Reconsiderations: Schweller's Deadly Imbalances

Introductory note:  
Randall Schweller's name is well known to those familiar with international-relations theory.  Schweller's first book, Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler's Strategy of World Conquest (1998), was based on his Columbia University dissertation.  His second book, Unanswered Threats (2006), also dealt with balance-of-power issues, focusing on instances of so-called underbalancing.  As mentioned before on this blog, in recent years Schweller's attitude toward the conventional versions of Realist international-relations theory has become much more critical (see his 2014 book Maxwell's Demon and the Golden Apple).  In this guest post, Peter T. looks back at Schweller's first book Deadly Imbalances, offering some thoughts on the book and on the enduring problem of the relation between theory and history.  I have added one sentence in brackets. -- LFC

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Schweller's theoretical argument starts from Waltz's classic Theory of International Politics (1979).  Schweller acknowledges the validity of criticisms that Waltz's theory, modelled explicitly on economic theories of the market, is "too abstract to generate useful hypotheses about specific foreign-policy behaviour."  By adding a number of other factors Schweller hopes to bring theory into a closer approximation to reality.  [By contrast, Waltz's view is that, within certain limits, a theory's "[e]xplanatory power...is gained by moving away from 'reality,' not by staying close to it." (Theory, p.7)]

The argument of Deadly Imbalances centers on the lead-up to and conduct of World War II.  Schweller argues that in the late 1930s, the world was effectively tripolar, with the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Germany the central players.  This requires that Schweller establish a more nuanced hierarchy among states than a simple division into Great Powers and others.  So from the classic IR world we go to a world of Poles, Lesser Great Powers, middle powers, and others.  Further, states are no longer simply status quo or revisionist in their aims, but status quo, revisionist or neutral (the U.S. up to 1941).  Revisionist powers can have limited or unlimited aims, and states' strategic choices are not just about balancing but also buck-passing, band-wagoning, binding, distancing or engagement.

Not all these strategies are realistic options for all states, but each state has sufficient choice that, in combination with their power status and aims, there are a myriad of potential outcomes.  And this is the problem with the approach: as Schweller adds new factors his theoretical base becomes less like an explanation and more like a description.  And, as the book proceeds, the theory gives way to what looks very like old-fashioned diplomatic-military history.  It is a long way, for instance, from calculations about the overall balance of power to Hitler's belief that shipping constraints would prevent effective U.S. intervention in the European war.

In this way the book falls between two stools.  The theory illuminates very little of the complex forces at play, while the exploration of the detail draws almost entirely on secondary sources and has dated rapidly.

A second issue is that Schweller's theory, like Waltz's, assumes that states have a clear and relatively accurate view of their own and others' power. Schweller goes into some detail on the strengths of the various Poles and Lesser Great Powers, using the Correlates of War (COW) project estimates of power.  For the period, these are a composite of industrial production, population, and military strength.  Yet, as Schweller details, all states made major errors in estimating their own and other's power.  And all considered not just these factors but many others -- national morale and political cohesion, geographic position, financial resources, allies and sympathisers, operational proficiency, military technology and more.

As an instance, the COW rankings put Great Britain well behind Germany in the '30s.  Yet Great Britain had an overwhelming advantage at sea, the backing of the dominions (most of whom disposed of considerable military and industrial resources), its position as the second financial centre of world trade, and the manpower and other resources of India.  Moreover, Great Britain's economy was more advanced than that of Germany (with its still large agricultural sector) and, of course, Britain had the advantage of being an island with free access to the Atlantic.  Britain worried about the German army and air force; Germany worried about British financial pressure, grip on overseas trade, ability to call on colonial and imperial resources and on U.S. support.  Germany had an immediate superiority, Britain an ultimate one.  These are not commensurate capabilities, to be summed into two numbers and compared.

Again, Germany's attack on the Soviet Union was predicated on the certainty that German operational proficiency and Soviet political weakness would more than compensate for superior Soviet numbers, the effects of distance, and German logistic shortfalls.  Soviet calculations were, of course, in the reverse direction.

The inability to exactly define or measure power is a central problem for IR theories.  A major reason that wars happen, as Geoffrey Blainey (in The Causes of War) pointed out, is that states are uncertain of their relative power.  Clausewitz likened battle to cash settlement in commerce -- the moment when true credit-worthiness is tested and revealed.  Likewise, war usually provides a moment of clarity about relative power.  In the absence of a recent test, all parties are left to manoeuvre in uncertainty.

And this uncertainty extends to defining who are the major players.  In the '30s the U.S. preponderance of industrial and financial power was widely acknowledged.  Yet how this translated into international influence given U.S. isolationism, its distance from Europe, and the small size of its army left a lot of room for error.  In some areas the U.S. was a major force, in others a minor player.  The same could be said of the Soviet Union, China, Japan and Italy.  It is this zone of uncertainty that gives rise to alterations in the ranks of the Great Powers -- the sources of their strength go unrecognised until revealed in some contest, rendering previous calculations and strategies moot.

So Schweller's Deadly Imbalances is an interesting, and not unrewarding, read. Its strength is his willingness to engage with the detail; its weakness the inability of abstract theory to explain that detail in any convincing way.  It is a general weakness of grand theory in this area of study.

-- Peter T.

Symposium on great-power retrenchment

The current symposium at ISQ Online is about the politics of great-power retrenchment.  The article that is the basis for the discussion has been ungated and can be read (and/or downloaded) here. (I've read neither the symposium nor the article; just passing this along for now.)

The U.S.-Russia war chatter

The amount of chatter about the possibility of a war between the U.S./NATO and Russia increased over this summer.  For one thing, there was a cover piece in The National Interest on the topic; I bought the issue in hard copy, rather predictably I barely glanced at it, and now (even more predictably) I am not sure where the copy of the issue is (yes, I could find it, assuming I didn't throw it out, but it's apparently not in one of the piles on the floor any more).

Just now I glanced at a piece in Vox (h/t) from this past June by Max Fisher summarizing the alarm bells that various experts have been ringing.  The most telling point, based on my skim, appears to be that Putin has lowered the threshold for nuclear use in Russia's official nuclear doctrine.  The official position now is that Russia will use nuclear weapons if a conventional conflict poses an "existential" threat to it; that's what I took from the Vox piece.  The implication is that certain influential Russian strategists, and maybe Putin himself, now think a "limited" nuclear war is possible and "winnable."  As far as I'm aware, no serious strategist in the West has entertained this ludicrous notion since the mid-1950s.  

One can probably see (or at least this is my view) that maintenance of tactical or 'battlefield' nuclear weapons makes no sense for countries that don't see a limited nuclear war as a realistic possibility, i.e., that think any nuclear exchange will likely escalate.  That's one of the reasons why it's pointless and a waste of money for the U.S. to still have 200 'tactical' nuclear weapons (gravity bombs) deployed in Europe.  These weapons have no purpose, nor much of a deterrent effect, unless one thinks that a limited nuclear exchange will stay limited, which Western strategists, as far as I'm aware, don't.

However, recent official statements emanating from Russia suggest that Putin might have adopted the belief that a limited nuclear exchange could stay limited, or even that use of a 'tactical' nuclear weapon would not draw a nuclear response (or a conventional response of high intensity).  Or maybe Putin just wants people to think he believes this.  Yeah, that Putin.  Crazy like a fox.

Insular v. continental states, and their 'near abroads'

...one can distinguish between insular and continental states. An insular state is the only great power on a large body of land that is surrounded on all sides by water.... The United Kingdom and Japan are obvious examples of insular states, since each occupies a large island by itself. The United States is also an insular power, because it is the only great power in the Western Hemisphere. A continental state, on the other hand, is a great power located on a large body of land that is also occupied by one or more other great powers. France, Germany, and Russia are obvious examples of continental states.

-- J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p.126

Recalling (for some reason) the above -- and putting aside for the time being the point that BraziI might not agree that the U.S. is the only great power in the Western Hemisphere -- I made this comment at Crooked Timber (slightly edited here):

It’s bad luck in a way for Russia, I suppose, that it’s a continental state, so when it acts improperly/illegally/thuggishly (pick your word) in its neighborhood the repercussions are felt by many countries and to some extent across Europe. Whereas, e.g., when the U.S. went into Panama in ’89 and toppled Noriega, the repercussions were not felt as widely, partly because of the U.S.’s insular location (and Panama's location). It may not be ‘fair,’ but geography matters — not to the (moral/legal) equities but in practical terms.

ETA: Before someone mentions e.g. Japan and the '30s, I should say I probably should have given this post a narrower title: "Russia and the U.S., and their 'near abroads'."

Book review: Winning the War on War

Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Dutton, 2011. 385 pp.

"The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party." -- William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1910)

"What dramatic vision of hell can compete with the events of twentieth-century war?" -- C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959), p.17

Introduction

War is on the decline: in particular, the years since the end of the Cold War, although obviously not free from deadly conflict, have been less violent than the years that came before. A main purpose of Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War (hereafter WWW) is to convey this message to a broad audience. The book also aims to persuade readers that peacekeeping, through the UN and other organizations, is succeeding and deserves much more financial and political support.

This review will not cover all the elements of the book; rather, I will summarize several of its main points and then offer some thoughts on why the decline in armed conflict has happened, focusing on certain historical aspects of the question. While agreeing with Prof. Goldstein that the decline in conflict is not irreversible, I will suggest (unoriginally) that future large-scale interstate war, or so-called hegemonic war, is very unlikely, for reasons that have partly to do with the impact and consequences of the twentieth century’s world wars. As the word "partly" suggests, I acknowledge at the outset that this explanation for the decline of conflict, and of interstate war in particular, is not a full one. Although the fact of the decline in conflict is clear, the reasons for it will remain an area of disagreement among scholars and other observers.

A related point of disagreement is whether to view the twentieth century as a uniquely violent era. Writing in 2002, Mark Mazower observed that "the twentieth century is increasingly characterized by scholars in terms of its historically unprecedented levels of bloodshed." ("Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century" (review essay), American Historical Review, v.107, no.4) However, it is clear that certain parts of the century were considerably worse than others. After comparing the twentieth to previous centuries, Goldstein concludes that "the twentieth century may indeed have been the bloodiest relative to population but is not really much different in character than earlier ‘bad’ centuries" (WWW, p.37). The twentieth century’s bloodshed, however, is arguably somewhat fresher in the collective memory than that of previous centuries, which may be significant.

Peacekeeping and the Decline of War

Winning the War on War begins with the story of the one occasion on which its author personally witnessed gunfire in a war zone: Beirut, 1980. Residents of the city, Goldstein observes, managed to live relatively normal lives in the midst of a low-level civil conflict. This story immediately engages the reader’s interest and is also a way to introduce the basic point that war exists on a scale, or a continuum, of destructiveness.

Interstate wars, in which two or more countries’ regular armies fight each other, are usually more destructive than civil wars, and the decline in interstate wars is the main reason that "battle-related deaths" – i.e., violent deaths that occur during armed conflicts -- have fallen over the last several decades. Such deaths averaged more than 200,000 a year during the 1980s, whereas from 2000 to 2008 they were on the order of 55,000 a year (WWW, p.238). Looking at longer periods, there were roughly 215,000 average annual battle deaths from 1970 to 1989, and this came down to an average of 75,000 annually from 1990 to 2009 (p.16). Furthermore: "More wars are ending than beginning, once ended they are less likely to restart, and the remaining wars are more localized than in the past" (p.4). On the other hand, military spending has not seen correspondingly sharp reductions (p.19), and "the problem of civil wars may remain in some fundamental way unsolved" (p.247).

While acknowledging multiple causes of the decline in conflict (see further discussion below), Goldstein takes peacekeeping as the "central thread" (p.44) in his account. He gives a history of UN peace operations from the days of their founder, Ralph Bunche, to the secretary-generalship of Kofi Annan and into the present. A key early moment was the 1956 Suez crisis, which resulted in the deployment of the first armed peacekeeping force. Since then, peacekeeping missions have become increasingly "multidimensional," involving not just observing or enforcing cease-fires but a range of other tasks, from disarming and demobilizing combatants to, in a few cases, temporarily running a government. There are 150,000 peacekeepers (about 100,000 UN and 50,000 non-UN) currently deployed at the relatively low cost of $8 billion a year (pp.308-9).

Although some peacekeeping missions have succeeded while others have failed -- and the failures, such as Bosnia or Rwanda, perhaps have tended to linger in the public memory longer than the successes, such as Sierra Leone or Namibia or (in a more qualified way) Cambodia – on the whole peacekeeping missions significantly reduce the chances that war will restart after a cease-fire (pp.105ff., citing the work of Page Fortna, Paul Collier, and Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis). As one would expect, the more peacekeepers there are relative to a country’s population the more likely it is the mission will succeed (at least eventually), as is evident from a comparison of the mission in Sierra Leone (which ended in 2005) with the ongoing mission in Dem. Rep. of Congo. Each mission had roughly the same number of peacekeepers, but Congo has ten times Sierra Leone’s population (p.176). Indeed, the number of peacekeepers in Congo (now roughly 17,000) has been absurdly inadequate given the country’s size. That is not the only reason for the shortcomings of the Congo mission but it is a significant one.

The revival of an active UN role in resolving difficult armed conflicts dates from the late 1980s, when a confluence of developments, including Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’, enabled the Security Council to pass Res. 598, demanding an immediate cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq war, then in its seventh year. A good deal of credit for this revival belongs to then-Sec. Gen. Pérez de Cuéllar, who at an informal meeting on Jan. 16, 1987 -- 25 years ago to the day -- prodded the representatives of the permanent members of the Security Council to act on the Iran-Iraq war. Goldstein’s account of this period draws on Giandomenico Picco’s 1999 memoir Man without a Gun. (To supplement it, see Cameron R. Hume, The United Nations, Iran, and Iraq: How Peacemaking Changed, reviewed in: Paul Lewis, "Rise of the Blue Helmets," N.Y. Times Book Review, Nov. 6, 1994. I have taken the detail about the Jan. 16, 1987 meeting hosted by Pérez de Cuéllar from Lewis; he calls it a "tea party," a phrase which now has other overtones.)

Winning the War on War contains not just description and analysis but also prescription. The peace movement, Goldstein argues, should focus directly on supporting efforts that contribute to the decline of conflict rather than following Pope Paul VI’s maxim "If you want peace, work for justice" (p.208). While peace is "almost always a necessary step" toward "prosperity, human rights, and social justice" (p.77; cf. p.169), peace should be treated as an independent goal and the peace movement should pay much more attention to strengthening institutions like the UN, Goldstein maintains. He argues that targeting "big corporations, oil companies, and globalization," as some in the peace movement do, is not an effective way to advance peace (p.208); however, given what he writes about the causes of civil wars, pressing for more economic assistance to poor countries might very well be (see pp.293, 307).

Causality and Learning

What is responsible for the decline in war? A number of plausible causes suggest themselves. Goldstein mentions a 2007 article by Louis Kriesberg that "identifies eight 'peace factors'…underlying the decline in wars…since 1990: the end of the Cold War; the dominance of U.S. power; the economic benefits of globalization (which war would disrupt); spreading norms about peace and human rights; spreading democracy; the proliferation of NGOs; the increased participation of women in politics; and the growing field of conflict resolution" (p.15). Later in the book he mentions the combination of factors identified by the 'democratic peace' theorists Bruce Russett and John Oneal: "democracy, economic interdependence, and...the development of international organizations, including the UN" (p.278). Thus for Goldstein the downward trend in war has "multiple causes, not easily untangled" (p.44) but, as already seen, he gives the UN and peacekeeping pride of place among the contributing causes. (See e.g. p.278, where he writes that the development of international organizations is the "most important, in my view" of the various factors.)

To say that the UN, and international organization more generally, is the most important cause of the decline in conflict raises the question: what "caused" the UN? I don’t mean what caused the UN in a proximate historical or ideological sense, a subject on which historians disagree. Rather: What if the UN, as it eventually came to function, is an institutional consequence of a process of learning from experience?

Goldstein writes (p.42):

Several possible causes [of the decline in war] come to mind. First is the notion that civilization has evolved over the long course of human history in a way that has gradually strengthened norms of behavior that discourage violence. Later in the book I will discuss evidence that changing norms have reduced barbarity in general, from torture and slavery to capital punishment, while building up an idea of human rights and the responsibility of governments to their people. As part of this process, war has gone from a standard and even attractive policy option to a last resort, at least in political rhetoric. One trouble with this explanation is that it would predict a gradual diminishing of war over the centuries, whereas instead we have found a long series of ups and downs culminating in the horrific World Wars.

Of course it is true that the twentieth-century world wars, and all the associated horrors, make it extremely difficult to tell a convincing story about linear normative progress from pre-history to the present. But it seems highly likely that the twentieth-century world wars themselves had an impact on subsequent normative and institutional development and on basic assumptions about war (a point Goldstein acknowledges but does not, in my opinion, emphasize enough). Thus, although an "evolving norms" or "learning" explanation does not work well for "the long course of human history," it may nonetheless help to explain the war-and-peace trajectory of the last century or so. (This in turn raises the question of why at least some human groups appear to have learned from the twentieth-century world wars, and from mass killings not connected with the world wars, what they failed to learn from earlier conflicts -- a question that might require an entire book to answer and so will be left to one side here.)

Consider the impact of the First World War, "a catastrophe of unbelievable horror, suffering, and destruction," in P. Kennedy’s words, in which armies suffered enormous casualties quite often for no good strategic or other reason. (Revisionist historians might disagree with this statement; so be it.) Goldstein remarks that "the senseless slaughter [of World War I] swung public opinion in the West against the idea of war as a good in itself" (WWW, p.224), but this statement is buried in the middle of the book and is not given much emphasis in the discussion of causality.

It took a while for revulsion about the 1914-18 war to set in fully, but once it had done so, World War I "permanently discredited major war both as an appealing activity and as a potentially profitable instrument of national policy" in the view of many "in the developed world" (John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, p.30). (One might qualify this statement inasmuch as reactions to the war were somewhat different in France, e.g., than in Germany.)

Mueller also argues that the experience of WW1 persuaded most "normal" political leaders, including those of Britain and France, that another major war on that scale was almost inconceivable. They were aware of Hitler's bellicose statements in Mein Kampf and elsewhere but could not take them seriously. As Mueller observes (Retreat from Doomsday, p.69):

…Hitler’s opponents in Europe were horrified by the experience of the Great War and appalled by the prospect of going through anything like that again. They had concluded that only a monster or a lunatic could want, or even want to risk, another Great War, and they paid Hitler the undue compliment of assuming that he did not fall into those categories…. There was thus broad consensus – shared even by the curmudgeonly Winston Churchill, then out of office – that great efforts should be expended to reach a general peaceful settlement of any remaining grievances in Europe.

Similarly, referring to the British and French "decision to abandon Czechoslovakia [at the Munich conference] in September 1938," James Joll wrote: "Above all it was the result of an intense desire for peace, a deep horror aroused by memories of the First World War and a reluctance to believe that Hitler actually envisaged war as a means of attaining his ends." (Europe Since 1870, p.373)

And a final quotation, from William Rock:

… [for the British] the historical lesson of the First World War was clearly writ: the total nature of that great struggle had rendered war in its traditional role as senseless beyond contemplation. It was not that the whole nation had converted to philosophical pacifism, for only a wing of the Labour party had taken that route…. It was simply a poignant realization of the terrible destruction wrought by modern war; a keen appreciation that its costs vastly exceeded any benefits which might accrue to a prospective victor, in name only; a plain recognition that Europe had reached a stage of moral development where war must be considered a barbarity incompatible with civilized life…. War, in short, had emerged in the British mind as the ultimate evil. Nothing would justify another one.

(Rock, British Appeasement in the 1930s, p.41, as quoted in Randall L. Schweller, “The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-39: Why a Concert Didn’t Arise,” in Elman and Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries, p.202)

Granted, there were increasing divisions in the British elite, as the 1930s progressed, about what policy to adopt toward Hitler; many bitter memoirs were later written about those divisions. But this doesn’t invalidate the points made in the passages quoted above.

Thus, the conviction, shared by many, that World War I had rendered great-power war illegitimate as a tool of statecraft (see Schweller, op. cit., pp. 200ff.) was an important moment in normative evolution.[1] Tragically, it took another great-power war, bringing with it more and indeed almost unimaginable horrors, before that conviction became widespread enough to have a significant influence on the behavior of the great powers as a group.

This argument should be distinguished from that of a commenter here a few years ago who suggested, in the comments thread to this post, that "the modern reduction in violence…reflect[s] a sort of hangover from the two World Wars and their grisly and prolonged aftermath (Korea, Vietnam, de-colonization, etc.)." A hangover, of course, is a very temporary phenomenon; by contrast, the ‘learning’ from the two world wars and subsequent conflicts has become institutionalized in various ways (peacekeeping being, of course, an important one).

Finally, it’s possible that some may view the preceding discussion as too Eurocentric or 'Western' in its emphasis, and too focused on the great powers. Perhaps it is. However, the decline in armed conflict, whatever its causes, is a global phenomenon, one that is definitely not confined to Europe and North America, and thus to draw attention to it cannot be seen as furthering a Eurocentric perspective on the world. (I’m sure Goldstein, who pays considerable attention to Africa in WWW, would agree.)

Conclusion

When one thinks of the armed violence still blighting some parts of the planet, it may seem hard to believe that the world is becoming more peaceful. But it is.

Winning the War on War describes this development while also offering a thorough analysis of peacekeeping and peace movements, along with prescriptions for strengthening them. Goldstein's proposals include a standing UN rapid deployment force with troop contributions from the permanent members of the Security Council. (This latter element is unlikely to happen, since most of the major powers have never shown much or any inclination to put their forces under UN command, although the UN Charter envisaged this.) The author’s feel for data is put to persuasive use, e.g. in ch. 10 ("Three Myths"), and the book manages to address four different audiences: general readers (especially in the U.S.), peace activists, students, and scholars.

In addition to presenting a lot of information and the findings of the relevant scholarly work (interspersed with personal stories), Goldstein is not shy about stating his own views. His attitude of hard-headed optimism is congruent with what might be called, with a bow to the late John Herz, a sort of realist liberalism. Even someone in general sympathy with the book's argument will not agree with every single statement in it; at least, I do not (e.g., was Fidel Castro's endorsement of the Tobin tax really a "kiss of death"? - p.312). The main thing, however, is the book's basic message, which is solid and well supported and deserves a wide hearing.

Footnote

1. How the much-maligned Kellogg-Briand Pact fits in here, or doesn’t, would have to be the subject of a separate post.

References mentioned/cited in this post

James Joll, Europe since 1870. Harper & Row, 1973.

Paul Kennedy, "In the Shadow of the Great War," New York Review of Books, Aug. 12, 1999.

Louis Kriesberg, "Long Peace or Long War: A Conflict Resolution Perspective," Negotiation Journal, April 2007.

Paul Lewis, "Rise of the Blue Helmets," New York Times Book Review, Nov. 6, 1994.

Mark Mazower, "Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century" (review essay), American Historical Review v.107, no.4, 2002. 

John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War. Basic Books, 1989.

William R. Rock, British Appeasement in the 1930s. Norton, 1977.

Randall L. Schweller, "The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-39: Why a Concert Didn't Arise," in Colin Elman and Miriam F. Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations. MIT Press, 2001.

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For more on WWW, see the author's blog: here.

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Added later: See also J. Mueller, "War Has Almost Ceased to Exist: An Assessment," Pol Sci Quarterly (2009), available here.

Abstract of the day

(That's a variation on Quote of the Day, in case you were wondering)

Sebastian Rosato and John Schuessler, "A Realist Foreign Policy for the United States," Perspectives on Politics (Dec. 2011). I haven't read the article, but here's the abstract:

What kind of policy can the United States pursue that ensures its security while minimizing the likelihood of war? We describe and defend a realist theory of foreign policy to guide American decision makers. Briefly, the theory says that if they want to ensure their security, great powers such as the United States should balance against other great powers. They should also take a relaxed view toward developments involving minor powers and, at most, should balance against hostile minor powers that inhabit strategically important regions of the world. We then show that had the great powers followed our theory's prescriptions, some of the most important wars of the past century might have been averted. Specifically, the world wars might not have occurred, and the United States might not have gone to war in either Vietnam or Iraq. In other words, realism as we conceive it offers the prospect of security without war. At the same time, we also argue that if the United States adopts an alternative liberal foreign policy, this is likely to result in more, rather than fewer, wars. We conclude by offering some theoretically-based proposals about how US decision makers should deal with China and Iran.

Stop the presses!! Did you know that if the great powers had balanced against Nazi Germany before '39, WW2 might have been averted?! Film at 11!! (or maybe that should be: Newsreel at 11!)

Ok, I'm sorry (sort of) for the sarcasm, but there were reasons -- very understandable ones in the historical context -- that there wasn't more balancing in the '30s. (Maybe the authors make that point and there wasn't space to put it in the abstract.) And I know, it's unfair to dump on an article solely on the basis of the abstract. (Blogging means having to say you're sorry ... again and again...)

The question at the beginning is, to be serious, a good one: "What kind of policy can the United States pursue that ensures its security while minimizing the likelihood of war?"

Here is, arguably, a better question: "In a world in which the likelihood of great-power war is vanishingly small, how should the U.S. reorient its foreign and defense policy to: (1) take account of that reality, (2) stop acting as if it's 1947 instead of 2011, and (3) generally come to its senses?"

How not to think about the obsolescence (or non-obsolescence) of "industrial" war

Scott Wolford argues, in effect, that we aren't seeing traditional interstate wars because big "industrial" armies are "cancelling each other out," not because interstate war is obsolete. (H/t Phil Arena, here, for directing my attention to this post.)

(Update: Scott Wolford writes in the comments to this post that I have misconstrued his point. I may well have. One of the hazards of blogging.)

This ignores several things. First, states are simply less interested now than they used to be in territorial conquest, which is what big armies have traditionally been used for. Look at the figures: Between 1945 and 1996, the percentage of armed conflicts in which territory was redistributed -- i.e. conquered -- was 23 percent; by contrast, between 1648 (I don't like to use this over-emphasized date btw, but anyway) and 1945, the percentage was in the range of 80 percent. This strongly suggests, although it admittedly doesn't definitively prove, that post-1945 armed conflicts have mostly been about matters other than traditional territorial acquisition. (Source: M. Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention, p.126, citing Robert Jackson & Mark Zacher, "The Territorial Covenant," Univ. of Br. Columbia Inst. of IR, working paper no.5, 1997; see also Zacher's Int'l. Org. article on the territorial integrity norm.) For the period since 1996, I believe the figures would be even lower though I don't have them to hand.

Second, Wolford's post ignores the argument that (at least some) states have progressively internalized norms against permanent territorial acquisition and conquest, and that great-power war has become progressively unthinkable as a live policy option for leaders -- so much so that Mueller (Retreat from Doomsday) argues it doesn't even appear in their minds ("subrationally unthinkable").

Third, Wolford's point that big wars aren't obsolete because you have to consider what would occur in the absence of "industrial" armies is a bit weird. It's weird because there's no proof that if A and B are having a territorial dispute, A would take the disputed territory by force if B didn't have a big industrial army. I'm not sure it's even likely. But to make his point convincingly Wolford would have to cite an instance or two where this has actually happened in fairly recent years (and surely it's possible to find cases of territorial disputes between very unequally armed adversaries), not just speculate about what might happen.

P.s. Off the top of my head, possible examples supporting Wolford's view are the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (except that Saddam was hardly a typical leader) and maybe the Russia-Georgia war of '08. I don't find either too convincing. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in '03, although a very bad idea, is not directly relevant here because its major aim was forcible regime change not territorial acquisition.

The decline of war (Part I)

Joshua Goldstein's piece in Foreign Policy, based on his new book Winning the War on War, will interest a lot of readers, not only IR types. In this post -- the first of a two-part discussion -- I will make some brief-ish comments on his Foreign Policy article. The second part of this discussion, which will appear in due course, will contain some broader ruminations about the relationship between global politics and global economics (no small, narrow subjects here, folks!).

Goldstein observes that the post-Cold War era, and especially the decade just passed, has been remarkably peaceful by historical standards. Citing research done by Lacina and Gleditsch at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, he notes that "the last decade has seen fewer war deaths" -- on average about 55,000 a year -- "than any decade in the past 100 years." Wars of all types, including civil wars, have decreased over the past 20 years.

What accounts for this decline of war? The article hints at a few possible explanations, but it's only at the end that Goldstein mentions what I'm inclined to believe is the most basic and consequential of the possible causes.

He writes that "armed conflict has declined in large part because armed conflict has fundamentally changed. Wars between big national armies all but disappeared along with the Cold War, taking with them the most horrific kinds of mass destruction." No doubt in the book Goldstein gives figures on how many "wars between big national armies" -- i.e., conventional interstate wars -- there were during the Cold War. The last war directly between great powers was either the Korean War or World War II (depending on whether you think China qualified as a great power at the time of the Korean War), and as Goldstein notes, the Korean War "effectively ended nearly 60 years ago." So there has not been a great-power war since either 1953 or 1945, depending on one's definitions. The end of the Cold War may have contributed to a change in the character of armed conflict, but the more basic change, I would suggest, is that great-power war as an 'institution' of international society seems effectively to have ceased to exist. [P.s. Of course some people thought the same thing in the period before 1914 and they turned out to be wrong, to put it mildly. But the situation is not analogous, for reasons I can go into in the comments or elsewhere, if anyone is interested.]

Why? Could shifts in the balance of power have something to do with it? Goldstein observes that "relative U.S. power and worldwide conflict have waned in tandem over the past decade," adding that the "best precedent for today's emerging world order may be the Concert of Europe...." The idea that a great-power concert, which today would include of course certain non-European powers, might be emerging (or might have already emerged) is not new. However, the heyday of the Concert of Europe (if I remember right) didn't last all that long (roughly, between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the Crimean War) and its operation was based in large part on shared reactionary values among the main European powers. This could be seen as either a pedantic irrelevancy or as casting some doubt on its suitability as an analogy, depending on one's inclination.

At the end of the piece Goldstein mentions that norms about war have changed, and this seems to be at the heart of the matter. Not only have norms about the protection of civilians changed; as J. Mueller, C. Fettweis, and others have argued, there is reason to think that great-power wars have become normatively unacceptable to great powers themselves. If correct, this is of course consonant with the main lines of Goldstein's argument, even if the emphases may differ somewhat. Btw, I'm sure his book (which I have not yet seen) goes into much greater detail, so readers interested in the subject should consult it rather than just the FP article.

Another p.s.: The decline of war also connects in a particular way with Foucault on biopower (oh no! I hear you crying), something which I learned a while back from a discussion on another blog. I'll get to this later (good, I hear you saying. In fact, why not make it never). Tsk, tsk, why can't the IR types all get along?

Have we learned?

It would take too long to explain, but certain technical/computer problems (which I hope to solve in the reasonably near future) are requiring me to squat on the floor while writing this -- so it will be fairly brief (or at least briefer than it would otherwise be).

Many of us face the problem of too much to read -- too many books, magazines, journals, newspapers, blogs. We make choices and we take shortcuts. I can sometimes get a reasonably good idea about a book via a twenty-minute or half-hour's browsing of it in a bookstore. I did that this evening with Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars. Being familiar with his King Leopold's Ghost, I knew he was a very good writer, so my interest here was not so much savoring the prose as figuring out what he is doing. The answer is that this is a book mainly about the British experience in World War I, but with particular attention paid to the war's opponents (including, e.g., some COs who physically suffered for their convictions) as well as a more conventional cast of dramatis personae. There are some very familiar stories here (e.g., that of Rudyard Kipling and his son) but no doubt also some less familiar ones.

I was struck by the way the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has chosen to pitch the book on the inside front jacket flap. The last line of the jacket description is something like "will we ever learn from the past?"

Some would argue that we already have. It is virtually impossible to imagine a replay of the First World War, in which large armies from the most supposedly 'advanced' countries in the world slaughtered each other in numbers mounting up to the millions while competing, at least on the Western Front, over tiny bits of territory. The last sustained armed conflict involving a direct clash between great powers was World War II (true, U.S. and Chinese troops fought in Korea, but the active fighting occurred over a relatively limited period). Some political scientists (most notably John Mueller) have made a fairly convincing case that the chances of another major great-power war are extremely remote -- not because nuclear weapons would come into play and make it short but because most countries no longer think in such terms, i.e., major war is no longer an option on the conscious menu of policy-makers. This thesis is controversial and it's not too hard to find some evidence that cuts the other way, especially if one looks, for example, at Pentagon planning documents, at the size of some defense budgets (especially but not only that of the U.S.), or at the amount of money that India, for instance, is planning to spend on weapons over the next decade.

Still, whatever one thinks of the obsolescence-of-major-war thesis, it seems to me too pessimistic to suggest that the attitudes that propelled Europe into its collective suicidal madness of 1914-1918 are anywhere near as strong today as they were a hundred years ago. Militarism and hyper-nationalism are certainly not extinct (and their strength varies in different parts of the world), but in general they do not have anything like the hold over mass publics and elites that they did in the early and middle years of the last century. The notion advanced by the historian David Bell that the "war on terror" represents a kind of apocalyptic thinking about war that dates from the Napoleonic era may have an appearance of plausibility, but I am more inclined to see discontinuities and some learning -- for lack of a better word -- in the history of the last 200 years.

P.s. Hitchens reviews To End All Wars in the NYT Book Review.

From Wealth to Power reconsidered

A brief exchange in comments with someone elsewhere in the blogosphere (specifically, at Slouching Towards Columbia) about Fareed Zakaria's 1998 book From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role prompted me to take another look at the book last night. (It was his dissertation and presumably is the only 'academic' book he will ever publish.)

From Wealth to Power argues that states are not simply security-seekers that expand in response to actual or perceived threats; rather, states expand when they see opportunities to extend their influence and when they have sufficiently strong central governments to translate desire into action. In the conclusion, Zakaria writes (p.185):

A scholar looking at great-power behavior over time -- even in a secure, relatively benign nation like the United States -- must conclude that states seek more than mere security: they seek influence over the international environment. And the more powerful they become, the more influence they seek.

Let's put aside the valid point that the U.S. was not "relatively benign" in the eyes of the native Americans or Filipinos whom it conquered, and focus on the main assertion: that states seek "influence over the international environment." This raises the question: why? What does it "do" for states, how does it benefit them, to have such "influence"? In the case of the U.S., one answer might be that "influence" resulted in overseas markets for capitalists. This is the answer given by the Wisconsin School (William Appleman Williams, et al.). But Zakaria, though he acknowledges a debt to certain writings of this school (p.51), clearly does not go in that direction.

Does he answer the question at all? Not as I recall, though I did not re-read the whole book. But if he were to have answered it, it seems to me he would have had a couple of options. He could have gone with Mearsheimer and said that expansion is the surest way to ensure security in an 'anarchic' world. Or he could have gone with Schumpeter and said that expansion is an atavistic impulse, an 'objectless disposition'. Neither of these is very satisfactory. A third possible answer, at least in the case of the U.S., would focus on culture and ideology (Social Darwinism, white man's burden, and all that), and Zakaria does mention this in passing (pp.135-36). Finally, one could look at the role of domestic pressure groups and parties. But as it is, the question why states seek "influence" rather than "mere security" is left hanging.

It may be worth noting that the very end of the book is guardedly optimistic. Zakaria does not talk of the obsolescence of great-power war, but he does note its "long absence." These are the concluding sentences (p.192):

The long absence of great-power war and the growth of the global economy have weakened the state and intertwined it in structures that will make the once-straightforward rise and fall of great powers a complex, friction-filled process. These complications may create greater uncertainty for scholars, but they could help blunt the otherwise aggressive temperament of great powers and tame the fierce nature of international life.

Quote of the day (1)

From W.L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise (Norton, 1965), p.56:

"Harriet Martineau's two volumes, The History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace, covering the years 1815 to 1846, were published in 1849; by 1855, but for the Crimean War, it would have been possible to speak of forty years' peace. Within that period British troops had been in action against Gurkhas, Pindaries, Mahrattas, Sikhs, Afghans, Burmese, Chinese, Kaffirs, Ashantis and Boers. Ships of the Royal Navy had bombarded Algiers, routed the Turks at Navarino, operated against Mehemet Ali, underwritten Latin American independence, blockaded Buenos Aires and the Piraeus, captured slavers and waged war on pirates from the Caribbean to the China Sea. Assam, Sind, the Punjaub [sic] and a great part of Burma had fallen to British arms. Quae caret ora cruore nostro? [What coast does not know our streams of blood? -- Horace; translation courtesy of a loyal reader.] It was natural that a country which lived by its foreign trade and its foreign investments should protect and extend them, in the last resort by force; it was remarkable that so many of its inhabitants did not realize that this had been done for years and treated the Crimean War as something different, not merely in scale but in kind, from anything that had happened since Waterloo."

(Actually, not so remarkable if one accepts a distinction between wars that involve more than one Great Power and wars that do not.)

Dr. Kagan's Iran prescription; or, Will the real Robert Kagan please stand up?

"Forget the Nukes" is the provocative title of Robert Kagan's Wash. Post column today. Never mind the "secret" uranium enrichment facility, never mind the long-range missile test; the main issue, he says, should be capitalizing on the regime's weakness by quickly applying "crippling" sanctions. This will give heart to the opposition, whose leadership "is engaged in a struggle to the death with the regime," and "might" -- I emphasize his use of might -- lead the regime to fall. At least the chance of that happening is greater than the chance that the current Iranian regime "will give up its nuclear program voluntarily," he contends.

Hmm. Let's ponder this for a sec. Just because the leadership of the Iranian opposition is locked in a death struggle with the regime does not mean the opposition as a whole is so committed. I have great admiration for the courage and determination displayed by those who demonstrated in June against the fraudulent elections. But I don't know enough about the workings of the Iranian opposition or its composition or internal dynamics to say whether sanctions will give it the boost Kagan supposes. Has there been a broad clamor within the opposition for the imposition of sanctions on the regime? If there has been, Kagan doesn't mention it.

In the column's last paragraph, Kagan makes another bet. "Americans have a fundamental strategic interest in seeing a change of leadership in Iran." Why? Because "[t]here is good reason to believe that a democratic Iran might forgo a nuclear weapon...or at least be more amenable to serious negotiations." And even if it does go nuclear, a democratic nuclear Iran will be far less dangerous than an autocratic-theocratic nuclear Iran, he maintains.

Indeed? Is this the same Robert Kagan who has been writing about the return of old-fashioned great-power politics in the twenty-first century? Interests and power rule, the hard-headed calculations of geopolitical advantage drive policy -- isn't that the message he's been delivering lately? Now, in this column, a slightly different tone seems to creep in -- domestic politics matters, what political scientists call (in typically sterile fashion) "regime type" counts for something. Of course, it's true the two positions are not in direct or logical contradiction, but there is arguably a tension in the messages here. Why is there "good reason" to suppose that a democratic Iran might give up nukes when its regional ambitions and the configuration of forces in its environment will be, presumably, pretty much the same? Neighboring Pakistan has nuclear weapons; Afghanistan is in turmoil (and don't forget the Iranian regime has never been friendly with the Taliban); and Iran, democratic or not, would want, one would think, to consolidate the increased influence that the Iraq war and its aftermath bestowed on it.

(Of course, if you believe Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the regime will stop short of actually developing a weapon once it has the capacity to do so. In which case regime change, from a "strategic" standpoint, becomes less urgent.)

There is a lot of "might" and "maybe" in Dr. Kagan's prescription. The "right kind of sanctions could help the Iranian opposition topple these still-vulnerable rulers [Ahmadinejad and Khamanei]," he asserts. But what are the "right kind of sanctions," and exactly how would they help? Until convincing answers to these questions are forthcoming, the judgment on "Forget the Nukes" must be the old Scotch verdict: Not proven.

Update: As another blogger observes, recent developments in the negotiations indicate that by not "forgetting the nukes," the Obama admin and the Europeans have achieved some progress on the issue.

Get ready for a multipolar world

Last November's report by the U.S. National Intelligence Council, "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World," got some press attention, but it would have gotten more had it been released in a non-election year and month. In the current Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz, an articulate proponent of a substantially smaller American global military-political footprint (a/k/a offshore balancing), reminds people of the report's forecast of a large shift in relative power from West to East, as China and India come to take more prominent positions on the world stage. Schwarz also points out that Pres.-elect Obama's foreign-policy statements to date are in many respects consistent with the established approach of trying to maintain U.S. leadership/hegemony and resist the onset of genuine multipolarity. Such resistance, Schwarz suggests, will prove both futile and counterproductive.

Here are his concluding paragraphs:

"'Global Trends 2025' should shake Obama's confidence in the wisdom of embracing a hegemonic foreign policy.... [T]he report concludes, in the words of the NIC chairman, Thomas Fingar, that over the next 16 years 'American dominance will be much diminished... The overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system...is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace....' A multipolar world -- a world of autonomous great powers that American global strategy has sought to avert for 60 years -- will inevitably emerge.

"If the NIC is correct, this president, elected on a promise of change, will be presiding over the country as it begins to come to terms with the most significant transformation in international politics since the Second World War (and that includes the Cold War). Among the other momentous tasks that confront him, he must help create a new American stance toward the world. Maybe now isn't the time to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. And why insist that the United States cling to a prerogative that history is about to snatch away?"

On the Great Powers

Nick at Worlds Apart has two thoughtful posts on great powers in the early 21st century. Reading these posts reminded me that there is no consensus among scholars about exactly how to define 'great power' or exactly which states count as great powers. To a large extent, however, the disagreements are probably more terminological than real.

Nick argues for three categories: 'global great power' (a category currently occupied only by the U.S.), 'regional great powers,' and 'global middle powers'. To be a 'global great power', he says, a state must meet five criteria: 1) dominate its region; 2) have a first-class military, including secure nuclear second strike capability, and an economy to support the military establishment; 3) wield 'soft power'; 4) have a political system that major domestic actors see as legitimate; and 5) be recognized as a great power by other states, as reflected in holding key positions in international institutions. Of these criteria, the only one I might quarrel with is number 4, though I would not want to press the point too hard. Two of these criteria, numbers 3 and 5, suggest that being a 'global great power' requires a certain amount of prestige. Prestige is itself a contested concept and there is disagreement about whether and how states compete for it (whatever 'it' is, exactly).

So, who counts as a regional great power, to use Nick's phrase? I would say China, India, the EU, Japan, and Russia. These five plus the U.S. account for a bit more than half the world's population, three-quarters of global GDP, and 80 percent of defense spending (R. Haass, "The Age of Nonpolarity," For. Aff., May/June '08, p.45). Of these five, China and India are 'rising powers,' while the positions/trajectories of the EU, Japan, and Russia are more uncertain.

There is one other aspect of the great power role that deserves mention: great powers have, or traditionally have been thought to have, special rights and responsibilities with respect to the maintenance of international peace and security (H. Bull, The Anarchical Society, p.202). Several of the great powers arguably have not been discharging these responsibilities as they should in recent years. The U.S. invasion of Iraq; China's actions in Sudan/Darfur and Tibet and Xinjiang; Russia's war with Georgia -- while these are not 'equivalent,' and while the rights and wrongs of each particular case can be argued, it does seem to be time for the great powers to reacquaint themselves with what one writer (R. Jackson, The Global Covenant, p.173) calls "the moral significance of what is involved in being a great power."