This book explores the intersection of the study of transatlantic relationships and the study of public support for the use of force in foreign policy. It contributes to two important debates: one about the nature of transatlantic partnership, and another about the determinants of support for the use of military force in a comparative perspective.

This book explores the intersection of the study of transatlantic relationships and the study of public support for the use of force in foreign policy. It contributes to two important debates: one about the nature of transatlantic partnership, and another about the determinants of support for the use of military force in a comparative perspective.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the world’s largest, most powerful military alliance. The Alliance has navigated and survived the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the post-9/11 era. Since the release of the 2010 Strategic Concept, NATO’s strategic environment has again undergone significant change. The need to adapt is clear. An opportunity to assess the Alliance’s achievements and future goals has now emerged with the Secretary General’s drive to create a new Strategic Concept for the next decade—an initiative dubbed NATO 2030. A necessary step for formulating a new strategic outlook will thus be understanding the future that faces NATO. To remain relevant and adjust to new circumstances, the Alliance must identify its main challenges and opportunities in the next ten years and beyond. This book contributes to critical conversations on NATO’s future vitality by examining the Alliance’s most salient issues and by offering recommendations to ensure its effectiveness moving forward. Written by a diverse, multigenerational group of policymakers and academics from across Europe and the United States, this book provides new insights about NATO’s changing threat landscape, its shifting internal dynamics, and the evolution of warfare. The volume’s authors tackle a wide range of issues, including the challenges of Russia and China, democratic backsliding, burden sharing, the extension of warfare to space and cyberspace, partnerships, and public opinion. With rigorous assessments of NATO’s challenges and opportunities, each chapter provides concrete recommendations for the Alliance to chart a path for the future. As such, this book is an indispensable resource for NATO’s strategic planners and security and defense experts more broadly.

This book provides a long-term perspective on the opinions of the British public on foreign and defence policy in the post-war era. Thematically wide-ranging, it looks at the broader role of foreign and defence policy in British politics and elections, public opinion towards Britain’s key international relationships and alliances (the United States, NATO, the EU and the Commonwealth), and public opinion towards the projection of ‘soft power’ (overseas aid) and ‘hard power’ (defence spending, nuclear weapons and military intervention). Assessing the main areas of change and continuity in the public’s views, it also pays close attention to the dividing lines in wider society over foreign and defence policy. Analysing an extensive range of surveys and opinion polls, the book situates the analysis in the wider context of Britain’s changing foreign policy role and priorities in the post-war era, as well as linking public opinion with the politics of British external policy – the post-war consensus on Britain’s overseas role, historical and contemporary areas of inter-party debate, and enduring intra-party divides. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of British politics, European politics, foreign policy analysis, public opinion, defence and security studies and more broadly to comparative politics and international relations.

The transatlantic partnership is in crisis (again!). Structural factors, toxic political rhetoric and malign foreign influence are in danger of pushing the two sides of the Atlantic even further apart. A sustained effort to rescue the transatlantic relationship is needed, but how can the transatlantic partners reaffirm the strength and endurance of their strategic bond? And where to begin? This book offers an overarching view of the major factors, trends and areas that are likely to shape transatlantic relations as the 2020s unfold. Rather than focus on how to defuse transatlantic disagreements over politically sensitive issues such as relations with China, Russia and Iran, this volume explores less researched, but equally consequential aspects of the transatlantic partnership. These include the cultural, military, security and democratic foundations of transatlantic relations, as well as the new geographical and thematic horizons for the strategic partnership and the new forums and formats for transatlantic cooperation. Collectively, they could create new space for dialogue, compromise and cooperation and provide a strong basis for reviving the transatlantic partnership.

This book examines US recourse to military force in the post-9/11 era. In particular, it evaluates the extent to which the Bush and Obama administrations viewed legitimizing the greater use-of-force as a necessary solution to thwart the security threat presented by global terrorist networks and WMD proliferation.

Motivated by the lack of scholarly understanding of the substantial gender difference in attitudes toward the use of military force, Richard C. Eichenberg has mined a massive data set of public opinion surveys to draw new and important conclusions. By analyzing hundreds of such surveys across more than sixty countries, Gender, War, and World Order offers researchers raw data, multiple hypotheses, and three major findings. Eichenberg poses three questions of the data: Are there significant differences in the opinions of men and women on issues of national security? What differences can be discerned across issues, culture, and time? And what are the theoretical and political implications of these attitudinal differences? Within this framework, Gender, War, and World Order compares gender difference on military power, balance of power, alliances, international institutions, the acceptability of war, defense spending, defense/welfare compromises, and torture. Eichenberg concludes that the centrality of military force, violence, and war is the single most important variable affecting gender difference; that the magnitude of gender difference on security issues correlates with the economic development and level of gender equality in a society; and that the country with the most consistent gender polarization across the widest range of issues is the United States.