Chain of command
The Inscrutable Intentions of Great Powers
Sebastian Rosato
International Security, Winter 2014/2015, Pages 48-88
Abstract:
Can great powers reach confident conclusions about the intentions of their peers? Many scholars argue that they can. One set of arguments holds that states can deduce others’ current intentions from certain domestic characteristics such as their foreign policy goals, ideology, or regime type. Another focuses on behavior and maintains that states can infer current intentions by examining their counterparts’ arms policies, membership in international institutions, or past actions in the security realm. A final set of arguments explains why intentions are unlikely to change and thus why current designs are good predictors of future plans. On careful review, these optimistic claims are unpersuasive. Great powers cannot confidently assess the current intentions of others based on the latter’s domestic characteristics or behavior, and they are even less sure when it comes to estimating their peers’ future intentions. These findings have important implications for theory and policy. Theoretically, they strengthen structural realism against competing approaches. As for the real world, they suggest that the United States and China are on a collision course if the latter continues to rise and becomes a peer competitor.
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Race, Paternalism, and Foreign Aid: Evidence from U.S. Public Opinion
Andy Baker
American Political Science Review, February 2015, Pages 93-109
Abstract:
Virtually all previous studies of domestic economic redistribution find white Americans to be less enthusiastic about welfare for black recipients than for white recipients. When it comes to foreign aid and international redistribution across racial lines, I argue that prejudice manifests not in an uncharitable, resentful way but in a paternalistic way because intergroup contact is minimal and because of how the media portray black foreigners. Using two survey experiments, I show that white Americans are more favorable toward aid when cued to think of foreign poor of African descent than when cued to think of those of East European descent. This relationship is due not to the greater perceived need of black foreigners but to an underlying racial paternalism that sees them as lacking in human agency. The findings confirm accusations of aid skeptics and hold implications for understanding the roots of paternalistic practices in the foreign aid regime.
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The ‘‘Star Wars’’ Murders: Revisiting a Cold Case from the Cold War
Marian Leighton
International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Spring 2015, Pages 290–318
"During the 1980s more than two dozen computer scientists, engineers, software designers, and highly-skilled technicians representing the cream of Great Britain's crop of missile defense experts died in mysterious and often gruesome ways. Coincidence might account for the timing and circumstances of these deaths, except for one caveat: Virtually all of the victims participated in the European counterpart to U.S. President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)...But these serial deaths have garnered almost no public attention throughout the years...The passage of nearly 30 years has yielded no resolution to one of the most intriguing unsolved cases of the Cold War or even an official British acknowledgement of possible serial homicides. Irrefutable evidence is still lacking...Intelligence gleaned from the Stasi files, declassified Soviet documents, and confessions of former terrorists lend credence to the hypothesis that the 'Star Wars' victims may have been pawns in a Soviet proxy war using terrorists and Stasi operatives to subvert SDI."
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Perceptions of a Changing World Induce Hope and Promote Peace in Intractable Conflicts
Smadar Cohen-Chen, Richard Crisp & Eran Halperin
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, April 2015, Pages 498-512
Abstract:
The importance of hope in promoting conciliatory attitudes has been asserted in the field of conflict resolution. However, little is known about conditions inducing hope, especially in intractable conflicts, where reference to the outgroup may backfire. In the current research, five studies yielded convergent support for the hypothesis that hope for peace stems from a general perception of the world as changing. In Study 1, coders observed associations between belief in a changing world, hope regarding peace, and support for concessions. Study 2 revealed the hypothesized relations using self-reported measures. Studies 3 and 4 established causality by instilling a perception of the world as changing (vs. unchanging) using narrative and drawing manipulations. Study 5 compared the changing world message with a control condition during conflict escalation. Across studies, although the specific context was not referred to, the belief in a changing world increased support for concessions through hope for peace.
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The Impact of China on Cybersecurity: Fiction and Friction
Jon Lindsay
International Security, Winter 2014/2015, Pages 7-47
Abstract:
Exaggerated fears about the paralysis of digital infrastructure and the loss of competitive advantage contribute to a spiral of mistrust in U.S.-China relations. In every category of putative Chinese cyber threat, there are also considerable Chinese vulnerabilities and Western advantages. China has inadvertently degraded the economic efficiency of its networks and exposed them to foreign infiltration by prioritizing political information control over technical cyber defense. Although China also actively infiltrates foreign targets, its ability to absorb stolen data is questionable, especially at the most competitive end of the value chain, where the United States dominates. Similarly, China’s military cyber capacity cannot live up to its aggressive doctrinal aspirations, even as its efforts to guide national information technology development create vulnerabilities that more experienced U.S. cyber operators can attack. Outmatched by the West, China is resorting to a strategy of international institutional reform, but it benefits too much from multistakeholder governance to pose a credible alternative. A cyber version of the stability-instability paradox constrains the intensity of cyber interaction in the U.S.-China relationship — and in international relations more broadly — even as lesser irritants continue to proliferate.
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WMD, WMD, WMD: Securitisation through ritualised incantation of ambiguous phrases
Ido Oren & Ty Solomon
Review of International Studies, April 2015, Pages 313-336
Abstract:
We seek to reinvigorate and clarify the Copenhagen School's insight that 'security' is not 'a sign that refers to something more real; the utterance ['security'] itself is the act'. We conceptualise the utterances of securitising actors as consisting not in arguments so much as in repetitive spouting of ambiguous phrases (WMD, rogue states, ethnic cleansing). We further propose that audience acceptance consists not in persuasion so much as in joining the securitising actors in a ritualised chanting of the securitising phrase. Rather than being performed to, the audience participates in the performance in the manner in which a crowd at a rock concert sings along with the artists. We illustrate our argument with a discussion of how the ritualised chanting of the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ during the run-up to the Iraq War ultimately produced the grave Iraqi threat that it purportedly described.
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Anti-Americanism and Anti-Interventionism in Arabic Twitter Discourses
Amaney Jamal et al.
Perspectives on Politics, March 2015, Pages 55-73
Abstract:
Systematic investigation of attitudes expressed in Arabic on Twitter towards the United States and Iran during 2012–13 shows how the analysis of social media can illuminate the politics of contemporary political discourses and generates an informative analysis of anti-Americanism in the Middle East. We not only analyze overall attitudes, but using a novel events-based analytical strategy, we examine reactions to specific events, including the removal of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, the Innocence of Muslims video, and reactions to possible U.S. intervention in Syria. We also examine the Boston Marathon bombings of April 2013, in which the United States suffered damage from human beings, and Hurricane Sandy, in which it suffered damage from nature. Our findings reinforce evidence from polling that anti-Americanism is pervasive and intense, but they also suggest that this animus is directed less toward American society than toward the impingement of the United States on other countries. Arabic Twitter discourses about Iran are at least as negative as discourses about the United States, and less ambivalent. Anti-Americanism may be a specific manifestation of a more general phenomenon: resentment toward powerful countries perceived as interfering in national and regional affairs.
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Offshoring the Army: Migrant Workers and the U.S. Military
Darryl Li
UCLA Law Review, January 2015, Pages 124-174
Abstract:
Long-running debates over military privatization overlook one important fact: The U.S. military’s post-2001 contractor workforce is composed largely of migrants imported from impoverished countries. This Article argues that these Third Country National (TCN) workers — so called because they are neither American nor local — are bereft of the effective protections of American law, local regimes, or their home governments; moreover, their vulnerability is a feature, not a flaw, in how the U.S. projects global power today. TCN workers are an offshore captive labor force whose use allows the government to keep politically sensitive troop numbers and casualty figures artificially low while reducing dependence on local populations with suspect loyalties. Legislation to combat human trafficking has done little to remedy exploitation and abuse of TCN workers because of jurisdictional hurdles and the lack of robust labor rights protections. Substantive reform efforts should address the deeper issue at stake, namely that the government uses TCN workers to carry out a core state function — namely, the use of force — without a clear relationship of responsibility to them. Unlike with soldiers, the labor of TCN workers is not valorized as sacrifice and unlike mercenaries selling their services to the highest bidder, they are frequently indebted to the point of indenture.
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The Rhetoric of Appeasement: Hitler's Legitimation and British Foreign Policy, 1938–39
Stacie Goddard
Security Studies, Winter 2015, Pages 95-130
Abstract:
Few grand strategies have been more scrutinized than Britain's decision to appease Nazi Germany. From 1933 to 1938, Britain eschewed confrontation and attempted to settle German demands. However in the five months following the negotiations at Munich, the British abandoned appeasement and embraced a policy of confronting the German state. The roots of both appeasement and confrontation can be found in Germany's legitimation strategies. Until the Munich crisis, Adolf Hitler justified Germany's aims with appeals to collective security, equality, and self-determination — norms central to the European system established by the Treaty of Versailles. After Munich, in contrast, German politicians abandoned these legitimation strategies, arguing instead that expansion was justified as a matter of German might, and not international rights. As Britain came to see German demands as illegitimate, so too did they decide this revisionist state was insatiable, impervious to negotiation, and responsive only to the language of force.
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When states appease: British appeasement in the 1930s
Peter Trubowitz & Peter Harris
Review of International Studies, April 2015, Pages 289-311
Abstract:
When do states appease their foes? In this article, we argue that governments are most likely to favour appeasing a foreign threat when their top leaders are severely cross–pressured: when the demands for increased security conflict sharply with their domestic political priorities. We develop the deductive argument through a detailed analysis of British appeasement in the 1930s. We show that Neville Chamberlain grappled with a classic dilemma of statecraft: how to reduce the risk of German expansionism while facing acute partisan and electoral incentives to invest resources at home. For Chamberlain, appeasement was a means to reconcile the demands for increased security with what he and his co-partisans were trying to achieve domestically. We conclude by discussing implications of the analysis for theorising about appeasement and about how leaders make grand strategy more generally.
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Winter-safe Deterrence: The Risk of Nuclear Winter and Its Challenge to Deterrence
Seth Baum
Contemporary Security Policy, Spring 2015, Pages 123-148
Abstract:
A new line of nuclear winter research shows that even small, regional nuclear wars could have catastrophic global consequences. However, major disarmament to avoid nuclear winter goes against the reasons nuclear weapon states have for keeping their weapons in the first place, in particular deterrence. To reconcile these conflicting aims, this paper develops the concept of winter-safe deterrence, defined as military force capable of meeting the deterrence goals of today's nuclear weapon states without risking catastrophic nuclear winter. This paper analyses nuclear winter risk, finding a winter-safe limit of about 50 nuclear weapons total worldwide. This paper then evaluates a variety of candidate weapons for winter-safe deterrence. Non-contagious biological weapons (such as anthrax or ricin), neutron bombs detonated at altitude, and nuclear electromagnetic weapons show the most promise. Each weapon has downsides, and the paper's analysis is only tentative, but winter-safe deterrence does appear both feasible and desirable given the urgency of nuclear winter risk.
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Llewelyn Hughes & Austin Long
International Security, Winter 2014/2015, Pages 152-189
Abstract:
What is the relationship between oil and coercion? For decades states have worried that their dependence on oil gives producers a potential lever of coercion. The size, integration, and sophistication of the current oil market, however, are thought to have greatly attenuated, if not eliminated, the coercive potential of oil. The best way to analyze the current global oil market is by viewing it as a series of distinct market segments, from upstream production to midstream transport to downstream refining, with the potential for coercion varying across them. Oil-producing states do not have the greatest coercive potential in the international oil market. Instead, the United States remains the dominant presence, though its dominance has shifted from production — where it resided prior to World War II — to the maritime environment. These findings are significant for scholars’ and policymakers’ understanding of the relationship between oil and coercion. More generally, they suggest that studies of the potential for states to coerce others using economic instruments should take into account differences in the structure of markets for different goods.
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Democracy and Multilateralism: The Case of Vote Buying in the UN General Assembly
David Carter & Randall Stone
International Organization, Winter 2015, Pages 1-33
Abstract:
Democracies are more supportive of US positions on important votes in the UN General Assembly than of nondemocracies. Is this because democracies share common perspectives, or does this pattern reflect coercion? Since 1985, US law has stipulated that the US State Department identify important votes and that aid disbursements reflect voting decisions. To unravel these alternative explanations, we introduce a strategic statistical model that allows us to estimate voting preferences, vulnerability to influence, and credibility of linkage, which are theoretical quantities of interest that are not directly observable. The results reject the hypothesis of shared democratic values: poor democracies have voting preferences that are more oppositional to US positions than autocracies, and they are more willing than autocracies to take symbolic stands that may cost them foreign aid. Democracies support US positions, however, because US aid linkages are more credible when directed toward democratic countries. Splitting the sample into Cold War and post–Cold War segments, we find that the end of the Cold War changed the way US linkage strategies treated allies and left- and right-leaning governments, but the effects of democracy remained constant.
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Has Successful Terror Gone to Ground?
Arnold Barnett
Risk Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article considers all 87 attacks worldwide against air and rail transport systems that killed at least two passengers over the 30-year period of 1982–2011. The data offer strong and statistically significant evidence that successful acts of terror have “gone to ground” in recent years: attacks against aviation were concentrated early in the three decades studied whereas those against rail were concentrated later. Recent data are used to make estimates of absolute and comparative risk for frequent flyers and subway/rail commuters. Point estimates in the “status quo” case imply that mortality risk from successful acts of terror was very low on both modes of transportation and that, whereas risk per trip is higher for air travelers than subway/rail commuters, the rail commuters experience greater risk per year than the frequent flyers.
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Ross Miller & Karen Albert
Political Communication, Winter 2015, Pages 61-82
Abstract:
We analyze New York Times coverage of international events and offer what is perhaps the first test for the reciprocal effects of media coverage and fatalities in militarized interstate disputes. Our results suggest that once disputes go public, the probability of fatalities rises dramatically. Simply stated, if it leads, it bleeds. We also find qualified support for the well-known “if it bleeds, it leads” hypothesis, and relatively robust evidence of the effects of distance and news bureaus on media coverage of international crises.
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Pakistani Political Communication and Public Opinion on US Drone Attacks
Christine Fair, Karl Kaltenthaler & William Miller
Journal of Strategic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conventional wisdom holds that Pakistanis are overwhelmingly opposed to American drone strikes in their country’s tribal areas and that this opposition is driven by mass media coverage of the loss of life and property the strikes purportedly cause. Using an approach based in the literature in political communication and public opinion, we argue this conventional wisdom is largely inaccurate. Instead, we contend that awareness of drone strikes will be limited because Pakistan is a poor country with low educational attainment, high rates of illiteracy and persistent infrastructure problems that limit access to mass media. Moreover, because of these same country characteristics, Pakistanis’ beliefs about drone strikes will be shaped primarily by informal, face-to-face political communication, rather than through more formal media sources. We test this argument using data that we collected by fielding a 7,656 respondent, nationally-representative survey carried out in Pakistan in 2013. The results of the statistical analysis support our arguments.
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“Tossing a Match into Dry Hay”: Nuclear Weapons and the Crisis in U.S.-Canadian Relations, 1962–1963
Michael Stevenson
Journal of Cold War Studies, Fall 2014, Pages 5-34
Abstract:
Newly declassified archival sources allow a reassessment of U.S.-Canadian diplomacy during the final months of John Diefenbaker's government concerning Canada's prospective acquisition of nuclear weapons in the wake of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Scholars have traditionally argued that Canadian proposals for U.S. nuclear warheads to be supplied to Canada after the outbreak of an international emergency were unworkable. Diefenbaker has been deemed primarily responsible for his government's collapse after personally fumbling the bilateral nuclear weapons talks. Drawing on previously unavailable primary documents, this article shows that the U.S. decision to reject Ottawa's proposals was rooted in political, not military, imperatives. The article also demonstrates that U.S. officials waged a concerted campaign to undermine the Canadian government, most notably through the State Department's unprecedented public rebuke of Diefenbaker's nuclear weapons policy in late-January 1963.
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Margaret Power
Journal of Latin American Studies, February 2015, Pages 93-119
Abstract:
This article examines transnational connections among anti-communist women in Brazil, Chile and the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. It explores the political beliefs and networks upon which these women drew and built in order to promote their role in the overthrow of João Goulart and Salvador Allende and to encourage other women across the Americas to join them in the fight against communism. This paper shows that these women reversed the flow of ideas, served as models for each other and for anti-communist women, and built gendered transnational networks of female anti-communist activists.
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Self-Containment: Achieving Peace in Anarchic Settings
Antonis Adam & Petros Sekeris
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
In anarchic settings, potential rivals can be dragged into arms races degenerating in open wars out of mutual suspicion. We propose a novel commitment device for contestants to avoid both arming and fighting. We assume that the military decides the armament levels of a country, while the civilian decides whether to attack a rival country. When these decision-making bodies perfectly communicate, the decision makers are unable to credibly communicate to their foe their willingness not to arm and not to attack, thus implying that war ensues. With imperfect information, however, peace may ensue as countries credibly signal to their rival a more peaceful stance since contestants are more reluctant to enter in an armed confrontation with a potentially understaffed army. Using data on the 1975 to 2001 period, we provide supportive evidence that in countries where the head of the state or the defense minister are military officers, and are therefore better informed of their armies’ fighting preparedness, the likelihood of observing an international conflict is higher.