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Fazal suggests one such comparison when she notes that, during World War II, several states issued war declarations without actually participating in the war. We also agree that declarations of war have important implications for domestic politics and that, more generally, they help bound war in time; that war has fuzzy borders at both its start and end today is not cause for celebration.[3] IS take issue with my "provocative" claim that the proliferation of IHL is related to the decline in declarations of war. Indeed, I found that war initiators were significantly less likely than noninitiators to issue formal declarations of war.[18] Additionally, a perplexing feature of World War II war formalities is that many countries issued formal declarations of war without ever committing troops, and toward the end of the war. Our theory suggests governments worried about the sort of signal a declaration of war would send about the legitimacy and extent of their war aims, complicating efforts to control escalation and manage third-party responses. [Extracted from the article]

Why do states no longer declare war? In a provocative analysis, Tanisha M. Fazal argues that states stopped declaring war to evade the costs of complying with the growing body of international humanitarian laws. We argue instead that post-1945 normative and legal developments that sought to prohibit war changed the meaning of war declarations in a way that made them at best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive. Although war-making did not end, a once routine feature of warfare came to be seen as a signal of extreme aims that could complicate escalation management and coalition building. Moreover, the United Nations (UN) system provided more desirable ways for states to justify military operations, particularly through self-defense claims. We support this argument through a reassessment of the empirical pattern of war declarations, an analysis of self-defense claims made under Article 51 of the UN Charter, and case studies of undeclared wars in the post-1945 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the dangers of polarization for U.S. foreign policy as of 2017. It states that the polarization captures several interrelated phenomena including the ideological positions of political elites, the sorting of the mass public into more homogenous parties, and an increase in affective polarization or negative partisanship. It highlights that the political risks of wielding power have increased without bipartisan consensus. It also stresses that presidents can respond to political risk by shaping military operations in ways that make them less effective.