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This chapter focuses on congressional efforts to curtail the president's foreign policy over terrorism and the Middle East, almost all of which has been unilaterally instituted. With a series of case studies and new experimental survey data, it is shown that congressional opposition to the president systematically influences the willingness of average citizens to support the president's military campaigns abroad and, moreover, that such opposition has occasionally induced the president to back off from his preferred policies. So doing, it demonstrates that congressional checks on presidential war powers, though certainly diminished, remain a core feature of unilateral politics.

Unilateral action challenges most Americans’ understanding of how policy-making should work in our constitutional system. But do most Americans instinctively oppose unilateralism as a threat to checks and balances? Through a series of survey experiments we find they do not. Rather, Americans evaluate unilateralism through the same partisan and policy-based lenses they use to make other political judgements. They tend to support unilateral actions taken by presidents of their party and oppose actions taken by the opposition. And they back executive actions that move policy in their preferred direction and oppose those that move policy further from their preferences. Relatively few Americans oppose presidential action solely because of the means through which it is achieved.

The presidential veto renders most congressional efforts to reverse executive actions legislatively all but futile. However, Congress exercises an important, if indirect check on presidential unilateralism through its ability to erode public support for executive action. Through a series of survey experiments we find that congressional criticism on both constitutional and policy grounds can diminish popular support for unilateral action across issue areas, both foreign and domestic. Presidents who anticipate costly congressional push-back and a resulting popular backlash may rationally forgo acting unilaterally to avoid incurring political costs that could jeopardize other aspects of their programmatic agendas.

Historically, courts have been reticent to check even aggressive assertions of unilateral presidential power. However, this chapter reviews evidence of an increasingly assertive judiciary in recent years. Perhaps more important, it also identifies an oft-overlooked indirect mechanism of judicial constraint: judicial defeats, or even public speculation concerning judicial challenges, can also shape public opinion. Courts need not rule against the White House to undermine popular support for its unilateral initiatives. Rather, even raising the specter of a judicial challenge can undermine popular support for the president and his policies.

This chapter discusses the book's argument that joint war planning provides a useful conceptual framework for explaining agreement and nonagreement in alliance treaty negotiations. Drawing on bargaining theory and negotiation analysis, it focuses on two key variables. The first variable is compatibility of ideal war plans. This refers to the participants' respective ideal war plans not having contradictory strategic components or operational components. Tensions can arise from conflicting military doctrines, such as one negotiation participant adhering to an offensive doctrine and another following a defensive doctrine. Thus, the key to ideal war plan compatibility is that both participants have similar notions of the threat and similar philosophies about the application of military force against that threat. The second variable is the attractiveness of outside options. Outside options are the policies each participant will pursue if the negotiation ends in nonagreement. Such policies include unilateral action or an alliance treaty with another state. The chapter then explains how these two variables lead to four types of alliance treaty negotiations: Same Page, Pleasant Surprise, Revealed Deadlock, and Standard Bargaining. It also details the three components of a war plan: strategic, operational, and tactical.

This chapter presents a new data set of more than two hundred executive orders never signed by the president. However that is interpreted — as good management or as gridlock — something that could have been done “with the stroke of a pen” was not. Here, too, quantitative and archival analysis pair to help us understand why. The results highlight the fact that unilateral action has costs, which at some point outweigh the benefits. Those costs may be rung up in Congress, or the courts, or by public opinion. But as the exploration here shows, they may also be imposed by the executive branch.

This chapter considers how the cybersecurity dilemma can be mitigated. It considers the ways in which states can act unilaterally to improve their baseline defenses, can form bilateral partnerships with other states, and can take action to signal that they are serious about addressing the problem. These include sending costly signals to other states in order to lend credibility to their professed intentions. In cybersecurity, zero day exploits and encryption policy offer opportunities to send costly signals. The chapter draws on Cold War history to provide conceptual examples for many of these actions.

Alongside EC-Bananas, the transatlantic trade feud over hormone-fed beef constitutes another informative case study for investigating how the challenges invoked in perennial disputes affect the motivations for and the practice of disputing at the World Trade Organization (WTO), generate shifts and conflicts between the goals of the WTO Dispute Settlement System (DSS), and shape the outcomes it ultimately yields. The chapter first recounts the basic facts of EC-Hormones and the dispute’s major milestones in the multilateral trade system. It then distils the factors that rendered EC-Hormones so resistant to compliance and resolution. On this basis, the chapter turns to an in-depth, goal-based analysis of the dispute, exploring the goal shifting characterizing the DSS’s operation throughout the conflict and the heightened role the system played along the fine line between law and politics. Finally, the chapter examines the mixed outcomes delivered in the case while addressing the goal conflicts those outcomes represent and their implications for the DSS’s effectiveness assessment.

This chapter explains how each State is a victim of the sovereignty exercised by one of its neighbours—the reality of State sovereignty when States are interdependent. States can agree upon common standards, or perhaps will agree to recognize each other’s different standards. In this sense, a State surrenders the right to act unilaterally and thereby to impose costs on other States; but by choosing instead to co-operate, that State gains by being able to participate in a mutually benefitting decision-making process. Many problems that beset States today are problems that are faced in common (climate change, migration, security), and it is possible that they are more likely to be solved effectively by collective action. This is the logic of the European Union (EU), in which all States are able to gain once they are locked into a mutually agreed framework for addressing such issues.

The transatlantic Bananas dispute rambled on in the multilateral trade system for almost two decades. The convoluted conflict, standing at the centre of this chapter, provides a useful starting point for studying the goal-attainment efforts exhibited by the World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement System (DSS) in perennial disputes, together with the goal-shifting and goal-conflict patterns characterizing such cases. The chapter first provides a brief background of the Bananas case. It then recounts the dispute’s major turning points in the multilateral trading system, and identifies the main factors rendering the conflict so prolonged and resistant to resolution. On these foundations, the chapter turns to a close goal-based reading of EC-Bananas, tracing the DSS’s goal-attainment efforts and the goal shifts marking this lengthy dispute. Thereafter, the chapter examines the resulting conflicts between DSS goals and the mixed, noncompliant outcomes ultimately produced in EC-Bananas, while assessing their ramifications for an analysis of the system’s effectiveness.