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How does power shape foreign policy attitudes? Drawing on advances in psychological research on power, I argue that the sense of relative state power explains foreign policy hawkishness. The intuitive sense that “our state” is stronger than “your state” activates militant internationalism, an orientation centered on the efficacy of force and deterrence to achieve state aims. Beyond general orientation towards the world, this sense of power explains discrete attitudes towards pressing security issues, from threat perception in the South China Sea to nuclear weapons use against Iran. Five original surveys across the US, China, and Russia, as well as an experiment fielded on the US public, lend support to these claims. The psychological effects of state power overshadow dispositional traits common in behavioral IR, like individuals’ personalities and moral proclivities. More surprisingly, power changes individuals, making hawks of even the most dovish. Taken together, the paper presents a “first image reversed” challenge to standard bottom-up accounts of foreign policy opinion, and offers unique explanatory leverage in a potential era of US decline, China’s rise, and Russian belligerence.
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