Mara Karlin
Elizabeth Saunders’s The Insiders’ Game offers a rich perspective regarding how legislators, military leaders, and high-ranking civilian officials shape national security decision-making. Elizabeth Saunders’s recent book, The Insiders’ Game, offers a positive contribution to the literature on war-making. By exploring the role of democratic elites in shaping major decisions regarding war and peace—including the approach, the parameters, and the length of a conflict—Saunders underscores that more people are at the decision-making table than readers may have previously considered. She focuses on three groups—legislators, military leaders, and high-ranking civilian officials—and the book is particularly useful in outlining how and in what ways these cohorts shape decision-making by imposing resource or informational costs on leaders. Although Saunders’s book provides a broad and rich view of multiple cases, her book is particularly illuminating in how it treats these dynamics during the formation of US policy toward Lebanon in the 1980s, and in comparing different administrations’ approaches to strategy during America’s post-9/11 wars.1
How Insiders Shaped a Fuzzy Mission in Lebanon. The calamitous national security decision-making that characterized President Ronald Reagan’s approach to Lebanon in 1982–84 has been well recounted. Saunders’s book provides clarity about the impact of this dysfunctional process; as she compellingly argues, the elite debates in Reagan’s administration ultimately constrained the US mission in Lebanon.
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