The Sense of Power and Foreign Policy Hawkishness: An Exchange – The Author Replies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Caleb Pomeroy, “Hawks Become Us: The Sense of Power and Militant Foreign Policy Attitudes,” Security Studies (2023).

2 Fettweis makes initial, important observations but does not conduct original empirical research. Christopher Fettweis, Psychology of a Superpower: Security and Dominance in US Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 2018).

3 Kertzer and Tingley first used this terminology but do not link it to relative power. Joshua D. Kertzer and Dustin Tingley, “Political Psychology in International Relations: Beyond the Paradigms,” Annual Review of Political Science 21, no. 1 (May 2018): 330.

4 Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon, “Why Hawks Win,” Foreign Policy, no. 158 (2007): 34–38.

5 Ana Guinote, “How Power Affects People: Activating, Wanting, and Goal Seeking,” Annual Review of Psychology 68, no. 1 (January 3, 2017): 369.

6 Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton University Press, 1998).

7 Bear F. Braumoeller, “The Myth of American Isolationism,” Foreign Policy Analysis 6, no. 4 (2010): 349; c.f., Charles A. Kupchan, Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World (Oxford University Press, 2020).

8 Nan Tian, Diego Lopes da Silva, Xiao Liang, Lorenzo Scarazzato, Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, and Ana Carolina de Oliveira Assis, “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2022,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (April 2023), 1–12.

9 Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft, “Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 67, no. 4 (2023): 752–79.

10 Caleb Pomeroy, Icarus Falls: The Psychology of Power in World Politics (Book Manuscript in Preparation).

11 These results are available in the “hawks_exchange_script.R” file in Caleb Pomeroy, “Replication data for: Hawks Become Us: The Sense of Power and Militant Foreign Policy Attitudes,” Harvard Dataverse, V1, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MVIVTW

12 Caleb Pomeroy and Brian C. Rathbun, “Just Business? Moral Condemnation and Virtuous Violence in the American and Russian Mass Publics,” Journal of Peace Research (2023); Brian C. Rathbun and Caleb Pomeroy, “See No Evil, Speak No Evil? Morality, Evolutionary Psychology, and the Nature of International Relations,” International Organization 76, no. 3 (2022): 656–89.

13 Joshua D. Kertzer, Kathleen E. Powers, Brian C. Rathbun, and Ravi Iyer, “Moral Support: How Moral Values Shape Foreign Policy Attitudes,” Journal of Politics 76, no. 3 (July 2014): 825–40.

14 Joris Lammers, Diederik A. Stapel, and Adam D. Galinsky, “Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior,” Psychological Science 21, no. 5 (2010): 737–44.

15 Kathleen E. Powers, Nationalisms in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2022); Brian C. Rathbun, “Towards a Dual Process Model of Foreign Policy Ideology,” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 34 (August 2020): 211–16.

16 Susan T. Fiske, “Controlling Other People: The Impact of Power on Stereotyping,” American Psychologist 48, no. 6 (1993): 621–28.

17 Daegyeong Kim, “Anti-Asian Racism and the Racial Politics of US-China Great Power Rivalry” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2022).

18 For a canonical qualitative take on perceptions of power, see William C. Wohlforth, “The Perception of Power: Russia in the Pre-1914 Balance,” World Politics 39, no. 3 (April 1987): 353–81. Research on the determinants of the sense of power would also be productive. McDermott’s suggestions about trait narcissism, as well as the drive for dominance, seem promising. More generally, on disentangling power from status, see Joe C. Magee and Adam D. Galinsky, “Social Hierarchy: The Self‐Reinforcing Nature of Power and Status,” Academy of Management Annals 2, no. 1 (January 2008): 351–98.

19 Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (Free Press, 1973), 246.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caleb Pomeroy

Caleb Pomeroy is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He thanks Dani Gilbert and David Peterson for comments on earlier drafts.