Showing papers in "International Security in 2012"

China's Century?: Why America's Edge Will Endure

Abstract: Two assumptions dominate current foreign policy debates in the United States and China. First, the United States is in decline relative to China. Second, much of this decline is the result of globalization and the hegemonic burdens the United States bears to sustain globalization. Both of these assumptions are wrong. The United States is not in decline; in fact, it is now wealthier, more innovative, and more militarily powerful compared to China than it was in 1991. Moreover, globalization and hegemony do not erode U.S. power; they reinforce it. The United States derives competitive advantages from its hegemonic position, and globalization allows it to exploit these advantages, attracting economic activity and manipulating the international system to its benefit. The United States should therefore continue to prop up the global economy and maintain a robust diplomatic and military presence abroad.

Targeting Top Terrorists: How Leadership Decapitation Contributes to Counterterrorism

Abstract: Several states, including Israel and the United States, have put decapitation tactics, which seek to kill or capture leaders of terrorist organizations, at the forefront of their counterterrorism efforts. The vast majority of scholarly work on decapitation suggests, however, that leadership decapitation is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, leadership decapitation significantly increases the mortality rate of terrorist groups, although the results indicate that the effect of decapitation decreases with the age of the group, even to a point where it may have no effect at all. This finding helps to explain the previously perplexing mixed record of decapitation effectiveness. Terrorist groups are especially susceptible to leadership decapitation because their organizational characteristics (they are violent, clandestine, and values based) amplify the difficulties of leadership succession. Additionally, in contrast to the conventional wisdom regarding the...

Does Decapitation Work?: Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Targeting in Counterinsurgency Campaigns

Abstract: Is killing or capturing insurgent leaders an effective tactic? Previous research on interstate war and counterterrorism has suggested that targeting enemy leaders does not work. Most studies of the efficacy of leadership decapitation, however, have relied on unsystematic evidence and poor research design. An analysis based on fresh evidence and a new research design indicates the opposite relationship and yields four key findings. First, campaigns are more likely to end quickly when counterinsurgents successfully target enemy leaders. Second, counterinsurgents who capture or kill insurgent leaders are significantly more likely to defeat insurgencies than those who fail to capture or kill such leaders. Third, the intensity of a conflict is likelier to decrease following the successful removal of an enemy leader than it is after a failed attempt. Fourth, insurgent attacks are more likely to decrease after successful leadership decapitations than after failed attempts. Additional analysis suggests that these findings are attributable to successful leadership decapitation, and that the relationship between decapitation and campaign success holds across different types of insurgencies.

Climate Wars?: Assessing the Claim That Drought Breeds Conflict

Abstract: Dominant climate models suggest that large parts of Africa will experience greater climatic variability and increasing rates of drought in coming decades. This could have severe societal consequences, because the economies and food supplies of most African countries depend on rain-fed agriculture. According to leading environmental security scholars, policymakers, and nongovernmental organizations, an increase in scarcity-driven armed conflicts should also be expected. A conditional theory of environmental conflict predicts that drought increases the risk of civil war primarily when it strikes vulnerable and politically marginalized populations in agrarian societies. However, an empirical evaluation of this general proposition through a unique gridded dataset of postcolonial Africa, which combines high-resolution meteorological data with georeferenced data on civil war onset and the local ethnopolitical context, shows little evidence of a drought-conflict connection. Instead, the local risk of civil war can be explained by sociopolitical and geographic factors: a politically marginalized population, high infant mortality, proximity to international borders, and high local population density.

Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?

Abstract: Why did violence decline in Iraq in 2007? Many policymakers and scholars credit the “surge,” or the program of U.S. reinforcements and doctrinal changes that began in January 2007. Others cite the voluntary insurgent stand-downs of the Sunni Awakening or say that the violence had simply run its course with the end of a wave of sectarian cleansing; still others credit an interaction between the surge and the Awakening. The difference matters for policy and scholarship, yet this debate has not moved from hypothesis to test. An assessment of the competing claims based on recently declassified data on violence at local levels and information gathered from seventy structured interviews with coalition participants finds little support for the cleansing or Awakening theses. Instead, a synergistic interaction between the surge and the Awakening was required for violence to drop as quickly and widely as it did: both were necessary; neither was sufficient. U.S. policy thus played an important role in reducing the v...

Organizing Insurgency: Networks, Resources, and Rebellion in South Asia

Abstract: A central question in civil war research is how state sponsorship, overseas funding, involvement in illicit economics, and access to lootable resources affect the behavior and organization of insurgent groups. Existing research has not arrived at any consensus, as resource wealth is portrayed as a cause of both undisciplined predation and military resilience. A social-institutional theory explains why similar resource wealth can be associated with such different outcomes. The theory argues that the social networks on which insurgent groups are built create different types of organizations with differing abilities to control resource flows. There is no single effect of resource wealth: instead, social and organizational context determines how these groups use available resources. A detailed comparative study of armed groups in the insurgency in Kashmir supports this argument. A number of indigenous Kashmiri insurgent organizations received substantial funding, training, and support from Pakistan from 1988 ...

Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity Is Not Peaceful

Abstract: The United States has been at war for thirteen of the twenty-two years since the Cold War ended and the world became unipolar. Still, the consensual view among international relations theorists is that unipolarity is peaceful. They base this view on two assumptions: first, the unipole will guarantee the global status quo and, second, no state will balance against it. Both assumptions are problematic. First, the unipole may disengage from a particular region, thus removing constraints on regional conflicts. Second, if the unipole remains engaged in the world, those minor powers that decide not to accommodate it will be unable to find a great power sponsor. Placed in this situation of extreme self-help, they will try to revise the status quo in their favor, a dynamic that is likely to trigger conflict with the unipole. Therefore, neither the structure of a unipolar world nor U.S. strategic choices clearly benefit the overall prospects for peace. For the world as a whole, unipolarity makes conflict likely. F...

The Terrorism Delusion: America's Overwrought Response to September 11

Abstract: The reaction of Americans to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has been massively disproportionate to the actual threat posed by al-Qaida either as an international menace or as an inspiration or model for homegrown amateurs. An examination of the activities of international and domestic terrorist “adversaries” reveals that exaggerations and distortions of the threat have inspired a determined and expensive quest to ferret out, and even to create, the nearly nonexistent. The result has been an ill-conceived and remarkably unreflective effort to react to an event that, however tragic and dramatic in the first instance, should have been seen to be of only limited significance at least after a few years. Not only has the terrorism delusion had significant costs, but the initial alarmed perspective has been so internalized that anxieties about terrorism have persisted for more than a decade despite exceedingly limited evidence that much fear is justified.

When Duty Calls: A Pragmatic Standard of Humanitarian Intervention

Abstract: When should the United States and other members of the international community intervene to stop a government from harming its own citizens? Since World War II, the main standard for intervention has been the high bar of genocide, although the international community has rarely acted to stop it. The main alternative—the “responsibility to protect”—would set the bar so low that virtually every instance of anarchy or tyranny would create unbounded obligations beyond the capacity of states to fulfill. A new standard—the pragmatic standard of humanitarian intervention—can help guide decisionmakers on when to intervene to stop governments from targeting their own citizens. The standard has three requirements: (1) an ongoing campaign of mass homicide sponsored by the government; (2) a viable plan for intervention with reasonable estimates of low casualties for the intervening forces; and (3) a workable strategy for creating lasting local security for the threatened population. The pragmatic standard was met in ...

The Psychology of Threat in Intergroup Conflict: Emotions, Rationality, and Opportunity in the Rwandan Genocide

Abstract: How do security threats mobilize social groups against each other? The strength of such threats lies in the power of group emotions, notably the primary emotion of fear. Fear works by activating psychological processes at the group level that polarize attitudes between different groups. An analysis of survey data, radio broadcasts, and interviews from Rwanda's civil war and genocide of 1990-94 reveals four psychosocial mechanisms at work in group polarization: boundary activation, outgroup derogation, outgroup homogenization, and ingroup cohesion. Additionally, scholarly debates on the role of emotions, material opportunities, and rationality in ethnic conflicts represent a false theoretical choice. Both emotions and material opportunities matter, and rationality and emotion are not incompatible. Two simple refinements to extant theoretical and empirical approaches are needed. First, scholars ought to distinguish between attitudes and violence in ethnic conflicts; emotions matter for the polarization of attitudes, but material and structural opportunities mediate their expression as violence. Second, scholars should pay greater attention to the extensive research in social psychology that shows that both emotion and reason interact in individual judgment and decisionmaking.

China's Fear of Contagion: Tiananmen Square and the Power of the European Example

Abstract: The Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989 remains a taboo topic in the People's Republic of China (PRC); the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still detains participants and suppresses online, popular, and scholarly discussions of it. The twentieth anniversary of the end of the transatlantic Cold War, however, saw the release of new sources from high-level contacts between the CCP and foreign leaders. These new sources, combined with older ones, show the extent to which Chinese political leaders were obsessed with the democratic changes in Eastern Europe and were willing to take violent action to prevent similar events on their territory. This obsession has received mention from a few scholars, but until now it has played too small a role in the current understanding of Tiananmen. New evidence documents that one of the main motivations for the CCP in deploying the army in June 1989—on the same day as semi-free elections in Poland—was its desire to combat possible contagion from the events in Europe. T...

The Jihad Paradox: Pakistan and Islamist Militancy in South Asia

Abstract: Islamist militants based in Pakistan pose a major threat to regional and international security. Although this problem has only recently received widespread attention, Pakistan has long used militants as strategic tools to compensate for its severe political and material weakness. This use of Islamist militancy has constituted nothing less than a central component of Pakistani grand strategy; supporting jihad has been one of the principal means by which the Pakistani state has sought to produce security for itself. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the strategy has not been wholly disastrous. Rather, it has achieved important domestic and international successes. Recently, however, Pakistan has begun to suffer from a “jihad paradox”: the very conditions that previously made Pakistan's militant policy useful now make it extremely dangerous. Thus, despite its past benefits, the strategy has outlived its utility, and Pakistan will have to abandon it to avoid catastrophe. Other weak states, which may also ...

Trading on Preconceptions: Why World War I Was Not a Failure of Economic Interdependence

Abstract: World War I is generally viewed by both advocates and critics of commercial liberal theory as the quintessential example of a failure of economic integration to maintain peace. Yet this consensus relies on both methodologically flawed inference and an incomplete accounting of the antecedents to the war. Crucially, World War I began in a weakly integrated portion of Europe with which highly integrated powers were entangled through the alliance system. Crises among the highly interdependent European powers in the decades leading up to the war were generally resolved without bloodshed. Among the less interdependent powers in Eastern Europe, however, crises regularly escalated to militarized violence. Moreover, the crises leading to the war created increased incentives for the integrated powers to strengthen commitments to their less interdependent partners. In attempting to make these alliances more credible, Western powers shifted foreign policy discretion to the very states that lacked strong economic disi...

Present at the Creation: Edward Mead Earle and the Depression-Era Origins of Security Studies

Abstract: Security studies, as an American field of inquiry, has particular historical origins. Contrary to standard views, it was the unraveling of the international order in the 1930s that compelled a collection of internationalist institutions and individuals, led by historian Edward Mead Earle, to bind together a variety of new and traditional disciplines to create an entirely new field focused on the problem of security. These institutions and individuals not only sought to confront the crisis at hand by influencing public views, altering academic discussion, enhancing government capacity, and creating an American “grand strategy,” but also to establish strong institutional and intellectual foundations for an enduring scholarly project that would contended with future national security problems generated by the modern world. In this effort, Earle and his foundation, government, and university collaborators had significant influence on the evolution of security studies as a field that are still felt today.

Barriers to Bioweapons: Intangible Obstacles to Proliferation

Abstract: Although the issue of knowledge diffusion has been at the heart of nonproliferation research and policies, no study in the political science field has thus far systematically identified the mechanisms that allow the acquisition and efficient use of specialized knowledge related to bioweapons. This analytical gap has led to the commonly held belief that bioweapons knowledge is easily transferable. Studies of past weapons programs, including the former U.S. and Soviet bioweapons programs, show that gathering the relevant information and expertise required to produce a weapon is not sufficient to guarantee success. The success of a bioweapons program is dependent on intangible factors, such as work organization, program management, structural organization, and social environment, which can enhance the advancement of a program or create obstacles to progress. When assessed within smaller state and terrorist bioweapons programs, such as those of South Africa and the terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo, these intangi...

Confronting Soviet Power: U.S. Policy during the Early Cold War

Abstract: Many self-identified realist, liberal, and constructivist scholars contend that ideology played a critical role in generating and shaping the United States' decision to confront the Soviet Union in the early Cold War. A close look at the history reveals that these ideological arguments fail to explain key aspects of U.S. policy. Contrary to ideological explanations, the United States initially sought to cooperate with the Soviet Union, did not initially pressure communist groups outside the Soviet orbit, and later sought to engage communist groups that promised to undermine Soviet power. The U.S. decision to confront the Soviets stemmed instead from the distribution of power. U.S. policy shifted toward a confrontational approach as the balance of power in Eurasia tilted in favor of the Soviet Union. In addition, U.S. leaders tended to think and act in a manner consistent with balance of power logic. The primacy of power over ideology in U.S. policymaking—given the strong liberal tradition in the United St...

Two Concepts of Liberty: U.S. Cold War Grand Strategies and the Liberal Tradition

Abstract: Contrary to conventional accounts, the United States did not immediately adopt a set of sweeping commitments to Europe after World War II. Instead, it pursued a buck-passing strategy until the early 1960s that sought to craft Western Europe into an independent pole of power capable of balancing the Soviet Union largely without the assistance of the United States, thereby facilitating the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the continent. Only under President John F. Kennedy did the United States adopt a balancing strategy, making permanent forward commitments to the defense of Europe. A new theory of liberal ideas and foreign policy explains this shift. “Negative liberals,” who see freedom in terms of opportunity and minimal state intervention, adopted a buck-passing strategy to pass the costs of foreign policy to other actors and minimize state intrusion at home. “Positive liberals,” who see freedom as the exercise of capabilities and often welcome state intervention, had no such compunctions. Starting with K...

They Think They're Normal: Enduring Questions and New Research on North Korea—A Review Essay

Abstract: A wave of recent scholarship, built on rich empirical research, provides new perspectives on enduring questions about North Korea. Three books, in particular—Patrick McEachern's Inside the Red Box, Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland's Famine in North Korea, and Suk-Young Kim's Illusive Utopia—present a comprehensive and panoramic vision of North Korea today. This essay reviews these books and makes two overarching arguments. First, North Korea is more “normal” than is often thought, and its domestic politics, economy, and society function in ways familiar to other countries around the world. When viewed from the inside out, North Korea's institutions, economic life, and its people act in ways that are not only similar to those of others around the world, but that differ only in their level of intensity. Second, North Korea's continuing nuclear and military challenge is only one aspect of its overall relations with the world, and policies designed to minimize its threatening military behavior may work at cr...

Israel's War in Gaza: A Paradigm of Effective Military Learning and Adaptation

Abstract: For more than two decades, the pursuit of “lessons learned” from major combat encounters has been an area of sustained activity within the defense establishments of the United States and its principal allies around the world. Yet as often as not, such efforts have, at best, yielded lessons merely indicated and identified, since they cannot be said to have been truly learned until their prescriptions have been accepted and assimilated into an armed service's doctrine, force development, and operating procedures. In one notable instance in late December 2008 and early January 2009, however, an exemplar of lessons learned and incorporated was offered by the twenty-three-day campaign conducted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) against the radical Islamist organization Hamas in the Gaza Strip. That performance came on the heels of the IDF's less impressive showing more than two years before against the Iranian-sponsored terrorist movement Hezbollah during Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon. By any measure, Israel's...

Debating the Sources and Prospects of European Integration

Abstract: In “Europe’s Troubles,” Sebastian Rosato argues that the high water mark of European integration has passed and that the fate of the European Union (EU) is increasingly uncertain.1 The European project, he claims, had a geostrategic imperative during the Cold War: unable to match Soviet power individually, the small and medium powers of Western Europe sought to balance the Soviet Union through economic integration. The Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War removed the strategic rationale for preserving the community that European governments had built over many decades. At best, according to Rosato, Europe will continue to muddle along. At worst, the entire European project will collapse. Rosato’s article is an important contribution to the debate on the origins and persistence of European integration. His argument that integration was motivated by Eurasian balance of power considerations, however, leads him to make a number of dubious theoretical and empirical claims. Theoretically, Rosato’s structural realist premises are indeterminate regarding the magnitude, scope, and direction of European integration. Empirically, Rosato is forced to overstate the scope and degree of European integration during the Cold War and to understate the achievements and advances af-

Decline and Retrenchment: Peril or Promise?

Abstract: Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent’s article “Graceful Decline?” offers a clear, parsimonious theory of great power retrenchment that helps all a massive gap in international relations scholarship.1 Through comparative case studies and “coarse grained” statistical analysis, MacDonald and Parent argue that the degree of a state’s decline often explains the form and extent of its retrenchment. They then show that retrenchment is a surprisingly common and effective response to relative decline. MacDonald and Parent correctly point out the myopia of the “pessimistic” structuralist dogma that simply dismisses retrenchment as an impractical and dangerous strategy that only accelerates decline by signaling weakness and creating additional vulnerability (pp. 13–18).2 Their spare neorealist model goes a long way toward repairing this deaciency. As a arst cut, it improves on the existing literature while facilitating progressive future research on the topic. Still, a number of theoretical and conceptual problems undermine their argument and compromise their results. Below I discuss three issues with MacDonald and Parent’s theory of retrenchment.

Just War Moral Philosophy and the 2008-09 Israeli Campaign in Gaza

Abstract: The 2008–09 Israeli military campaign in Gaza, commonly known as Operation Cast Lead, is best understood in the context of Israel's “iron wall” strategy. During the 1930s, the strategy emphasized the need for overwhelming military power to break Arab resistance to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine; since the creation of Israel in 1948, it has continued to be at the core of Israeli policies in the overall Arab-Israeli conflict. From the outset, the strategy has included attacks on civilians and their crucial infrastructures. Such attacks violate the just war moral principles of discrimination and noncombatant immunity. In addition, Cast Lead violated the just war principles of just cause and last resort, which state that wars must have a just cause and even then must be undertaken only after nonviolent and political alternatives have failed. Israel did not have a just cause in 2008–09, because its primary purpose was to crush resistance to its continuing de facto occupation and repression of...

Civilians, Soldiers, and the Iraq Surge Decision

Abstract: In “The Right to Be Right,” Peter Feaver slurs Samuel Huntington and other civilmilitary relations theorists whom he dubs “professional supremacists.”1 This is doubtless inadvertent, because everyone in the aeld knows that he reveres Huntington. Moreover, Feaver’s version of the debate about prerogatives and limits in the interaction of soldiers and civilian policymakers is generally fair, even though I would assess it differently. My objection is to the label “professional supremacists.” This is not pedantic quibbling, because even academics succumb to the vice of skimming and attributing according to the bumper sticker versions of complex arguments. If taken seriously, this catchy label will establish a oatly incorrect term of art that falsely discredits, a priori and almost by deanition, the view it challenges. The dictionary unambiguously deanes “supremacist” as having a claim to dominance and control. Neither Huntington nor anyone I know in his camp challenges the norm of civilian supremacy, which Feaver nevertheless poses as the opposite of their arguments for certain degrees of military assertion. A few ignorant militarists aside, no one I know argues that, in determining policy, professionals should have even an equal vote, let alone supremacy. (Feaver makes much of the verb “insist” in how some describe the right of professionals to get their way, but insisting on one’s view does not mean denying the right of higher authorities to act irresponsibly and overrule it.) The case for uninhibited debate within government—what I have called elsewhere “equal dialogue and unequal authority”2—and for allowing disagreements of military leaders about the effectiveness of proposed wars to be known by Congress and, at least after resignation, by the public, is not a brief for military control. Peter Feaver is a conscientious scholar and an honorable public servant. He should keep his argument but retract the defamatory label “professional supremacist” before it catches on. —Richard K. Betts New York City, New York

Bargaining Theory and Rationalist Explanations for the Iraq War

Abstract: In “Two Cheers for Bargaining Theory: Assessing Rationalist Explanations for the Iraq War,” David Lake makes several important contributions to international relations scholarship.1 He provides greater empirical testing of the hypotheses generated by bargaining theory, a need that many theorists have long recognized.2 He likewise provides greater “analytical eclecticism” to international relations scholarship by seeking to integrate rationalist and behavioral explanations for war.3 He also draws needed attention to the issue of postwar governance costs in strategic bargaining and decisionmaking. Finally, he provides a theoretical framework for the 2003 war in Iraq, arguably the most important U.S. conoict since the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, in evaluating rationalist explanations for the Iraq War, Lake does not fully take into account the strategic environment faced by Saddam Hussein or the George W. Bush administration. Instead, he concludes that both sides suffered from “self-delusions, biased decisionmaking, and failures to update prior beliefs,” which illustrated “deviations from rationality” and “cognitive limitations” (pp. 9–10). Although both sides are likely guilty in this respect, Lake overlooks or downplays the incentives to misrepresent and commitment problems faced by both sides, and thereby overstates the limits of rationalist propositions to explain the Iraq War.4 Further consideration of their respective strategic environments demonstrates that bargaining theory provides greater insights into the Iraq War than Lake claims.

Debating India's Pathway to Nuclearization

Abstract: In his article, Andrew Kennedy attributes India’s nuclear restraint from 1964 to 1989 to (1) implicit nuclear umbrellas extended by the two superpowers and (2) the normative beliefs of Indian leaders.1 Using newly available declassiaed documents, he argues that India’s apparent absence of nuclear balancing against China and Pakistan until the 1980s was a distortion of reality, because the balancing occurred in secret. Its means were implicit nuclear umbrellas, arst extended against China in the mid-1960s by both superpowers and then from 1970 to 1991 by the former Soviet Union. As Soviet power in the mid-1980s waned, India resorted to internal balancing by developing an independent nuclear arsenal (pp. 151–152). Kennedy further claims that Indian leaders arst sought security through international disarmament institutions. Only when that quest failed did they proceed with nuclear acquisition (pp. 144–146). In this letter, I argue that there is no credible evidence to support either of the above two theses. Further, neither provides a consistent explanation for Indian nuclear behavior over the period in question. Hence neither qualiaes as a general cause for Indian nuclear restraint. Kennedy’s arst claim is contradicted by two events: the 1974 Pokhran test and the aborted plan for nuclear tests in 1982–83.2 The 1974 test came in the wake of the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation. The treaty’s key clause was article 9, the security clause, which according to Kennedy formally institutionalized the implicit Soviet nuclear guarantee (pp. 136–140). If the implicit nuclear guarantee was the cause for Indian nuclear dormancy, then the 1974 test is a puzzle that needs explaining all over again. Kennedy further links India’s revived nuclear program around 1985– 86 to the advent of the Gorbachev regime and the sense among Indian ofacials that the adelity of Moscow’s implicit nuclear guarantee was waning (pp. 141–144). This claim ignores historical evidence that places the revived Indian nuclear weapons program Correspondence: India’s Pathway to Nuclearization