often-overlooked role of political parties, we find that military deployments have been systematically contested amongst political parties across Europe. Further, we find that contestation is driven by the left/right axis, as opposed to newer cleavages captured here by the so-called gal/tan axis. We also find evidence that patterns of contestation depend on parties’ positions in government or opposition, a factor we relate to bureaucratic and international pressures on the parties in office, and to political opportunities for opposition parties.

This article examines international reactions to Scotland’s 2014 bid for independence as an instance of socialisation of an aspirant state, what we term ‘pre-socialisation’. Building on and contributing to research on state socialisation and role theory, this study proposes a nexus between roles and sovereignty. This nexus has three components: sovereignty itself is a role casted for by an actor; the sovereign role is entangled with the substantive foreign policy roles the actor might play; and the sovereign role implicates the substantive foreign policy roles of other actors. The Scottish debate on independence provides an effective laboratory to develop and explore these theoretical dimensions of pre-socialisation, revealing the contested value and meaning of sovereignty, the possible roles that an independent Scotland could play, and the projected implications for the role of the UK and other international actors. Our analysis of the Scottish case can provide insights for other cases of pre-socialisation and is more empirically significant following the UK’s 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. Postprint

Foreign policy change (FPC) is an important topic and has therefore attracted much scholarly attention. Yet, the literature has largely overlooked how FPC is related to international norms. This special issue seeks to add value to the field of foreign policy analysis by strengthening the empirical literature linking FPC and international norms. The papers in this issue tease out the intervening factors in facilitating the relationship between foreign policy change and the international norm. The introductory article introduces the conceptual framework which draws on both the structure–agency and “push–pull” debates to provide the cohesive analytical structure for the issue.

This article examines how decision-making dynamics in coalition cabinets influence states’ responses to international norms and foreign policy change. International normative structures may be interpreted differently by coalition partners, which share the authority for responding to external expectations and pressures. I examine two cases of internal contestation over international norms—Japanese decision-making over the ban of imported rice in response to international norms of trade liberalization (1993) and Turkish decision-making over the ban of the death penalty in response to international norms on human rights (1999–2002). In both cases, coalition partners disagreed over policy responses to the norm and I unpack the way in which the norm became entangled in internal coalition politics. The cases are examples of (eventual) policy change, which challenges a dominant image of coalitions completely deadlocked actors. The explanations of these case outcomes further our understanding of how domestic agents and structures respond to international norms and produce changes in foreign policies.

This analysis investigates the role of historical analogies in the influence that parliaments have in foreign policy. Our empirical focus is the UK House of Parliament’s unusual opposition to the Prime Minister on UK involvement in Syria in2013. The Parliament’s vote challenges many conventional expectations about the role of parliament in security affairs. Important in this vote were lessons learned and strategically used from UK participation in the intervention of Iraq in 2003. We develop this argument theoretically based on research on historical analogies, arguing that parliaments, ‘learn’ (primarily negative) lessons about past foreign policy events which guide parliamentary preferences and procedures and can enhance parliaments’ role in subsequent foreign policy. We contribute to research on analogies by extending the logic to lessons on process. This use of precedents can offer more structurally-oriented perspectives mechanisms that translate critical junctures into reforms in procedures and policy making practices.

The move from territorial defence to ‘wars of choice’ has influenced the domestic politics of military interventions. This paper examines the extent to which both the substance and the procedure of military interventions are contested among political parties. Regarding the substance, our analysis of Chapel Hill Expert Survey data demonstrates that across European states political parties on the right are more supportive of military missions than those on the left. On the decision-making procedures, our case studies of Germany, France, Spain and the United Kingdom show that political parties on the left tend to favour strong parliamentary control whereas those on the right tend to prefer an unconstrained executive, although with differences across countries. These findings challenge the view that ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’ and contribute to a better understanding of how political parties and parliaments influence military interventions.

On 29 August 2013, the UK House of Commons inflicted the first defeat on a Prime Minister over a matter of war and peace since 1782. Recalled to debate and vote on UK intervention in Syria, the Commons humbled the government and crucially impacted the development of UK foreign policy. This article places that vote, and the developments leading to it, in the context of the role of parliaments in security policy and explores the relationships between parliamentary influence, leadership, intra-party and intra-coalition politics, and public opinion. From an in-depth analysis of leaders’ statements and parliamentary debate, we find a combination of intra-party politics and party leadership were most significant. An additional factor – the role of historical precedent – was also important. Our analysis explores the fluidity and interconnectedness of the various factors for parliamentary influence in foreign policy and offers directions for future theoretical development and empirical research.

Cataloged from PDF version of article. Explanations of states’ security decisions prioritise structural — systemic, institutional and cultural — constraints that characterise foreign security decisions as a function of external/international, domestic/institutional, or normative/cultural factors. By examining Turkey’s 1990–1991 and 2003 Iraq war decisions systematically, we problematise this prioritisation of structure, and we investigate the dynamic relationship between structural constraints and leaders in their decision-making environments. In these cases, while the structural constraints remain constant or indeterminate, the decision outcomes and the decision-making process differ significantly. Our findings, based on structured-focused comparison, process tracing, and leadership trait analysis, suggest that the leaders’ personalities and how they react to constraints account for this difference and that dependence on only one set of factors leads to an incomplete understanding of security policies and international politics. We contribute to the broader understanding of leaders’ personalities by suggesting that self-confidence and cognitive complexity are the key traits distinguishing leaders’ orientations towards structural constraints.

Turkey’s decision on its role in the Iraq war in 2003 illustrates the power—and limits—of parliaments as actors in foreign policy. Traditionally, assemblies are not seen as important players in the foreign policies of parliamentary democracies. Instead, cabinets are generally considered the chief policymaking authorities. If the government enjoys a parliamentary majority, legislatures typically support the cabinet, if they are brought into the process at all. The March 1, 2003 vote by the Turkish parliament to not allow the United States to use Turkey as a base for the Iraq invasion challenges this conventional wisdom on parliamentary influence (in addition to many interest-based explanations of foreign policy). This paper examines this decision in the context of the role of parliaments in foreign policies and explores the relationships between parliamentary influence, leadership, intraparty politics, and public opinion.