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Rousing a Response Amanda J. Rothschild When the United States Changes Policy Toward Mass Killing

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Rousing a Response Amanda J. Rothschild When the United States Changes Policy Toward Mass Killing Rousing a Response Rousing a Response Amanda J. Rothschild When the United States Changes Policy toward Mass Killing State-sponsored mass killings claimed millions of lives during the twentieth century. Examples in- clude the Armenian Genocide of World War I, the Holocaust, West Pakistani massacres in Bangladesh in 1971, the Iraqi massacres of Kurds in 1988, atroci- ties in the Balkans in the 1990s, and the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. In most cases, the international community offered only a limited response. Given the frequency and enormity of the problem of mass killing, political scientists, historians, and journalists have attempted to understand the sources of this limited responsiveness. Some argue that it was a lack of political will for robust action.1 Others point to cost-beneªt considerations.2 Still others argue that the answer can be found in changing norms about which groups are worthy of protection.3 Finally, some focus on the importance of individual his- Amanda J. Rothschild is an associate with the International Security Program in the Belfer Center for Sci- ence and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. For helpful comments and suggestions, the author thanks Mark Bell, Kelly Greenhill, Vipin Narang, Roger Petersen, Barry Posen, Michael Poznansky, Stephen Van Evera, the anonymous re- viewers, her interview subjects, and participants in seminars and workshops at Harvard Univer- sity, the University of Virginia, and the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, and ISSS-ISAC. For their generosity and assis- tance, the author thanks archivists and staff at the National Security Archive, the National Ar- chives, the Library of Congress, and the presidential libraries of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, George H.W. Bush, and William Clinton. The author thanks the Tobin Project and the Harry S. Truman Library Institute for funding this research. She is particu- larly grateful to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation and the late Harry Middleton for support through the Harry Middleton Fellowship in Presidential Studies. 1. Michael N. Barnett makes this argument with regard to the United Nations in Rwanda. See Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 3. Samantha Power concludes that “the real reason the United States did not do what it could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or inºuence but a lack of will. Simply put, American leaders did not act because they did not want to.” She sug- gests that a democratic state should be susceptible to pressures to act from inside and outside of government. In contrast to my analysis, however, she argues that the executive has been largely free from internal pressures and does not outline how these pressures might change policy. See Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), particularly pp. 508–509. See also Thomas G. Weiss, “The Sunset of Humanitarian Intervention? The Responsibility to Protect in a Unipolar Era,” Security Dialogue, Vol. 35, No. 2 (June 2004), pp. 135–136, doi:10.1177/0967010604044973; and Thomas G. Weiss, “R2P after 9/11 and the World Summit,” Wisconsin International Law Journal, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2006), pp. 742–743, 745, 747, 757. 2. Benjamin Miller, “The Logic of U.S. Military Interventions in the Post–Cold War Era,” Contem- porary Security Policy, Vol. 19, No. 3 (December 1998), pp. 83–87, doi:10.1080/13523269808404202. 3. Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 52–73. International Security, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2017), pp. 120–154, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00295 © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 120 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ISEC_a_00295 by guest on 27 September 2021 Rousing a Response 121 torical actors, at times maintaining that leaders’ beliefs about the use of force or their worldviews play a decisive role in shaping policy.4 Like other states in the international community, the United States has typi- cally responded to mass killings with restrained measures, such as condemn- ing the violence or offering limited humanitarian aid, for the duration of the crisis. In certain cases, however, U.S. presidents have changed course to dra- matically intensify American humanitarian, diplomatic, or military efforts to stop the killing. The reasons behind such sudden and signiªcant increases in responsiveness remain largely undertheorized. Building on the extant literature, this article develops a generalizable theory to explain signiªcant policy change in U.S. responses to state-sponsored mass killings. I argue that three factors account for why and when the United States moves from a limited response to more robust measures: dissent within the president’s inner circle; a high degree of congressional pressure on the presi- dent to change policy; and the president’s perception that inaction will lead to personal political costs. In contrast to prior work, my theory illuminates the role of nonmilitary re- sponses, including diplomatic, humanitarian, and economic policies. Studying an array of policies allows me to incorporate signiªcant U.S. responses that fell short of military intervention. A prominent example, and the subject of this ar- ticle, is what President Franklin D. Roosevelt regarded as perhaps the most signiªcant U.S. response to the Holocaust:5 the War Refugee Board (WRB), a refugee rescue program, established in 1944, that saved approximately 200,000 Jews from near-certain death.6 Remarkably, a history of the Board has not yet been written, and the public appears to be largely unaware of its activities.7 4. Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013); Michael Roskin, “From Pearl Harbor to Vietnam: Shifting Generational Paradigms and Foreign Policy,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 3 (Autumn 1974), pp. 563–588; Eliza- beth N. Saunders, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011); Jon Western, “Sources of Humanitarian Intervention: Beliefs, Information, and Advocacy in the U.S. Decisions on Somalia and Bosnia,” International Security, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Spring 2002), pp. 112–142, doi:10.1162/016228802753696799; Jon Western, Selling Intervention and War: The Presidency, the Media, and the American Public (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and Jon Western, “Warring Ideas: Explaining U.S. Military Intervention in Regional and Civil Conºicts,” Columbia University, 2000. 5. “Caring for Refugees in the United States, Message from the President of the United States,” June 12, 1944, box 673, White House Central Files: Ofªcial File (WHCF: OF) 127 (1945), Truman Pa- pers, Harry S. Truman Library (hereafter TL), Independence, Missouri. 6. Rafael Medoff, Blowing the Whistle on Genocide: Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. and the Struggle for a U.S. Re- sponse to the Holocaust (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2009), p. 129; and Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 294. 7. On the need for more research on the War Refugee Board, see “Transcript of the Summary of the Conference on ‘Policies and Responses of the American Government to the Holocaust,’ 11– Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ISEC_a_00295 by guest on 27 September 2021 International Security 42:2 122 The theory also explains variation in responses to cases with similar cost- beneªt outcomes and to cases occurring almost simultaneously—without time for signiªcant changes in humanitarian norms—such as the cases of Rwanda and Somalia. Finally, the study draws heavily on primary sources to improve historical accuracy, to highlight overlooked evidence, and to more fully under- stand internal government debates on this issue. The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. First, I advance a new theory to explain signiªcant shifts in U.S. policy during cases of mass killing. Second, I illustrate the theory with an examination of U.S. responsiveness to the Holocaust. Third, I demonstrate how the theory applies to other cases by providing a brief shadow case on U.S. policy toward atrocities in Bosnia in the early 1990s. I conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of this research for international relations, international security, and diplo- matic history. The Argument I argue that U.S. presidents decide to change policy to respond more forcefully to mass killing when three factors are present. I consider policies to be more forceful when they involve increased resource costs or when they address the killing more directly—for instance, a shift from alleviating the consequences of the killing to directly confronting it. In determining whether a policy shift has occurred, I also consider the duration of the policy change, which in turn illu- minates whether the shift represents a temporary, limited measure or a delib- erate adjustment. I also examine historical documents to determine whether key actors at the time viewed the change as a purposeful shift in strategy from their prior approach. Policies pursued in a period of change or in a period of limited measures can assume a variety of forms. The theory described here does not predict which policies the United States will pursue, but rather the timing of policy change toward increased responsiveness. To simplify the analysis, I group U.S. policies into seven categories: enabling policies; ignore policies; private diplomacy; and public condemnation, human- itarian, punishment, and intervention policies. Enabling policies occur when the United States provides military or economic assistance to the perpetrating 12 November 1993,” in Verne W.
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