Ends of History
Then What? Assessing the Military Implications of Chinese Control of Taiwan
Brendan Rittenhouse Green & Caitlin Talmadge
International Security, Summer 2022, Pages 7-45
Abstract:
The military implications of Chinese control of Taiwan are understudied. Chinese control of Taiwan would likely improve the military balance in China's favor because of reunification's positive impact on Chinese submarine warfare and ocean surveillance capabilities. Basing Chinese submarine warfare assets on Taiwan would increase the vulnerability of U.S. surface forces to attack during a crisis, reduce the attrition rate of Chinese submarines during a war, and likely increase the number of submarine attack opportunities against U.S. surface combatants. Furthermore, placing hydrophone arrays off Taiwan's coasts for ocean surveillance would forge a critical missing link in China's kill chain for long-range attacks. This outcome could push the United States toward anti-satellite warfare that it might otherwise avoid, or it could force the U.S. Navy into narrower parts of the Philippine Sea. Finally, over the long term, if China were to develop a large fleet of truly quiet nuclear attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines, basing them on Taiwan would provide it with additional advantages. Specifically, such basing would enable China to both threaten Northeast Asian sea lanes of communication and strengthen its sea-based nuclear deterrent in ways that it is otherwise unlikely to be able to do. These findings have important implications for U.S. operational planning, policy, and grand strategy.
New Deal, New Patriots: How 1930s Government Spending Boosted Patriotism During WWII
Bruno Caprettini & Hans-Joachim Voth
Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We demonstrate an important complementarity between patriotism and public-good provision. After 1933, the New Deal led to an unprecedented expansion of the US federal government's role. Those who benefited from social spending were markedly more patriotic during WWII: they bought more war bonds, volunteered more, and, as soldiers, won more medals. This pattern was new - WWI volunteering did not show the same geography of patriotism. We match military service records with the 1940 census to show that this pattern holds at the individual level. Using geographical variation, we exploit two instruments to suggest that the effect is causal: droughts and congressional committee representation predict more New Deal agricultural support, as well as bond buying, volunteering, and medals.
Who Lost Afghanistan? Samuel Huntington and the Decline of Strategic Thinking
Will Atkins
Armed Forces & Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
Numerous reflections exist regarding who should be held accountable and what lessons should be learned from the military withdrawal and political collapse of Afghanistan. This essay argues that the failures in Afghanistan are second- and third-order effects of a failure of strategic thinking on behalf of civilian and military leadership alike. I argue that this failure of strategic thinking is caused, in part, by the overreliance on concepts of civil-military relations espoused by Samuel Huntington. These concepts have been inculcated by a professional military education system that has subsequently developed a generation of officers with an atrophied appreciation for the political aspects of war, and an inability to link operational prowess to the achievement of strategic objectives. This dilemma is aggravated by a similar overreliance on systematic thinking, which further obscures the linkages between the military and political aspects of strategy.
Narratives and War: Explaining the Length and End of U.S. Military Operations in Afghanistan
William Walldorf
International Security, Summer 2022, Pages 93-138
Abstract:
Why did the U.S. war in Afghanistan last so long, and why did it end? In contrast to conventional arguments about partisanship, geopolitics, and elite pressures, a new theory of war duration suggests that strategic narratives best answer these questions. The severity and frequency of attacks by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State across most of the 2000s and 2010s generated and sustained a robust collective narrative across the United States focused on combatting terrorism abroad. Audience costs of inaction generated by this narrative pushed President Barack Obama (2009) and President Donald Trump (2017) to not only sustain but increase troops in Afghanistan, against their better judgement. Strategic narratives also explain the end to the war. The defeat of the ISIS caliphate and a significant reduction in the number of attacks on liberal democratic states in the late 2010s caused the severity and frequency of traumatic events to fall below the threshold necessary to sustain a robust anti-terrorism narrative. As the narrative weakened, advocates for war in Afghanistan lost political salience, while those pressing retrenchment gained leverage over policy. Audience costs for inaction declined and President Joe Biden ended the war (2021). As President Biden seeks to rebalance U.S. commitments for an era of new strategic challenges, an active offshore counterterrorism program will be necessary to maintain this balance.
Adjudicating Competing Theories: Does Civilian Control Over the Military Decrease Conflict?
Edward Gonzalez
Armed Forces & Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
What explains variation in the propensity for conflict involvement and initiation among states? In the study of international security, a debate remains between those who argue stronger civilian control of the military lowers the likelihood of interstate conflict, and those who argue that states with stronger civilian control over the military will be more conflict-prone. This article adjudicates between these competing theories through the use of a newly published measure of civilian control over the military. The theory is tested via Poisson regression using a large-N country-year data set. Ultimately, the results support theories of military restraint, showing that states with stronger civilian control over the military are more conflict-prone than states with weaker civilian control of the military. The article contributes to our understanding of war and interstate conflict and the study of civil-military relations by showing that increased civilian control increases the likelihood of interstate conflict.
From Moscow With a Mushroom Cloud? Russian Public Attitudes to the Use of Nuclear Weapons in a Conflict With NATO
Michal Smetana & Michal Onderco
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article presents findings of an original survey experiment on public attitudes toward nuclear use conducted on a representative sample of Russian citizens. We randomly assigned our participants to experimental treatments with vignettes describing a military conflict between Russia and NATO in the Baltics, where Moscow considered a limited nuclear "escalate-to-deescalate" strike to avert defeat. Our findings show that Russians are significantly more averse to nuclear strikes than to the corresponding use of conventional missiles. The participants disapproved similarly of a demonstrative nuclear explosion in an unpopulated area and of nuclear strikes in a more escalated scenario. We also found associations between the moral values of individuals and strike support corresponding to earlier studies in the United States. Finally, our participants reported similar concerns about both nuclear and conventional strikes, with the worry about civilian casualties and the suffering of victims at the top of the list across experimental treatments.
The 2016 Election and America's Standing Abroad: Quasi-Experimental Evidence of a Trump Effect
Regina Bateson & Michael Weintraub
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Global favorability toward the United States declined by more than 10 percentage points from 2016 to 2017. This shift coincided with the end of the Obama administration and the inauguration of Donald Trump - but did Trump's election cause America's standing abroad to erode? Leveraging a natural experiment, we show that Trump's victory had an immediate, negative effect on international public opinion toward the United States. Our identification strategy exploits the fact that a major cross-national survey, the AmericasBarometer, was in the field when the 2016 US presidential election occurred. Using data from four Latin American countries, we compare respondents surveyed just before and after the election. We find that Trump's unexpected win caused a sharp drop in trust in the US government. While scholars have long observed that domestic political considerations shape leaders' foreign policy decisions, we show that domestic political events - such as elections - can also affect a country's international image.
Irredentism and Institutions
Christopher Hale & David Siroky
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do states engage in irredentism? Expanding on previous scholarship, this article advances a new theory with rationalist microfoundations that accounts for the incentives of both elites and citizens to support irredentism in democracies and dictatorships. Our model suggests irredentism is more likely when it enables political elites to provide a specific mix of private goods, public goods, and welfare transfers to citizens who desire them at the lowest tax rate. This leads to the prediction that irredentism is most likely in majoritarian democratic electoral systems and military dictatorships, and least likely in proportional electoral systems and single-party dictatorships. We test and find supportive evidence for these expectations using a comprehensive dataset covering all observed and potential irredentist cases from 1946 to 2014.
Democratic Peace and Covert Military Force: An Experimental Test
Allison Carnegie, Joshua Kertzer & Keren Yarhi-Milo
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
How should we reconcile covert war with normative theories of the democratic peace? Proponents argue that these interventions are consistent with democratic peace theory, as leaders intervene covertly to escape backlash by a public that has internalized liberal norms. Yet we know little about public opinion regarding the covert use of force. Using a survey experiment, we find that respondents are more favorable towards covert interventions against democratic targets than our theories assume, and that even citizens who value transparency the most still wrestle with a trade-off between their normative commitments and the instrumental benefits they perceive covert actions to hold. Our results thus help to explain why American leaders have repeatedly chosen to conduct covert military operations against fellow democracies, and raise important questions about the scope conditions of normative theories of the democratic peace.
On Target? Sanctions and the Economic Interests of Elite Policymakers in Iran
Mirko Draca et al.
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
How successful are sanctions at targeting the economic interests of political elites in affected countries? We study the case of Iran, using information on the stock exchange-listed
assets of two specific political entities with significant influence over the direction of Iran's nuclear programme. Our identification strategy focuses on the process of negotiations for sanctions removal, examining which interests benefit most from news about diplomatic progress. The results indicate the 'bluntness' of sanctions on Iran, but also provide evidence of their effectiveness in generating substantial economic incentives for elite policymakers to negotiate a deal for sanctions relief.
World War II Blues: The Long-lasting Mental Health Effect of Childhood Trauma
Mevlude Akbulut-Yuksel, Erdal Tekin & Belgi Turan
NBER Working Paper, July 2022
Abstract:
There has been a revival of warfare and threats of interstate war in recent years as the number of countries engaged in armed conflict surged dramatically, reaching to levels unprecedented since the end of Cold War. This is happening at a time when the global burden of mental health illness is also on the rise. We examine the causal impact of early life exposure to warfare on long-term mental health, using novel data on the amount of bombs dropped in German cities by Allied Air Forces during World War II (WWII) and German Socioeconomic Panel. Our identification strategy leverages a generalized difference-in-differences design, exploiting the plausibly exogenous variation in the bombing intensity suffered by German cities during the war as a quasi-experiment. We find that cohorts younger than age five at the onset of WWII or those born during the war are in significantly worse mental health later in life when they are between ages late 50s and 70s. Specifically, an increase of one-standard deviation in the bombing intensity experienced during WWII is associated with about a 10 percent decline in an individual's long-term standardized mental health score. This effect is equivalent to a 16.8 percent increase in the likelihood of being diagnosed with clinical depression. Our analysis also reveals that this impact is most pronounced among the youngest children including those who might have been in-utero at some point during the war. Our investigation further suggests that measures capturing the extent of destruction in healthcare infrastructure, the increase in the capacity burden of the healthcare system, and wealth loss during WWII exacerbate the adverse impact of bombing exposure on long-term mental health, while the size of war relief funds transferred to municipalities following the war has a mitigating impact. Our findings are robust across a variety of empirical checks and specifications. With the mental health impact of childhood exposure to warfare persisting well into the late stages of life, the global burden of mental illness may be aggravated for many years to come. Our findings imply that prioritizing children and a long-term horizon in public health planning and response may be critical to mitigating the adverse mental health consequences of exposure to armed conflict.
The Effect of Service-Length Obligations on Occupational Selection: Evidence from West Point Graduates
Samuel Redman & Kyle Greenberg
Defence and Peace Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper estimates the effect of the U.S. Army's June 2020 decision to increase the service obligation for Army aviators from six to ten years on West Point cadets' preferences for aviation. We use a difference-in-differences identification strategy, exploiting how the policy took effect after the Class of 2021 submitted four sets of interim preferences but before cadets submitted two final sets of preferences, using preferences from cadets in the Classes of 2015 to 2020 to form counterfactual outcomes. The increased service obligation made aviation less popular, reducing the percentage of cadets who ranked aviation as their first choice by 4.1 percentage points (baseline of 18.5%) and increasing the percentage of cadets who ranked aviation as among their three lowest choices by 6.9 percentage points (baseline of 8.9%). The reduction in aviation's popularity is most pronounced among cadets with above-median grade-point-averages, above-median aviation talent scores, and above-median SAT scores.