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The article contributes to scholarship on symbolic interactionist role theory in Foreign Policy Analysis, focusing on the concept of altercasting. Altercasting refers to verbal and non-verbal state behaviors in a role relationship to cast another state into roles that are complementary to its own roles. The article suggests putting more attention on the agency of the actor "doing" the altercasting to gain a better understanding of how altercasting works. To this purpose, the article develops a framework to unpack the agency of the altercasting actor. The framework addresses the preconditions for actors to engage in altercasting, the interplay of altercasting with domestic politics, and the available altercasting techniques. The article illustrates this framework in a case study on the efforts of the Biden administration to altercast Germany into a "faithful ally" role vis-à-vis China when the new German government transitioned into office in late 2021. Building on evidence from expert interviews among the U.S. foreign policy community, the case study demonstrates that the Biden administration had clear role expectations of Germany and understood the balance of opinion between the German coalition parties. The Biden administration used the altercasting techniques of self-presentation, signaling approval, and disapproval and making direct behavioral demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of his personality, had Donald Trump won the 2020 election the remarkable and unexpected united response by NATO allies to the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine would not have happened. Relying on leader personality research in foreign policy, we demonstrate this by using the counterfactual method of analysis. Specifying key differences between Biden's and Trump's personalities in terms of their experiences, traits and beliefs, we explicitly show that president Trump would have been very unlikely to share US intelligence, rally NATO allies in support of Ukraine or challenge Vladimir Putin. In contrast, these responses fit very well with Joe Biden's personality. We first present counterfactual analysis as a method before comparing Biden and Trump along personality characteristics known to significantly influence foreign-policy decisions. Through our case-study, we demonstrate the value of using systematic and theoretically grounded counterfactual methods for assessing the importance of individual differences between leaders and emphasizing their impact on international affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of crises over the last decade have put pressure on Europe's fundamental ordering principles. In response, German policymakers have scrambled to reinterpret Germany's foreign policy for a new era. To understand this process, the authors utilize an interpretivist approach, analyzing the discourse of German foreign policymakers through the lens of four traditions of thought informing debates: regionalism, pacifism, realism, and hegemonism. The article suggests that despite serious challenges, prevailing patterns of belief centered round regionalism and pacifism, supported by a particular civilian understanding of hegemony, persist. Yet, Germany's allies are challenging this framework and calling for it to accept more responsibility for regional and global security. As a result, a realist tradition is reemerging in Germany's discourse. The taxonomy provided here allows a richer understanding of these debates as well as an appreciation of how policymakers mobilize ideas to resist or enable policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abstention of the conservative-liberal government under Chancellor Angela Merkel on UN Security Council resolution 1973 marked the first occasion in which the Federal Republic of Germany stood against all three of its main Western partners, the US, France, and the UK, simultaneously, on a major foreign policy issue. Many accounts of this decision invoke the influence of electoral incentives. What is problematic, however, is that the causal weight attached to electoral politics is often left ambiguous and difficult to assess with traditional case study methods. The article, therefore, employs counterfactual reasoning to scrutinize "electoral politics" explanations of Germany's policy on Libya. Specifically, it develops counterfactuals in which decision making did not take place in the shadow of upcoming elections and investigates how other variables on different levels of analysis would have shaped decision making in the counterfactual scenarios. The findings suggest that electoral incentives did not decisively shift German foreign policy on Libya. More generally, the article speaks to the value of counterfactuals in foreign policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]