Abstract
The National Emergencies Act of 1976 requires the president to provide a written statement that justifies the purpose of a national emergency declaration, continuation, or termination, but presidents vary considerably in terms of the degree of detail and scope of commentary included as part of this documentation (Halchin, in National Emergency Powers, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/98-505/32, 2021; Ouyang & Morgan, in Presidential Studies Quarterly 49(3):718–732, 2019). In addition to these reporting requirements, presidents utilize a variety of public venues to communicate the merits of a national emergency to wider audiences. To better understand factors that influence the tone of presidential rhetoric, we use quantitative text analysis to evaluate an original dataset of presidential documents, speeches, and remarks related to national emergency policies. We develop models of several potential determinants of rhetorical tone and find that economic conditions have a significant effect on how presidents talk about national emergency policies.
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Notes
- 1.
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Many members of the Taliban studied the Deobandi Islam in seminaries, or madrassas, located in Pakistan (Hughes, 2008; Katzman & Thomas, 2017). The madrasas not only provided a religious education that informed the Taliban’s strict interpretation of the Koran, but provided an ideological foundation for young Afghan men that had grown up in refugee camps in Pakistan and had no memory of Afghanistan before the Afghan-Soviet War (Rubin, 1999; Sullivan, 2008).
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This fatwa was entitled “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” and was published in Al-Quds Al-Arabi, a newspaper based in London (Tierney, 2016). This widely distributed religious edict was followed up by a televised interview with CNN in 1997 and an additional fatwa focused on American service members and civilians in February 1998 (Crenshaw, 2001). During this time, bin Laden and the larger al-Qaeda network were being monitored closely by US intelligence agencies, with the CIA already making strides to “disrupt” his burgeoning terrorist network (Crenshaw, 2001).
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This delegation was led by then-US Ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson (Katzman & Thomas, 2017).
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The embassy attacks resulted in the deaths of 224 individuals, 12 of which were American, as well as injuries to thousands more (Crenshaw, 2001; Tierney, 2016). The US responded to these attacks by using cruise missiles to target suspected al-Qaeda training sites in eastern Afghanistan as well as a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan (Crenshaw, 2001; Katzman & Thomas, 2017; Thomas, 2022; Tierney, 2016).
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The national emergency, and its associated sanctions, was enhanced by UN Security Council Resolution 1267 passed on October 15, 1999, which called for multilateral sanctions that restricted air travel for and froze assets of the Taliban unless bin Laden were surrendered immediately (Ghufan, 2001; Katzman & Thomas, 2017).
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The United States may have had multiple chances to assassinate bin Laden, including an alleged sighting in Tarnak Farm, a training camp outside of Kandahar, by an unarmed Predator drone in the fall of 2000 (Katzman & Thomas, 2017).
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In totality, these attacks resulted in more than 3000 deaths and became the most lethal terrorist act on American soil in US history (Bergen, 2023).
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The decision to equate governments harboring terrorists with those who commit terrorist acts led to a foreign policy necessitating regime change to mitigate the threat of terrorism (Katzman & Thomas, 2017).
- 12.
The United States also sought international backing for an aggressive response to the 9/11 attacks, and on September 12, 2001, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1368, which noted that the Council “expresses its readiness to take all necessary steps to respond to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and to combat all forms of terrorism, in accordance with its responsibilities under the Charter of the United Nations,” (Katzman & Thomas, 2017; UNSC, 2001). Despite the absence of an explicit endorsement of retaliation or a reference to Chapter VII of the UN Charter, Resolution 1368 was interpreted as blanket support for military action by the Bush Administration (Katzman & Thomas, 2017).
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Despite the absence of an explicit endorsement of retaliation or a reference to Chapter VII of the UN Charter, Resolution 1368 was interpreted as blanket support for military action by the Bush Administration (Katzman & Thomas, 2017).
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The US-led coalition scored a series of major military victories in November 2001, overtaking the cities of Taloqan, Bamiyan, Herat, and Jalalabad in a matter of weeks, and perhaps most importantly, Kabul on November 12, 2001 (Katzman & Thomas, 2017; Laub & Maizland, 2022). After being cornered in the southeast portion of Afghanistan by coalition forces, Mullah Mohammad Omar fled from Kandahar on December 9, 2001, leaving the city under tribal rule and marking the end of the Taliban regime (Katzman & Thomas, 2017; Laub & Maizland, 2022). American and Afghan forces continued efforts to root out Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters through Operation Anaconda beginning in March 2002 (Katzman & Thomas, 2017; Laub & Maizland, 2022). Only on May 1, 2003, did the United States Declare and end to major combat operations in Afghanistan (Katzman & Thomas, 2017; Laub & Maizland, 2022).
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While the national emergency had been terminated, the United States and its allies maintained a military presence in Afghanistan until the withdrawal of troops on August 31, 2021 (Laub & Maizland, 2022). After the withdrawal, the Taliban quickly reestablished control over Afghanistan and reinstated most of the policies that were in place prior to Operation Enduring Freedom (Maizland, 2023). In response, the Biden Administration once again declared a national emergency toward Afghanistan on February 11, 2022, through Executive Order 14064 (Biden, 2022).
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This data only includes instances when a specific target is identified by the national emergency declaration. Cases in which the target is ambiguous, such as the emergency against the proliferation of WMD, are excluded. For a complete list of declared national emergencies, see Waldman (2023).
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Of the 76 national emergencies declared between 1979 and 2022, all but seven included economic sanctions under the authority of the IEEPA (Waldman, 2023).
- 18.
Yaqub (2021) finds that Trump’s tweets gradually shift from positive to negative sentiment during the pandemic and there is a negative correlation between the sentiment of Trump’s tweets and number of COVID-19 cases.
- 19.
As quoted in Kurtzleben (2017), Tom Rosenstiel, the Executive Director of the American Press Institute, says, “the president is normally encased in a layer of aides and protected, and we know him… at some remove.”
- 20.
For more technical details on the exact mathematical algorithm used for each of the three approaches to measuring tweet sentiments, please see the online documentation for the sentimentr package (Version 2.9.0): https://github.com/trinker/sentimentr.
- 21.
Though we present only the results of the Bayesian multilevel linear regression models in this chapter, we also conduct fitting the models using a variety of model specifications and modeling approaches. In addition to the Bayesian multilevel models shown, we also fit standard linear regressions with fixed effects for both presidential administrations and for targets, as well as standard, frequentist multilevel models. Results in Table 3.2 are robust to different model specifications and are substantively similar regardless of modeling framework. Thus, given Bayesian models’ capability of to better address small sample issues (Hox & McNeish, 2020), we present the Bayesian models results here.
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Ouyang, Y., Morgan, M.A. (2023). Presidential Rhetoric and National Emergencies. In: Talking Tough in U.S. Foreign Policy. The Evolving American Presidency. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39493-5_3
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