A president's decision to use military force is among the most consequential that they can take. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has remained a great power and has enjoyed relative stability in coalitional alignments. Yet, these highly consequential decisions to use force in foreign military interventions in American foreign policy have been inconsistent. This is especially true across a range of key foreign policy issues, including humanitarian interventions and responses to acts of terrorism. When conflict erupted in the Balkans following the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991, and allegations of ethnic cleansing emerged, President George H.W. Bush cast the conflict as one based on ‘ancient, ethnic animosities’ as his administration argued the US didn't ‘have a dog in the fight’ (Baker quoted in Power, 2003: 267). While initially adopting a similar position, Clinton would decide to intervene following the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995 as Holocaust-like images emerged, prompting Al Gore's impassioned plea: ‘What should I tell my daughter?’

Similarly, even as Barack Obama called for restraint over the use of force in US foreign policy, he would succumb to calls for intervention in Libya in 2011 even though the US had ‘no interests in Libya’ (Baker quoted in Power, 2003: 267) as aides warned ‘this is like Rwanda’. Then, despite drawing a ‘red line’ (Obama, 2012), he would revert to restraint following the use of chemical weapons in Syria amid humanitarian conditions and powerful calls for intervention from international partners and domestic coalitions because ‘there was no Benghazi to be saved’. These puzzling variations in presidential positions on the use of force, sometimes under the same administration, poses an important question: what explains variation in foreign policy decisions when the material and social conditions of state interests remain formally the same?

This work offers an original theoretical perspective to help better understand variations in foreign policy decision-making. While there have been numerous efforts to explain foreign policy decision-making, rationalist approaches have typically pointed to moments of crisis, and exogenous shocks to explain shifts in foreign policy interests. Even as constructivist and ontological security perspectives offer a greater capacity to recognize how the competing material and identity needs of states influence foreign policy, their explanations remain incomplete.