Ronald R. Krebs

• Ph.D., Columbia University
• Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Professor of Political Science at University of Minnesota

Contemporaries and historians often blame the errors and tragedies of US policy during the Cold War on a dominant narrative of national security: the “Cold War consensus.” Its usual periodization, according to which it came together in the late 1940s and persisted until the late 1960s when it unraveled amidst the trauma of the Vietnam War, fits wel...

This introductory framing paper theorizes the role of legitimation—the public justification of policy—in the making of grand strategy. We contend that the process of legitimation has significant and independent effects on grand strategy's constituent elements and on how grand strategy is formulated and executed. Legitimation is integral to how stat...

As the costs of the invasion and occupation of Iraq mount, scholars have sought to explain how the United States came to launch this war in the first place. Many have focused on the “inflation” of the Iraq threat, and indeed the Bush administration did frame the national dialogue on Iraq. We maintain, however, that the failure of most leading Democ...

While scholars of International Relations and comparative politics have usually treated rhetoric as epiphenomenal, one strand of constructivism has recently returned rhetoric to the heart of political analysis, especially through the mechanism of persuasion. We too maintain that rhetoric is central to political processes and outcomes, but we argue...

Events of and since 11 September 2001 have renewed interest in age-old questions about liberal-democratic governance in the shadow of insecurity, crisis, and war. Academic lawyers in particular have engaged in a vigorous debate about how liberal polities can confront security threats while maintaining their commitment to the rule of law. Yet few em...

When deciding whether to support a military operation, do citizens in democracies weigh whether soldiers themselves support the operation? Recent research has concluded that, in the United States, public support for military operations rests in part on people’s beliefs that soldiers favor their own deployment. However, it is not known whether this...

Although, in many countries, the military is the most trusted state institution, we know little about public trust in the military outside the United States. We argue that, for the military, trust is grounded in its legitimation as, and aspiration to be, non-partisan. From this insight, we develop hypotheses regarding the relationship between trust...

Why do people think that soldiers and officers join the military? In this article, we report and explain unique survey results of nationally representative populations in five democracies—France, Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Beliefs about motivations for military service vary significantly by nation. In Israel and Fra...

Beginning in the 1960s, advanced industrialized states have gradually replaced the mass army, recruited via mandatory conscription, with a volunteer military recruited via market mechanisms. Although some military sociologists bemoaned that military service was consequently becoming merely a “job,” rather than a duty of citizenship, many post-consc...

It is widely acknowledged that the core institutions of the Liberal International Order (LIO) have in recent years been subject to increasingly intense contestation. There is less agreement on the sources of this contestation. This introductory paper to the Special Issue on "contestation in a world of liberal orders" makes two main contributions. F...

As the Cold War came to a close in 1991, US President George H. W. Bush famously saw its shocking demise as the dawn of a 'new world order' that would prize peace and expand liberal democratic capitalism. Thirty years later, with China on the rise, Russia resurgent, and populism roiling the Western world, it is clear that Bush's declaration remains...

[...] This introductory essay has four aims, corresponding to the four sections that follow. First, it introduces readers to the history of the concept of gran strategy and to the central themes of that literature. Second, it explores the abiding tensions in the literature on grand strategy - especially as manifest in the contributions to this Hand...

Grand Strategy is a state’s “theory of victory,” explaining how the state will utilize its diverse means to advance and achieve national ends. A clearly articulated, well-defined, and relatively stable grand strategy is supposed to allow the ship of state to steer a steady course through the roiling seas of global politics. However, the obstacles t...

Grand Strategy is a state’s “theory of victory,” explaining how the state will utilize its diverse means to advance and achieve national ends. A clearly articulated, well-defined, and relatively stable grand strategy is supposed to allow the ship of state to steer a steady course through the roiling seas of global politics. However, the obstacles t...

A clearly articulated, well-defined, and relatively stable grand strategy is supposed to allow the ship of state to steer a steady course through the roiling seas of global politics. However, the obstacles to formulating and implementing grand strategy are, by all accounts, imposing. The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy addresses the conceptual an...

What shapes public support for military missions? Existing scholarship points to, on the one hand, individuals’ affiliations and predispositions (such as political partisanship and gender), and, on the other hand, factors that shape a rational cost–benefit analysis (notably, mission objectives, the prospects for victory, and the magnitude and distr...

An influential model of democratic civil-military relations insists that civilian politicians and officials, accountable to the public, have “the right to be wrong” about the use of force: they, not senior military officers, decide when force will be used and set military strategy. While polls have routinely asked about Americans’ trust in the mili...

This brief article reports the results of a June 2019 survey on Americans' attitudes toward civil-military relations. The article can also be found at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-07-14/civilian-control-military-partisan-issue.

Although voluntary recruitment to the military is today the Western norm, we know little about citizens’ beliefs regarding service members’ reasons for joining. This article, reporting and analyzing the results of a nationally representative U.S. survey, rectifies this gap. We find that, despite the reality of market-based recruitment, many America...

Scholars have vigorously debated whether adversaries carefully scrutinize if states have in the past demonstrated toughness and whether adversaries base present and future crisis-bargaining behavior on this record. If they do—as a central strain of deterrence theory, and its contemporary defenders, maintain—hard-line policies, including limited mil...

The field of international relations has long focused on understanding and explaining the causes of war. In contrast, scholars have devoted relatively little attention to war’s consequences. However, scholarly literature on the consequences of violent conflict, including its effects on liberal democracy, has burgeoned and improved in recent decades...

Studying social narratives is not part of mainstream political science, but, as Shaul Shenhav argues in Analyzing Social Narratives, it ought to be. Narratives are everywhere and are an important factor in human and social life; human beings are essentially homo narrans, and so social science must take narratives seriously. Narratology is just one...

div class="title">Response to Laurie A. Brand’s review of Narrative and the Making of US National Security - Volume 14 Issue 4 - Ronald R. Krebs

Official Stories: Politics and National Narratives in Egypt and Algeria. By Brand Laurie A. . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 296p. $90.00 cloth, $27.95 paper. - Volume 14 Issue 4 - Ronald R. Krebs

Preventing the recurrence of civil war has become a critical problem for both scholarship and policy. Conventional wisdom urges the creation of capable, legitimate, and inclusive postwar states to reduce the risk of relapse into civil war, and international peacebuilders have often encouraged the formation of a new national army that would include...

1. Narrating national security Part I. Crisis, Authority, and Rhetorical Mode: The Fate of Narrative Projects, from the Battle against Isolationism to the War on Terror: 2. Domination and the art of storytelling 3. Narrative lost: missed and mistaken opportunities 4. Narrative won: opportunities seized Part II. Narrative at War: Politics and Rhetor...

Many contend that the citizen-soldier tradition in the United States is dead. They argue that the elimination of the draft in 1973, and the establishment of the all-volunteer force (AVF), severed the link between military service and citizenship. The author maintains that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Critics of the AVF have idealized the pre-...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, by all accounts, a master orator. Yet success eluded him as he sought to make his fellow citizens aware of the threat Nazi Germany posed and to banish isolationists to the illegitimate margins. At other times, however, Roosevelt's campaigns to shift the underpinnings of national security debate were more effective. No...

Krebs, Ronald R. and Aaron Rapport. (2012) International Relations and the Psychology of Time Horizons. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2478.2012.00726.x © 2012 International Studies Association Theories of international relations have often incorporated assumptions about time horizons—a metaphor for how heavily actors value th...

For the Israeli right and its allies around the world, the greatest danger to Israel's future is the unwillingness of Palestinians to make peace. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict does threaten Israel, but not, as the right would have it, because militant and even seemingly moderate Palestinians harbor plans to drive the Jews into the sea. Rather, t...

The academy and the military would seem to be radically different institutions. Militaries are fundamentally hierarchical: at the end of the day, orders must be obeyed. At least in principle—and the emphasis here is on principle, since anyone who has lived within the academy knows how far reality departs from this purported ideal—academic disciplin...

In recent years, Americans witnessed assertions of presidential prerogative and a concerted effort to sideline Congress that were unequalled in the preceding three decades. Some hailed these developments, alongside increased government surveillance, as the price to be paid for a “War on Terror” whose effective prosecution required nimble governance...

Democracies often compromise their principles during crises: executive authority grows, rights of due process are set aside, and free expression suffers. But war's effects on liberal-democratic institutions and processes are diverse, often contradictory, and not always negative. Fear of the Soviet Union helped create the U.S. national security stat...

Counterterrorist state forces and terrorist insurgents compete to control not only territory and populations but language. The success of counterterrorism, therefore, hinges crucially on representational practices. Defeating terrorism in the long run requires both undermining the legitimacy of political violence and its purveyors and opening space...

Can Louis XIV's consolidation of power in seventeenth-century France guide the way for state builders in Afghanistan today? No, argue Arjun Chowdhury and Ronald Krebs, because the cases are too different. And, writes James Nathan, the Sun King's approach was too costly to be emulated. Sheri Berman disagrees.

War has diverse and seemingly contradictory effects on liberal democratic institutions and processes. It has led democracies to abandon their principles, expanding executive authority and restricting civil liberties, but it has also prompted the development of representative parliamentary institutions. It has undercut socioeconomic reform, but it h...

Ronald R. Krebs discusses the history, politics, and effects of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. While the Prize seeks to change the world through its conferral, Krebs argues the award only occasionally draws attention to ignored problems. He claims that the award has sometimes produced unexpected and unwanted outcomes, which have become more co...

Many contend that the citizen-soldier tradition in the United States is dead. They argue that the elimination of the draft in 1973, and the establishment of the all-volunteer force (AVF), severed the link between military service and citizenship. The author maintains that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Critics of the AVF have idealized the pre-...

Studies of counterterrorism have argued for the importance of bolstering, or “mobilizing,” moderates in the confrontation with violent extremists. Yet the literature has not elucidated when states seek to mobilize moderates and marginalize extremists, how they do so, or when they prove successful. The received wisdom is that states should cultivate...

There is little disagreement in Washington that the United States is losing the so-called Battle of Ideas, and there is a surprising consensus on what needs to be done: “reach out” to Muslim moderates. Bolstering moderate voices in the Muslim world is indeed crucial to the fate of the War on Terror, but “reaching out” to them is no solution. In fac...

Neorealism, States, and the Modern Mass Army. By Resende-SantosJoão. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 332p. $85.00 cloth, $29.99 paper. - Volume 6 Issue 3 - Ronald R. Krebs

Leaders around the globe have long turned to the armed forces as a "school for the nation." Debates over who serves continue to arouse passion today because the military's participation policies are seen as shaping politics beyond the military, specifically the politics of identity and citizenship. Yet how and when do these policies transform patte...

Students of comparative military organizations have advanced three hypotheses to explain when armed forces adopt more liberal manpower policies: when a major security threat looms, when the military professionalizes, or when the surrounding society grows more tolerant of difference. This article argues that all three are theoretically and empirical...

‘Public diplomacy' has become the holy grail of American foreign policy. In a Washington polarised by sharp partisan divisions, few issues have generated as much consensus. Numerous recent reports from think tanks, blue-ribbon commissions and government advisory groups offer recommendations for how the United States could improve its efforts to swa...

International Security 29.4 (2005) 196-207 Chaim Kaufmann's recent article on the selling of the Iraq war makes a valuable contribution both to the debate over the origins of that war and to scholarship on threat inflation. I agree with much of his argument: George W. Bush's administration misled the public on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WM...

International Security 28.4 (2004) 85-124 Theodore Roosevelt and his fellow Progressives hoped that universal military training would "Americanize" the mass of newcomers who had recently landed on America's shores. Leonid Brezhnev similarly believed that widespread service in the Red Army would forge a unified Soviet citizenry committed to "the Soc...

Last year the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved the expansion of the Atlantic alliance. Whereas some advocates of enlarging NATO, particularly Eastern European leaders for whom the Soviets' iron grip is an all too recent memory, stress the extension of the alliance's traditional deterrent function, others acknowledge that Russia is in no position...

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 2003. Includes bibliographical references. Department: Political Science.