Knowledge Bank

Who do leaders fight? Grandiose narcissism provides a pathway to understanding how personality can impact a leader’s preferences and subsequently their behavior in foreign policy. More narcissistic leaders will focus their efforts on maintaining their inflated self-image by selecting how they will fight on the world stage and who they will fight against. While most leaders will divert attention to easier won battles, more narcissistic leaders will prefer to fight against high status states by themselves. This paper introduces a new measure of United States' presidential narcissism, and finds support for the argument that more narcissistic United States presidents prefer fighting without allies against great powers relative to other international disputes using data from the 1897-2008 period. The case of Operation Giant Lance is used to illustrate causal mechanisms.