Visceral Politics and Its Impact on US Foreign Policy Decision-Making

Abstract

Growing understanding of the connections between the mind and the body, and of the ways in which interoception influences decision-making, may well revolutionize our understanding of how decisions are reached in foreign policy analysis, drawing attention to a phenomenon which has been termed “visceral politics.” Applying the somatic marker theory to an understanding of political decision-making, this manuscript briefly analyses President William McKinley's decision-making prior to the Spanish–American War, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's decisions about the Iran hostage rescue mission, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's Kosovo decision-making, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ decisions about the Bin Laden raid, and National Security Adviser Susan Rice's decision-making about Syria. We draw these five disparate but related examples together in order to illustrate the impact of somatic markers on foreign policy decision-making, a role hitherto neglected in the literature.