An illuminating, empirically grounded collection of essays by leading scholars of U.S. foreign policy decision making, Checking the Costs of War investigates the ability of domestic actors to constrain the war-making powers of the president. The central question is whether, as the editors Sarah E. Kreps and Douglas L. Kriner put it, “changes in the political and institutional environment since 9/11 have weakened, strengthened, or conditionally influences” those “best positioned to push back against presidential overreach,” namely Congress, public opinion, and the federal bureaucracy (p. 15). Each chapter then considers whether and how the resurgence of the theory of a unitary executive has interacted with the military’s ability to mask the costs of war by relying on drone strikes and with rising polarization among political elites and the public to shape these checks on the president’s foreign policy, post-2001. (The media, advocacy groups, and social movements as sources of accountability are mentioned solely in passing.)

The volume advances scholarship at the intersection of U.S. domestic politics and international relations—a literature that has been overshadowed by the vast body of work which employs theories of state behavior based on a unitary actor assumption or, in the case of the United States, claims an imperial presidency. For experts in U.S. foreign policy decision making, Checking the Costs of War is a must-read, as each chapter pushes the boundaries of current knowledge about how actors at home operate in an evolving domestic political context to shape the executive’s actions abroad. The volume, however, deserves an even wider audience. In addition to providing cutting-edge (and cross-national) analyses, the authors situate their contributions in relevant existing literature (e.g., on elite framing, the public’s casualty sensitivity, civil–military relations, and organizational behavior), making the book both a primer on the potential domestic determinants of foreign policy among democracies and an important step toward greater synthesis across research programs. Taking this work seriously will make projects on current or future U.S. foreign policy not only richer but also arguably more accurate.

What does Checking the Costs of War reveal about whether domestic actors hold U.S. presidents accountable for their foreign policy decisions in the post-September 11 political environment? While members of Congress have access to institutional mechanisms, as well as the bully pulpit, to shape the executive’s will and its ability to deploy U.S. forces, the conventional wisdom is that bipartisan pushback against imprudent foreign policies has eroded as political polarization has intensified. As a result, in a unified government, the Congressional majority merely rubberstamps White House initiatives. (Or so the theory goes.) Yet, Kreps and Kriner find that ideology can trump partisanship. For instance, hawkish Republicans spoke in favor of the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, while dovish Democrats members criticized these deployments—regardless of whether the president was a co-partisan. In the third chapter, Jordan Tama further demonstrates that “cross-partisanship” (i.e., when more than 10% of a party’s members in Congress vote against the party’s dominant position) and “anti-presidential bipartisanship” (i.e., when majorities of both parties in Congress vote against the president) remain common in matters of foreign policy relative to domestic political issues. Bipartisan attempts to check the president’s use of the military via formal legislative tools also have not declined since 2001, despite the rise in polarization. Christopher Dictus and Philip B. K. Potter (Chapter 5) find that presidents focus on foreign policy after losing control of Congress in midterm elections, when executive action becomes the primary tool available to enact their agendas, and avoid foreign policy when seeking reelection. This pattern of waxing and waning presidential attention to international issues points to windows of opportunity for Congress to shape U.S. actions abroad. Although this dynamic is not explored by the authors, Congressional opponents can extract private concessions on foreign policy when a president prefers to focus voters on the administration’s domestic policy wins. But then, they can organize a chorus of legislative opposition to the president’s actions abroad after their party has flipped seats in the midterms or simply outperformed expectations.

At the same time, Benjamin O. Fordham (Chapter 4) identifies overlooked disincentives for Congress to push back on White House foreign policy. He demonstrates that early opposition to a war does not reap greater rewards at the ballot box when the mission later proves unpopular. As a result, if Congressional nay-sayers worry that they will not benefit electorally from an early stand against a foreign policy failure and thus avoid or temper criticism, we can expect less rigorous legislative scrutiny of (and thus public debate around) potential major U.S. military interventions. Moreover, the novel analyses of public opinion carried out by Jessica D. Blankshain and Lindsay P. Cohn (Chapter 6), Aaron Childree et al. (Chapter 7), and Krebs and Robert Ralston (Chapter 8) together suggest that, even when U.S. uses of military force are politically salient and unpopular among elements of the electorate (e.g., with women and nondominant racial and ethnic groups), it remains unclear whether and how such attitudes actually translate into limits on executive decision making and foreign policy outcomes. These critical chapters invite further investigation of the conditions under which public opinion—either independent of or interacting with elite cues—can hold the commander-in-chief to account. Indeed, in the conclusion, the editors help to fill this gap by teasing out the effect of an increasingly isolationist public on Congress and on presidential foreign policy post September 11.

The most counterintuitive, yet recurrent obstacle for a wartime president is the executive bureaucracy. As Andrew Rudalevige effectively argues in Chapter 9, the bureaucracy’s size and fragmentation, its access to specialized information (particularly in national security matters), its divergent goals internally and with the president, and its standard operating procedures can result in a misalignment between executive branch practices and White House preferences. In the following chapter, Rebecca Ingber questions whether a bureaucratic process that can stymie the president’s policy agenda is evidence of a “deep state,” as posited by far-right narratives that claim a cabal of unelected elites who secretly control the government. To assess the legality of the executive bureaucracy’s actions in response to undemocratic presidential efforts, she conducts an in-depth analysis of the insurrection on January 6, 2021. The author debunks the deep state narrative by demonstrating that members of the executive branch checked President Donald Trump’s unlawful power grab through the discretionary use of their formal authority and by adhering to the chain of command. That said, Ingber cautions that, while the bureaucracy can constrain individual presidents, the executive branch works to expand and entrench the power of the presidency, often through the use of the courts. She predicts a future in which members of Congress on both sides of the aisle struggle to hold presidents accountable for foreign policy failures.

While Checking the Costs of War was published on the eve of Trump’s second term, one must now view its conclusions through the lens of the president’s agenda upon returning to office. It may be a perverse confirmation of its findings that a president committed to consolidating power has eliminated, weakened, or reshaped the very institutions, processes, and attitudes identified by the authors as potential bulwarks against an executive with unfettered war powers. The fact that these efforts have been both condemned and celebrated, however, highlights a central challenge addressed only piecemeal by the volume—namely, identifying the nature of “accountability.” The authors largely evaluate sources of opposition to or constraints on presidential uses of military force. But, the concept of accountability is normative, suggesting efforts to counter inappropriate uses of presidential authority, including actions viewed as illiberal, immoral, and/or imprudent. Accountability itself is in the eye of the beholder. Consider, for instance, whether it is a failure of accountability when a majority of Congress, the public, and the executive bureaucracy support and/or enable a president who violates international law, undermines traditional American values in foreign policy, and pursues what experts deem reckless gambits abroad. It depends in part on one’s partisan affiliation and in part on one’s views about democracy and the appropriate applications of military force. A deeper engagement with the concept of accountability may have prompted the authors to consider more systematically not just the inability, but also the unwillingness of many U.S. domestic actors to “check” presidential foreign policy in a second Trump administration, and to explore the implications of this new reality for the United States’ role in the world.