The President as Communicator-in-Chief

In US military intervention policy, presidents can usually benefit from substantial room for manoeuvre, which is not called into question by Congress and its members. Based on a domestic perspective of US foreign policy, this study argues that presidents deploy tropes of American exceptionalism and that such rhetoric conduces to congressional deference by setting the terms of the debate and silencing prospective criticism. Three qualitative case studies of the military interventions and their respective discourses in Kosovo in 1999, Iraq as from 2003 and Libya in 2011 show that members of Congress defer to presidential warmongering when they are left without access to a societally sustainable rebuttal.