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The interaction between domestic politics and foreign policy has recently grasped a great deal of scholarly as well as public attention. The existing literature primarily focuses on a host of domestic actors—the president, the legislature, the media, public opinion, interest groups and political parties—and how they connect with the making of foreign policy. This paper introduces a new angle—the impact of electoral cycles on foreign policy. When politicians mull over dramatic foreign policy breakthroughs, they consider how the timing of policy achievements can help their political standing. Of particular importance to the effect of political timing is the election cycle, which presidents and lawmakers strategically consider and yet, cannot arbitrarily change in representative democracies. In this paper, I give special attention to the post–midterm election period in the United States when the sitting president attempts to make a dramatic comeback from a political setback. The three historical case studies involve the U.S. normalization of relations with former adversaries, namely China, Vietnam, and Cuba. The context of American politics provides for a convenient experimental backdrop by which politicians face elections every other year with presidential contests every four years and congressional elections in between. Dealing with such politics of time, this article offers analytical analogies while not necessarily setting out to prove causal mechanisms. This firstcut research attempts to shed a new light on the way election strategy and foreign policy are linked in representative democracies and global communities.
