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Recently, international relations scholars have posited that, though economically unsuccessful American presidents may have incentives to divert via international conflict, their potential adversaries are also privy to their plight and may seek to avoid fighting them at such junctures. However, this “strategic conflict avoidance” (SCA) perspective offers relatively few insights concerning the impact of a potentially important source of leadership weakness in the American case: legislative opposition to presidential policy. Indeed, scholars seem uncertain about whether general legislative opposition actually drives American presidents to divert or leads them to refrain from international ventures. This article seeks to develop and test a general theory concerning the targeting of presidents who face legislative opposition to their foreign policies. The article predicts that economic distress increases “conflict avoidance” on the part of potential adversaries, whereas overt legislative opposition to presidential foreign policy decreases the utility of diversion and creates transparent elite divisions that invite targeting. Negative binomial generalized estimating equations (GEE) models of the U.S. foreign policy experience from 1949 to 2001 support these predictions, in that the U.S. is less likely to be the target of incident initiation by other states when the economic misery index increases, but is more likely to be targeted when members of Congress voice displeasure with presidential foreign policy. Further analyses show that these findings are generally strongest during periods of high American inflation, in the context of enduring rivalries, and during the Cold War.
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