I would like to thank Christopher Fettweis for his thoughtful comments and kind words on my book. In the rest of this response, I respond to some of the key points he raises in his review. First, Fettweis notes that “Nixon would have been a more interesting case to explore” because Nixon seems to have engaged in prolonged MIDs to defend reputation and credibility. I agree with Fettweis that Nixon would have been an interesting case. Indeed, when I started this project I wanted to write about Nixon. Nixon’s personality, it can be argued, played a significant role in shaping his foreign policy behavior, and as a result, he could have been a good test case to explore in the book. However, there are at least three important reasons why Nixon might be a problematic case. First, as the book clearly indicates, historians are split in their assessment of Nixon’s self-monitoring. As a result, Nixon cannot be classified as an ideal-type high or low self-monitor. From a research design perspective, the case studies should illuminate the causal mechanisms underlying cases in which the value of the independent variable falls clearly within one category. Second, Nixon’s behavior, even in the realm of foreign policy, revealed some inconsistencies in terms of concerns for reputation for resolve. Furthermore, given Kissinger’s influence over foreign policy during his administration, it is difficult to separate where Kissinger’s ideas ended and Nixon’s began.

Another important point that Fettweis raises is whether concerns for reputation are constant throughout the cases I explore. Indeed, it is the variation in concerns for reputation that I seek to explain in this book. But Fettweis asks whether we should expect all cases to generate a similar level of reputational concerns for decision makers. In the book I deal with this variation in two different ways. First, I argue that in all the Cold War crises, the Soviet Union was the primary outside audience, whereas in the crises in the post–Cold War era, the audiences vary depending on the crisis. I further offer evidence about public opinion and pressure from allies during each of those crises to identify the strength of support for the use of force.

Finally, Fettweis wonders whether I consider President Obama to be a low self-monitor. My answer is that I cannot offer a definitive answer to this question; the classification of leaders is a task that is best assigned to scholars, experts, or at least personal acquaintances who know or have studied the president on and off camera. But even if we were to classify President Obama as a low self-monitor, it does not mean that he would be unable or disinclined to ever modify his behavior in response to social cues. Rather, it is a matter of the degree and frequency with which he chose to do so. Overall, however, I do believe it is worthwhile to extend the analysis to Presidents Obama and Trump and probe whether these two out-of-sample presidents fit the overall pattern I identified in this book.