How leaders talk about potential interventions

Abstract Chapter 2 illustrates the overall pattern of presidents’ justifications for military action using an original dataset of justifications for every potential US military intervention from 1990 to 2013. It details the process of collecting and coding national addresses to create the dataset, explaining how the book measures the use and emphasis of different justifications. Descriptive data reveal that each president regularly gave national addresses about potential military interventions and had ample opportunities to justify action to the US public. The chapter then turns to the distribution of security and humanitarian justifications, confirming that across administrations and political parties, leaders consistently included humanitarian justifications in their speeches about intervention, even when US security was at stake. Presidents also, however, limited their emphasis on humanitarian explanations in security crises. The pattern of simultaneous demand and restraint in presidents’ use of humanitarian language reinforces the book’s main puzzle.