Defence and unilateral action define US cybersecurity

Significance A recent analysis identified 96 pieces of cybersecurity legislation in the House of Representatives and 61 in the Senate as of December 2021. However, the federal government is moving slowly on changing regulation to boost cybersecurity of critical infrastructure. Impacts Bills to promote the development of the cybersecurity workforce enjoy broad bipartisan support, and are more likely to pass. Cryptocurrency traders should expect more oversight and regulation, especially on transparency requirements and anti-money laundering. Mandatory reporting requirements for ransomware and other types of cyberattacks are likely to be passed eventually. Critical infrastructure firms will face the greatest obligations to inform the government about their cybersecurity.

Energy versus safety: unilateral action, voter welfare, and executive accountability

Does increasing executive power necessarily decrease accountability? To answer this question, I develop a two-period signaling model comparing voter welfare in two separation-of-powers settings. In one, the executive works with a median legislator to change policy; in the other, the executive chooses between legislation or unilateral action. Both politicians may have preferences that diverge from the voter's, yet I find that increasing executive power may increase accountability and welfare, even in some cases when the legislator is more likely to share the voter's preferences than the executive. Unilateral power allows a congruent executive to overcome gridlock, implement the voter's preferred policy, and reveal information about the politicians’ types—which can outweigh the risks of a divergent executive wielding power for partisan ends.

Policy Durability, Agency Capacity, and Executive Unilateralism

In this essay I argue that the need to motivate bureaucrats to invest in high quality policy implementation alters the appeal of executive unilateralism. If executive orders are less durable than legislation, then the bureaucracy will have weaker incentives to invest in policymaking. This affects presidents’ willingness to compromise and work with Congress to pass legislation, rather than pursue unilateral action. Unilateralism becomes less attractive as bureaucratic capacity increases and as the relative durability of executive orders decreases. I formalize this logic in a simple formal model and discuss fruitful extensions for future work.

1920–1922

The sub-chapter summarises military and political developments in the eastern Mediterranean in 1920–1922, beginning with the decision to formally occupy Istanbul, which expanded Allied responsibilities while leading to the emergence of a rival Turkish national assembly in Ankara. It assesses Greece’s successive offensives into Anatolia, which ended in defeat and the loss of Izmir to Turkish national forces in September 1922. It further examines the impact of the Bolshevik victory in the Russian civil war on Britain’s position in the Caucasus and Istanbul, and the changing relationship between the Allies and Greece following the Royalist victory there. The chapter shows how Britain took unilateral action to redefine its position in Egypt after failed negotiations with nationalist representatives. Finally, it shows how confrontation with Greece and nationalist Turkey in the vicinity of Istanbul forced the British government to accept a revision of the peace treaty they had forced on the region.

Domestic Provision of Global Public Goods: How Other Countries’ Behavior Affects Public Support for Climate Policy

When considering public support for domestic policies that contribute to a global public good, such as climate change mitigation, the behavior of other countries is commonly regarded as pivotal. Using survey experiments in China and the United States we find that other countries’ behavior matters for public opinion, but in a contingent manner. When citizens learn that other countries decrease their emissions, this leads to support for further domestic action. Yet, support for reciprocal behavior is not a necessary consequence of other countries increasing their emissions. Responding in-kind to emissions increases abroad depends upon the home country’s past behavior and who the other country is. Our results imply that the international context remains important, despite global climate policy now relying more on unilateral action and polycentric governance. They also show, however, that we need to pay greater attention to contingent effects of countries’ positive and negative behavior in this area.

EU-UK Northern Ireland deal is only a temporary fix

Significance The extension permits retailers in Northern Ireland to continue importing products such as mince, sausages and pies from Great Britain until September 30. It is designed to ease implementation of the Northern Ireland protocol (NIP) at a time of heightened tension between the EU and United Kingdom over Northern Ireland. Impacts London could announce further unilateral action concerning the NIP before the parliamentary recess on July 22. Future unilateral action by the UK government in relation to the NIP’s implementation risks undermining the EU-UK trade deal. Though unlikely, early elections in Northern Ireland this year would further complicate the implementation of the protocol.

Assessing the Trump Presidency on Its Own Terms

Some scholars have judged the Trump presidency to be an ineffective failure by applying theories of presidential power derived from the research of Richard Neustadt, who emphasized the need for presidents to master the task of bargaining with other stakeholders in the American political system to overcome what he saw as the limited potency of unilateral action. Such an approach, however, fails to account for two important considerations: (1) whether Trump’s goals in office were similar to those of other presidents, and (2) whether the Trump presidency was instead organized around the principles of unitary executive theory, an increasingly popular conception of the presidency in conservative intellectual circles. Viewing the Trump presidency through this alternative lens emphasizes its successes in gaining political control over elements of the executive branch bureaucracy and resisting institutional checks by Congress, raising serious questions about whether Trump was indeed often effective in realizing his goals—and whether future presidents will follow in the same path.

“Dear John”

This chapter presents a new data set of more than two hundred executive orders never signed by the president. However that is interpreted — as good management or as gridlock — something that could have been done “with the stroke of a pen” was not. Here, too, quantitative and archival analysis pair to help us understand why. The results highlight the fact that unilateral action has costs, which at some point outweigh the benefits. Those costs may be rung up in Congress, or the courts, or by public opinion. But as the exploration here shows, they may also be imposed by the executive branch.

The Nature and Use of Unilateral Executive Measures

Constitutions and constitutional constructs offer executives a repository of fuzzy sources of power which enable unilateral action. This chapter focuses on one of these forms: executive making of (semi)-formal unilateral measures. These orders and edicts have an important edge: on their face, they are ‘lawlike’, and seemingly carry the imprimatur of binding law, even when their legal status is fuzzy. The chapter uses comparative methodology in order to show the strong similarity between such measures as they emerged and continue to be applied in the two systems compared in this book. Orders in Council, Executive Orders and the like, such as the ones brought before the courts in Bancoult and Youngstown, have been at the focus of extensive study; yet to date, such measures, issued in both systems, have never been conjointly discussed. This chapter offers the first comparative analysis. This novel comparative exercise leads to the discovery of a surprising convergence—surprising, if attention is focused on structural regime elements. The findings support two of the main themes advanced in this book: that the emergence and retention of fuzzy legality is an unavoidable feature of the state, despite the ingrained danger it poses to the proper functioning of democracies. A third theme, concerned with the need to constrain fuzziness by robust judicial oversight, is addressed in the last chapter of this book. This chapter also offers new insights on the unclear distinction between constitutional- and statute-derived fuzziness, again, a feature shared by both systems.

Selfless Intervention

This chapter fleshes out how unilateral, ‘extraterritorial’ action could be justifiable. The starting point of the analysis is that, in light of institutional failures to protect common interests adequately, unilateral action may at times be necessary to dispense global corrective justice. The author ascertains whether there is such a thing as an ‘international community’, and whether individual states rather than international institutions can be entrusted with ‘selfless’ jurisdictional powers. While acknowledging the risk of self-serving behaviour, the author is inclined to support benevolent unilateralism as the alternative—no action—may be worse. He argues that the justification of such unilateralism should be sought in a reinterpretation of the notion of sovereignty, as well as in the substantive values supposedly furthered by unilateral action.