The Persistence of US Conflict Behavior: Continuity in the Use of Force

Abstract

I argue that decision-making processes by the president and the national security establishment and a conception of past US military operations as credibility-establishing precedents for future US military actions have tended to result in a fixation on political developments occurring in a relatively small number of nations. Together, these foreign-policy making routines produce a high degree of regularity in US military activities whose importance is not often appreciated in studies that emphasize more variable domestic political forces, such as diversionary theory, or traditional security concerns, such as realism. I use both a zero-inflated, negative binomial model and a proportional hazards model to illustrate the impact of past US militarized dispute behavior on the prospects for future military activity. I find that past US conflict behavior exercises the most important influence in both models.