This article seeks to improve our grasp of the societal foundations of US foreign policy by examining how race and gender -two fundamental dimensions of social stratification of US society -affect support for military force in the pursuit of external objectives. It is generally appreciated that, in the United States, women are less inclined to support armed intervention than are men, and feminist theory provides some foundation for explaining the gap. It is less widely recognized that a similar gap separates the attitudes of African-Americans and white Americans, but there is little in the social science literature to suggest why this should be so. The authors examine a number of possible explanations for the parallel, focusing both on attributes that are specific to women and blacks, and on one common to both groups (a high level of political alienation) but not shared by white men. They conclude that, while alienation partially accounts for the parallel attitudes toward force, properties specific to the two demographic groups nevertheless carry part of the burden for explaining their shared relative aversion to military intervention.

No abstract

Much of the work on US military intervention addresses the patterns it exhibits and the circumstances that lead to the decision to resort to force. This article deals with a somewhat different aspect of the issue: the structure of the incentives that determine the US government's commitment to persevere in the armed interventions it has chosen to undertake. Commitment is modeled in terms of the costs of the intervention and public support for the venture, and the model is based on an economic metaphor. The hypothesis is that the public responds to costs in the manner of consumers, making its support an inverse function of costs. By contrast, Government responds to costs in the fashion of an investor, viewing costs as an investment to be redeemed: up to a point, the higher the cost, the greater the commitment. The parameters of the model are statistically estimated for the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the point at which public and governmental support coincide is discussed.

Policies to counter the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have, for the most part, been modeled on strategies originally devised to counter the danger of nuclear proliferation. While useful in countering a traditional CBN (chemical/biological/nuclear)/WMD threat, current counter-proliferation and non-proliferation regimes are insufficient to meet the challenge of maritime terrorism. Maritime terrorism represents a new category of threat; one that partially overlaps with conventional WMD, but for which -due to the scope and nature of the maritime industry -traditional counter-proliferation policies may be inadequate and even inappro-priate. This article outlines the means by which maritime shipping can be used as WMD and discusses the policies implemented to deal with these threats, in light of the challenges presented to traditional conceptualizations of WMD and counter-proliferation strategies.