Analyzing Variation in US NATO Policy: A Role Theory Approach to the Clinton and Trump Administrations

President Clinton helped to transform NATO into the institution that it is today. He led the first post-Soviet enlargement of NATO, welcoming three newly independent countries as members of the alliance. He also expanded the mission of NATO, transforming a defense alliance into the security management organization for the free world. President Trump, by contrast, was in perpetual opposition to the alliance. Trump continually questioned the importance and purpose of the alliance. He focused on the costs of the alliance rather than its benefits, deriding NATO and its member nations for ‘taking advantage’ of the United States in their failure to meet collective defense commitments. The pillars of US national defense policy are often understood by various structural frameworks in international relations theory that focus on the distribution of power and polarity in the international system. However, structural considerations have been criticized for a ‘status- quo bias’ and an inability to explain change in foreign policy behavior (Schweller 1996). Indeed, in the case of NATO policy, structure fails to explain variation between the Clinton and Trump administrations’ preferred approaches. The limits of structural explanations invite an agent-oriented approach toward understanding the apparent differences in Clinton and Trump’s NATO policies. However, to resist the impulse to focus on the particulars of individuals myopically and reductively, an effort to understand policy variation should incorporate both ideational analysis (the realm of perceptions, values, and beliefs) and structural considerations. Role theory meets both of these conditions because it views a leader’s national role conceptions as the primary driver of their foreign policy while also incorporating structural constraints (Holsti 1970). In this paper, I test role theory’s viability for understanding the variation between the NATO policies pursued by President Clinton and President Trump. Through a systematic analysis of public statements and speeches, I generate a comprehensive role set for both administrations to assess whether or not these role sets can explain variances in NATO policy identified by case analyses