Presidents and War

Abstract

The institution of the American presidency became remarkably war-prone with the development of new resources and a long-term war rational in the post-World War II era. Militaristic tendencies were augmented with changes in recruitment processes and media developments after the early 1970s. I delineate the logic of the increasing tendency to presidential uses of force for political reasons, supply some evidence from the Correlates of War data, and conclude with the consequences-both obvious, and more speculative-- of the presidential temptation to war, and the legal and constitutional changes that might be adopted to lessen that tendency.