Bringing the boys back home: Campaign promises and US decision-making in Iraq and Vietnam
| Author | Andrew Payne |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395720937205 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
937205POL0010.1177/0263395720937205PoliticsPayne
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
Politics
2021, Vol. 41(1) 95 –110
Bringing the boys back home:
© The Author(s) 2020
Campaign promises and US
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https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720937205
decision-making in Iraq and
DOI: 10.1177/0263395720937205
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
Vietnam
Andrew Payne
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
This article argues that electoral politics acts as an important constraint on presidential decision-
making in war. Going beyond the existing literature’s focus on cases of conflict initiation, it
outlines how electoral pressures push and pull presidents away from courses of action which may
otherwise be deemed strategically optimal. Importantly, however, these electoral constraints will
not just apply on the immediate eve of an election but will vary in strength across the electoral
calendar. Together, this conceptual framework helps explain why presidential fulfilment of
rhetorical pledges made on the previous campaign trail may be belated and often inconsistent.
To probe the plausibility of these arguments, case studies of the closing stages of the wars in
Vietnam and Iraq are outlined, drawing on archival and elite interview material. These episodes
demonstrate that electoral accountability can be a powerful factor affecting wartime decision-
making, but its effect is non-linear, and not easily observed through a narrow focus on particular
timeframes.
Keywords
elections, war, presidential decision-making, U.S. foreign policy
Received: 20th September 2019; Accepted: 18th February 2020
Defending his December 2018 decision to withdraw troops from Syria, Donald Trump
chastised the naysayers who were quick to criticise the move. There was, he maintained,
a clear logic to his decision. The president had been elected on a platform in which he had
repeatedly signalled his distaste for a continued American military presence in the Middle
East. Now, the order to bring some 2000 troops home was simply about following through
on his democratic mandate. ‘I campaigned on getting out of Syria and other places’,
tweeted Trump (2018), alluding to reports of a corollary intention to withdraw 7000
troops from Afghanistan. ‘Now when I start getting out the Fake News Media, or some
Corresponding author:
Andrew Payne, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Manor Road
Building, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ, UK.
Email: andrew.payne@politics.ox.ac.uk
96
Politics 41(1)
failed Generals who were unable to do the job before I arrived, like to complain about me
& my tactics, which are working. Just doing what I said I was going to do!’
Trump’s claim is notable because of the nakedly political justification of a decision
involving the commitment of ‘boots on the ground’. To be sure, what Trump actually said
about Syria and Afghanistan on the 2016 campaign trail was vaguer than his later state-
ments imply. This may come as no surprise, since Trump’s campaign promises can be
viewed more as rhetorical vessels designed to reach voters than serious policy proposals
(Hall, 2021) and may be the product of his celebrity status more than political nous
(Moon, 2019). Yet despite the lack of details, his limited appetite for the sustained pres-
ence of combat troops remained a common thread in a more consistent broader narrative
which remained heavily critical of recent US interventions in the region. Even when
indicating he had a plan to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria, for instance, he appeared to pre-
fer airpower to manpower, famously pledging to ‘bomb the s— out of them’, while call-
ing for other nations to increase their share of the commitment. ‘I am going to have very
few troops on the ground’, he plainly told one interviewer during the campaign (Trump,
2016). If his promises were neither expressed nor subsequently fulfilled with perfect con-
sistency (MacDonald and Parent, 2019), it was not without reason that the president
invoked past rhetorical commitments when justifying his controversial decision to expe-
dite the withdrawal from Syria in October 2019 (Lucey, 2019; Trump, 2019). Much the
same could be said of the White House’s subsequent justification of a deal struck with the
Taliban the following February (Trump, 2020), which contained provisions for the with-
drawal of US troops from Afghanistan. Notably, the president reportedly pushed advisers
to accelerate the timeline of that drawdown even faster than anticipated in the original
agreement, so as to better satisfy his electoral priorities (Gibbons-Neff and Barnes, 2020).
The transparent and unapologetically political nature of his rationale for these decisions
is striking, and speaks to the point made well in the introduction to this special issue
(Lacatus and Meibauer, 2021) that incumbent presidents can expect to be held to account
by voters for their ability to act on the rhetorical commitments made on the campaign
trail. Like any president, Trump has good electoral reasons for trying to fulfil his promises
(Bernstein, 2019; Fishel, 1985).
This article complements contributions to this issue which focus on the construction of
Trump’s campaign rhetoric by exploring how and when these commitments materially
affect the foreign policy of presidents once in office. Placing Trump’s record in historical
context, it analyses two past cases sharing similar characteristics: Barack Obama’s deci-
sions regarding the pace and finality of a troop drawdown schedule in Iraq and Richard
Nixon’s earlier handling of the denouement of the Vietnam War. These cases are not
exhaustive of the range of foreign policy decisions a president is faced with, nor can they
be fully representative of the behaviour of all political leaders, each of whom bring par-
ticular beliefs and personalities to any given problem. Yet they do stand out as particularly
instructive since, like the present incumbent, both Obama and Nixon gained office in part
thanks to their opposition to overseas conflict, and both also took far longer than expected
to extricate US forces from the battlefield (Boys, 2014; Boys, 2015). By focusing on deci-
sions concerning a conflict in which US forces are already committed, moreover, this
article builds on recent attempts to shift existing scholarly attention away from initial
decisions to use force and towards in bello decision-making (Payne 2019/2020). Finally,
these cases also serve as something of a hard test for the claim that such electoral consid-
erations matter, since we know that leaders who inherit wars and are not seen as ‘culpa-
ble’ for their initiation should be less vulnerable to domestic political punishment for their
outcome (Croco, 2011).
Payne
97
Drawing on archival material and a series of interviews with senior decision-makers,
the cases reveal several important insights concerning the relationship between campaign
rhetoric, the electoral cycle and decision-making in war. Conceiving of the decision-
making process as a balancing act between the president’s often competing interests as
both Commander-in-Chief and holder of the highest elected office, it shows how electoral
pressures pushed and pulled each president away from courses of action he deemed stra-
tegically optimal. The influence of such constraints was not constant, however, but rather
varied across the electoral cycle, with both presidents appearing more sensitive to the
opinion of voters as an election approached than in its immediate aftermath. Taken
together, the cases make clear that presidents may well be trapped by their rhetorical com-
mitments made on the campaign trail, but that the weight accorded to them may figure
less strongly in the beginning of a term before coming back to bite as re-election concerns
grow. Conceptually, these findings add nuance to existing studies of electoral accounta-
bility, suggesting that the electoral cycle introduces a degree of conditionality which is
not accounted for by existing studies, which tend to focus on fixed periods in the immedi-
ate lead-up to an election. Empirically, it places Trump’s recent decisions squarely within
the tradition of past precedent.
Elections, campaign promises and war
In approaching decisions about military strategy in war, the American president has dual
responsibilities. On one hand, he is Commander-in-Chief, responsible for pursuing a course
of action he deems strategically optimal. On the other hand, as an elected officeholder, he
must ensure that any course of action he chooses carries minimal electoral risk to his per-
sonal political future. In thinking about how electoral pressures affect in-bello decision-
making, then, we can employ a useful heuristic which conceptualises the decision-making
process as a balancing act between two sets of preferences, as illustrated in Figure 1. Like
any conceptual lens, this necessarily draws attention to electoral dynamics at the expense of
many other alternative or underlying causes of the outcomes of interest. In practice, moreo-
ver, presidents will not assess military strategy in the neat two-step process implied here
with electoral pressures isolated from consideration of conditions on the battlefield.
Nevertheless, while not purporting to offer an exhaustive explanation of any given course
of action, this heuristic does offer a reasonable approximation of the president’s often com-
peting interests in the national...
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