Stacie E. Goddard, When Right Makes Right: Rising Powers and World Order, available December
SAMPLER 2018
Joshua R. Itkowitz Shifrinson, Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts, available September
•
Michael Beckley, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower, available September
P O LIT IC AL SCIENCE
This sampler contains short excerpts from the following forthcoming and recently published books from Cornell University Press. Full details about each book are available on our website, cornellpress.cornell.edu.
•
Paul K. MacDonald & Joshua M. parent, Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment, available now Nicholas L. Miller, Stopping the Bomb: The Sources and Effectiveness of US Nonproliferation Policy, available now Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War, available December Philip G. Roeder, National Secession: Persuasion and Violence in Independence Campaigns, available October
CORNE L L PRE SS.COR N ELL.EDU
CORNELLL UNIVER SITY PRESS
Alexander Lanoszka, Atomic Assurance: The Alliance Politics of Nuclear Proliferation, available November
POLITICAL SCIENCE S A M P L E R 2 0 1 8 [FREE]
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Unrivaled Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower
M i c h ae l B eckley
Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of a grant from the Faculty Research Awards Committee at Tufts University, which aided in the publication of this book. Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Beckley, Michael, author. Title: Unrivaled : why America will remain the world’s sole superpower / Michael Beckley. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Series: Cornell studies in security affairs | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018004047 | ISBN 9781501724787 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: United States—Foreign relations—21st century. | United States—Foreign relations—China. | China—Foreign relations—United States. | Unipolarity (International relations) | Hegemony. | Great powers. Classification: LCC E895 .B43 2018 | DDC 327.73009/05—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004047
Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
1.
Why America?
1
2.
The Pillars of Power
10
3.
Economic Trends
33
4.
Military Trends
62
5.
Future Prospects
98
6.
The Unipolar Era
135
Notes
155
Works Cited
179
Index
223
vii
chapter 1
Why America?
By most measures, the United States is a mediocre country. It ranks seventh in literacy, eleventh in infrastructure, twenty-eighth in government efficiency, and fifty-seventh in primary education.1 It spends more on healthcare than any other country, but ranks forty-third in life expectancy, fifty-sixth in infant mortality, and first in opioid abuse.2 More than a hundred countries have lower levels of income inequality than the United States, and twelve countries enjoy higher levels of gross national happiness.3 Yet in terms of wealth and military capabilities—the pillars of global power—the United States is in a league of its own. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for 25 percent of global wealth, 35 percent of world innovation, and 40 percent of global military spending.4 It is home to nearly 600 of the world’s 2,000 most profitable companies and 50 of the top 100 universities.5 And it is the only country that can fight major wars beyond its home region and strike targets anywhere on earth within an hour, with 587 bases scattered across 42 countries and a navy and air force stronger than that of the next ten nations combined.6 According to Yale historian Paul Kennedy, “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing.” The United States is, quite simply, “the greatest superpower ever.”7 Why is the United States so dominant? And how long will this imbalance of power last? In the following pages, I argue that the United States will remain the world’s sole superpower for many decades, and probably throughout this century. We are not living in a transitional post–Cold War era. Instead, we are in the midst of what could be called the unipolar era—a period as profound as any epoch in modern history. This conclusion challenges the conventional wisdom among pundits, policymakers, and the public.8 Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have dismissed unipolarity as a fleeting “moment” that would soon be swept away by the rise of new powers.9 Bookstores feature bestsellers such as The Post-American World and Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline;10 the U.S. National Intelligence Council has issued multiple reports advising
1
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the president to prepare the country for multipolarity by 2030;11 and the “rise of China” has been the most read-about news story of the twenty-first century.12 These writings, in turn, have shaped public opinion: polls show that most people in most countries think that China is overtaking the United States as the world’s leading power.13 How can all of these people be wrong? I argue that the current literature suffers from two shortcomings that distort peoples’ perceptions of the balance of power. First, the literature mismeasures power. Most studies size up countries using gross indicators of economic and military resources, such as gross domestic product (GDP) and military spending.14 These indicators tally countries’ resources without deducting the costs countries pay to police, protect, and provide services for their people. As a result, standard indicators exaggerate the wealth and military power of poor, populous countries like China and India—these countries produce vast output and field large armies, but they also bear massive welfare and security burdens that drain their resources. To account for these costs, I measure power in net rather than gross terms. In essence, I create a balance sheet for each country: assets go on one side of the ledger, liabilities go on the other, and net resources are calculated by subtracting the latter from the former. When this is done, it becomes clear that America’s economic and military lead over other countries is much larger than typically assumed—and the trends are mostly in its favor. Second, many projections of U.S. power are based on flawed notions about why great powers rise and fall. Much of the literature assumes that great powers have predictable life spans and that the more powerful a country becomes the more it suffers from crippling ailments that doom it to decline.15 The Habsburg, French, and British empires all collapsed. It is therefore natural to assume that the American empire is also destined for the dustbin of history. I argue, however, that the laws of history do not apply today. The United States is not like other great powers. Rather, it enjoys a unique set of geographic, demographic, and institutional advantages that translate into a commanding geopolitical position. The United States does not rank first in all sources of national strength, but it scores highly across the board, whereas all of its potential rivals suffer from critical weaknesses. The United States thus has the best prospects of any nation to amass wealth and military power in the decades ahead. For the foreseeable future, therefore, no country is likely to acquire the means to challenge the United States for global primacy. This is an extraordinary development, because the world has been plagued by great power rivalry for millennia. In the past five hundred years alone, there have been sixteen hegemonic rivalries between a ruling power and a rising power, and twelve of them ended in catastrophic wars.16 In the first half of the
2
WHY AMERICA?
twentieth century, for example, when the world was multipolar, Germany twice challenged Britain for European primacy. The result was two world wars. In the second half of the twentieth century, under bipolarity, the Soviet Union challenged the United States for global primacy. The result was the Cold War, a conflict in which the superpowers spent between 6 and 25 percent of their GDPs on defense every year, waged proxy wars that killed millions of people, and brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Today, by contrast, unipolarity makes a comparable level of great power competition impossible and thus makes a comparable level of conflict highly unlikely.17
Not the Argument Before elaborating on the points above, let me be clear about what I am not arguing. First, I am not arguing that U.S. dominance is guaranteed or will last forever. The United States could easily squander its geopolitical potential. It could, for example, gut its demographic advantage by restricting high-skill immigration. It could allow demagogues and special interests to capture its political institutions and run the country into the ground. Or it could fritter away its resources on reckless adventures abroad. In addition, there are any number of events (e.g., a nuclear accident, natural disaster, or disease outbreak) that could disproportionately devastate the United States. The purpose of this book is not to argue that unipolarity is set in stone, but rather to make an educated guess about how long it will last based on present trends and current knowledge about why great powers rise and fall. Second, I am not arguing that the United States is invincible or all-powerful. There are more than 190 countries, 7 billion people, and 197 million square miles of territory on earth. The United States cannot be present, let alone dominant, in every corner of the globe. Weaker nations can “route around” American power, doing business and calling the shots in their home regions while ignoring the United States.18 They also can “tame” American power by, among other things, denying the United States access to their domestic markets, suing the United States in international courts, bribing American politicians, bankrolling anti-American terrorist groups, hacking U.S. computer networks, meddling in U.S. elections, or brandishing weapons of mass destruction.19 Unipolarity is not omnipotence; it simply means that the United States has more than twice the wealth and military capabilities of any other nation. To translate those resources into influence, the United States will often have to collaborate with regional players. Third, I am not arguing that unipolarity constitutes a Pax Americana, in which U.S. primacy guarantees global peace and prosperity. Unipolarity implies the absence of one major source of conflict—hegemonic rivalry—but
3
CHAPTER 1
it allows for, and may even encourage, various forms of asymmetric conflict and domestic decay.20 The United States still faces serious threats at home and abroad. The purpose of this book is to clarify the scope of these threats, not to deny their existence. Finally, I am not arguing that Americans are inherently superior to other nations or that the United States is the most wonderful place on earth. I assume that people are basically the same all around the world, and I know for a fact that citizens of some rich nations enjoy a higher quality of life than the average American. My argument, therefore, is not that Americans are exceptional or that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Instead, I argue that the United States has been blessed by exceptional circumstances that all but guarantee that it will be the most powerful nation. One implication of this conclusion, as I explain later, is that the United States can afford to devote a bit more of its immense resources to improving the lives of its citizens.
Plan of the Book The plan of the book is straightforward. First, I develop a framework for measuring power and use it to assess current trends in the balance of power. Then, I build a framework for predicting power trends and use it to assess the future prospects of today’s great powers. Finally, I discuss the implications of my findings for world politics and U.S. policy. t h e pi lla rs of po wer Chapter 2 defines power and explains how to measure it. I start by showing that standard indicators exaggerate the power of populous countries because they ignore three types of costs that drain countries’ economic and military resources: production, welfare, and security costs. Production costs are the price of doing business; they include the raw materials consumed, and the negative externalities (e.g., pollution) created, during the production of wealth and military capabilities. Welfare costs are subsistence costs; they are the expenses a nation pays to keep its people from dying in the streets and include outlays on basic items like food, healthcare, education, and social security. Finally, security costs are the price a government pays to police and protect its citizens. Needless to say, these costs add up. In fact, for most of human history, they consumed virtually all of the resources in every nation. Even today, they tie down large chunks of the world’s economic and military assets.21 Thus analysts must deduct these costs to accurately assess the balance of power. To illustrate these points, I show that the rise and fall of the great powers and the outcomes of hundreds of international wars and disputes during
4
WHY AMERICA?
the past two hundred years correlate closely with variations in countries’ net stocks of economic and military resources—not with gross flows of resources. China and Russia, for example, had the largest GDPs and military budgets in the world during much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but both countries suffered from severe production, welfare, and security costs that condemned them to defeat at the hands of smaller but more efficient nations. After reviewing this history, I develop a framework for assessing the current balance of power. I also explain why China is the most potent challenger to U.S. primacy and thus why I focus on the U.S.-China power balance in the following two chapters. e c on om i c tren d s Chapter 3 analyzes economic trends for the United States and China. The main conclusion is that the United States is several times wealthier than China, and the absolute gap is growing by trillions of dollars each year. China’s economy is big but inefficient. It produces high output at high costs. Chinese businesses suffer from chronically high production costs, and China’s 1.4 billion people generate massive welfare and security burdens. The United States, by contrast, is big and efficient, producing high output at relatively low costs. American workers and businesses are seven times more productive than China’s on average, and with four times fewer people than China, the United States has much lower welfare and security costs. Gross domestic product and other popular indicators create the false impression that China is overtaking the United States economically. In reality, China’s economy is barely keeping pace as the burden of propping up loss-making companies and feeding, policing, protecting, and cleaning up after one-fifth of humanity erodes China’s stocks of wealth. mi li tary tren d s Chapter 4 analyzes the U.S.-China military balance, both overall and within East Asia. The results are stark: the United States has five to ten times the military capabilities of China, depending on the type of military forces in question, and maintains a formidable containment barrier against Chinese expansion in East Asia. In a war, China could potentially deny the U.S. military sea and air control within a few hundred miles of China’s territory, but China cannot sustain major combat operations beyond that zone, and the United States retains low-cost means of denying China sea and air control throughout the East and South China seas as well as preventing China from accomplishing more specific objectives, such as conquering Taiwan. The widespread perception that China is poised to dominate East Asia and close the military gap with the United States stems from a neglect of
5
CHAPTER 1
production, welfare, and security costs. My analysis takes these factors into account. I show, for example, that Chinese weapons systems are roughly half as capable as the United States’ on average; Chinese troops, pilots, and sailors receive less than half the training of their American counterparts and have limited operational experience and no combat experience; China’s personnel costs are at least 25 percent higher than the United States’; and homeland security operations consume at least 35 percent of China’s military budget and bog down half of China’s active-duty force, whereas the U.S. military outsources such operations and their costs to civilian agencies. Of course, U.S. military assets are dispersed around the world whereas China’s are concentrated in East Asia. The United States, however, is involved in most regions by choice and can redeploy forces from one area to another without seriously jeopardizing its security. China, by contrast, has to keep most of its military on guard at home, because it suffers from twice the level of domestic unrest as the United States and shares sea or land borders with nineteen countries, five of which fought wars against China within the last century and ten of which still claim parts of Chinese territory as their own. Crucially, many of these countries have developed the means to deny China sea and air control throughout most of its near seas—even without U.S. assistance. In sum, despite much talk of the rise of China, the United States maintains a huge economic and military lead, and the trends are generally in its favor. For China or any other nation to catch up to the United States, they will need to grow their power base much faster than they currently are. How likely is that? f u tu re prospects Chapter 5 analyzes the future prospects of the great powers and shows that the United States has the best foundation for growth. I begin by critiquing two theories that currently dominate discussions about why great powers rise and fall—balance-of-power theory and convergence theory. Both of these theories suggest that unipolarity will be short lived.22 Balance-of-power theory holds that weak states usually gang up on strong states and force a redistribution of international power.23 Convergence theory holds that poor countries grow faster than rich countries, thus rising challengers inevitably overtake reigning hegemons.24 I argue that these theories do not apply today. Balance-of-power dynamics are muted, because the United States is too powerful and far away for other major powers to balance against.25 Currently, no country can afford a sustained military challenge to U.S. primacy, and all of America’s potential rivals are packed together in Eurasia and therefore are more likely to fight each other than band together against the distant United States.26 To
6
WHY AMERICA?
back up this argument, I show that balancing against the United States has been sporadic since 1991 while bandwagoning with the United States has been widespread. Convergence theory, on the other hand, is underspecified.27 Sometimes poor countries grow faster than rich countries and sometimes they fall further behind. In the late nineteenth century, for example, Germany, Japan, and the United States rose relative to Britain whereas Austria-Hungary, France, Russia, China, India, and the Ottoman Empire declined. These and other historical examples show that convergence is conditional; it depends on additional factors that, so far, have not been incorporated into theories of international change. To address this shortcoming, I develop a new framework for projecting the rise and fall of nations. Drawing on studies from the field of economics, I show that sustained economic growth depends on three broad factors: geography, institutions, and demography. The ideal geography for growth is one with abundant natural resources, transport infrastructure, and buffers from enemies.28 The ideal government is one that is capable yet accountable, meaning that it is strong enough to provide services and maintain order, but sufficiently divided to prevent corruption and the violation of private property rights.29 Finally, the ideal population is large, young, and educated.30 After presenting the evidence linking these factors to economic growth, I use indicators of each to assess the future prospects of the eight most powerful countries: the United States, China, Russia, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and India. I find that the United States has, by far, the best growth fundamentals. Geographically, the United States is a natural economic hub and military fortress. It has enormous stocks of natural resources, more natural transport infrastructure than the rest of the world combined, and is surrounded by “friends and fish� (Canada, Mexico, and two huge oceans) whereas all the other major powers border powerful rivals. Institutionally, the United States is so-so. The small and divided U.S. government does a poor job redistributing wealth, but it fosters entrepreneurship and innovation; spurs reform after policy blunders; and helps the United States suck up investment, technology, and human capital from other nations. Demographically, the United States has the most productive population, and its working-age population is set to grow during this century, unlike the populations of its competitors. Potential challengers each have several weaknesses. China, the only country that is anywhere close to challenging U.S. primacy, has especially dismal growth prospects. In the coming decades, China will lose a third of its workforce and age faster than any society in history, with the ratio of workers to retirees shrinking from 8-to-1 today to 2-to-1 by 2050; its institutions fuel corruption, stifle entrepreneurship, and stymie reform after policy mistakes; its natural resources have dwindled due to overuse
7
CHAPTER 1
and pollution; and it is encircled by more than a dozen hostile countries. Russia has vast stocks of natural resources, but its institutions are more corrupt and less effective than China’s, and it has a declining and extremely unhealthy population and a vulnerable geographic location. Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom have slightly more effective and less corrupt institutions than the United States (France lags slightly behind), but they have small and shrinking populations and few natural resources. India will soon have the largest and youngest population among the great powers, but it trails the other great powers in virtually every other category. In sum, the United States has the most potential for future growth, in addition to an enormous economic and military lead. Unipolarity is not guaranteed to endure, but present trends strongly suggest that it will last for many decades. im pli cati o ns Chapter 6 concludes by discussing the implications of unipolarity for world politics and U.S. policy. The most important implication is the absence of hegemonic rivalry. During the past five hundred years, there has been a hegemonic competition between a rising power and a ruling power every thirty years on average.31 Seventy-five percent of these feuds ended in war, and even many of the “peaceful” cases were vicious cold wars. Today, by contrast, the United States does not face a peer competitor. As a result, there is less warfare in the world than in any period in modern history.32 Unipolarity, however, is not totally conducive to peace and prosperity. In the remainder of chapter 6, I highlight several dangers. First, unipolarity may undermine crisis stability between the United States and weaker nations.33 American military superiority could embolden the United States to stand firm in a crisis while simultaneously encouraging weaker nations to shoot first, before the U.S. military can wipe out their offensive forces. This “use it or lose it” dynamic can turn minor incidents into major wars. I discuss how the United States can avoid such scenarios with China, Russia, and North Korea. Second, unipolarity will tempt the United States to fight stupid wars of choice in areas of little strategic value.34 I explain where and when such imperial temptations will be most severe and propose ways to contain them. Third, without a superpower rival, American national unity may dissolve, and special interests may capture the country’s institutions and stifle reform and innovation.35 The analyses of U.S. institutions in chapter 5 suggest that polarization, gridlock, and corruption are already infecting the American system of government. I highlight these trends and assess various proposals to reverse them. Finally, unipolarity could undermine the liberal world order.36 As the world’s sole superpower, the United States is more capable than other
8
WHY AMERICA?
nations of providing global governance, but it may have less incentive to do so given its secure location and vast stocks of wealth. In the coming decades the United States could become a “global power without global interests,� turning inward while leaving others to maintain international security, prop up the global economy, and defend human rights.37 Arms buildups, insecure sea-lanes, and closed markets are only the most obvious risks of a return to U.S. isolationism.38 Less obvious are problems, such as climate change, water scarcity, refugee crises, and disease, which may fester without a leader to rally collective action. I discuss these threats to global security and explain why the United States can and should help address them.
9
Rising Titans, Falling Giants How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts
J os h ua R . I tzko w itz S hif rins o n
Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of subventions from the Department of International Affairs at the George Bush School of Government & Public Service and the Melvin G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, both at Texas A&M University, which aided in the publication of this book. Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of Americ a Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shifrinson, Joshua R. Itzkowitz, author. Title: Rising titans, falling giants : how great powers exploit power shifts / Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Series: Cornell studies in security affairs | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018002247 (print) | LCCN 2018002931 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501725067 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501725074 (epub/mobi) |
ISBN 9781501725050 (cloth ; alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. | Soviet Union—Foreign relations—United States. | Great powers—
History—20th century. | Balance of power—History— 20th century. Classification: LCC E183.8.S65 (ebook) | LCC E183.8.S65 S5435 2018 (print) | DDC 327.73047—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002247
Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction: Rising States and the Fate of Declining Great Powers
1
1. Predation Theory
13
2. A Formerly Great Britain: Predicting U.S. and Soviet Strategy
42
3. The U.S. and Soviet Response to Britain’s Decline
63
4. Watching the Soviet Union Decline: Assessing Change
and Predicting U.S. Strategy
99
5. U.S. Strategy and the Decline of the Soviet Union
119
Conclusion: Rising Powers, the Fate of Declining States, and the F uture of Great Power Politics
160
Appendix 1. Declining Great Powers, 1860–1913
187
Appendix 2. Interviews Conducted with Former U.S. Government Officials
191
Notes 195 Index 255
v
Introduction Rising States and the Fate of Declining G reat Powers
Sir Orme Sargent was worried. Watching the stunning growth of U.S. and Soviet power as World War II wound down, the f uture permanent under secretary of state in the British Foreign Ministry could not help but recog nize that the distribution of power was shifting against Great Britain by the day. With the war over, Britain—once arguably the strongest state in Europe, but now nearly bankrupt—would be far weaker than its rising U.S. and So viet counterparts. A grim f uture awaited. European security, Sargent wrote in July 1945, “is to a large degree in the hands of the Soviet Union and the United States,” as “there is a feeling that Great Britain is now a secondary Power and can be treated as such.”1 Unless British strength grew rapidly, the country was destined to find itself falling further in the ranks of the g reat powers and vulnerable to Soviet and U.S. machinations. Sargent’s fears proved largely unfounded. In the immediate postwar world, a rising United States and Soviet Union both tried to keep the United Kingdom a g reat power. The United States’ efforts initially involved limited financial aid to keep Britain afloat, but eventually saw the United States pro vide extensive economic assistance to reconstruct Britain’s economy via the Marshall Plan and offer military backing via the North Atlantic Treaty Organ ization (NATO).2 Nor was the United States alone, as the Soviet Union adopted strikingly similar policies. From 1945 through mid-1947, Soviet lead ers tried to reach a quid pro quo with Britain that would divide Europe between the two states and, as British strength continued to falter, upped the ante by offering Britain a military alliance.3 Of course, Soviet efforts to support Britain did not last forever: by late 1947, Soviet leaders were de nouncing British policies and trying to undermine Britain’s postwar recov ery. Nevertheless, U.S. and Soviet responses to Britain’s decline were not nearly as bad as Sargent had feared. Although the Soviet Union eventually preyed on British weaknesses, both the United States and Soviet Union first attempted to support Britain in Europe and, by the close of the 1940s, the 1
Introduction
United States was actively engaged in rebuilding British economic and mil itary capabilities. Neither Sargent’s concerns nor the varying U.S. and Soviet responses are unique. Across time and space, states facing decline—defined simply as one great power’s sustained loss of economic and military capabilities relative to one or more other powers—have feared the f uture and worried, as Dale Co peland observes, that “if they allow a rising state to grow, it w ill either attack them later with superior power or coerce them into concessions that com promise their security.”4 After all, states living in a competitive international system have to provide for their own security, seemingly giving them good reasons to prey on potential rivals as their relative power grows.5 Thucydides, for example, famously attributed the Peloponnesian War to “the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”6 Similarly, Wil helmine Germany’s leaders saw the rise of Russia as “an ever increasing night mare,” just as Soviet leaders late in the Cold War worried that the United States would use its increasing strength to try “to gain superiority over the Soviet Union.”7 In practice, however, rising states differ wildly in their approaches to de clining great powers. Witnessing another’s decline, some rising states go for the jugular and challenge a declining state’s strategic position. As the Soviet Union declined in the 1980s and early 1990s, for example, the United States exploited Soviet weaknesses. Indeed, thousands of declassified documents and dozens of interviews with former policymakers show that the United States systematically took advantage of Soviet problems, initially pressing for asymmetric diplomatic and military concessions before eventually facili tating the demise of the Soviet alliance network and hindering Soviet eco nomic recovery.8 Similarly, Germany attempted to supplant a weakening Great Britain as Europe’s leading power before the First World War through diplomatic aggrandizement and a naval arms race;9 a rising Prussia fought a declining France for dominance in Central Europe in 1870–71;10 and Euro pean influence in North America was undermined throughout the 1800s by the emerging United States.11 Yet at other times, states are not as power hun gry. A rising Russia, for instance, allied itself with a weakening France before 1914;12 Germany tethered its cart to Austria-Hungary’s increasingly de crepit horse after the 1870s;13 and the Soviet Union limited its competition with the United States as the latter’s power seemed to wane in the 1970s.14 In short, rising state strategies vary markedly: rising states sometimes prey on declining states in economic, military, and/or diplomatic affairs, but they may also support their waning peers, as well as prey or support with greater or lesser intensity. What explains these behaviors? When dealing with a declining great power, what strategies do rising states adopt? When and why do some ris ing states act as the United States did toward the Soviet Union in the 1980s and early 1990s, adopting predatory strategies designed to further weaken
2
Introduction
declining great powers and push them down the great power ranks? Under what conditions do rising states pursue supportive strategies designed to slow or stop a declining state’s relative losses? Put simply, what explains ris ing state strategy toward declining great powers?
The Argument in Brief In this book, I develop a theory of rising state strategy—what I term “pre dation theory”—to understand and account for a rising state’s predatory or supportive policies t oward its declining peers. Contrary to what policymak ers may fear and scholars may expect, I argue that rising states engage in the most intensive and brutal kinds of predation only if a rising state con cludes that a declining state simultaneously (1) can give the riser little or no help in opposing other g reat power threats, and (2) lacks military options to keep the riser in check. In t hese circumstances, rising states seeking to max imize power in an uncertain world have an opportunity to gain all they can at a decliner’s expense by weakening the decliner as quickly as possible. Conversely, rising states tend to adopt supportive strategies the more they can use the declining state to counter other threats—in fact, they are especially supportive when they both need a declining state’s help against other g reat powers and have l ittle to fear militarily from the declining state. Just as the pre–World War I era saw a growing Germany improve ties with Austria- Hungary while a surging Russia tried to come to France’s defense, rising states in t hese situations have good reason to prevent a decliner from growing weaker, as efforts to prey on a militarily denuded decliner can leave a rising state bereft of allies and facing a powerful opposing coalition. Significantly, a rising state’s desire for partners and the threat posed by a decliner are not perceptual issues affecting individual states idiosyncrati cally. Although policymakers rarely have perfect information regarding the distribution of power, once a rising state’s leaders conclude that power is moving in their favor and against a decliner, their responses tend to vary depending on (1) the distribution of power, geography, and political rela tionships in the international system, and (2) the declining state’s own military tools. When decline occurs in an environment where geography, power, and politics mean that a declining state is unable to help a rising state against other states or is itself a major threat, the riser has good reasons to prey on the decliner: d oing so weakens a potential challenger and positions the riser to better compete against other g reat powers. In the best-case sce nario, preying on a declining state that is the only other great power around allows a rising state to become a hegemon and operate f ree of great power threats. Here, the declining state’s ability to credibly threaten war is the only thing that can keep a rising state’s predation in check—the more a de clining state can impose significant costs on a rising state in defense of its
3
Introduction
interests, the less intensely a rising state is likely to pursue a predatory strat egy. Take away a declining state’s ability to penalize a rising state, however, and the riser can set to work eliminating the decliner as a great power. This, I argue later in the book, was a major driver of U.S. efforts to exploit the Soviet Union’s decline late in the Cold War: as Soviet problems worsened and military options waned, U.S. competitiveness increased. These calculations change when a rising state needs assistance against other great powers and a declining state is positioned to help. In t hese cir cumstances, supportive strategies are an attractive way to bid for the declin ing state’s cooperation, to keep the decliner out of opposing coalitions, and to avoid fruitless competition or war with a prospective partner. Just as a surging Soviet Union offered to work with Britain after World War II largely to gain British assistance against the United States, support reflects an effort by rising states both to find partners to share the costs of opposing other great powers and to keep opposing coalitions as small as possible. Here, however, a declining state’s efforts to defend itself are a double-edged sword, as a declining state that can provide security for itself can also pose problems for friend and foe alike. Instead, only if a declining state is unable to challenge others do rising states come to its assistance in earnest, with the goal of re building a partner over which they can exert influence. Ultimately, focusing on a rising state’s need for help against other threats, a declining state’s ability to meet this need, and the military problems posed by a decliner in the process grounds rising state strategy in a riser’s self- interest. As a rising state’s need for help and worries about the decliner wax and wane across time and space, so too does rising state policy change. Thus, although declining states sometimes find their international lives nasty and brutish, this is not always the case.
Why Study Responses to Great Power Decline? The implications of this study are stark. Throughout the post-1945 era, wor ries about decline have been at the forefront of debates over U.S. foreign pol icy.15 Reflecting the outsize role of the United States in world politics, few issues are more central to discussions of international security at the start of the twenty-first century as understanding what policies emerging great pow ers such as China will adopt if and as U.S. power wanes. And like the con cerns voiced in ancient Athens, pre-1914 Germany, and the late Cold War Soviet Union, worries that f uture rising states w ill prey on a waning United States are alive and well.16 These concerns are not surprising. As Fareed Za karia observes, rising states have generally “expanded their political inter ests abroad” as their power has grown.17 As a result, declining states tend to fear that risers w ill eventually increase the political, economic, and military demands placed on them. These escalating demands can end up threaten
4
Introduction
ing a declining state’s vital interests, leaving it in the position of either ac cepting challenges to its survival or vital interests, or risking war.18 As noted above, however, rising states are not always predators—in fact, they sometimes treat declining great powers with surprising moderation and support. Understanding why states respond to another state’s decline with predatory or supportive strategies is therefore central to addressing declining states’ concerns. This insight can subsequently help declining states posi tion themselves to ensure their security as their power wanes. Knowing, for instance, that rising states tend to support decliners that can help counter other threats suggests novel policy options for strategists worried about U.S. decline: rather than trying to compete with all rising states, t here are circum stances in which the United States might be better served by underscoring its use in containing rising states’ other opponents. In contrast, knowing that rising states prey on decliners that are unable to provide assistance against other threats implies that the more the United States is the sole actor stand ing between a rising state and the riser’s hegemony, the more the United States needs to have a credible threat of force to keep predation in check. This, in turn, would push against calls for reductions in the U.S. military. Above all, this study should interest students of international security concerned with the politics of power shifts in particular, and great power cooperation and competition more generally. On one level, predation the ory offers insights into the central debate in the study of power shifts— namely, the role of change in the distribution of power as a cause of g reat power war. A large body of research argues that major wars tend to occur when a fundamental shift in the distribution of power—especially a power transition—empowers one state and disadvantages others.19 Conversely, a growing number of studies propose that state responses to power shifts are more variable, s haped by a range of domestic and structural conditions.20 Notably, this burgeoning literature helps explain why empirical tests of the link between conflict and shifting power have yielded mixed results, with some power shifts resulting in great power conflict while others shifts occur peacefully.21 The argument developed in this book thus contributes to ongoing efforts to clarify the relationship between power shifts and state behavior. Although not focused on conflict per se, circumstances causing rising state predation should increase the chance of conflict. To say this is to acknowledge that in ternational politics is competitive. Not only might rising states attack de clining states as part of their predatory efforts, but declining states might use force against the growing threat presented by rising states. Even though— as chapter 1 elaborates—rising states generally avoid policies that are most likely to provoke war until they enjoy a large military advantage, the com bined effect of rising state predation and declining state unease invites mis calculation and conflict. In contrast, situations that incentivize rising state support limit the risk of war as rising states—by definition—forgo aggression
5
Introduction
as part of their supportive efforts, thereby reducing pressure on declining states to lash out. Support does not remove conflict from the power shift equation, but it creates room for reassurance and conciliation to limit the risk of violence. In short, predation theory refines the relationship between power shifts and conflict by proposing that the central question is not whether states end up at war during a power shift, but why states adopt strategies that in crease or decrease the chance of conflict at such times. Yet beyond the politics of great power rise and decline, determining when and why rising states prey on or support declining great powers speaks to debates at the heart of international relations theory over the sources of co operation and competition in world politics. For decades, realist theories of all stripes have been critiqued for appearing to overpredict international competition and understate cooperation; more recently, so-called offensive realist arguments have received special attention for seeming to describe a world in which cooperation is scarce and states are always ready to seize opportunities to increase their relative power.22 However, despite portray ing a world in which states are often interested in maximizing power and trumping one another, the realist tradition is significantly more ambiguous as to when states actually engage in power-seeking behaviors. The best that can be claimed is that even power-hungry states engage in what John Mearsheimer terms “calculated aggression”—biding their time until the mo ment is right to strike—without explaining what conditions allow aggran dizement.23 Depending on how states calculate whether predation pays, in other words, both competition and cooperation are possible within realist frameworks. The argument developed in this volume thus makes three contributions to the study of cooperation and competition in international relations. First and foremost, I build on existing scholarship to explain when and why ris ing states conclude that predation pays. As noted above, policymakers and scholars often suggest that rising states’ growing relative power makes them the most likely candidates for further expansion, even though the evidence for this behavior is decidedly mixed. Hence, identifying when and why ris ing states prey clarifies the circumstances in which g reat powers writ large challenge other states. Second, the argument helps explain when and why supportive strategies emerge even within a realist framework. In d oing so, this book joins other recent research in explaining the sources of coopera tion in world politics by describing the strategies states pursue when they do not seek to expand, alongside the conditions under which they aid other states.24 For example, knowing why the rising United States supported the declining Britain but challenged the waning Soviet Union or why the surg ing Germany backed Austria-Hungary but preyed on France and Britain tells us much about cooperation and competition among great powers in general. Finally, predation theory raises the possibility of bridging divides among different theoretical traditions. It does this by showing how power maximi
6
Introduction
zation and cooperation can be the product of the same basic set of calcula tions, as whether states prey on a decliner or support and cooperate with it varies according to calculations of power and opportunity common to many realist arguments. At its root, the argument thereby helps reconcile dispa rate research on g reat power cooperation and contestation in the context of great power rise and decline.
Alternative Accounts of Rising State Strategy My theory also challenges a series of scholarly and policy arguments used to explain state strategy toward declining states drawn from several theo retical traditions. Paradoxically, given that the topic is central to policy and scholarship, there is only a limited body of systematic research examining rising state strategy.25 This absence is even more surprising given that nu merous studies examine the sources of decline,26 state efforts to grapple with their own decline,27 and declining state options for managing rising states.28 If rising state strategy is addressed at all, it most often comes up as part of aforementioned efforts in hegemonic stability and power transition theo ries to explain why declining hegemons and rising challengers go to war with one another for leadership of the international system. H ere, scholars argue that war is more likely if a rising state is a revisionist or dissatisfied actor seeking to overturn an international order maintained by a declining hegemon, and less likely if a rising state is a satisfied power pursuing a sta tus quo course. These studies, however, suffer from two related problems. First, they provide few clues as to why rising states pursue a revisionist or status quo policy in the first place.29 Second, they focus nearly exclusively on competition between a dominant state and a rising challenger, thereby missing the fact that great powers face different incentives for cooperation and competition when more than two great powers are present.30 Although not full-fledged theories, other approaches offer predictions to explain what great powers writ large may want as their relative power grows. As elaborated below, I use t hese competing arguments to develop a research agenda to check predation theory’s explanatory power. Instead of differen tiating between status quo and revisionist powers, for example, research on insecurity spirals and misperceptions suggests that rising state predation or support varies depending on the intensity of the security dilemma.31 Because great powers merely seek security for themselves—a key assumption of de fensive realist approaches to international relations, and a point of division between defensive and offensive realist theories—it is only when a rising state fears that a declining state’s path to security threatens the riser that a rising state has reasons to prey.32 Conversely, the less a declining state threat ens a rising state—for example, by winding down arms races and adopting nonthreatening military positions—the less intense the security dilemma and
7
Introduction
the more rising and declining states can find ways of cooperating. Support ive strategies are thus possible if declining states take steps to reassure ris ing states by limiting the political and military threat they pose.33 Similarly, research on trade and international political economy suggests that economic interdependence can dampen competitive tendencies and in centivize cooperation as power shifts. Interdependence does this by creat ing domestic interest groups whose livelihood depends on the continual free flow of goods and services. Provided that rising and declining states are both willing to trade, domestic groups interested in exchange will lobby against competitive policies that upset these relationships, thereby acting as brakes on predation.34 This behavior should be especially strong when rising states have reason to believe that economic exchange w ill continue in the f uture.35 Seeking to continue economic exchange, rising states thereby support and cooperate with declining states out of economic self-interest. Still a third approach relates rising state strategy to domestic ideologies in rising and declining states. Here, rising states that share with decliners similar conceptions of what Mark Haas terms “domestic political legitimacy”— liberal, conservative, socialist, etc.—are expected to pursue supportive rather than predatory strategies.36 Conversely, states with disparate ideolo gies are likely to pursue a predatory course. Scholars offer a variety of mechanisms to explain these phenomena, including claims that support is normatively appropriate when states share similar ideologies; that support for ideological fellow travelers and predation toward ideological rivals rein forces a rising state’s domestic legitimacy; and that support reflects the di minished threat perceptions that occur when states share similar ideologies. Yet, regardless of the specific cause, the expectation is that birds of a similar ideological feather flock together amid shifting power. Finally, a related line of research explains predation or support by empha sizing the ideas held by policymakers in rising states. From this perspec tive, a rising state’s growing capabilities are necessary but insufficient for predation—it also needs to be led by elites whose unifying ideology calls for expansion.37 These ideas can take many forms. For example, Christopher Layne argues that U.S. leaders have long espoused liberal c auses that have led the United States to pursue “an expansionist—indeed, hegemonic or even imperial—policy.”38 Likewise, Nathan Leites, in his seminal study of Soviet worldviews, describes Soviet ideology as seeking to spread commu nism abroad and ensuring that “no advance, no matter how small, should be neglected.”39 Scholars today, meanwhile, are actively debating w hether Chinese elites are adopting a narrowly nationalist perspective that calls for foreign expansion.40 The expectation, therefore, is that rising states led by elites with expansionist worldviews w ill tend to prey on declining states as power shifts. By implication, supportive strategies are possible if the ruling ideology itself calls for cooperation with other g reat powers.41
8
Introduction
The Path Ahead: Testing Predation Theory in the Archives The remainder of this book presents the hypotheses and causal logic of pre dation theory, tests the argument against competing accounts, and offers im plications for scholars and policymakers. Following this introduction, chap ter 1 outlines a way of studying a rising state’s strategic choices vis-à-vis a declining g reat power. It also elaborates on the logic of predation theory by highlighting the links among the decliner’s ability to assist rising states against other great powers, its military options, and rising state strategy. The majority of the book consists of a pair of case studies examining the great power declines attendant to the start and end of the Cold War. Look ing back from the span of several decades, it is easy to forget that the dawn of the postwar era and the closing salvos of the Cold War were driven in large part by fundamental changes in the distribution of power, as first the United Kingdom and then the Soviet Union tumbled from the ranks of the g reat powers. These declines, as suggested above, compelled other, relatively ris ing great powers such as the United States to respond to shifts in the distri bution of power. As with most qualitative research, the objective in the case studies is not to test the theory against the universe of cases, but to show the explanatory power of the theory in particularly salient and data-rich episodes. To this end, the case studies draw on extensive qualitative research—involving thousands of archival and other primary source documents, alongside doz ens of policymaker interviews—and leverage intra-case variation in support of three tasks. First, using the comparative case method, I assess whether predation theory’s variables correctly predicted the strategies actually adopted by states facing another’s relative decline. Second, I evaluate the theory’s causal logic through process tracing since, by showing the sequences of events through which strategies change, I am able to obtain unique pur chase on the mechanisms at the heart of the argument.42 Finally, case stud ies allow me to evaluate predation theory against competing accounts. In support of this objective, I selected cases that have extreme values on the variables emphasized by one or more of the alternative arguments, and for which my theory and its competitors generally make discrete and different empirical predictions. Combined, the cases thus allow strong tests of my ar gument against alternative accounts: if other arguments explain rising state behavior, they should do so in readily observable ways in these cases. Hence, the more the rising state strategy is accurately explained by my argument rather than its competitors, the more confidence we have in the theory.43 Each chapter therefore compares my argument to alternative approaches, show ing that predation theory provides greater insight into the course and out come of the cases than its competitors. In the process, the research also makes stand-alone historiographic contributions by illustrating the process and
9
Introduction
logic through which g reat power decline has been addressed in the post-1945 world. Within each case study, I assess three types of evidence for insight into the course and conduct of rising state strategy. The first consists of the military, diplomatic, and economic policies t hese states adopted toward decliners. Identifying these policies allows me to categorize rising state strategies according to their predatory or supportive nature. Second, I consider the de bates leading to the adoption of t hese strategies, and the policies that w ere considered but rejected by policymakers—that is, those individuals charged with forming and executing state policy. This offers insight into what strat egists hoped to achieve with their policies and helps me reconstruct the underlying drivers of state behavior. Finally, I pay attention to moments within the cases when declining states responded to these strategies by seek ing some kind of change in rising states’ policies. Evaluating whether and why rising states responded to declining state pressure at these critical junctions provides insights into what relatively rising states wanted from declining states, how far they were willing to go to achieve these objectives, and their reasons for doing so. The book proceeds chronologically. Chapters 2 and 3 examine efforts by the United States and Soviet Union to address the decline of the United King dom in the early postwar period. Although emerging from World War II as one of the Big Three victors in the conflict and included as one of the “super powers” in William T. R. Fox’s original treatment of the subject, the United Kingdom soon tumbled out of the g reat power ranks.44 In response, the United States backed Great Britain—eventually offering it extensive eco nomic and military assistance—while the Soviet Union seemingly tried to expand in the resulting power vacuum. These responses should be difficult for my argument to explain: as chapter 2 emphasizes, not only are U.S. ef forts to support the United Kingdom seemingly addressed by accounts em phasizing the countries’ ideological affinity, economic interdependence, and shared security dilemma, but Soviet predation makes sense in light of these arguments as well. Making extensive use of U.S. and British primary sources, chapter 3 qual ifies these accounts. In fact, and in line with predation theory, I show that both the United States and the Soviet Union supported the United Kingdom in the immediate postwar period, as the two states worked to retain the United Kingdom as a potential ally. Moreover, these efforts intensified as British military options waned. Notably, this trend helps explain the origins of Cold War touchstones such as the Marshall Plan and NATO. Just as important, it uncovers evidence of an unexpectedly cooperative Soviet Union immediately a fter World War II, including proposals for an Anglo- Soviet alliance in the winter of 1946–47. Indeed, Soviet and U.S. policies w ere strikingly symmetrical—and supportive of Britain—until late 1947, when growing Anglo-American cooperation led Soviet leaders to conclude that
10
Introduction
Britain would never be a Soviet partner and so prompted the Soviet Union to try to weaken the United Kingdom. In sum, the theory advanced in chap ter 1 provides more insight into the episode than its competitors, accurately predicting the course and conduct of Soviet and U.S. policies t oward Great Britain. Chapters 4 and 5 then study U.S. foreign policy and the decline of the So viet Union during the late Cold War. As chapter 4 explains, this is a uniquely important case with which to test my theory. Not only did the Soviet Union decline in dramatic fashion and make major military reductions in the process— offering extreme values on predation theory’s explanatory variables—but the case is intrinsically significant. With the waning of Soviet power, the United States experienced such a rise in its relative position that it became the world’s sole superpower, far and away the most dominant state in international affairs. Most importantly, the case provides an especially strong test of my argument against competing accounts. Not only does a large body of scholarship propose that the United States cooperated with the Soviet Union during the latter’s decline by managing change in Europe to both sides’ advantage, but my theory and its competitors often make sharply different predictions regarding the course and d rivers of U.S. strategy. Drawing on thousands of recently declassified American archival docu ments and dozens of interviews with most of the major U.S. policymakers involved in U.S.-Soviet relations at the time, I show instead in chapter 5 that U.S. strategy was consistently predatory throughout the period of Soviet de cline. Far from cooperating with the Soviet Union, U.S. strategy was driven by a persistent desire to maximize U.S. advantages, dominate the Soviet Union, and bring about a world in which the United States would be free of constraints imposed by other great powers. In fact, and unique to my argu ment, U.S. strategy became markedly more predatory after the collapse of Soviet military power in Eastern Europe following the Revolutions of 1989–90 created a window of opportunity for the United States to directly undercut the Soviet position in Europe. Simply put, rather than conciliating a declin ing Soviet Union, the United States preyed on the Soviet Union once Soviet decline began, sometimes doing so quite intensely. Again, my theory out performs competing accounts of rising state strategy. Finally, the conclusion performs several tasks. After summarizing the evi dence from previous chapters, I offer brief additional assessments of the theory by examining g reat power responses to the declines of Austria- Hungary and France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These cases are instructive extensions of the argument. Not only w ere Austria-Hungary and France the g reat losers in Europe’s game of g reat power politics before World War I (see Appendix 1), but examining responses to the French and Austro-Hungarian declines shows that predation theory explains rising state behavior in an era when competition among many great powers was endemic. Combined with the post-1945 case studies, these
11
Introduction
additional cases thus demonstrate that the theory can account for rising state strategy across a wide swath of diplomatic history. Subsequently, I present policy implications emerging from the study, before highlighting the significance of the research for international relations theory. Ultimately, the argument and evidence in this book provide a novel explanation for rising states’ behavior toward declining great powers, one that helps illuminate key aspects of g reat power relations in the modern world. Questions sur rounding the rise and decline of g reat powers lie at the heart of international relations theory, historical interpretation, and diplomatic practice, making this book relevant to several fields.
12
When Right Makes Might Rising Powers and World Order
Stacie E. Goddard
Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
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Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without
permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goddard, Stacie E., 1974– author.
Title: When right makes might : rising powers and world order / Stacie Goddard.
Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Series: Cornell
studies in security affairs | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018013753 (print) | LCCN 2018017539 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501730313 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501730320 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501730306 | ISBN 9781501730306 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Great powers—History—19th century. | Great
powers—History—20th century. | Middle powers—History—19th century. | Middle powers—History—20th century. | World politics—19th century. | World politics—20th century. | International relations—Case studies.
Classification: LCC JZ1310 (ebook) | LCC JZ1310. G73 2018 (print) | DDC 327.1/1209034—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013753
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Contents
List of Tables
ix
Acknowledgments xi 1. The Great Powers’ Dilemma: Uncertainty, Intentions, and Rising Power Politics
1
2. The Politics of Legitimacy: How a Rising Power’s Right Makes Might
16
3. America’s Ambiguous Ambition: Britain and the Accommodation of the United States, 1817–23
47
4. Prussia’s Rule-Bound Revolution: Europe and the Destruction of the Balance of Power, 1863–64
84
5. Germany’s Rhetorical Rage: Britain and the Abandonment of Appeasement, 1938–39
118
6. Japan’s Folly: The Conquest of Manchuria, 1931–33
149
Conclusion: Legitimacy, Power, and Strategy in World Politics
183
Notes 199 Index 235
vii
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chapter 1
The Great Powers’ Dilemma Uncertainty, Intentions, and Rising Power Politics
Why do great powers accommodate, even facilitate, the rise of some challengers, while others are contained or confronted, even at the risk of war? What explains a great power’s strategic response to rising powers in the international system? The conventional wisdom suggests that a great power’s response to a rising power rests on how it perceives the challenger’s intentions.1 When a rising power has limited aims, it is unlikely to pose a threat. Rising powers with limited aims may seek minor adjustments to territorial boundaries, but not engage in extensive expansion; they will still abide by the rules and norms that govern sovereignty and regulate conquest. They may demand more economic resources, but not threaten the existing great powers’ livelihood. They may seek recognition of their growing prestige, but accept the legitimacy of an existing status hierarchy. Under these conditions, great powers should turn to accommodation as the best way to manage a new power’s rise. In the nineteenth century, Britain was willing to cooperate with the United States because that rising power seemed likely to play by the emerging rules of the liberal international order: the American power might seek security within its own boundaries, and influence in the Western Hemisphere, but would not threaten Britain’s core interests. Likewise after resisting German unification for over half a century, in the 1860s the European powers—Britain, Austria, and Russia—decided that Prussia’s aims were ultimately benign. For this reason, the great powers allowed Prussia to overturn the political and territorial status quo on the continent, uniting the states of the German Confederation under Prussian leadership, and cementing Germany’s position as a European power. A rising power with revolutionary aims, in contrast, poses a significant threat and must be contained or confronted, even if doing so risks war between the great power and its emerging adversary. Revolutionary powers will seek to upend existing territorial boundaries and advance new and 1
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even hegemonic sovereign claims. They will overhaul the existing economic order, demanding changes to terms of trade and spheres of influence. The political and normative order, too, may come under attack, as rising powers demand changes to global governance that better reflect their increased influence in world politics. For this reason, great powers must mobilize against a revolutionary challenge. After appeasing a rising Germany for almost a decade, in late 1938 Britain came to see Hitler and the Nazi regimeas an existential threat that had to be confronted even at the price of war. Japan’squest for a new order in the Asia-Pacific met a catastrophic end when the United States committed to containing, and then confronting, Japanese expansion. When it became clear that the Soviet Union harbored revolutionary intentions, the United States and its European allies rightly joined forces against their adversary. In each of these cases, great powers, believing they faced a revolutionary threat, mobilized their military, economic, and political resources to contain a rising challenger. They stood willing to sacrifice blood and treasure to check their adversary’s ambitions. The decision to accommodate, contain, or confront a rising power turns on how great powers gauge the ambition of a challenger’s aims. Yet determining the intentions of a rising power is a process fraught with uncertainty. How do great powers know the intentions of rising challengers? How do great powers decide that they are certain enough about their potential adversaries’ ambitions to commit to a strategy of containment, confrontation, or accommodation? My fundamental argument in this book is a straightforward one: great powers divine the intentions of their adversaries through their legitimation strategies, the ways in which rising powers justify their aims. To make judgments about a challenger’s intentions, great powers look not only to what the rising power does; they listen to what a rising power says—how it justifies its foreign policy. When new powers rise, their leaders recognize that they operate in an atmosphere of uncertainty in which their adversaries are unsure of aims and interests. The rising powers hope to convince the great powers that, even as they increase their might and make revisionist demands, they will do so within the boundaries of what is right: that their growing strength will reinforce, not undercut, the rules and norms of the international system. If a rising power can portray its ambitions as legitimate, it can make the case that—far from being a revolutionary power—its advances will preserve, and perhaps even protect, the prevailing status quo. In contrast, if a rising power’s claims are illegitimate—if they are inconsistent with prevailing rules and norms—then great powers will see its actions as threatening, making containment and confrontation likely. To focus on rhetoric is not to deny that power transitions are a “material” phenomenon: new powers rise and old ones fall based on changes in wealth and military might. But whether a rising power is a threat is not only a material but a social fact: it is based not solely on the challenger’s military 2
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The Great Powers’ Dilemma
and economic might but on understandings of whether its actions are right and consistent with the norms and rules of international politics.2 The approachhere bears a family resemblance to rationalist signaling theories, which focus on how states communicate their own intentions and interpret the ambitions of others. These scholars stress the role of costly signals— either capabilities or behavior—in shaping perceptions of a rising powers’ aims. Some scholars, for example, suggest that great powers assess rising powers’ ambitions based on the politics of harm. Accommodation may happen if a rising power can signal a limited ability to hurt the great power, if the challenger lacks the military capacity to threaten a great power’s security.3 For others, how great powers perceive a challenger’s intentions depend on the politics of interests, with rising powers signaling not their inability to harm others, but their disinterest in doing so. There can be no doubt that great powers worry about whether an emerging peer will use its newfound strength for good or ill, and whether a new distribution of power will undercut their interests. But I argue that these “costly signals” are actually indeterminate indicators of a rising power’s intentions. Capabilities reveal only limited information about a state’s intentions: it is not what a rising power has in terms of resources, but how it intends to use these resources that matters. Even what we commonly think of as costly behavior—invasion, conquest, aggression—often fails to reveal clear aims. Conquest can stem from offensive or defensive intentions. Aggression is often in the eye of the beholder. Legitimation is crucial because a risingpower’s behavior does not speak for itself. It is rhetoric that sets the meaning of these actions; in framing behavior as consistent or inconsistent with norms and rules, rising powers shape a great power’s understanding of a rising power’s intentions, and thus the choice for accommodation, containment, or confrontation. The bulk of this book is devoted to four qualitative studies of rising powers, their legitimation strategies, and great power strategy: Britain’s decision to accommodate the rise of the United States in early nineteenth century; the decision of the European powers to allow for growing Prussian power in the 1860s; Britain’s appeasement of Hitler’s rise in the 1930s, and its turn toward confrontation after the Munich crisis in 1938; and U.S. decisions to contain and confront the rise of Japan in the twentieth century. In each of these cases, I argue that the way in which rising powers justified their expansionist aims significantly shaped the reactions of the existing great powers. When great powers viewed challengers as willing to play by the “rules of the game,” they were more likely to pursue accommodation, even at the price of relative power. In contrast, even weak rising powers were treated as existential threats when their claims seemed illegitimate. While the focus of this study is historical, in the conclusion I take up the implications of the legitimation theory for contemporary power transitions, and relations between the United States and China. Whatever agreement 3
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exists over China’s growing power, there is considerable debate over how China intends to use it. Some are increasingly concerned that China’s ambitions are “growing in step with its power.”4 In this scenario, China’s move toward a revolutionary strategy, one that upends the status quo in the AsiaPacific, is inevitable, and the United States should be ready to contain or even confront this rising challenger. Others cast doubt on these concerns. As China’s power has grown, its aims have remained relatively consistent; though it has become somewhat more assertive about its aims in the South China Seas, the substance of these claims has not changed, nor has it sought broader territorial or economic revision. For those who believe China has limited aims, a continued strategy of engagement is a wise choice, indeed the only way to avoid unnecessary conflict.5 If the legitimation theory developedin this book is correct, the future of U.S.-China relations rests as much on rhetoric as reality: it will be how China legitimates its expansionist claims that communicate its intentions and shape the contours of U.S. foreign policy. My aim in this book is to shed light on often-overlooked processes of legitimationin international politics. In this chapter, I lay out the core puzzle driving this study, beginning with a section looking at the traditional theories of power transitions. For the scholars discussed here, power transitions are a dangerous business: when new powers rise, they inherently threaten the existing great powers. A clash of catastrophic proportions is likely, if not inevitable.6 In the next section, I unpack the two dominant explanationsof great power responses: the politics of harm and the politics of interests. I conclude by introducing the book’s core argument: that great powers look to a rising power’s legitimation strategies as a way to divine the intentions of its adversary.
The Challenge of Rising Powers: Uncertainty, Intentions, and World Politics All rising powers have some revisionist intentions.7 As a state accumulates power, it will be tempted to seek changes in the territorial status quo, challenge existing economic rules, and demand revision of political institutions to reflect newfound status. As discussed above, a great power’s response to a challenger should hinge on whether the challenger harbors limited or revolutionary aims. When an emerging power’s intentionsare relatively benign, accommodation should be the preferred strategy. There is no sense in aggressively balancing a state with limited aims: at best, it is a waste of resources; at worst, the policy provokes a security dilemma and a spiral toward war. Great powers believe, in contrast, that revolutionaries must be stopped. Without a firm policy of containment or confrontation, revolutionary states pose an existential threat to the international order. 4
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How, then, do great powers divine the intentions of a rising power? For some, the task of assessing another state’s intentions is a futile one. As Mearsheimer writes, “States can never be certain about other states’ intentions. Specifically, no state can be sure that another state will not use its offensive military capability to attack [another state].”8 Great powers can never be certain that they are facing a state with limited aims. To make matters more complicated, even if a great power can somehow figure out a rising power’s intentions in the present—if it can reduce or eliminate current uncertainty about its ambitions—states are known to be mercurial, and intentions are likely to change in the future.9 A benign power today can turn into an aggressive revisionist one tomorrow.10 Faced with this uncertainty, these scholars argue that existing great powers will always act assertively to secure their own survival. This means that great powers must deal with rising powers aggressively, deploying their own resources to check the emergence of the potential challenger. Some great powers may decide to contain a rising peer, allowing the developing state to amass some wealth and military might while at the same time making certain that this power cannot threaten the core interests of the status quo states.11 To do so, great powers can mobilize their own domestic resources,building up their military to deter and check a challenger’s increasing strength. Faced with a rising Russia, Wilhelmine Germany built up its manpower, invested in offensive strategies, and galvanized its economy. Another option is for great powers to build alliances, seeking partners abroad that can hem in a rising power’s influence. Or states might seek to check challengers through economic measures. The Marshall Plan served as the original strategy of containment during the Cold War, an attempt to use economic investment to stem the tide of Soviet influence throughout Western European states. If the rising adversary presents a significant threat, great powers will not only contain but confront a challenger, using their power to counter revisionist demands and roll back the rising adversary, thus preventing it from emerging as a potential competitor, even at the cost of war. In doing so, great powers strangle the baby in the cradle, so to speak, to eliminate the dangers of a new contender before those threats become reality.12 A great power can crush a challenger’s economy through sanctions, or by denying the rising power access to critical routes of trade. Great powers may use diplomatic tools to confront a challenger as well, excluding rising powers from key international institutions and alliances. At the extreme, when it still holds a significant advantage over the emerging opponent, an existing power will launch a preventive war against a challenger rather than face the costs of conflict later on, when the great power’s own relative position may have weakened.13 No doubt that preventive war is costly, but scholars contend that great powers often believe it is “the most attractive response” to a new power’s rise.14 5
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Power transitions are thus dangerous affairs. Unable to be certain of a rising power’s intentions, great powers act on fear. But others question these grim predictions. The historical record suggests that great powers can and will accommodate rising powers, even when they cannot be entirely certain of a challenger’s aims. Despite its uncertainty about American goals, Britain accommodated the United States’ rise in the nineteenth century. Although they could not be entirely certain of Prussia’s aims, the European powers accepted German unification, both in the nineteenth century and again in the twentieth. For decades, the United States has pursued engagement with a rising China. In each of these cases, these great powers chose neither containment nor confrontation, but a strategy of accommodation, making concessions to a state’s expansionist demands that increase the power of that state in world politics.15 These great powers were not simply engaging in foolish appeasement. Great powers recognize that containment, even when limited, is not cheap. It requires building up military power, projecting this might abroad, and managing alliance partnerships. Containment may force great powers to engage in fierce economic competition, investing in costly trade deals or in potential allies. Confrontation is even more expensive in terms of casualties and costs, and may escalate into catastrophic war. Containment and confrontation also incur opportunity costs. Accommodation might allow for territorial expansion, but this might actually settle territorial disputes and create more stable borders. Accommodation might facilitate a power’s economic rise, but it might also give a great power access to new markets and lead to an increase in wealth for all involved. The entrance of a rising power into institutions might mean diminished status for an existing great power, but it also might create more pillars to support international rules and norms. When faced with a new challenger, great powers do not make worst-case assumptions; they do not simply act out of fear. Rather, great powers will try to determine the intentions of the rising challenger, making predictions about what it will do with its growing might. It is true that divining a rising challenger’s intentions is no easy task. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain closely watched the United States for signs that it was revolutionary or reformist. Whether the United States was a power to be feared or embraced, in other words, hinged on the question of America’s status as a revolutionary state. A revolutionary America could overturn Britain’s emerging economic regime in the Caribbean and South America, and threaten its position in Canada. But a United States with limited ambition might secure the Western Hemisphere and even aid the growth of British power. Likewise, in the mid-nineteenth century, the great powers sought to pin down the extent of Prussia’s ambition. A revolutionary nationalist Prussia would have posed an existential threat to Austria and Russia’s conservative governments. A German power with limited aims, committed to maintaining aristocracy, would prove an 6
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invaluable ally. Even when great powers eventually come to the “right” conclusion about their adversary’s intentions, it is often a long and fraught process. In 1812, Britain fought a costly war with the United States before deciding it harbored limited aims. And Chamberlain and his government remained convinced Hitler’s Germany could become a good European citizen up until the eve of World War II. In each of these cases above, great powers struggled to determine whether a rising challenger’s aims were revolutionary or limited. In each of these cases, the answer to this question drove critical choices in foreign policy, such as to accommodate, contain, or confront the rising power. In the midst of the uncertainty that is endemic in international relations, how did these great powers decide that they were certain enough about their potential adversaries to commit to a strategy of containment, confrontation, or accommodation?16 Most scholars argue that it is through costly signals that rising powers reveal their intentions to potential adversaries.17 Rising powers are not passive; they may invest their resources in particular behavior and policies in order to send a credible signal about their type. Great powers read these costly signals as credible indicators of their rivals’ intentions, and thus a reliable way to distinguish “benign” from “revolutionary” challengers. When rising powers invest considerable resources in their behavior, moreover, this ties their hands, locking them into a benign course of action, now and in the future.18 When these signals are sufficiently costly, they can solve both the information and commitment problems that hinder cooperation. As seen above, we can classify theories about this signaling process broadly into two schools of thought: the politics of harm and the politics of interest.
The Politics of Harm When a rising power engages in the politics of harm, it sends signals that it is either building or limiting its capacity to hurt an existing great power.19 Some scholars point to material capabilities—especially a rising power’s military might—as the primary indicators of threat. Some of these indicators are structural, and thus cannot be manipulated by the rising power. Geography matters, and “neighboring states and world powers with substantial interests in the region of the rising power will be affected more than distant powers with minor or no interests in the area of its growth.”20 The distribution of power is significant as well. In a multipolar world, for example, rising powers might face numerous threats and may be less inclined to engage in offensive action. But a rising power can also manipulate its ability to harm, and because of this, rising powers use their military might to signal their intentions, investing in behavior that decreases uncertainty about their aims. A rising power with limited aims, for example, can demonstrate its benign intentions 7
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through “restraint—that is, by reducing its military capability below the level that it believes would otherwise be necessary for adequate deterrence and defense.”21 In the 1920s, for example, Japan chose to participate in naval reductions that limited its ability to harm American and British interests in the Pacific. Likewise whether a rising power is able to harm a great power depends on its balance of offensive and defensive capabilities.22 If a rising power invests heavily in offensive technology, seemingly building the capacity for force projection and conquest, then existing great powers should be fearful indeed, particularly if the rising power could rationally protect itself with defensive technology. In contrast, if a rising power looks to invest in defensive technology—if its capabilities are oriented toward protecting and not projecting its power—then the risks of cooperation are low, and accommodation is a more feasible choice.23 Rising powers might also attempt to communicate information about their preferred military strategies: most notably, are there signs that the state is orienting its forces toward the offense, planning to project their forces outside of their borders, or to shore up their defenses at home?24 The Soviets decision to maintain their forces after World War II, deployed outside of the country’s borders, was taken as a strong signal that the power had expansionist aims far beyond what would be expected from a “defensive” power. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 demonstrated it had built the capacity to hurt not only China, but great power interests in the Pacific. Information from military might effectively reveal intentions because it is costly. As Glaser argues, a state with limited aims can “communicate information about its motives only by adopting a policy that is less costly for it than the policy would be for a greedy state.”25 A rising power with limited aims incurs little cost by adopting defensive technology or maintaining forces at a level consistent with defending the homeland, but a state with revolutionary intentions must seek offensive capabilities. A rising power with limited aims is unlikely to engage in conquest even when its security is threatened, but a revolutionary state will seek out opportunities for expansion. Great powers rely on these signals, to reduce their uncertainty about a rising power’s intentions, which allows them to commit to compromise or confrontation.
The Politics of Interest States may also practice the politics of interest, with rising powers signaling not their inability to harm others with their newfound might, but a lack of interest in doing so. When a rising power engages in the politics of interest, it attempts to signal to other powers that its core aims are aligned with those of the existing great powers. Even if the rising power had the capacity to harm the existing powers, it would not do it. The thinking goes that revolutionary 8
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behavior would make little sense because it would hurt not only the interests of the other powers, but a rising power’s own aims and ambitions. Like the politics of harm, some of the signals that bring a rising power’s interests into alignment with other states are akin to what Robert Jervis calls “indices,” characteristics that a rising power cannot manipulate, and thus cannot use to dissemble its aims.26 Democracies, for example, might inherently provide more reliable information about their interests than their autocratic peers. In “modern democracies,” Kydd argues, “the policy-making process is transparent enough so that a wealth of information is generated about a state’s motivations.”27 The restraints imposed by a democratic decision-making process, moreover, may allow great powers to conclude that revolutionary behavior would be difficult and costly to achieve, and not in the rising power’s interests.28 Some argue that when rising powers share ideologies with great powers, they are more likely to see this as a sign that their interests as aligned and will remain so in the future.29 Others suggest that the content of an ideology is a reliable signal: if a rising power is driven by a hardline or “universal” ideology—the Soviet commitment to global communism, or the U.S. pledge to pursue democracy—this leads revolutionary tendencies in foreign policy.30 Rising powers can also signal whether their interests are aligned with the great powers in the system. For example, if a rising power invests substantial resources in existing economic institutions, this can be read both as a credible signal of intentions—the rising power is investing in the existing rules of the international system—and as a “binding” maneuver that locks the state into future cooperation.31 It is for this reason that some scholars are optimistic about China’s intentions: having linked its own interests with that of the liberal economic order, China no longer has any rational interest in pursuing revolutionary policies. Autocratic states might sign on to more liberal treaties as a signal that they will abide by international norms, even if their own internal values suggest otherwise. Rising powers can send costly signals that indicate revolutionary intentions as well. Transparency can be both a blessing and a curse. If it looks like a democratic rising power is rallying its domestic population around a program of expansion, for example, this can be read as a credible signal of a rising power’s aggressive aims. The politics of harm and the politics of interest are often treated like competing explanations about how great powers perceive rising powers and how they attempt to resolve their uncertainty about a challenger’s intentions. In a world where the politics of harm guides state interactions, reducing uncertainty is a fundamentally dangerous and difficult task. If reducing uncertaintymeans limiting one’s own capacity to harm, this is an inherently risky endeavor, one that could put a state’s very survival at stake. A state that limits its arms in an attempt to signal its restraint risks vulnerability if attacked. A state that adopts only defensive technology might be unable to help an ally. For these reasons, even states with limited aims get locked into 9
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pernicious security dilemmas, when all of them pursue policies designed to increase their own security, yet end up threatening other states. For those that focus on the politics of interest, the signaling process is less fraught, and coping with uncertainty less dangerous. When a rising power accepts the status quo, signaling becomes a coordination game: given enough credible information, accommodation and cooperation is simply the optimal strategy. But both of these approaches share fundamental assumptions about the way in which a rising power communicates its intentions, and the way in which great powers interpret those signals. Great powers begin with a set of prior beliefs about what “type” of rising power they are facing, assigning probabilities to whether that state has revisionist or benign intentions. A rising power’s behavior gives them information that allows them to update these probabilities, and adjust their strategies accordingly. Both the politics of harm and the politics of interest assume that the meaning of the rising power’s behavior is objective: what a signal means is given, stable, and universal.32 Finally, for both approaches, these signals carry inherent material costs and thus reveal credible information about the challenger’s type. Because signals are believed to reliably communicate information, then, they can reduce uncertainty about challenger’s intentions, thus allowing great powers to decide whether accommodation, containment, or conformation is the best response. In essence, both the politics of harm and the politics of interest are rationalist accounts of signaling. And there are significant silences in both accounts. First, neither approach explains how a signal acquires meaning: how and why its signals are interpreted as information. This would be fine if signals were truly objective, if the meaning of actions was inherent, stable, and uncontested. But, in reality, the meaning of actions “are not self evident, but contingent and open to interpretation.”33 Most signals are indeterminate: they can be interpreted in multiple ways by an audience. For example we can imagine a situation where a set of great powers is uncertain about a rising power’s intentions, and while they are dithering, the rising power invades another country. Yet while “invasion” may seem like a fairly straightforward signal, in reality, its meaning is likely ambiguous. Was Prussia’s invasion of Schleswig Holstein in 1863 an attempt to uphold a dynast’s legitimacy? A defense of the rights of German speakers? The first step on the march to global hegemony? Is China’s revisionist action in the South China Seas an attempt to challenge American dominance in the Asia Pacific? Or is it the return to the nineteenth century territorial status quo, as China claims? There may be brute facts in international politics, and expansion is not entirely what an actor makes of it. What is indeterminate in each of these cases—both to the scholar and to the contemporary observers of these events—is the meaning of these signals, and what they are supposed to say about intentions. If a signal’s meaning is indeterminate, then a rising power’s behavior cannot be a stable and objective source of information. Rather, signals are 10
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social and intersubjective, and how actors interpret each other’s behavior depends not on something inherent to the signal itself, but on social context, the understandings actors use to interpret the signal in question. Theoretically, if it signals a lack of inherent meaning, then the process of “Bayesian updating” is more complicated than rationalists suggest. Behavior does not seamlessly provide information; actors are not merely “sending” and “receiving” signals. Rather signals, as Jervis argues, “are not natural; they are conventional. That is, they consist of statements and actions that the sender and receiver have endowed with meaning in order to accomplish certain goals.”34 In practice, this means that how great powers understand a rising power’s intentions depends on the meaning it attributes to its actions. It suggests that a rising power may have room to frame the meaning of its actions, and that how great powers interpret a signal’s meaning determines how it will respond. Signaling becomes not an objective and given, but an intersubjective and contingent process. Furthermore, both the politics of harm and the politics of interest assumethat successful signals—those that are treated as credible indicators of intentions—are those that have inherent, material costs. The process of signaling works because actions provide costly information about intentions—it is the cost of the signal that makes the information a reliable indicatorof intention. Yet it is not always clear what counts as a costly signal of a rising power’s intentions. “Cost,” on the face of it, should imply a significant investment of an actor’s material resources. Given this definition, some of the signals that count as “costly” are somewhat mystifying. At times, actors seem to materially discount costly signals, privileging less costly appeals. Chamberlain took Hitler’s appeals to European norms of self-determination as a costly demonstration of intentions, even as the Germans were investing in offensive military strategies. The United States seemed to ignore costly signals of Soviet constraint under Khrushchev, such as significant force reductions, and reacted more strongly to revolutionary pronouncements. A rising power’s decision to join an institution or sign a treaty may be “costless,” with little required of the state outside of what it would have normally done in order to join the institution, and few consequences if it were to leave.35 We could add to the definition of “cost” more ephemeral concerns such as “reputation,” but this would raise questions of under what conditions a state’s reputation would be considered costly. None of this is to say that cost is not a central component of effective sig naling. Rather, what is problematic is determining what counts as a “costly” signal, when how states see costs is not self-evident.36 This insight has already sparked a vibrant literature, especially in the literature on political psychology, on how cognitive filters shape whether actors perceive signals as costly or benign. These scholars point to mental mechanisms such as “selective attention,” confirmation bias, and existing trust to explain how individuals attribute meaning to a given behavior.37 Like cognitive theories, 11
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my argument suggests that how actors interpret the meaning of signals is critical to explaining great powers’ management of uncertainty, and whether the subsequent response to a rising power is as a friend or adversary. But unlike adherents of cognitive theories, I maintain that how great powers understand a rising power’s behavior is not simply in the mind of the beholder. Rather than focus on individuals and cognition—the subjective evaluation of meaning and costs—I examine how social and intersubjective understandings shape the signaling process.38 I follow rationalist and realist theories, arguing that rising powers will attempt to signal their intentions and convince others that they are status quo states, and that the existing great powers will attempt to use these signals to determine the veracity of that claim and the rising power’s true type. Yet rather than assume that signals have objective costs and meaning, I begin with the assumption that events and behavior rarely speak for themselves. The process of signaling intentions must be understood and analyzed as a means of conveying information as well as a process of meaning making. Rising powers will strive to invest certain signals with meaning, relying on shared norms and understandings to define their aims to the other powers. Great powers, too, will rely on these social configurations to interpret the rising power’s signals. The meaning and costs of signaling, in other words, cannot be reduced to a material and objective process; it is a rhetorical and intersubjective one. And this leads us to the core argument of this book: if we are to understand how rising powers signal their intentions to great powers—and the strategies that great powers adopt as a response—we need a theory of how actors come to communicate and understand the meaning of signals. To gauge the nature of their potential adversary, I argue that great powers look to what a rising power does as well as to what it says, specifically the rhetoric it uses to justify its expansionist policies.
The Politics of Legitimacy As argued above, all rising powers will adopt some expansionist aims. They will seek to modify the territorial status quo, demand economic institutions be reformed in their favor, and challenge those political rules that seem to restrain their growing power. The question for great powers is whether these actions are merely revisionist—do they seek to modify the rules of the game in minor ways—or are they revolutionary, an attack not merely on the interests of the other powers but on the system as a whole. I argue that to divine the intentions of their potential adversary, great powers look to a rising power’s legitimation strategies, the rhetoric it uses to justify its policies. At its core, legitimation is a process through which rising powers explain their aims and motives—what they want and why they want it—in reference to existing norms and rules in the international 12
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system.39 As states increase their power, they must justify their expansionist policies. Any territorial conquest, economic revision, or demand for a change in political institutions must be accompanied by rhetoric that explains why this change is legitimate. Russia, for example, has appealed to the norms of ethnic rights to justify its invasion of Crimea. China, likewise, has deployed a mix of historical and legal reasoning to explain its actions in the South and East China seas. The United States maintained that its 2003 invasion of Iraq was necessary in the name of self-defense. In each of these cases, states appealed to publicly accepted norms and rules to justify the coercive practice of power in the international system. Legitimation strategies matter because, by giving meaning to behavior, great powers attribute intentions to the rising power. Justifying revisionist behavior as rule bound suggests that the rising power has limited ambitions. Flaunting the rules suggests a more revolutionary state. Rising powers’ intentions will likely be seen as limited by great powers if their leaders invoke legitimate international norms to explain behavior, even if that behavior might otherwise be thought of as revolutionary. Conversely, states’ intentions are deemed aggressive if their leaders fail to make legitimate sense of similar, and even more modest, actions. In essence, legitimation creates a rhetorical frame for a rising power’s behavior, giving its actions meaning and allowing a great power to interpret material facts—military buildups, invasions, economic competition—as either threatening or benign. To focus on the politics of legitimacy is not to deny the importance of power or interests. My theory takes for granted that great powers will care about the politics of harm, and consistently evaluate whether a rising power is capable of hurting its core interest. It assumes that great powers judge challengers based on their interpretation of shared interests. Yet a focus on legitimation fills crucial assumptions and silences in existing accounts. It explains what makes signals understandable and how they are invested with meaning. It explains how it is that certain signals are seen as “ costly,” even if they lack inherent material value. The politics of legitimation explains why certain actions are defined as “threatening” to a great power’s core interests, and thus whether rising powers are seen as challenging or as upholding the international system. Some scholars of international relations dismiss talk as cheap, arguing that it is the prater of politicians, not a serious object of political analysis. But talk is pervasive in social life, and it is arguably the primary way states practice international politics. This is why we see state leaders devote an inordinate amount of diplomatic resources to their rhetoric. Rising powers struggle to use language that defines the meaning of their expansionist attempts, hoping to persuade others to accept their benign intentions, or even to bludgeon possible opponents into silence. Rising powers pledge to abide by existing rules, make promises that any expansion will be limited, deny that they harbor revolutionary aims, and claim that any resistance to 13
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their expansion would be unjustified. This is all talk. Likewise, great powers look to rising powers’ claims and make decisions about what is reasonable based on them. They look to the actions of a rising power, yes, but also for the reasons behind expansionist policies—to how they talk—as a guide to their strategic response. By placing rhetoric at the center of this study, I owe much to the diverse literature that comprises the “rhetorical turn” in international politics.40 Here I focus on a particular type of talk—legitimation—in a specific setting— a rising power’s attempts to justify its behavior to great powers. The legitimation theory developed in this book rests on three analytical wagers about rhetoric and politics.41 First, while the model assumes that both rising powers and great powers are strategic, legitimation cannot be reduced to self-interest. Actors are embedded in a social environment that simultaneously makes possible and constrains strategic action. No leader stands outside structures of discourse: they must operate within a given “cultural tool-kit,” in Ann Swidler’s words, that includes rhetorical resources.42 This does not mean that discourse determines action. To conceive of speakers and audiences as social creatures is not to treat them as cultural dopes, mindlessly following established discourse. But as actors strive to explain their actions, and as they respond to others’ efforts at justification, they are equally constrained and empowered by the resources embedded in discursive structures. Legitimation is thus no mere window dressing for interest. This leads to the second assumption: while rhetoric is irreducible to interest, I argue that actors are less socialized and more strategic than in many constructivist accounts. For example, constructivists who draw from the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas have focused less on strategic action and more on processes of deliberation and the creation of consensus.43 The legitimation theory here, in contrast, emphasizes how language is deployed strategically. Language thus remains tied to power and interest, marked by contestation, and central to politics. Finally, the model of legitimation here rests on a dialogical view of rhetoric and politics, in which a variety of actors’ claims will compete for dominance. I will thus depart from an earlier postpositivist, often structuralist, linguistic turn in international relations.44 Here the focus is not on discursive structures, but on the interaction and contestation among actors, as they deploy legitimation strategies in dialogue with one another. As they interact, these agents shift their arguments, strategically framing and reframing them in order to persuade and coerce their audiences. Because discursive structures do not determine signals, actors can choose their rhetoric during interaction, and even create new legitimation strategies in response to their opponents’ actions. For this reason, existing discursive formations do not eliminate all space for choice and contingency. To the contrary, agency is at the core of legitimation theory. Bringing together these three assumptions forms a theory that may be thought of as a social constructivist approach to strategic signaling. It 14
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accepts, like rationalist accounts, that communication is a strategic process, and that actors will deploy language that best suits their interest. But the point of communication is not merely to convey information. By legitimating their aims, these rising powers tell a story about what the state wants, why it wants it, and what it will want in the future. Certainty is achieved, not because this information is costly, but because the legitimation strategy makes sense of the rising power’s actions to a great power audience. When new powers rise, great powers face an unenviable set of choices. To contain or confront a rising power may seem the safe option, but those strategies carry considerable and potentially unnecessary costs. To accommodate a rising power might allow for peace, but it also carries the risk that one faces a wolf in sheep’s clothing. To make the choice for accommodation or confrontation, great powers not only look to rising power behavior, but listen to what they say. In chapter 2, I put the flesh on the theoretical bones of this argument. I define what legitimation strategies mean and the assumptions a legitimation theory makes about the role of rhetoric and norms in world politics. I focus on two puzzles: why legitimation strategies matter for rising power politics, and when they are likely to be seen as credible indicators of a rising power’s aims. I argue that legitimation strategies are a vital component in collective mobilization, both at home and abroad. By justifying its actions, a rising power hopes to manage its audience’s understanding of its actions and, in the process, shape whether existing powers mobilize against—confront or contain—or allow revisionist behavior. Fundamentally, then, legitimation strategies matter because they are a source of power politics.45 If the argument of this book is correct, it has significant implications for academics and policymakers alike. It suggests that talk, so often ignored by academics, plays a critical role in the formation of grand strategy. It suggests that legitimacy is not peripheral to international relations, no mere window dressing for power and interests; it is an integral part of power politics. And it suggests, as the conclusion of this book discusses in depth, that the consequence of a future change in the balance of power is to be found not only in the realm of military and economic power, but also in the battle over the rules and norms of the international system.
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Atomic Assurance The Alliance Politics of Nuclear Proliferation
Al e x an der L a no s zka
Cornell University Press —-1 —0 —+1
Ithaca and London
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Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [[CIP to come]] Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly
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composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.
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Contents
Introduction: The Alliance Politics of Nuclear Proliferation
1
1. How Alliances (Mis)Manage Nuclear Proliferation
10
2. American Security Guarantees during the Cold War,
1949–1980
29
3. West Germany, 1954–1970
48
4. Japan, 1952–1980
79
5. South Korea, 1968–1980
110
6. Nuclear Proliferation and Other American Alliances
132
Conclusion: Understanding and Managing Alliances in the 21st Century
149
Notes 159 Index 000
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Introduction The Alliance Politics of Nuclear Proliferation
Tensions w ere high on the Korean Peninsula. Fears of nuclear proliferation were rife, and a newly elected American president had gone on record saying unflattering things about the South Korean government. Such was the context in mid-1977 when the American ambassador in Seoul met with vari ous government officials and scientists, in part to discuss what could be done to prevent South Korea from undertaking nuclear weapons activities. During that meeting, a nuclear scientist proposed that one solution would involve the United States extending the same “nuclear umbrella policy” to South Korea as that given already to Japan. This proposal struck the ambassador as nonsensical. After all, South Korea benefited from a nuclear umbrella thanks to its treaty alliance with the United States and the tactical nuclear weapons that American forces had stationed on its territory. The only change to the alliance was the full withdrawal of American ground forces from South K orea—a policy for which President Jimmy Carter had advocated during his presidential campaign. And so the ambassador wrote back to the State Department in Washington, decrying “the evidence of ignorance at very senior government levels of either costs or risks [sic] involved in the weapons development program over and above seriously adverse impact on US relationship [sic].”1 Carter ultimately decided against his planned troop withdrawal, and South Korea did not acquire a nuclear weapons capability, but the episode raises important questions that continue to resonate into the twenty-first century. Why did the alliance break down so as to create proliferation risks? And to what extent was the alliance responsible for restraining South Korea’s nuclear ambitions? T hese questions in turn speak to a much larger concern: what is the relationship between alliances and nuclear proliferation? Ever since the United States forged its alliances with partners around the world at the beginning of the Cold War, many experts agree that alliances have yielded important strategic benefits. Alliances enable the United States
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Introduction
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to manage local conflicts, to prevent arms races, and to reassure partners that the United States w ill defend them in a military crisis that involves a shared adversary. The result is that recipients of these security guarantees feel less need to acquire their own nuclear weapons. Even when allies have pursued nuclear weapons development, the United States would coerce them into halting their ambitions. Such is the emerging narrative of the American experience of the nuclear era: that alliances are effective nonproliferation tools and that the Cold War is largely a story of American nonproliferation success. This nonproliferation mission could become more challenging to undertake if predictions of American decline are true and allies are growing in power relative to the United States. This book challenges this emerging narrative by making two related claims. The first claim is that military alliances are important tools for thwarting nuclear proliferation, but they are more susceptible to breakdown and credibility concerns than some accounts in the international relations litera ture presume. Indeed, why alliances should ever be a viable solution for nuclear proliferation is puzzling, since international agreements ought to be fundamentally unbelievable in the absence of a world government that can enforce them. Even if we accept that strong commitments are possible, t hose very commitments risk emboldening t hose allies to undertake aggressive foreign policies that are contrary to the interests of the United States. The second claim is that although the United States has played a key role in enforcing the nuclear nonproliferation regime, we should be careful not to attribute too much success to the United States. It encountered severe difficulties in curbing suspect nuclear behaviors of key allies like West Germany and Japan, to say nothing of G reat Britain and France—allies that feared American abandonment yet succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons. South Korea often serves as an example of the effectiveness of American coercion, but the state of its nuclear program made South Korea an easy target at a time when the United States wanted to demonstrate its commitment to nuclear nonproliferation. Moreover, the proliferation scare that took place during Jimmy Carter’s presidency happened after the United States had seemingly shut down South K orea’s nuclear weapons program and strong-armed Seoul into ratifying the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). That nonproliferation campaign took place between 1974 and 1976. Safeguard violations persisted into the early 1980s. Put together, from the perspective of Washington, deterring nuclear weapons interest is easier than eliminating it once it has become activated. This is the main message of this book. This book expands on t hese arguments by investigating the link between alliances and nuclear proliferation using a series of case studies drawn from the Cold War. I consider two main questions. The first question is, how do alliances prevent nuclear proliferation? To answer it, I examine why some states that received security guarantees have tried to acquire nuclear weapons and why many of them ultimately renounced such efforts by making
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nonproliferation commitments. Both France and G reat Britain successfully acquired nuclear weapons, but only France does not need technological support from the United States to keep them. Japan and West Germany do not have nuclear weapons but have enrichment and reprocessing capabilities. South K orea has agreements with the United States that forbid it from having reprocessing capabilities to this day. We thus arrive at the second question: what was the role of the United States in its allies’ decisions to renounce nuclear weapons? To consider these questions even further, it is worth clari fying the puzzle of nuclear proliferation from an alliance perspective.
The Puzzle of Alliances and Nuclear Proliferation The standard view among international security experts is that guarantors like the United States face a conundrum when designing alliances. The so- called alliance dilemma is as follows. By offering a strong commitment, the guarantor demonstrates that it w ill back its ally in the event of a militarized crisis that involves a shared adversary. However, the ally might exploit this favorable situation by pressing its claims against the adversary harder than it otherwise would, thereby raising the likelihood of starting a war that the guarantor does not want. B ecause the guarantor wishes to protect its reputation for upholding its commitments, it might find itself intervening in this war to support its ally. All t hings equal, the risk of entrapment—that is, of being dragged into an undesirable war—increases with the strength of the alliance commitment.2 Yet weakening the alliance commitment to lessen entrapment risks introduces new problems. The ally might fear abandonment when it starts to doubt the credibility of the guarantor and its security pledges. A weakened commitment might tempt the adversary to attack the ally, which may thus feel compelled to launch destabilizing preemptive mea sures.3 As a tool for preventing nuclear proliferation, the alliance commitment must be strong enough for the ally to view it as a credible deterrent against the adversary. Otherwise, doubts about the guarantor’s stated pledges would lead the ally to discount the military value of the alliance and to reconsider its own armament choices. For the guarantor, the policy challenge becomes acute: how does one craft a security commitment that at once resolves the alliance dilemma and discourages nuclear proliferation–related behavior? The difficulty of this policy challenge has led scholars to adopt conflicting positions regarding the relationship between alliances and nuclear proliferation. Some scholars downplay the alliance dilemma and emphasize the stabilizing impact alliances have for international politics. These scholars see formal defense alliances as credible and thus the most desirable security institutions states can have. B ecause formal alliance treaties are public and thus known to all other states, guarantors incur high reputation costs for
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violating them.4 T hese alliances are the best for deterring adversaries and reassuring allies. Democratic states like the United States are especially good allies: the transparency of their institutions makes them more predictable, and the difficulties of shepherding alliance treaties through domestic ratification processes make their commitment choices stronger and more selective.5 Entrapment concerns are overstated, since guarantors can attach conditions and specify the terms in which the alliance would be activated.6 Accordingly, written and public security guarantees (particularly those issued by demo cratic countries) are credible, allay abandonment fears, and reduce incentives for nuclear proliferation. Yet other scholars see abandonment concerns as a pervasive feature of alliance politics, no m atter the political system of the state that dominates the alliance. These scholars argue that such concerns encourage states to seek nuclear weapons in order to deter adversaries on their own.7 The problem with many existing alliance-based arguments is that they expect either too little or too much nuclear proliferation. Scholars who see democratically led alliances as relatively f ree of pathologies have trouble explaining the proliferation record of American alliances. Of the thirty or so states that at least considered getting nuclear weapons at one point since 1945, over half of them were aligned with the United States.8 In contrast, only three nuclear proliferators had defensive alliances with the Soviet Union: China, North K orea, and Romania. Five of fourteen NATO allies at least considered getting nuclear weapons by the 1970s, but only one out of seven Warsaw Pact members committed the same offense. Scholars who see alliances as inherently problematic face a different challenge. If abandonment concerns are so acute, then why do allies only seldom move to acquire nuclear weapons? Unfortunately, we are yet to have an account that specifies the precise conditions u nder which states sufficiently fear abandonment so that they begin desiring nuclear weapons. Many allies ultimately renounced their efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, but to what extent were such reversals the result of alliance politics? The academic literature is also divided on this question. Some scholars dismiss security explanations of nuclear proliferation altogether, emphasizing instead such variables as leaders’ beliefs or economic growth strategies.9 However, a school of thought has recently emerged—one that stresses the restraining role of American alliances with respect to nuclear proliferation. Nicholas Miller claims that the threat of American sanctions has deterred nuclear proliferation, especially a fter the United States demonstrated its commitment to nonproliferation by suppressing South Korean and Taiwanese nuclear activities in the 1970s.10 Gene Gerzhoy similarly maintains that threats of alliance abandonment—meted out by the United States—have curbed proliferation risks, whereas Francis J. Gavin concludes that nonproliferation has been as much a pillar of American grand strategy as containment (in the Cold War) and openness (since 1945).11 Yet close scrutiny reveals
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important shortcomings in t hese claims. American nonproliferation efforts against South Korea and Taiwan w ere done quietly so as not to alarm China and Japan, making it debatable as to whether t hose efforts signaled American nonproliferation interests widely and clearly. Those states have also relapsed into nuclear proliferation–related behavior after having been sanctioned. Moreover, if abandonment fears provoke nuclear interest, then how can credible threats to abandon an alliance altogether reverse that interest? Finally, nuclear nonproliferation may have been a by-product of American foreign policy, rather than a core aim of it. Ridding South Korea of nuclear weapons helped ensure stability on the Korean Peninsula when the United States pursued rapprochement with China. For diplomatic and possibly economic reasons, the Ford administration did not push Japan as hard as it could have for Japan to make clear nonproliferation pledges. W hether nuclear reversals resulted from alliance politics remains an open empirical question. th e argu men t How do guarantors like the United States design commitments that at once mitigate the alliance dilemma and reduce nuclear proliferation risks? To what extent are alliances responsible for curbing the efforts of those states interested in acquiring nuclear weapons? I advance a new theoretical framework in chapter 1 that begins with the observation that nuclear security guarantees contain much ambiguity despite involving existential stakes. The recipients of these guarantees have good reason to worry about abandonment: no world government exists to ensure that their received commitments would be honored, and the written commitments that they receive are often vague. Consequently, as much as allies pay attention to the foreign policy doctrines of their guarantors, they desire more than simple pledges of support. Allies thus tend to believe that in-theater conventional military deployments are necessary for bolstering commitments to extend deterrence. T hese deployments are not just “trip wires” that help deter an adversary by threatening the involvement of the guarantor should its ally be attacked. They have war-fighting capabilities and are tangible representations of the nuclear security guarantees that t hese states receive.12 States see the credibility of their security guarantees tied to such deployments as troops more so than even tactical nuclear deployments, despite how the latter m atter for extended nuclear deterrence. As long as these commitments appear stable, abandonment fears will not intensify, and the temptation to develop nuclear weapons will be limited. Moreover, these troops have the additional benefit of helping to restrain the ally’s foreign and defense policies. For example, those troops’ participation in joint military planning with the ally’s own armed forces reduces entrapment risks. And so alliances are useful for deterring nuclear proliferation. However, if allies anticipate or suddenly experience
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unfavorable conventional redeployments (i.e., large, unilateral troop withdrawals), then their abandonment concerns rise to a level much higher than normal. They begin to doubt their security guarantees enough to embark on a set of behaviors related to nuclear proliferation, which range from hedging strategies to the active pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability. Unfortunately, the guarantor w ill experience severe challenges in its efforts to reverse the nuclear proliferation–related behavior of its ally. To begin with, the guarantor needs to repair the security guarantee that the ally now perceives as sufficiently broken to warrant nuclear weapons pursuit. To reassert its security guarantees and to soothe intensified abandonment fears, new agreements that credibly restore or preserve troop levels are necessary. Yet these agreements are difficult to forge if the underlying circumstances that broke the security guarantee in the first place still exist. Other diplomatic levers have limited efficacy and could be counterproductive: threatening the withdrawal of more troops or the termination of the alliance altogether so as to isolate the ally w ill only exacerbate abandonment concerns. I thus argue that the best possible recourse available to the guarantor is its economic and technological power over the ally. If the ally depends on those nonmilitary goods from the guarantor, then the ally might have to reconsider its nuclear activities in the interest of its own welfare. Absent such leverage, the guarantor will have trouble getting the ally to renounce nuclear weapons credibly. In the event that the ally decides to reverse its nuclear be havior, it may do so for reasons that have little to do with the coercion— threatened or applied—by its guarantor. In g oing about t hese nonproliferation efforts, the guarantor must have a clear and strong interest in preventing nuclear proliferation and perhaps even in preserving its security guarantees. At first glance, an eagerness to limit the spread of nuclear weapons seems to dominate American foreign policy. The United States withheld major atomic secrets from its biggest co alition partner in World War II and the Manhattan Project, Great Britain. In 1946, Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act so as to restrict other countries’ access to nuclear information possessed by the United States. A later amendment to this act still reiterated its nonproliferation principles, thus becoming a source of frustration to some presidents who contemplated nuclear- sharing arrangements with other countries. Indeed, Congress has passed laws like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978 and the Pressler Amendment to advance nonproliferation objectives. Nevertheless, I contend that American interest in nonproliferation is variable. Although American decision makers may agree in principle that nuclear proliferation is highly objectionable, the desire to satisfy other foreign policy interests could have the potential to undercut nonproliferation efforts. As the American campaign against Taiwan’s nuclear weapons program indicates, sometimes narrow foreign policy interests—in this case, improving relations with China to exploit the Sino-Soviet split—can strengthen nonproliferation efforts.
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To evaluate my argument, I use a qualitative research design that I elaborate toward the end of chapter 1. The empirical bulk comprises three intensive case studies on West Germany, Japan, and South K orea. These three American allies also represent most-likely cases for when an alliance with the United States inhibited nuclear interest. For each of t hese cases, I rely on deep archival research. The primary documents I collected and discovered serve as process-tracing evidence. They allow me to test the causal mechanism and the implications of my theory against several leading alternative arguments that prioritize adversarial threats, domestic politics, and the prestige that states might see in nuclear weapons. B ecause I am skeptical of how alliances can halt nuclear weapons activities definitively, I allow for the possibility that t hese other causal processes can effect a state’s decision to cease its proliferation-related behavior. Chapter 2 sets up the main case studies of this book by reviewing the history of American security guarantees during much of the Cold War. I show how and why American presidents from Harry Truman to Jimmy Carter designed their alliance commitments and implemented their strategic doctrinal visions. Of interest in this chapter is President Dwight Eisenhower’s adoption of the New Look, the stated emphasis of “flexible response” in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and President Richard Nixon’s articulation of the Nixon Doctrine. American presidents consistently preferred a military strategy whereby the United States provides the “nuclear sword” and allies supply the “conventional shield.” Nevertheless, the implementation of this strategy varied over time and in intensity between Western Europe and East Asia. We thus have variation in how allies might assess the security guarantees they receive. Chapters 3 and 4 together form a controlled case comparison of West Germany and Japan. Both countries are similar along several key dimensions: their roles in World War II, liberal democratic political regimes, spectacular economic reconstruction and growth in the postwar period, and hosting of a large-scale American military presence. Despite t hese similarities, West Germany began considering nuclear weapons development in the mid1950s. Thereafter it had an ambiguous stance with respect to nuclear nonproliferation.13 Japan started its nuclear hedging behavior about a decade later. Differences in their strategic situations led t hose two allies to vary in how they perceived changes in their security guarantee and in their subsequent behaviors. Chapter 3 shows that, as a mostly landlocked country, West Germany was affected by Eisenhower’s stated objectives of relying more on nuclear weapons at the expense of such conventional military deployments as ground power. Its abandonment fears intensified when news reports appeared in the United States that suggested large-scale troop withdrawals from West Germany and Europe w ere being planned. Shortly thereafter West Germany entered a short-lived trilateral initiative with France and Italy to develop
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nuclear weapons. Because the policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations exhibited important continuities from those of the Eisenhower administration, West Germany had little motivation to renounce nuclear weapons fully. I show that the United States attempted various alliance solutions to little avail and had difficulty leveraging its economic power to secure various agreements from West Germany during the 1960s. I provide evidence that alliance coercion might not have been so decisive in curbing West German behavior as now presumed. Explanations that emphasize domestic politics better account for West German decisions regarding the NPT. Chapter 4 demonstrates that Japan was attuned to Eisenhower’s New Look because of its geography. Indeed, Japan remained quiescent u ntil China’s first nuclear detonation in 1964—an event that shook the Japanese leadership and forced it to attend more carefully to American security guarantees. As the American military involvement in Vietnam slowly unraveled, Japanese leaders became apprehensive of American alliance support and began to ratchet up their nuclear activities, giving national priority to a centrifuge program. Though Japan relied on the United States for the development of its civilian nuclear program, such dependency was not enough to eliminate American unease regarding its nuclear policy. Like West Germany, Japan ratified the NPT b ecause of domestic politics and an international safeguards agreement that it was able to secure. Chapter 5 addresses South Korea, a critical case for my theory because the American government initiated plans for major troop withdrawals from the peninsula on several separate occasions. In fact, the United States barely consulted with South K orea when it openly sought troop withdrawals in 1970 and 1977. Moreover, the first of t hese troop withdrawals reflected the Nixon Doctrine—an important shift in American defense policy. The magnitude of these unwanted redeployments should have provoked a response from South Korea. Therefore, my theoretical framework must have empirical validity in this case. I demonstrate that South K orea’s nuclear efforts are comprehensible only from the perspective of its alliance with the United States. That is, South K orea first explored and later began a nuclear weapons program in reaction to Nixon’s troop withdrawals from its territory. South Korea tried to operate this program secretly. Yet once Washington discovered it, it pressured Seoul to cancel the primitive nuclear weapons program. South Korea’s nonmilitary dependence on the United States contributed to this result. Underscoring the difficulties of mounting a nonproliferation campaign, the story does not end there. Carter sought to withdraw all American forces from South K orea—a move that some observers speculate incited further efforts by South K orea to develop nuclear weapons secretly. Safeguard violations persisted into the early 1980s. Chapter 6 reviews a set of smaller case studies to expand the variation of my study. T hese cases are G reat Britain, France, Norway, Australia, and
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Taiwan. I argue that my theory can illuminate why both Great Britain and France sought nuclear weapons and why only France succeeded in acquiring an independent nuclear deterrent capability. I show that Norway largely abstained from nuclear proliferation–related behavior for domestic political reasons. For its part, Australia was alarmed that its received security commitments were not backed by military power. It subsequently tried to acquire nuclear weapons, only to cancel the project when the L abor Party came to power. Taiwan feared abandonment due to the prospect of Sino-American rapprochement and the waning of its received military commitment from the United States. I highlight how Taiwan evaded many coercive efforts by the United States to shut down its nuclear weapons program. Chapter 7 summarizes the main argument and discusses the broader implications of this study for both international theory and policy. The core message of this book is that alliances are more effective in deterring potential nuclear proliferation than in curbing actual cases of nuclear proliferation. This book thus has implications for how we think about such topics in international relations theory as credibility, coercion, American primacy, and the great power management of weaker states, more generally. For policy makers and practitioners, the findings demonstrate that the retraction of such military assets as troops can provoke intense abandonment fears even if the nuclear basis of extended deterrence remains unchanged. Upholding alliance commitments is insufficient: such pledges need to be coupled with credible military support. Though no one seriously argues that nuclear nonproliferation is easy, the record of alliances is much more mixed than commonly presumed with respect to being tools for curbing actual nuclear activities. A lot depends on the economic and technological leverage that the United States might have over the proliferating ally. If its relative global position continues to erode, Washington w ill experience greater difficulties in reversing the nuclear undertakings of its allies. As such, it will need to be even more forward-looking and careful in adjusting its alliance commitments.
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Twilight of the Titans Great Power Decline and Retrenchment
Paul K. M acDo na ld a n d J os e p h M. Pa rent
Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of a grant from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame, which aided in the publication of this book. Copyright Š 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: MacDonald, Paul K., author. | Parent, Joseph M., author. Title: Twilight of the titans : great power decline and retrenchment / Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Series: Cornell studies in security affairs | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017034805 (print) | LCCN 2017036520 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501717109 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501717116 (ret) | ISBN 9781501717093 | ISBN 9781501717093 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Great powers. | Hegemony. | Regression (Civilization) | International relations. Classification: LCC JZ1312 (ebook) | LCC JZ1312 .M34 2018 (print) | DDC 327.1/1409034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034805 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.
Contents
List of Illustrations
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
Introduction
1
Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: Debating Decline
11
2.
Parry to Thrust: The Logic of Retrenchment
23
3.
The Fates of Nations: Decline by the Numbers
43
Studies in Revival
69
4.
A Hegemon Temporizes: 1872 Great Britain
80
5.
A Hegemon Wakes Up: 1908 Great Britain
95
6.
A Descending Whirligig: 1888 Russia
114
7.
“Les Jeux Sont Faits�: 1893 France
129
8.
Tsar Power: 1903 Russia
147
9.
The Utopian Background: 1925 France
162
Conclusion: Retrenchment as Reloading
179
Notes
201
Index
255
1.
vii
Introduction The real cause, however, I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable. —Thucydides Such extraordinary efforts of power and courage will always command the attention of posterity; but the events by which the fate of nations is not materially changed will leave a faint impression on the page of history. —Edward Gibbon
How do great powers respond to relative decline? Since Thucydides, the consensus is that great power transitions are particularly perilous.1 Intoxicated by their newfound capability, rising powers work to undermine and overturn the existing order. Nationalist politicians rail against past humiliations and hunger for future glories. Rising states feel they are claiming their birthrights while declining states feel they are being stripped of theirs. Frightened by their loss of influence—and the looming specter of worse to come—declining powers threaten force to sustain the status quo. Diplomacy breaks down because neither side trusts that agreements will be honored. Alliances cease to deter as weak states flock to aggressors. Domestic dysfunction compounds matters as parties polarize, special interests dig in, and foreign policy whipsaws or stalemates. The results are disastrous: vicious infighting, gridlocked politics, pointless diplomacy, escalating crises, desperate decisions, and, ultimately, war. In politics as in nature, eclipses are spectacularly dark times. If the underlying problem during relative decline is that states try to maintain or expand their ambitions with dwindling resources, the solution could be curtailing ends to match the available means. But the conventional wisdom is that retrenchment creates more problems than it cures. Overseas, retrenchment smacks of weakness, which sows anxiety in allies and avarice
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in adversaries. Disengagement destabilizes regions, creating cracks that split the international order. Domestically, alarmed lobbyists will mobilize to defend parochial benefits, while hardliners will equate retreat with defeat and brand advocates of retrenchment as naive appeasers. Rather than renewing investment at home, policymakers will increase military spending to keep up.2 Bluff and bluster will trump diplomacy, provocation will substitute for deterrence, and preventive war now appears preferable to inexorable defeat later. In this book, we argue that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Specifically, we make three main arguments. First, relative decline causes prompt, proportionate retrenchment because states seek strategic solvency. The international system is a competitive place, and great powers did not get to the top by being imprudent, irrational, or irresponsible. When their fortunes ebb, states tend to retain the virtues that made them great. In the face of decline, great powers have a good sense of their relative capability and tend not to give away more than they must. Expanding or maintaining grand strategic ambitions during decline incurs unsustainable burdens and incites unwinnable fights, so the faster states fall, the more they retrench. Great powers may choose to retrench in other circumstances as well, but they have an overriding incentive to do so when confronted by relative decline. Second, the depth of relative decline shapes not only how much a state retrenches, but also which policies it adopts. The world is complex and cutthroat; leaders cannot glibly pull a policy off the shelf and expect desired outcomes. Because international politics is a self-help system, great powers prefer policies that rely less on the actions of allies and adversaries. For lack of a better term, we refer to these as domestic policies, which include reducing spending, restructuring forces, and reforming institutions—all to reallocate resources for more efficient uses. But international policies may also help, and they include redeploying forces, defusing flashpoints, and redistributing burdens—all to avoid costly conflicts and reinforce core strongpoints. The faster and deeper states fall, the more they are willing to rely on others to cushion their fall. Retrenchment is not a weapon but an arsenal that can be used in different amounts and combinations depending on conditions and the enemies faced. Third, after depth, structural conditions are the most important factors shaping how great powers respond to relative decline. Four conditions catalyze the incentives for declining states to retrench. One is the declining state’s rank. States in the top rungs of the great power hierarchy have more resources and margin for error than those lower down, so there is less urgency for them to retrench. Another is the availability of allies. Where states can shift burdens to capable regional powers with similar preferences, retrenchment is less risky and difficult. Yet another is the
2
INTRODUCTION
interdependence of commitments. When states perceive commitments in one place as tightly linked to commitments elsewhere, pulling back becomes harder and less likely. The last catalyst is the calculus of conquest. If aggression pays, then retrenchment does not, and great powers will be loath to do it. The world is not just complex and cutthroat, it is also dynamic. No set of conditions is everlasting, and leaders must change with the times. Empirically, this work aims to add value by being the first to study systematically all modern shifts in the great power pecking order. We find sixteen cases of relative decline since 1870, when reliable data for the great powers become available, and compare them to their non-declining counterparts across a variety of measures. To preview the findings, retrenchment is by far the most common response to relative decline, and declining powers behave differently from non-declining powers. States in decline are more likely to cut the size of their military forces and budgets and in extreme cases are more likely to form alliances. This does not, however, make them ripe for exploitation; declining states perform comparatively well in militarized disputes. Our headline finding, however, is that states that retrench recover their prior rank with some regularity, but those that fail to retrench never do. These results challenge theories of grand strategy and war, offer guidance to policymakers, and indicate overlooked paths to peace.
Why the Question Matters The claim that relative decline is dangerous has become a fundamental truth in international relations, one with wide-ranging implications. First and foremost, this assumption informs most of our theories of war and peace. Hegemonic stability theorists contend that relative decline undermines the ability of systemic leaders to uphold international order.3 Power transition theorists warn that relative decline generates opportunities for revisionist challenges to the status quo.4 Critics of the balance of power note that sudden shifts in power can upset the delicate equilibrium necessary to preserve peace.5 Rationalist theories contend that differential growth can generate insoluble commitment problems, which are one of the main causes of war.6 For each of the approaches, relative decline is the central factor that explains why stable and peaceful relations devolve into instability and conflict. The idea that relative decline is dangerous also has significant policy implications. Leaders’ beliefs about the importance of prestige, the need for credibility, and the dangers of appeasement are based on notions that even the mere perception of decline can spell doom for a great power.7 Historically,
3
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fears of falling dominos and emboldened adversaries have been root causes of geopolitical overstretch and failed strategic adjustment.8 Contemporary arguments in favor of U.S. engagement abroad rest on the claim that any retreat of American influence would upset the stability of the international system.9 Robert Kagan prophesies that a “reduction in defense spending . . . would unnerve American allies and undercut efforts to gain greater cooperation. There is already a sense around the world, fed by irresponsible pundits here at home, that the United States is in terminal decline.”10 Robert Kaplan likewise predicts, “Lessening our engagement with the world would have devastating consequences for humanity. The disruptions we witness today are but a taste of what is to come should our country flinch from its international responsibilities.”11 Policymakers provide strikingly similar assessments. “We have learned the hard way when America is absent, especially from unstable places, there are consequences,” the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has testified. “Extremism takes root, aggressors seek to fill the vacuum, and security everywhere is threatened, including here at home.”12 In 2012, then–secretary of defense Leon Panetta echoed, “If we turn away from critical regions of the world, we risk undoing the significant gains [our military personnel] have fought for. That would make all of us less safe in the long term. This is not a time for retrenchment.”13 In his confirmation hearings for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson made basically the same point: “In recent decades, we have cast American leadership into doubt. In some instances, we have withdrawn from the world. . . . Meanwhile, our adversaries have been emboldened to take advantage of this absence of American leadership.”14 It has become a mantra in policy circles that U.S. leadership is essential to global peace and prosperity. Talk of decline is defeatist, and the country must maintain its commitments and credibility come what may. Assumptions about the dangers of relative decline cast a similar shadow over debates about China’s rise. Graham Allison contends that “based on the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely. . . . When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained . . . can initiate a cascade of reactions.”15 Aaron Friedberg observes, “Throughout history, relations between dominant and rising states have been uneasy—and often violent . . . the fact that the U.S.China relationship is competitive, then, is simply no surprise.”16 “We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to ten years,” future White House strategist Steve Bannon bluntly declared in a March 2016 radio broadcast. “There’s no doubt about that.”17 It is precisely because shifts in power are so dangerous that many conclude the United States has no choice but to confront a rising China before it is too late.
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INTRODUCTION
In sum, the claim that relative decline is dangerous is a deeply important one. It shapes our theoretical understandings of the causes of war and peace. It influences assessments about the importance of continued American engagement abroad and the risks of retrenchment. It fuels concerns about how the rise of new powers might undermine the current liberal international order. If great powers respond to decline with domestic dysfunction and aggression abroad, then the twenty-first century stands to be a period of profound geopolitical turbulence. Yet if great powers can manage power shifts peacefully, this pessimism may be misplaced.
Defining Decline and Retrenchment This book is about grand strategic responses to relative decline. The protagonists of the story are great powers, though domestic groups, decision makers, and weaker states play supporting roles. Great powers are the heavyweights in international politics; they are the class of states possessing the largest combination of military and economic resources.18 Militarily, that means they have bigger armies, spend more on defense, and use the most advanced technology. Economically, that means they produce more economic output, participate more in the world economy, and have more complex economic systems. While small states and midrange powers may fret about the global distribution of power, they more often concentrate on local matters and have less capacity to respond in either case. We focus on great powers because they are the most influential actors, and because they are the centerpieces of the literature.19 The prime cause acting on these protagonists is decline. There are many different ways to conceptualize decline, but in what follows we focus on periods of what we call “acute relative decline” (or, for brevity, simply “decline”).20 These are moments characterized by two traits. First, a great power suffers a decline in relative power that decreases its ordinal rank among the great powers. Second, this decrease in relative power is sustained for at least five years. When the rank order of great powers changes—for instance, when numbers one and two switch places—and the switch is not temporary, this is what we mean by decline. Later, we discuss how different kinds of decline may impact great power responses, but we do not usually differentiate cases based on their sources of decline. Some declines take place when a dominant state falls in absolute terms and rapidly loses its rank. Other declines are the product of a rising state outperforming its peers in relative terms before slowly overtaking them. Despite their different origins, each of these cases results in an ordinal transition, and we treat both as cases of decline.
5
INTRODUCTION
In defining decline this way, we assume that great powers are primarily concerned about relative, rather than absolute, power.21 Because states reside in a competitive self-help system in which they alone are responsible for providing security from external threats, they are particularly concerned about where they rank in the hierarchy of great powers. It is not a state’s own trajectory that matters but how this trajectory changes its position relative to others. Absolute declines are alarming precisely because they allow rival states to overtake you rapidly. Absolute gains are cold comfort if potential competitors are steadily outpacing you. A corollary of this point is that we do not assume hegemonic transitions are substantially different from other changes in the great power ranks. Hegemonic transitions may be special, of course, but that is something that should be shown, not asserted. Great powers should be particularly alarmed any time they fall relative to their peers. We also assume that states focus on long-term trends, especially those that threaten their current positions. Indicators of national power can fluctuate rapidly, and some shifts are short-lived and not indicative of broader trends. But shifts in power that result in an ordinal transition are different: they are easier to identify, more salient to policymakers, and pose greater threats to a state’s security.22 Next, we assume that material factors have a more substantial and predictable impact on national power than other factors. Surely nonmaterial factors like national character, political unity, status, or legitimacy shape the ability of states to exercise influence.23 Yet it is the material resources accessible to a state, such as its taxable economic surplus or population available for military service, that form the foundation of national power. National disunity can undoubtedly prevent abundance from being exploited, but no amount of ideological harmony can make up for resource scarcity. We assume some leaders may put their faith in intangible components of power, but most will have perceptions that track closely with objective measures. A related benefit of focusing on the material elements of national power is that they can be compared systematically across cases. What we are trying to explain is how decline affects grand strategy. We define grand strategy as the purposeful use of military, diplomatic, and economic resources by a state to seek security from external threats.24 By security, we mean the capacity of a state to preserve its autonomy.25 Grand strategy is distinct from military strategy in that it considers how all the instruments of statecraft combine to enhance the security of a state during war or peacetime.26 Naturally, states often have grand strategies that are incomplete, contradictory, or misguided. What matters most is that there is a minimal consensus within the official mind about how a state should advance its interests abroad.27 Scholars have offered numerous ways to categorize grand strategies.28 These distinctions are undoubtedly important in different contexts, but for
6
INTRODUCTION
Less ambitious
More ambitious
Isolationism
Selective engagement Offshore balancing
Cooperative security Great power concert
Global empire Primacy
Figure 1. Continuum of grand strategies
present purposes we classify grand strategies along a single dimension: their degree of ambition. By ambition, we mean the scale and scope of the outcomes that a particular grand strategy seeks to influence. Scope here refers both to the geographic reach of a particular grand strategy and to the potential range of issue areas it addresses. Figure 1 arranges the most familiar grand strategies along this spectrum.29 On one end of the continuum, ambitious grand strategies seek to influence outcomes in a significant manner across a number of issue areas and geographic regions. They maintain that the security of a state depends on the maintenance of an active and engaged presence abroad. An important example of a grand strategy located on this end is primacy, in which a great power attempts to guarantee its security by establishing preponderance over all rivals.30 A slightly less ambitious grand strategy is cooperative security, in which a great power uses standing alliances and other multilateral institutions to deter aggression and manage collective crises.31 On the other end of the continuum, less ambitious grand strategies seek less dramatic impacts and have more modest reach. They posit that security can be maintained through a more selective and restrained foreign policy, which seeks to influence issues closer to home or in select issue areas. One example located on this end of the spectrum is isolationism, in which a state concentrates on defending the homeland while avoiding most foreign entanglements.32 A more ambitious but still relatively restrained grand strategy is selective engagement, in which a great power seeks to influence outcomes only in regions crucial to its security.33 On the most elemental level, states can expand, contract, or maintain their grand strategic ambitions. They may change their grand strategy to a greater or lesser degree using an array of tools, but the elementary distinction is whether ambitions are going up, down, or staying the same. When ambitions rise, a state is in grand strategic expansion; when they fall, it has chosen retrenchment; and when they stay the same, it is sticking to the status quo. These changes are not grand strategies unto themselves; they reflect significant and sustained trends in ambition. A state may retrench from a more to a less ambitious strategy of primacy just as it may expand from a less to a more ambitious strategy of isolationism.
7
INTRODUCTION
At base, retrenchment is an intentional reduction in the overall cost of a state’s foreign policy.34 Conversely, expansion is an intentional increase in the overall cost of a state’s foreign policy, and the status quo is maintaining the overall cost of a state’s foreign policy. The cost of a state’s foreign policy is a product of its expenses, risks, and burdens. To illustrate, retrenching states can economize expenses by cutting, inter alia, military spending and personnel. Retrenching states can also reduce risks by pruning foreign policy liabilities, tempering foreign policy goals in some geographic areas, and demoting the importance of some issues. Finally, retrenching states can try to shift burdens, fobbing off foreign policy obligations on allies or dependencies. All these policies allow resources to be redistributed from peripheral to core interests. Simply put, great powers retrench when they seek foreign policies that are less active, less ambitious, and less burdensome than the status quo. Retrenchment is not synonymous with appeasement, which is narrower, or reform, which is broader. By appeasement, we mean policies of asymmetrical and sustained concessions to an adversary in order to defuse conflict.35 Appeasement does not require retrenchment and vice versa. Retrenchment need not relate only to adversaries, nor be asymmetric or abiding. Indeed, declining powers are just as likely to offer sustained asymmetric concessions to recruit potential allies as to satiate potential adversaries. They may also use retrenchment to gather resources to confront enemies. One advantage of studying decline is that it helps identify when appeasement looks like the only way to safety. Furthermore, retrenchment is distinct from the more generic concept of reform. By reform, we mean efforts by states to markedly change the roles, missions, standard practices, and organizational structure of prominent domestic institutions. Retrenchment can widen the possibilities for reform, but reform is not automatic. A state may decrease its overseas commitments, omit domestic reforms, and still count as a case of retrenchment. Similarly, a state may keep its overseas commitments constant while trimming back and overhauling institutions at home, and this, too, counts as retrenchment. Of course, states can also reform to maintain gains or expand assertively, but this is not evidence of retrenchment. Grand strategy is hard in the best of times, but in many ways decline makes it more difficult.36 Paraphrasing Alexis de Tocqueville, the most dangerous moment for a government is when it starts to reform.37 Declining powers can face more intense and immediate threats to their security abroad and more difficulty controlling politics at home. Unable to dominate by traditional margins, they are vulnerable to challenges by potential predators and domestic groups. Procrastination is tempting. Declining powers also find it harder to command the traditional tools of statecraft. Because observers question the credibility of their commitments, they may
8
INTRODUCTION
struggle to deter potential aggressors, reassure alliance partners, and negotiate diplomatic agreements. Perhaps of greatest importance, declining powers have fewer resources to support grand strategy. Some policies are too expensive given a dwindling resource base, while others siphon funds away from pressing domestic problems. In short, declining powers face a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, they face a more uncertain and potentially dangerous world. They fear the rise of new challengers and the potential instability created by sudden shifts in the distribution of power. At the same time, declining powers have fewer resources and more limited options available to manage these threats. They worry about the sustained erosion of their national power and the decreasing efficacy of traditional tools of statecraft. How do great powers respond to such pressures?
Plan of the Book The remainder of this book explores how great powers deal with decline. Chapter 1 unpacks the conventional wisdom, which associates decline with paralysis at home and increased instability abroad, questioning its logic and teasing out testable implications. In chapter 2, we explain why declining powers are drawn to retrenchment during decline. We describe the various forms that retrenchment can take and why states might be drawn to different policies at different times. We also show how different structural conditions might amplify or mute pressures to retrench. Chapter 3 looks at decline by the numbers. We identify sixteen cases of decline since 1870 and quantitatively trace the grand strategic choices that all the cases made in response. The chief findings are that retrenchment is the most common response to decline, even over short time spans, and that the depth of decline is a decent predictor of the degree of retrenchment. Compared to their non-declining counterparts, declining powers tend to spend less on their militaries and keep the size of their armed forces down, and the fastest declining states are more likely to enter alliances. We also find that declining states do not make inviting targets because, compared to non-declining states, they do not tend to lose disputes overall and tend to prevail in the disputes they initiate. This suggests that declining powers are flexible and formidable. After this brief overview, the next six chapters provide a series of natural experiments that get inside the cases. We study three pairs of great powers, each experiencing similar depths of decline but manifesting somewhat divergent responses. Chapters 4 and 5 look at two small declines: Britain in 1872 and 1908, respectively. While geography, culture, and institutions stay constant, British policymakers retrenched in both periods, but they did so in differing manners. Policymakers in the 1870s dabbled with domestic
9
INTRODUCTION
reforms and struggled to rein in imperial proconsuls, whereas their counterparts in the 1900s embraced retrenchment at home and abroad. The latter episode elicited a more determined response because Britain had fewer reserves of power, fewer concerns of falling dominos, and access to more reliable allies. Different conditions drove different policies. Chapters 6 and 7 compare two cases of medium decline: 1888 Russia and 1893 France, respectively. Despite radical differences in their domestic political systems, these powers espoused similar policies of retrenchment, culminating in an alliance with one another. Yet these two cases varied in key nuances: France came around to retrenchment reluctantly, while Russia took it up more eagerly, an outcome explained in part by the steady hand of successive tsars. Distant beginnings united in a common ending. Chapters 8 and 9 pair two large declines: 1903 Russia and 1925 France, respectively. Although both states rejected preventive war as a viable option and adopted elements of retrenchment, neither limited its ambitions as much as their dire straits would have suggested. Part of this can be explained by dysfunctional domestic politics: an erratic tsar and a fractious party system. But in neither case were conditions fully favorable to retrenchment. Russia struggled to erect stable buffers along its vast and vulnerable frontiers, whereas France stumbled in its efforts to find capable, reliable allies. Their muddled responses led to morbid outcomes. In the conclusion, we summarize findings, discuss implications, and offer predictions about the incipient Sino-American transition. To telegraph our points, we contend that China’s rise is neither a historical outlier nor inherently dangerous. Consistent with other low to medium declines, we expect the United States to favor mild retrenchment aimed mostly at remedying domestic problems. The Obama administration adopted some policies from the retrenchment playbook, and we draw out the conditions that might shape whether these policies continue and where they might be prove effective. We conclude that the biggest danger may not be the impending Sino-American transition itself, but the widespread belief that it makes war more likely.
10
Stopping the Bomb The Sources and Effectiveness of US Nonproliferation Policy
N i c h ol as L. M iller
Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Miller, Nicholas L., 1987– author. Title: Stopping the bomb : the sources and effectiveness of US nonproliferation policy / Nicholas L. Miller. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017048061 (print) | LCCN 2017055323 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501717819 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501717826 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501717802 | ISBN 9781501717802 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Nuclear nonproliferation—Government policy— United States—History—20th century. | Economic sanctions, American—History—20th century. Classification: LCC JZ5675 (ebook) | LCC JZ5675 .M55 2018 (print) | DDC 327.1/7470973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048061 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.
Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
List of Abbreviations
ix
Introduction: The Proliferation Problem
1
Theorizing the Sources and Effectiveness of US Nonproliferation Policy
10
2.
The Sources of US Nonproliferation Policy, 1945–1968
40
3.
The Sources of US Nonproliferation Policy, 1969–1980
69
4.
Nonproliferation in Action: The United States and Friendly Countries’ Nuclear Weapons Programs, 1964–Present
95
1.
5.
The Effectiveness of US Nonproliferation Policy
123
6.
The French Nuclear Program (1954–1960)
148
7.
The Taiwanese Nuclear Program (1967–1977)
171
8.
The Pakistani Nuclear Program (1972–1987)
193
9.
The Iranian Nuclear Program (1974–2015)
217
Conclusion: Lessons from US Nonproliferation Policy
244
Notes
253
Index
307
v
Introduction The Proliferation Problem
In the summer of 1945, the United States became the first country to develop, test, and use nuclear weapons in war. Having dragged the world into the nuclear age, US policymakers were immediately forced to confront the possibility that their nuclear monopoly would not long endure. Even before the United States tested its first weapon in New Mexico, a group of Manhattan Project scientists led by James Franck argued against immediately using nuclear weapons on Japan, warning that “nuclear bombs cannot possibly remain a ‘secret weapon’ at the exclusive disposal of this country for more than a few years.”1 Soon after the war ended, a government committee led by David Lilienthal and Dean Acheson came to similar conclusions about the likely spread of nuclear weapons. Contending that the basic scientific principles behind nuclear weapons “are well known to competent scientists throughout the world” and that “the incentive to other nations to press their own developments is overwhelming,” the committee recommended international control of nuclear technology as the best means to avoid proliferation and nuclear war.2 From this moment onward, the US government struggled with the question of how to prevent, delay, manage, or perhaps even accept or selectively promote the spread of nuclear weapons. As this book will demonstrate, it ultimately took more than thirty years for a firm nonproliferation policy to emerge. As the nuclear age progressed, analysts and policymakers became increasingly concerned that the spread of nuclear weapons would not be gradual but rather rapid and self-perpetuating, warning of nuclear cascades and domino effects and predicting exponential increases in the number of states pursuing and acquiring nuclear weapons.3 In 1961, in negotiations with Nikita Khrushchev over a limited test ban treaty, President Kennedy predicted that “if no agreement is reached, then in a few years there might be ten or even fifteen nuclear powers.”4 That same year, as nuclear sharing with NATO allies was a matter of public debate, Albert Wohlstetter warned
1
INTRODUCTION
in the pages of Foreign Affairs of the “N+1” problem, in particular arguing that “it has always been clear . . . that the acquisition of nuclear military power by some of our allies can impel its acquisition by enemies. . . . The spread occurs in chain.”5 Two years later, Kennedy publicly warned that without effective policy interventions, the world could soon face a scenario with anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five nuclear-armed powers.6 These fears were strengthened immensely by China’s entry into the nuclear club in 1964. In the aftermath of China’s first test, the influential Gilpatric Committee warned, “The world is fast approaching a point of no return in the prospects of controlling the spread of nuclear weapons.” The committee specifically predicted that India and Japan would be tempted to pursue nuclear weapons, and that this in turn could compel Pakistan, Israel, the United Arab Republic (UAR), West Germany, and other European states to follow suit.7 After India tested its first nuclear device a decade later, delivering a blow to the nascent nonproliferation regime, a government report sounded a similarly pessimistic note. The report judged that the effort to prevent proliferation “is now at a crucial stage . . . as a result of the Indian nuclear test, other non-nuclear weapons states may rethink their decisions regarding the acquisition of nuclear explosives.”8 Yet there is a significant problem with these repeated predictions of nuclear domino effects: They have proven spectacularly wrong. As Sagan has noted, the number of states with nuclear weapons has grown slowly and steadily, with no single instance of nuclear acquisition leading to a cascade of additional nuclear states. Meanwhile, the number of states actively pursuing nuclear weapons has actually declined in recent decades.9 Indeed, in 1985, a National Intelligence Council report observed that “the most striking characteristic of the present-day nuclear proliferation scene is that, despite the alarms rung for some decades by past National Intelligence Estimates, no additional overt proliferation of weapons has actually occurred since China tested its bomb in 1964.”10 While several countries acquired nuclear capabilities in this time period—namely, Israel, India, and South Africa—none of them declared their arsenal and openly stockpiled weapons. This apparent failure of nuclear domino predictions has motivated a large literature in recent years, producing a new consensus that holds the nuclear domino theory is invalid.11 In explaining the relatively slow pace of proliferation, recent scholarship has emphasized the role of leader identity conception, norms embodied in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), regional security environments, domestic regime type, and threats of force by the adversaries of potential proliferators.12 Other recent work has explored the role of foreign technological assistance in spurring proliferation.13 This book takes a different tack, emphasizing the role of US nonproliferation policy in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons, a factor that
2
THE PROLIFERATION PROBLEM
has received systematic attention from social scientists only in the last few years.14 Until recently, many adhered to Waltz’s assertion that “no country has been able to prevent other countries from going nuclear if they were determined to do so.”15 While there are several excellent historical works that explore the evolution of US nonproliferation policy over time, they do not theorize and thoroughly assess both the sources and effectiveness of US efforts.16 Specifically, this book argues for the importance of nonproliferation sanctions policies established by the United States in the mid-1970s, policies that were advocated by members of the US Congress and ultimately incorporated into US law. These policies credibly link nonproliferation with access to the vast economic and military resources of the United States and thereby dramatically raise the costs of proliferation for states in the US sphere of influence. I also offer a theory for the sources of US nonproliferation policies, arguing that heightened expectations of nuclear domino effects, greater government attention to nonproliferation, and political openings for nonproliferation advocates in Congress and the bureaucracy explain why US policy strengthened so dramatically in response to the Chinese and Indian nuclear tests of 1964 and 1974, leading first to the NPT and later the adoption of sanctions policies. Collectively, these two theories suggest the possibility that forecasts of nuclear domino effects have to a large degree been a self-defeating prophecy: US policymakers anticipated domino effects and put in place policies that may have effectively prevented them.17
Why Nonproliferation Matters The spread of nuclear weapons and the efficacy of efforts to prevent this spread are important topics for both theoretical and policy reasons. First, in terms of policy, nuclear proliferation is consequential since it affects both the risk of nuclear use and the likelihood and character of conventional interstate conflict. While theoretical arguments about whether nuclear weapons stabilize or destabilize international politics persist, a growing body of empirical work suggests that nuclear weapons may not deter conventional conflict to the extent previously thought, may provide bargaining advantages in crises, encourage greater resolve or aggression, or lead states to become more assertive in their foreign policies.18 Moreover, even the pursuit of nuclear weapons can cause regional instability and war. Fuhrmann and Kreps identify eight cases where nuclear programs were preventively attacked, in addition to ten other cases where states seriously considered preventive attacks.19 Most prominently, the mistaken belief that Iraq continued to pursue nuclear weapons was a significant motivation for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.20 Israel attacked
3
INTRODUCTION
an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 and Syrian nuclear facilities in 2007, and some have argued that the Soviets instigated the Six-Day War of 1967 in order to attack Israel’s nuclear program.21 There has likewise been widespread discussion of the possibility of an American or Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, with the threat of force publicly “on the table” for many years.22 While it is impossible to say definitively whether more nuclear-armed states would increase the risk of nuclear use, scholars subscribing to the “proliferation pessimism” school of thought generally argue that this is the case. This argument is plausible for two main reasons. First, there will simply be more opportunities for advertent or inadvertent use as the number of nuclear-armed states increases.23 A second perspective holds that nextgeneration proliferators are likely to be weaker, poorer, military-dominated states that lack the financial and institutional capacity to minimize the risk of accidental or intentional nuclear use.24 This topic is also important for theoretical reasons. First, the limited amount of proliferation is puzzling from the standpoint of several existing theories. Proliferation has not accelerated even as the technology to produce nuclear weapons has diffused and become easier to master. Moreover, from the perspective of realism, which assumes that states seek security and survival above all else and argues that nuclear weapons are the ultimate guarantor of a state’s survival, it makes little sense that proliferation has been so rare.25 After all, it is not as if all states with a potential motive and capability have proliferated. According to one recent estimate, there are currently fifty-six non-nuclear states with the basic technical capacity to develop nuclear weapons; moreover, many of these states have at least one nuclear-armed neighbor, generally thought to be the strongest motivation for nuclear proliferation.26 Second, while it is possible that norms associated with the NPT could explain the rarity of proliferation, this argument is problematic because the NPT itself and the decisions of states to adhere to it have often been a consequence of superpower interests and pressure.27 Finally, the role of sanctions in limiting proliferation that this book highlights is theoretically important since the majority of existing scholarship on sanctions argues that they are generally ineffective.28 Whether for reasons of theory or policy, is it crucial to understand the sources and efficacy of US nonproliferation efforts.
Patterns of Proliferation, 1945–Present Table I.1 below identifies the countries that have pursued nuclear weapons since 1945 along with the years they initiated their programs, acquired nuclear weapons, and/or abandoned their programs, according to Way’s updated codings.29 In order for a country to be coded as pursuing nuclear
4
THE PROLIFERATION PROBLEM
Table I.1 Nuclear weapons pursuit since 1945 (data from Way and Weeks 2014)
Soviet Union United Kingdom France China Israel Australia India Egypt Taiwan South Korea Libya Pakistan South Africa Argentina Brazil North Korea Iraq Iran Syria
Program start
Acquire year
1945 1947 1954 1955 1958 1961 1964 1965 1967 1970 1970 1972 1974 1978 1978 1980 1982 1985 2000
1949 1952 1960 1964 1969
Abandon year
1973 1988 1974 1977 1978 2003 1987 1979
1991 1990 1990
2006 1995
weapons, they must “do more than simply explore the possibility of a weapons program. They have to take additional further steps aimed at acquiring nuclear weapons, such as a political decision by cabinet-level officials, movement toward weaponization, or development of single-use, dedicated technology.”30 In addition to a declining rate of nuclear weapons program initiation over time, there is a striking change in the type of countries that have pursued nuclear weapons in different time periods. Prior to the mid-1970s, proliferating states were often friends or allies of the United States—for example, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Pakistan. After the mid-1970s, by contrast, proliferating states have exclusively been states either with troubled, ambivalent relations with the United States (Argentina, Brazil) or states entirely outside the US sphere of influence (North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria). This book’s theory aims to shed light on this changing character of proliferation in recent decades. It also seeks to explain why US nonproliferation efforts have failed against some countries—for example, Pakistan, North Korea, and India—while succeeding against countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Iraq.
5
INTRODUCTION
The Evolution of US Nonproliferation Policy, 1945–1980 This book also seeks to explain changes in US nonproliferation policy over time, which I argue is central to understanding the changing patterns of proliferation. There has been significant variation in US policy historically with respect to whether the US government has sought to impede proliferation across the board or has facilitated or acquiesced to it in particular cases. In this book, I focus on the period between 1945 and 1980 for two reasons: (1) it encompasses the most important shifts in US nonproliferation policy, including the negotiation and establishment of the NPT and development of strong export controls and sanctions policies, and (2) much of the book relies on declassified government documents, which are much spottier after 1980.31 The arc of US nonproliferation policy in this period will be discussed in detail in chapters 2 and 3, but a brief summary demonstrates the oscillations in US policy. After early efforts to restrain proliferation in the 1940s, namely the failed Baruch Plan and the Atomic Energy Act, which sought to limit national access to nuclear weapons and nuclear technology, policy in the mid-1950s became markedly more permissive. The Eisenhower administration sought to increase the control of NATO allies over nuclear weapons through the NATO stockpile plan and Multilateral Force (MLF), secured revisions of the Atomic Energy Act to allow the United States to provide aid to Britain’s nuclear weapons program, and launched the Atoms for Peace program, which promised to spread nuclear technology globally. While some of these initiatives can be interpreted as nonproliferation measures in the sense that they sought to dissuade fully independent nuclear programs and maintain a semblance of American control over the spread of nuclear technology, materially they resulted in increased access of states to nuclear weapons and technology. Moreover, Eisenhower himself was clearly open to selective proliferation, as chapter 2 will explore. Nonproliferation policy in the early 1960s was schizophrenic, with significant efforts to impede proliferation such as the Limited Test Ban Treaty and the installation of permissive action links (PALs) on US nuclear weapons in Europe, but also a refusal to give up the plan for the MLF in NATO and the decision to offer additional aid to the French and British nuclear weapons programs. From 1964 to 1968, US policy shifted strongly in favor of nonproliferation, most notably with the scrapping of the MLF and the conclusion of the NPT. After a down-weighting of nonproliferation from 1969 through 1973, which included a Nixon administration decision not to press for NPT adherence, from 1974 through 1980 US policy again shifted strongly in favor of nonproliferation with the establishment of strong supplier controls and sanctions policies.
6
THE PROLIFERATION PROBLEM
The Argument This book advances theories to explain both the evolution of US nonproliferation policy over time and its effectiveness, which I argue sheds light on the changing character of proliferation. With respect to the sources of US nonproliferation policy, I argue that the Chinese and Indian nuclear tests (1) strengthened expectations of nuclear domino effects; (2) caused the US government to pay greater attention to nonproliferation; and (3) provided a political opening for nonproliferation advocates. Expectations of nuclear domino effects—the notion that proliferation in one state increases the probability of proliferation in other states—was crucial in leading US policymakers to prefer an across-the-board rather than a selective nonproliferation policy. More specifically, I argue that the consequences of proliferation for the United States and the costs of enforcing nonproliferation differ from state to state as a function of whether that state is an enemy, ally, or unaligned and therefore that an across-the-board nonproliferation policy makes sense only when nuclear domino effects are perceived to be strong, in other words when policymakers believe proliferation cannot be contained to individual cases of friendly states. The Chinese and Indian nuclear tests also played two subsidiary roles in causing the changes in US policy, namely by leading the US government to focus more attention on nonproliferation and creating political openings for actors with a strong stake in nonproliferation, for example arms control bureaucrats and members of Congress. While heightened expectations of domino effects helped change many policymakers’ preferences on nonproliferation policy, greater government attention and openings for nonproliferation advocates helped ensure the implementation of policy changes. The second theory explains how US nonproliferation policies—in particular the threat of sanctions established in the mid-1970s—have helped to limit proliferation and alter its character. As a global hegemon with unparalleled military and economic resources, the United States has long maintained important security and economic relationships with a large number of countries that provide leverage the United States can bring to bear in the nuclear realm. Specifically, by credibly threatening to cut off or weaken economic and military support to states that pursue nuclear weapons, the United States dramatically raises the costs of proliferation for states that depend on the United States and therefore has the power to deter states from pursuing nuclear weapons in the first place. This rationalist argument, where states calculate the risk of sanctions and refrain from proliferating if the threat is credible and the costs are too heavy to bear, implies that sanctions will succeed in compelling countries to give up ongoing nuclear weapons programs only when they underestimate the risk of sanctions. This could occur because they started their programs prior to the development
7
INTRODUCTION
of US sanctions policies or because they faced multilateral sanctions of unexpected strength. The deterrent effect of US sanctions sheds light on why US allies and friends have ceased pursuing nuclear weapons in recent decades, thus rendering nuclear proliferation an activity exclusively in the purview of “rogue states” like Iran, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and North Korea. It also helps explain why unilateral US sanctions have often failed—because they were targeted at countries with low dependence on the United States who were rationally undeterred—while multilateral sanctions have proven crucial at halting recent proliferators.
Roadmap for the Book The body of the book develops these two theories in more detail and then tests their observable implications using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. Chapter 1 begins by reviewing the literature on the causes of nuclear proliferation and US nonproliferation policy and then offers new theories on the sources and effectiveness of US policy. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 empirically assess the theory on the sources of US nonproliferation policy. In chapter 2, I draw on archival documents and secondary sources to trace the evolution of US policy from 1945 to 1968 as well as investigate the motivations for these changes. Chapter 3 conducts a parallel analysis for the 1969–1980 period. In chapter 4, I use declassified documents to explore how well the theory performs in explaining US policy toward individual countries pursuing nuclear weapons after 1964. In particular, I examine whether the United States did indeed oppose proliferation across the board in this time period, and I assess what motivated US nonproliferation efforts in these cases. Chapters 5 through 9 test the theory on the effectiveness of US nonproliferation policy. In chapter 5, I quantitatively assess the theorized deterrent effect of US sanctions policy, examining whether countries with higher degrees of dependence on the United States are less likely to pursue nuclear weapons after the development of credible sanctions policies. Chapter 5 also assesses the argument on when sanctions are likely to succeed at halting ongoing nuclear programs by examining the universe of cases where the United States threatened or imposed nonproliferation sanctions. Chapters 6 though 9 offer four in-depth case studies of the effectiveness of US nonproliferation efforts against countries with ongoing nuclear weapons programs. In chapter 6, I examine US policy toward the French nuclear program in the 1950s to assess whether US nonproliferation policy was indeed more permissive in this time period, thus providing openings for the acquisition of nuclear weapons. The next two chapters examine US policy toward Taiwan and Pakistan, both of which had ongoing nuclear programs
8
THE PROLIFERATION PROBLEM
and faced threats of sanctions when US nonproliferation policy tightened in the 1970s, thus allowing us to assess directly the effect of changes in US policy. In chapter 9, I assess US nonproliferation policy toward Iran from the 1970s to 2015, seeking to explain why Iran agreed to significant limits on its nuclear program in the late 1970s, resumed its nuclear weapons program in the 1980s, and then agreed to limits again in 2015. The final chapter concludes with a discussion of implications for theory and policy as well as avenues for future research.
9
Covert Regime Change Americ a’s Secret Cold War
Li n ds e y A . O’ Ro u rke
Cornell University Press —-1 —0 —+1
Ithaca and London
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Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [CIP to come] Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly
-1— 0— +1—
composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.
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Contents
List of Illustrations
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
1. The False Promise of Covert Regime Change
1
2. Causes: Why Do States Launch Regime Changes?
22
3. Conduct: Why Do States Intervene Covertly versus Overtly?
48
4. Consequences: How Effective Are Covert Regime Changes?
73
5. Overview of US-Backed Regime Changes during the
Cold War
97
6. Fostering Communist Heresy in Eastern Europe
125
7. Containment, Coup d’État and the Covert War in Vietnam
158
8. Dictators and Democrats in the Dominican Republic
194
9. Covert Regime Change after the Cold War
225
Notes 237 Index 000
—-1 —0 —+1 vii
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chapter 1
The False Promise of Covert Regime Change Many more princes have lost their lives and their states through conspiracies than through open warfare. —Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy
Although the policy of regime change is often associated with the US-led invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), the practice has a long historical precedent. Foreign-imposed regime changes created the modern world. John Owen, for instance, identified 209 cases of interstate regime change between 1510 and 2010, and Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten found one hundred cases since 1815 alone.1 Yet, these works, like most academic studies, examine overt cases—that is, operations involving the direct and publicly acknowledged use of military power to overthrow another state. States, however, seldom resort to outright war to topple another country’s government. When a state wants to overthrow an adversary, it is more likely to attempt a covert regime change—by assassinating a foreign leader, staging a coup d’état, manipulating foreign elections, or secretly aiding dissident groups in their bids to oust a foreign government. In fact, covert regime change is a remarkably common instrument of statecraft, ranking alongside war, limited military strikes, and economic sanctions as one of the central foreign policy tools used by great powers. Although covert regime change has long played a central role in international politics, comprehensive theories to explain how, when, and why states launch these operations are lacking, possibly because of the special challenges involved in studying covert actions. Nonetheless, American actions during the Cold War offer a unique opportunity to study a great power in covert action. The combination of the US government’s declassification rules, congressional inquiries, and journalistic coverage has revealed much of what American officials have sought to conceal. Building on archival research of declassified US government documents, this book introduces an original
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dataset of all US-backed regime changes during the Cold War, containing forty-five more covert regime change attempts than the most expansive existing academic study.2 The dataset reveals that the United States pursued a remarkable number of regime changes during the Cold War (1947–89) and that the vast majority of these interventions were conducted covertly—sixty-four covert operations compared to six overt ones. Twenty-five of America’s covert operations helped bring a US-backed government to power, whereas the remaining thirty-nine failed to achieve that goal. As table 1.1 indicates, these missions targeted all types of states: adversaries and allies, powerful and weak, demo cratic and authoritarian, communist and capitalist alike. In many cases, US- backed forces squared off against Soviet-backed adversaries. Sometimes Washington conspired with other countries to topple a foreign government; at other times, the US government intervened alone. Some missions would not have occurred if not for Americ a’s covert interference; in other cases, Washington played a secondary role in covert plots hatched by actors abroad. Some of these operations are just now coming to light; others have long been a source of international controversy—such as Washington’s efforts to overthrow Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh (1953), Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz (1954), and Cuban leader Fidel Castro (1960–68). Perhaps given the notoriety of these cases, covert regime changes are sometimes viewed as an artifact of the Cold War. Regime change is not, however, just a Cold War phenomenon. On the contrary, each American administration in the post–Cold War era has enthusiastically embraced both covert and overt regime change, intervening in places such as Haiti (1994), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and Syria (2012). This preference for regime change seems unlikely to change anytime soon. The United States and other great powers will continue to undertake both covert and overt missions regularly. To understand modern world affairs, it is therefore necessary to determine how and why states launch these operations. Toward that end, this project analyzes the causes, conduct, and consequences of foreign-imposed regime change.
Causes: Why Do States Launch Regime Changes?
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What logic drives policymakers to launch regime change operations? Stated differently, why would political leaders decide that pursuing a regime change—as opposed to another foreign policy tool—was the best way to secure their interests? In simplest terms, states launch both covert and overt regime changes to increase their security and the security of their allies. Sometimes this means overthrowing a foreign government that poses a specific military threat; at other times, states pursue regime change to increase their relative military
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Nicaragua (1979–80) Suriname (1982–85) Chile (1984–89)* Haiti (1986–88) Panama (1987–89)
Japan (1952–68)* Indonesia (1954–58)
Angola (1964–72) Mozambique (1964–68) Somalia (1964–67) Thailand (1965–69) South Vietnam (1967–71)* Iraq (1972–75) Italy (1972–73)* Portugal (1974–75)* Angola (1975–76) South Yemen (1979–80) Chad (1981–82)* Ethiopia (1981–83) Liberia (1983–88) Philippines (1984–86)* Angola (1985–88)
China (1949–68)
Czechoslovakia (1949–56) East Germany (1949–56) Estonian SSR (1949–56) Hungary (1949–56) Latvian SSR (1949–56) Lithuanian SSR (1949–56) Poland (1949–56) Romania (1949–56) Soviet Union/Russian SSR (1949–59) Ukrainian SSR (1949–56) North Korea (1950–53) Tibet (1958–68) North Vietnam (1961–64) Cuba (1961–68) Afghanistan (1979–89)* Nicaragua (1980–89)* Poland (1981–89)* Cambodia (1982–89) Libya (1982–89)
* Denotes that the US-backed forces assumed power; † denotes that the intervention was aborted before implementation.
Syria (1955–57)† Lebanon (1957–58)* Laos (1959–73) Congo (1960)* South Vietnam (1963)*
Dominican Republic (1960–61)* British Guiana/Guyana (1961–71)* Dominican Republic (1961–62)* Chile (1962–73)* Haiti (1963) Bolivia (1963–66)* Brazil (1964)* Dominican Republic (1965–68)* Haiti (1965–69) Bolivia (1971)* Grenada (1979)†
Guatemala (1952–54)*
Iran (1952–53)*
Lebanon (1958)*
Covert
Cuba (1960–61)
Libya (1986)
France (1947–52)*
Overt
Panama (1989)*
Dominican Republic (1965)* Grenada (1983)*
Overt
Hegemonic
Italy (1947–68)*
North Korea (1950)
Albania (1949–56)
Covert
Preventive
Belarusian SSR (1949–56) Bulgaria (1949–56)
Overt
Covert
Offensive
Table 1.1 U.S.-backed regime change attempts during the Cold War (1947–1989)
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power vis-à-vis rivals. To better understand this behavior, I introduce the following typology to categorize the three main types of security interests that drive states to intervene: Offensive operations aim to overthrow a military rival or break up a rival alliance. During the Cold War, t hese missions pursued the foreign policy strategy of “rollback,” and the United States attempted twenty-three covert and two overt missions of this nature against the Soviet Union and its allies. The missions came in two waves. First was a major effort beginning in the late 1940s to weaken the Soviet Union by supporting numerous secessionist movements within the Soviet Union as well as the Eastern European countries that it had come to dominate as a result of World War II. After these interventions failed entirely and Washington recognized the difficulties of overthrowing a consolidated Soviet ally, American leaders largely avoided offensive operations until the last decade of the Cold War, when fissures in the Soviet system once again provided an opening for the United States to support anti-Soviet groups, thus enabling covert interventions in Afghani stan, Nicaragua, Poland, and Cambodia. Preventive operations attempt to maintain the status quo by stopping a state from taking certain actions—like joining a rival alliance or building nuclear weapons—that may pose a threat in the f uture. In Cold War terms, t hese correspond to Washington’s twenty-five covert and one overt “containment” operations targeting states believed to be in danger of joining the Soviet alliance system. Over the course of the Cold War, the United States pursued a variety of covert missions t oward this end: Washington first worked to ensure that it would have great power allies in its looming confrontation with the Soviet Union by backing moderate and rightwing pro-American politi cal parties during democratic elections in France, Italy, and Japan. L ater, as the superpower conflict expanded to include the M iddle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa, US covert interventions followed suit, including notable cases such as the 1953 coup that ousted Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the failed attempt to oust Indonesian leader Sukarno in 1958, the inadvertent assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem during a 1963 coup, and covert support for Angolan rebels during the 1970s and 1980s. Lastly, hegemonic operations seek to keep target states politically subordinate. In these cases, the intervener is trying to acquire or maintain hegemony over a certain geographic region to obtain the military, political, and economic benefits associated with being a regional hegemon. Although the United States attempted eighteen covert and three overt operations of this type during the Cold War period, they do not reflect a specific Cold War strategy per se, but rather a strategy of regional hegemony that was first articulated in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and has driven US policy in the hemisphere ever since. In t hese cases, Washington foresaw the rise of a potentially hostile government that would challenge the US-led regional order
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and potentially encourage other states to defect from it as well. To head off this possibility, the United States sought to install a friendly and reliable pro- American regime in its place. Given the context of the Cold War, some target governments had clear ties to Moscow, such as Fidel Castro’s Cuba or Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua. Other target regimes w ere viewed as sympathetic to communism, although US officials debated the extent of their direct ties to the Soviet Union, such as Jacobo Arbenz’s Guatemala or Salvador Allende’s Chile. Still others, however, entered America’s crosshairs not because of the target government was considered too leftist, but rather b ecause they were governed by unpopular repressive dictators whose continued rule, Washington feared, could lead to instability and popular revolutions, such as Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican Republic or Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s Haiti. Why do policymakers try to change who holds the reins of power in a foreign government? The idea that leaders launch regime changes to increase their state’s security provides only half an answer. When a country finds itself embroiled in an interstate dispute, it may respond in a number of ways—for example, through negotiation, coercion, sanctions, limited military action, or outright war. Why choose regime change rather than one of these other foreign policy initiatives? The answer is that regime change holds a unique appeal for policymakers. Unlike most foreign policy strategies, regime change can alter the underlying preferences of a foreign government. Most efforts to alter another state’s behavior rely on negotiation, brute force, or coercion. Although these tactics may persuade a state to change its be havior temporarily, none of t hese efforts will change that state’s underlying interests if its leadership remains unchanged. If one state hopes to maintain ongoing influence in the other’s affairs, it w ill therefore require repeated attempts at coercion or subjugation to persuade the foreign government to act against its interests. By its nature, however, regime change promises a deeper solution to intractable conflicts like these. Regime change allows a state to install a foreign government that shares the intervening state’s preferences and interests. In theory, such a move is mutually beneficial to both parties and has the potential to fundamentally transform the relationship between the two states. If the operation is successful, the new government will share mutual interests with the intervener, meaning that it w ill then act in the intervening state’s interests without having to be bribed or coerced into doing so.3 This, in turn, should reduce tensions between the two states. The stage is set for future cooperation as a foe becomes a friend. In the best- case scenario, the new regime will become a reliable client state and pursue the intervener’s interests at home and abroad. Given this remarkable potential to transform adversaries into allies, we might reasonably expect states to pursue regime change more often than they do. Indeed, why would a powerful state consent to live in a world of sovereign rivals when it could potentially live in a world filled with
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compliant puppet regimes? Most interstate disputes, however, do not lead to a regime change b ecause of two necessary—but not sufficient—preconditions for intervention. These two preconditions reduce the potential pool of cases where a state may theoretically pursue regime change to a smaller subset of disputes in which states are actually likely to intervene. The first precondition is that the dispute must be based on the perception of a chronic, irreconcilable divergence of national security interests. The hardest disputes to reconcile occur when the target government fears losing power should they comply with the intervening state’s demands.4 The most common catalysts for regime change, therefore, involve disputes where the intervener demands that that target government take an action that could jeopardize its f uture ability to rule, such as relinquishing its military capabilities, forgoing an alliance with a great power protector, or abandoning a fundamental political position without which it would struggle to maintain power.5 Disputes of this nature are particularly difficult to resolve via negotiation or coercion b ecause the intervening state’s demands place the target government in a catch-22: Acquiescing to the intervener’s demands will weaken the target government’s grip on power and thus increase the odds that it will be overthrown by domestic or foreign opponents. Failing to comply with the intervener’s demands, however, means the intervening state may overthrow it directly. Faced with these unpleasant alternatives, some governments targeted for regime change decide to reject the intervener’s demands, leaving policymakers in the intervening state to believe that regime change is the only way for the two states to break the political gridlock.6 A second precondition is that the intervener must be able to identify a plausible political alternative to the government it is trying to overthrow. The best alternatives have both the capacity to administer the target state and preexisting support from the state’s population.7 Most importantly, from the perspective of intervening policymakers, the alternative regime must also share similar policy preferences. That is, its members must want to rule their country in a manner consistent with the intervener’s interests. If all plausible replacements for the current leadership are likely to behave in the same manner as their predecessors, then there is no benefit to regime change. Although it may seem that finding a foreign leader willing to play ball would be a relatively easy task, US officials often struggled to identify foreign political actors with similar interests and enough political power to be considered viable, and variation in the availability of these leaders over time was one of the key factors determining when Washington intervened. Interestingly, US policymakers did not seem to believe that any one type of foreign government would be more likely to pursue their interests. Ideological theories of regime change predict that states will be more likely to install foreign governments with the same type of regime as their own
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ecause they believe that similar regimes share similar interests. US interb ventions during the Cold War, however, confound the expectations of t hese theories. The United States supported authoritarian forces in forty-four out of sixty-four covert regime changes, targeted at least six liberal democratic governments in favor of illiberal authoritarian regimes, and covertly tried to influence the outcome of democratic elections in an additional dozen cases. Yet, Washington’s proclivity for installing authoritarian regimes was also not absolute. In one-eighth of its covert missions and one-half of its overt interventions, Washington encouraged a democratic transformation in the target state. This suggests that US leaders w ere pragmatic in their choice of whom to support. When US policymakers believed that the majority of the target state’s population shared their interests, they promoted democ ratization. When they believed that only a smaller subset of the population shared their preferences, they supported whatever type of government would bring that subset to power—be it a military junta, a single-party authoritarian regime, or a personalist dictator. In most Cold War interventions, US leaders believed that an authoritarian regime would be most likely to pursue their interests. However, that may not always be the case. After communism’s popular appeal declined alongside the Soviet Union, democ ratization has taken on a larger role in US foreign policy in the post–Cold War world. The most famous example is Iraq (2003), when President George W. Bush maintained that given the opportunity to freely select their own government, the Iraqi people would select leaders who shared American values and held a similar vision for the f uture of their country.8 Taken together, this suggests that US leaders are open to promoting different types of regimes, and history suggests that when promoting democracy serves US interests, Washington will readily do so.
Conduct: Why Do States Intervene Covertly versus Overtly? Leaders decide how to intervene in the same way that they decide most foreign policy decisions: by debating the risks and rewards of the options available to them. Specifically, they weigh two kinds of considerations: (1) tactical factors, including the likelihood that an operation w ill succeed and its potential costs, and (2) strategic f actors, reflecting the intrinsic strategic value that the intervener attaches to replacing the target government as well as the intervener’s desire to demonstrate either restraint or resolve on the international stage. In most cases, both tactical and strategic considerations f avor covert conduct, which explains why Washington chose covert rather than overt action by a ratio of 10 to 1 during the Cold War. Tactical considerations include the two major operational concerns that policymakers evaluate when deciding how to intervene: the mission’s estimated costs and its likelihood of success. Covert action has a significant
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bearing on both concerns. On the one hand, covert conduct lowers a mission’s potential military, economic, and reputational costs because the heart of covert action is “plausible deniability,” or the belief that the intervening state can hide its role in the operation by deflecting blame onto o thers. Covert regime changes are designed so that domestic opposition forces in the target state take on the heavy lifting of toppling the foreign regime, as well as the blame if the operation fails. This allows the intervener to disavow involvement in the plot, which in turn lowers the likelihood of military retaliation from the target state. It also lowers the potential reputational costs of intervention because covert action enables the intervener to behave hypocritically by secretly acting in ways that contradict its purported values or public positions. At the same time, however, covert operations fail to replace the government of the target state more often than their overt counterparts. The reason is that covert regime changes face a fundamental trade-off between size and secrecy. The type of large operation required to overthrow a powerful state is extremely difficult to organize covertly and carry out while maintaining plausible deniability. Overt missions, by contrast, face no such restrictions. In comparison to their covert counterparts, overt regime changes can typically employ more resources, and are generally more flexible, better supervised, and more thorough in their contingency planning. Policymakers thus face a tactical dilemma. If they attempt a covert regime change, its potential costs may be lower, but it is also more likely to fail. If they intervene overtly, the mission’s likely costs are higher, but they stand a better chance of success. Faced with these two possibilities, US leaders have overwhelmingly chosen the covert option, recognizing that this increased the odds of mission failure. In most cases, policymakers believe that the low potential costs of covert conduct make this option worth the higher chance of failure—particularly because they expect covert failures to remain hidden. In fact, covert conduct may lower an operation’s anticipated costs to such a degree that it shifts the cost-benefit calculation from the point where intervention would not seem desirable to the point where it becomes worthwhile. These tactical considerations are only half of the equation. Policymakers must also assess the overall strategic value of replacing the target government and whether they want to signal restraint or resolve on the international stage. The greater a state’s strategic value, the greater the costs leaders are willing to incur to replace that state’s regime. Even in such cases where policymakers are willing to intervene overtly, however, I find that they still generally prefer to intervene covertly to minimize the operation’s costs. Nevertheless, covert regime change might not always be an option. Successful covert missions require time. The intervening state needs preexisting intelligence on the target regime and a connection to a feasible domestic opposition group in the target state. Thus, when a government must act quickly in response to developing situations in strategically important states,
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covert action may not be a practical option, and policymakers may resort to overt intervention. Such a course of action, however, carries its own set of risks. Governments targeted for regime change seldom back down without a fight. With its very survival in the balance, the target regime is likely to use all military resources at its disposal to maintain its hold on power. Knowing this, policymakers intervene overtly only when they believe they can secure a quick and decisive military victory without risking protracted war. The case studies and chapter 5, which provides an overview of all US Cold War cases, confirm my theoretical predictions. Of the six overt regime changes conducted by the United States during this time, Washington escalated to overt conduct only a fter first trying and failing to overthrow the target state covertly in four cases (Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Libya, and Panama)— leaving one case where the United States intervened overtly from the beginning (Grenada) and one case where the United States launched concurrent covert and overt efforts to replace the regime (North K orea). In each of t hese cases, I argue that the United States was willing to overtly intervene b ecause policymakers believed that rapidly developing events on the ground necessitated a quick response and that Washington would achieve a quick and decisive victory, thus sending a strong signal of American resolve.
Consequences: How Effective Are Covert Regime Changes? Policymakers may have compelling tactical and strategic reasons to prefer covert rather than overt conduct, but the question remains whether covert regime change is a wise choice. That is, do covert regime changes generally secure their desired foreign policy objectives? Chapter 4 analyzes both the short-and long-term consequences of these operations. In both regards, I find that states tend to overestimate their value as a policy tool. Attempted covert regime changes failed to overthrow their target more than 60 percent of the time, and even when they did, most operations failed to remain covert, and many sparked blowback in unanticipated ways. Chapter 4 first analyzes short-term effectiveness by asking, “Did the covert regime change successfully replace the foreign government?” During the Cold War, US-backed covert regime changes succeeded in replacing their targets 39 percent of the time, compared to a 66 percent success rate for their overt counterparts. However, Washington’s most successful covert missions tended to be the ones that were least needed from a geostrategic perspective in that they involved overthrowing weak states with limited international political or economic influence, such as Guatemala or the Dominican Republic. Washington was far less successful when it targeted powerful military adversaries, such as during its many efforts to install pro-American leaders in Soviet satellite states. To understand why, I ask whether certain characteristics of the target state—such as military capabilities, regime type,
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alliance membership, or level of domestic political stability—made it a better or worse target for regime change. My statistical analysis then shows that the best candidates for covert regime change are weak states, democracies, and American allies. Another key factor influencing the success rates of covert missions was the relative domestic power of the groups backed by the United States. When the US-backed forces had already amassed sufficient resources to their side and enjoyed widespread domestic support, Washington had to do comparatively l ittle to tip the scales in their f avor—indeed, many likely would have come to power even without US covert support. When the opposition forces were weak relative to the regime, however, Washington struggled to provide enough aid to have a decisive impact without blowing its cover or becoming overtly entangled in the conflict. This dynamic is reflected in the low success rate of covert interventions to support armed dissident groups in their bids to topple a foreign government: because the dissidents backed by the United States w ere generally quite weak relative to their central governments, only four of thirty-five attempts overthrew their targets. Other covert tactics that typically backed stronger opposition forces had higher rates of success. For instance, nine out of thirteen US-backed military coup attempts successfully ousted their targets. Likewise, I identified sixteen cases where Washington sought to influence the result of a foreign election by covertly funding and spreading propaganda on behalf of its preferred candidates, often d oing so beyond a single election cycle. Of t hese, the US-backed parties won their elections three-quarters of the time. Yet, it is reasonable to assume that many of t hese parties would have won their elections anyway, given that they w ere leading in the polls before the US intervention. Taken together, I conclude that America’s Cold War covert regime change attempts w ere most likely to succeed when the domestic conditions favored intervention and Washington’s contribution to the effort could be relatively limited. Successfully changing a regime, however, does not necessarily make a mission a long-term success. In this regard, very few covert regime changes worked out as US planners intended. Policymakers launch regime changes to install foreign leaders with similar policy preferences, with the expectation that when the newly installed leaders then pursue their own interests, their actions will benefit the intervening state as well. Despite the simplicity of this plan, it often proves much more difficult in practice than interveners anticipate. Operations that succeed in toppling a foreign regime are still besieged by a “principal-agent” problem. The reason why is that for an interstate dispute to have escalated to the point of regime change in the first place, the target government must have had a compelling reason not to acquiesce to the intervener’s demands when the dispute first arose. Unfortunately for the intervener, this means that even if it succeeds in replacing the foreign govern-
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ment, the same political pressures that compelled the first government to act against their interests often continue to hold true for its successor as well. Consequently, I find that the only installed leaders who w ere willing to act as long-term agents for the United States w ere t hose who remained highly dependent on US aid. Such leaders, however, usually faced great difficulties maintaining power domestically. The new leader’s opponents often accused the government of being a US puppet and, in some cases, even took up arms against the regime. In fact, approximately half of the governments that came to power via a US-backed covert regime change during the Cold War were later violently removed from power through assassination, war, revolution, or coup. So great was the domestic opposition against them that many leaders installed by the United States acted on behalf of American interests for only a short time, or the United States had to commit an inordinate amount of resources to keep them in power. Covert operations that fail to replace their targets can also spell trouble for the intervener. Although policymakers launch covert operations with the expectation that the mission’s plausible deniability will shield them from the negative repercussions of trying to topple a foreign government, in practice, this often proves more difficult than planners anticipate. In more than 70 percent of America’s Cold War interventions, Washington was publicly accused of meddling in the domestic affairs of the target state at the time of the regime change attempt. As a result, when t hese missions failed to oust their target, US policymakers found themselves in the awkward position of having to do business with foreign leaders who knew that Washington was actively trying to remove them from office. Unsurprisingly, this often had the effect of further souring their country’s already negative relationship with the United States. This, in turn, increased the likelihood that the two states would come to blows in the future. To test these theoretical predictions, chapter 4 asks how America’s covert interventions influenced the quality of relations between Washington and the target states. Contrary to the expectations of policymakers, I show that the United States was more likely to experience militarized interstate disputes with the states that they targeted for covert regime change compared to similar countries where they never intervened. Covert interventions also appeared to harm Washington’s relationship with the target state at lower levels of cooperation, such as United Nations voting behavior and foreign policy portfolio similarity. Given that Washington already had hostile relationships with these states, however, one potential criticism is that these post- regime change conflicts were the result of a selection effect: namely, that the United States was more likely to target states for covert regime change where the possibility of conflict was already present. To guard against that possibility, chapter 4 introduces several models that use the statistical data prepro cessing method of matching to compare the cases where the United States intervened to a set of similar cases where it did not intervene, but which
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showed a similar propensity for conflict, to confirm that the breakdown in relations was a result of the intervention. The chapter then explores the impact of covert interventions on the targeted states by analyzing the target state’s subsequent levels of democratization, civil war, adverse regime changes, and episodes of mass killing compared to similarly matched samples of cases. H ere too, the results paint a grim picture: states whose governments were overthrown covertly appear less likely to be democratic afterward and more likely to experience civil war, adverse regime changes, or human rights abuses. I conclude that states underestimate the consequences of covert regime change. The costs in American dollars and lives lost during the Cold War tell only part of the story. Many operations also incurred considerable indirect costs, such as a rise in anti-American sentiment and a loss of international trust. The case studies develop this theme further and illustrate how covert interventions often backfire in unanticipated ways. For instance, chapter 6 shows how early US-backed missions to topple Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe helped to convince Stalin that postwar cooperation with Washington was no longer feasible. Likewise, chapter 7 illustrates how the 1963 plot to oust South Vietnamese premier Ngo Dinh Diem had precisely the opposite effect of its intention; rather than stabilizing the country in order to facilitate an American withdrawal from Vietnam, it upended the South Vietnamese political order and drew the United States deeper into the conflict.
Why Covert Regime Change Matters
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Covert regime changes have shaken the international system for millennia. One of the earliest occurred in 227 b.c.e., when the Crown Prince of the Chinese state of Dan tried to assassinate Qin Shi Huang to prevent the much stronger Qin dynasty from conquering his territory.9 The Republic of Venice planned or attempted approximately two hundred foreign political assassinations between 1415 and 1525.10 During the Reformation, both Catholic and Protestant leaders sought to assassinate their foreign rivals, most notably Philip II of Spain’s attack on William of Orange, the leader of Holland.11 During the 1570s and 1580s, foreign leaders tried to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I of E ngland at least twenty times. She employed assassins herself in Ireland.12 More recently, Woodrow Wilson covertly supported anti-Bolshevik forces in 1917 before escalating to overt intervention in the Russian Civil War.13 Indeed, history is so rife with cases of covert regime change that it is difficult to imagine the modern world without it. Regime changes have broad and long-lasting effects for all states involved. For target states, the consequences are often catastrophic. Covert and overt regime changes have fueled bloody civil wars, brought brutal dictators to
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power, and increased the odds of government-led episodes of mass killing. For intervening states, the consequences can also be dire. Poorly executed operations have helped bring about long, costly wars, such as following the 1963 US-backed coup d’état that ousted South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem or the 2003 overt intervention to remove Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Overt interventions and exposed covert operations can provoke an international backlash, which in turn can weaken a state’s diplomatic and political authority. Domestically, covert missions can undermine a state’s democratic ideals by creating situations in which political leaders are unaccountable to their citizens. On the other hand, foreign-imposed regime change operations may also have positive effects. For intervening states, successful missions can bolster their security by replacing hostile regimes with friendly ones, by creating buffer zones, or by neutralizing threats abroad before they can spark unrest at home. Successful missions may also provide material benefits for the intervening state by protecting its economic interests or by ensuring access to the target state’s markets. In certain situations, these actions may even foster interstate stability and peace. Finally, regime changes appear to have played a key role in stopping several humanitarian disasters: for instance, Vietnam’s 1979 invasion of Cambodia overthrew the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and ended a genocide believed to have claimed roughly 2 million lives.14 Regime changes occupy a unique position relative to the major international relations theories. On the one hand, the motives cited earlier— overthrowing a military rival, increasing one’s relative military power, preventing a new military threat, and establishing regional hegemony—are the same ones that Realist scholars have long provided to explain war.15 On the other hand, however, the strategy of regime change—replacing the political leadership of another state in order to change that state’s behavior—has received surprisingly little attention from Realist scholars. Perhaps the reason for this omission is that some prominent Realist theories view all states as unitary, self-interested actors. Neorealists, in particul ar, famously “black- box” the state—meaning that they do not look to a state’s domestic politics to explain its international behavior. Instead, they believe that all states, regardless of who is in charge, will behave in predictable patterns based on their geostrategic position and available resources.16 If states r eally viewed one another as “black boxes,” however, regime change is an odd goal.17 Why would a state care who is in charge of a foreign government if domestic politics are irrelevant for explaining international relations? Nevertheless, the frequency with which states launch regime changes suggests that leaders do care a g reat deal about the political leadership of foreign powers and frequently intervene—covertly and overtly—to influence the makeup of that leadership. To fill that void, this book aims to provide a Realist explanation for regime change. I argue that states use both covert and overt regime changes to
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increase their relative power within the international system—by overthrowing current military adversaries, dividing enemy alliances, and ensuring that their existing allies and states within their sphere of influence are governed by leaders who w ill remain committed to that alliance. In my telling, systemic factors—such as the distribution of the balance of power— create the broad incentives for states to pursue regime change, while factors internal to the intervening and target states—such as policymakers’ perceptions regarding the efficacy of different military strategies and the availability of foreign opposition groups to support—affect the specific foreign policy decisions regarding the timing and conduct of regime changes.18 This study also has important implications for the existing literature specifically on regime change. Despite the frequency that states launch covert regime changes, most studies on the c auses of regime change have focused only on overt operations, causing scholars to misinterpret the basic causes of regime change. Ideological accounts focusing on the regime type of the intervening and target states often break down once covert operations are considered. Contrary to what many of these accounts predict, states are not restrained from covertly overthrowing their ideological equivalents or secretly cooperating with their supposed ideological foes. Alternative explanations focusing on norms are similarly misspecified. Norms do matter, but not as much as some authors believe, nor in the way that they imagine. Contrary to the claims of some existing studies, international norms do not restrain states from attempting regime change. Norms only constrain states from conducting overt operations. When policymakers want to conduct an operation that they know violates international norms, they simply conduct it covertly to hide their involvement. Finally, studies arguing that military or economic interests motivate regime change fare better, but they are applicable only to a narrow subset of cases as currently formulated, and each fails independently to account for most cases.
Definitions and Data
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To ensure that readers understand the specific vocabulary used in this study, it will be helpful to define certain terms. Regime is used to mean either a state’s leadership or its political processes and institutional arrangements.19 Regime change thus refers to an operation to replace another state’s effective political leadership by significantly altering the composition of that state’s ruling elite, its administrative apparatus, or its institutional structure. This study focuses only on cases in which an intervening state intends for the target state to retain its juridical sovereignty or, in the case of secessionist movements, to obtain its juridical sovereignty. Consequently, cases of territorial conquest, colonization, or annexation are not included.20
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Covert regime change denotes an operation to replace the leadership of another state where the intervening state does not acknowledge its role publicly.21 T hese actions include successful and failed attempts to covertly assassinate foreign leaders, sponsor coups d’état, influence foreign demo cratic elections, incite popular revolutions, and support armed dissident groups in their bids to topple a foreign government. Although many dif ferent types of foreign actions can be conducted covertly, the study avoids other secretive actions not designed to replace a foreign state’s leadership— espionage, counterintelligence, diplomacy, operational security, and propaganda.22 This definition aligns with the US government’s classification of covert regime change, first laid out in National Security Council Directive 10/2 in 1948: The National Security Council . . . has determined that, in the interests of world peace and U.S. national security, the overt foreign activities of the U.S. Government must be supplemented by covert operations . . . so planned and executed that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and if uncovered the U.S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Specifically, such actions shall include covert activities related to propaganda; economic warfare; preventative direct actions, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas, and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.23
Overt regime change includes operations involving the direct and publicly acknowledged use of military force to replace the political leadership of another state. States can go to war for regime change, but the definition also includes smaller military actions designed to replace foreign political leaders, such as air strikes or limited invasions. A few definitional caveats before I proceed. First, my data exclude efforts to covertly prop up a state’s allies through publicly unacknowledged financial or military aid.24 For instance, the United States reportedly provided covert support to the Saudi royal family during the Cold War to help them maintain their position of power and stability in the region.25 Although, actions of this nature are similar to covert regime change in that they strive to influence the domestic political system of a foreign power, they differ from regime change in that they seek to maintain the status quo rather than revising it. Consequently, I believe covert actions of this nature are better classified as regime maintenance. T here is also the question of how to differentiate covert operations to influence the result of a foreign election from regime maintenance efforts. During the Cold War, for instance, the United States sought to covertly guarantee that their preferred candidate would win a democratic election in over a dozen countries. Most of these cases
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do not pose a definitional challenge for this project because Washington’s covert efforts were designed to upend the status quo: either the United States was trying to bring a new leader to power via the election, or they were trying to influence the first democratic election in a country a fter it underwent a power transition from another system of government. However, in five cases—Italy (twice), France, Japan, and Chile—the United States conducted operations to ensure that a ruling party would continue to win elections and thus remain in power. One potential objection is that these cases are better considered examples of regime maintenance and therefore should be excluded from my sample. Nevertheless, I decided to include these cases because I believe it is reasonable to view free and fair competitive democratic elections as, by their nature, prescheduled opportunities for regime change. Furthermore, omitting these cases would paint an inaccurate picture of America’s covert behavior during the Cold War because the interventions played a major role in US Cold War strategy. Fi nally, these cases provide a noteworthy exception to one of the main claims of this study—that covert regime changes are most likely to succeed against weak, geostrategically unimportant states and that many operations spark anti-American blowback and resentment. In four of t hese five cases—US operations in Italy, France, and Japan—the actions succeeded against powerful, important states with few negative repercussions for Washington. In the spirit of transparency, it is therefore important that I include these cases because failing to do so would bias the data in my f avor. In contrast to some studies, my dataset focuses on target countries rather than individual operations. For example, the United States supported three separate coups in short succession during its efforts to overthrow Guatemala in 1954. Although some datasets list these coups as separate events, this study treats them as a single covert campaign. Similar to this is the fact that the United States often pursued more than one covert tactic simultaneously against the same state. For instance, during eight years of covert operations against Cuba in the 1960s, US officials backed multiple assassination plots against Fidel Castro as part of a plan known as Operation Mongoose, as well as the Bay of Pigs paramilitary invasion by Cuban exiles. This study groups them together as one eight-year case rather than multiple indepen dent operations. Similarly, when the United States covertly sought to influence democratic elections across multiple election cycles within the same country, I grouped them together as one campaign. Analyzing covert campaigns rather than independent missions is preferable b ecause states frequently launch more than one operation simultaneously, and treating t hese actions as independent overlooks the fact that they often have mutually reinforcing effects on one another. Despite the frequency of covert regime changes, international relations (IR) analysts are often ambiguous in their treatment of them. On the one hand, many critics of US foreign policy frequently allege covert American involve-
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ment in controversial political events throughout the world. On the other hand, covert regime change generally does not play a major role in Ameri ca’s foreign policy debates, and IR textbooks seldom address it in depth. This ambiguity about the importance of covert attempts at regime change stems from the fact that Americ a’s covert activities are more often treated as the subject of speculation than of systematic analysis. The following anecdote from a conversation between Henry Kissinger and Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai in 1971 reflects this contradictory treatment. When Chou questioned Kissinger about the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) covert actions, Kissinger replied that Chou “vastly overestimates the competence of the CIA.” Yet Chou pressed on: “Whenever something happens in the world they are always thought of.” Yes, Kissinger retorted, “That is true, and it flatters them, but they don’t deserve it.”26 To help resolve this speculation, this study aims to systematically analyze all US-backed regime changes during the Cold War (1947–89). I have chosen to use this sample for both theoretical and practical reasons. Theoretically, I can hold several important features of the international state system constant by focusing on the Cold War. For one, the modern notion of “regime change” is premised on the idea of Westphalian state sovereignty, or that “states exist in specific territories, within which domestic political authorities are the sole arbiters of legitimate behavior.”27 However, this understanding of sovereignty has not always been the norm. Before the age of decolonization, the international system was based on a much more fluid idea of sovereignty. Although Western powers interacted with each other as sovereign equals, they did not treat their colonies, protectorates, or imperial domains in a similar manner. They considered it their legitimate right to replace the domestic leadership of these territories. Thus, the colonial era concept of “regime change” had neither the same connotations nor the same consequences it does t oday. Likewise, since 1945, only states have launched regime change missions. This too has not always been the case. For instance, in 1855, an individual—Tennessean William Walker—overthrew the Nicaraguan government and ruled as president for several years with only a small, privately funded army. Similarly, in 1910, a corporation— Cuyamel Fruit Company—hired mercenaries to overthrow the government of Honduras to protect its banana plantations.28 The motives driving these non-state actors likely differ from those of states, and excluding t hese cases simplifies the study. There are also several practical reasons to limit this study to US operations during the Cold War. For one t hing, the combination of US government declassification regulations, several influential Congressional investigations, and journalistic coverage of these missions have severely undermined Washington’s ability to keep its covert actions secret. However, the same cannot be said of operations launched by other states or during different eras. The ere obtained through archival research primary sources used in this study w
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at the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Security Archive, and several presidential libraries. From this effort, I have obtained thousands of declassified documents—mostly from the CIA and the executive branch—outlining the planning, implementation, and effectiveness of ecause the amount of data available per mission ranges these missions. B from a few reports to thousands of documents, I have imposed a minimum requirement of three primary source documents to verify each case. These primary sources are listed in several online appendixes: Appendix I lists three primary source documents for each of the sixty-four covert cases indicating that the United States attempted to covertly overthrow the target country. Appendix II does the same for each of Americ a’s six overt operations. Appendix III covers cases where the United States has been publicly accused of instigating a covert regime change, but where the existing evidence indicates that Washington was not actively involved in the plot, as well as three primary source documents to support why I made that determination. In several cases that are commonly considered the work of the CIA, such as the 1967 Greek coup or the 1976 Argentine coup, I argue that Washington did not take an active role in planning or implementing the operation, although US officials may have had preexisting ties to the coup plotters or foreknowledge that a coup could occur. The coup plotters may also have been emboldened by the knowledge that Washington would likely back them if they succeeded. Two potential data concerns are worth addressing in detail. One objection is that my dataset may be skewed toward identifying failed operations while overlooking successful covert cases precisely because they have succeeded in remaining secret. I believe this concern is valid, but likely overstated. For one, at several points in its history, US government agencies have compiled internal histories of the nation’s covert operations. If unknown successful cases existed, they most likely would have been included in these reports. For instance, during the Watergate hearings, CIA director James Schlesinger ordered agency officials to collect all potentially incriminating actions for review. The resulting report—declassified in 2007 and commonly referred to as the “Family Jewels”—covers the period from the 1950s through 1970s and does not include any cases that this current study has failed to identify.29 In addition, several individuals interviewed for this project who w ere involved in the planning of these missions have indicated that the list is comprehensive. Finally, as with any potential data bias, the question arises of w hether the bias supports or opposes the argument. T here are a few cases where the secondary literature provides compelling reason to suspect that the United States may have pursued a covert intervention, but for which I have been unable to locate primary source verification one way or the other, such as the allegations that the United States sought to covertly influence elections in the Philippines and Greece during the 1950s or sought to organize a coup in Iraq in the early 1960s. However, t hese cases are entirely consistent with
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my argument. To the extent that any covert US regime changes could have completely escaped my attention, I believe they are most likely to be small unsuccessful operations. B ecause I argue that covert regime changes are largely ineffective, however, failing to identify these cases weakens my argument. Selection bias therefore poses fewer problems for this project than one might originally suspect. A second potential methodological objection is that I have “selected on the dependent variable.” This criticism relates to the research practice of analyzing only t hose cases where the phenomenon of interest was observed (e.g., US-backed regime change attempts) and not analyzing cases where the phenomenon was not observed (e.g., cases where the United States could have attempted a regime change but did not). According to this line of reasoning, if a scholar samples on the dependent variable, any inferences that they make about the causes of their research subject w ill be invalid because they may have inadvertently overlooked cases where the causal f actors that they consider important were present but did not result in the phenomenon. Applying this criticism to this project, I argue that states launch regime change operations in response to chronic, security-based interstate disputes. One could argue that because I selected on the dependent variable by creating a dataset of regime change attempts, I cannot make any causal inferences about the motives for these interventions.30 Despite the importance of this concern, I believe that it does not pose an insurmountable problem for four reasons. First, and most importantly, a correlation between security-based disputes and regime changes is not the only piece of evidence that I use to argue that the United States launched regime change operations to pursue security interests. My assertion is also based on extensive qualitative analysis of a plethora of different data sources, such as declassified government documents, meeting transcripts, and recordings. Second, my case studies were selected to show variation in policymakers’ willingness to launch regime change operations within and across cases. Third, the two prerequisites for intervention are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions. This means that I readily acknowledge that t here may be cases where t hese two f actors are present but do not lead to regime change. Fourth, to avoid sampling on the dependent variable while constructing my dataset, I would have had to identify a corresponding control group of situations where the United States could have launched a regime change but did not. However, from a purely practical perspective, it is difficult to imagine what this control group would look like in a large-N study because the proximate catalysts for US intervention varied widely across cases. The potential control group would therefore have to encompass a huge number of public and private interactions that Washington had with foreign governments, for which it would be virtually impossible to gather data. Chapters 6–8 include three comparative historical analyses of US-backed covert and overt operations in separate geographic regions. Chapter 6 looks
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at Albania, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and Yugoslavia during the early Cold War. The rollback missions in this chapter were covert efforts to overthrow pro-Soviet regimes in states where the Soviets had a military presence but still faced domestic opposition to their rule. Chapter 7 analyzes the US experience with covert regime change in North and South Vietnam in the run-up to the Vietnam War. I show how American officials sought to contain the spread of communism in Vietnam by launching one series of preventive covert operations to strengthen the leadership of South Vietnam and another set of offensive missions to weaken the leadership of North Vietnam. Finally, chapter 8 investigates a series of Hegemonic operations against the Dominican Republic during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Eisenhower administration first covertly pursued an assassination and coup d’état plot against Americ a’s one-time ally General Rafael Trujillo. In 1962, Kennedy launched a second covert operation to manipulate the country’s upcoming presidential elections. After these covert efforts failed to produce a stable government, Johnson overtly intervened during a 1965 crisis to prevent leftist forces from assuming power. Afterward, he reverted to covert conduct to manipulate Dominican elections in 1966 and 1968. Each case study creates a rich, strategic narrative regarding the structural forces and strategic decisions that influenced the origins, design, and effectiveness of these operations. Within each case study, I employ process tracing to test w hether the perceptions of US policymakers match my theory’s predictions, to verify that the sequencing of historical events matches my causal argument, and to compare my causal logic to the alternative explanations. I also use congruence testing to confirm the internal validity of my theory across different environments and to generate external validity for my theory by comparing it to the alternative explanations across cases.31 Four criteria were used for selecting cases. First, the cases that I have selected allow me to best test my arguments compared to rival hypotheses. My theory and the alternative explanations each make specific predictions with observable implications for each case, thereby allowing me to weigh the relative merits of each. I have also attempted to select the “hard cases” for my theory—where alternative explanations are at their strongest—so that I may evaluate them on their best merits.32 Second, these cases are representative of the missions conducted in their type (e.g., offensive, preventive, or hegemonic), time, and geographic region, which helps maximize the external validity of my findings. This means that I have selected cases for what Dan Slater and Daniel Ziblatt term “typological representativeness.” The advantage of this technique, they argue, is that “strategically choosing cases in search of representative variation can be one effective way to avoid the trap of selection bias. . . . Based on deep knowledge of cases and the categories scholars have used to array them, one can identify the relevant range of
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outcomes ex ante using well-accepted typologies that by definition specify mutually exclusive outcomes that also are exhaustive of all empirical variations.”33 Third, I have selected cases that show variation at each step in my causal logic, thus allowing me to test and verify the logic of my entire argument. Finally, given the controversial nature of my research subject, I must substantiate both US decision-making processes and the details of the covert actions. As such, I selected cases with a wide range of available primary sources.34
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National Secession Persuasion and Violence in Independence Campaigns Philip G. Roeder
CORNELL UNIVERSITYÂ PRESS
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Contents
Figures and Tables vii Acknowledgments ix 1.
Three Questions about National Secession
1
2.
Strategic Constraints: Goals and Means
20
3.
Organization and Mobilization in Campaign Development
46
4.
Programmatic Coordination in Campaigns
67
5.
Significant Campaigns: Getting on the Global Agenda
92
6. Intractable Disputes: Consequences of
Successful Campaigning 117
7.
Protracted Intense Struggles: Reinforcing Intractability
149
8. Complementary Explanations: Motivations and
Opportunities 171 9.
Looking Forward: Implications of Programmatic Analysis
189
Appendix to Chapter 2 199 Appendix to Chapter 5 207 Appendix to Chapter 7 217 Appendix to Chapter 9 229 Notes 239 Glossary 263 References 267 Index 287
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1 THREE QUESTIONS ABOUT NATIONAL SECESSION
In recent decades the challenge confronting many countries around the world has not been communist revolution or Islamic transformation but national secession. Among the political agendas that have convulsed the world, campaigns to achieve independence through secession have been among the most momentous. These national-secession campaigns promise a transformation every bit as profound and deep as class revolution or religious transformation—not only in the lives of those they claim to liberate but often in the lives of those whom they claim to be their oppressors and even their neighbors. This book asks why some programs for national secession give rise to such significant campaigns and lead to intractable disputes, and even to protracted intense conflicts. National-secession campaigns are akin to revolutionary activity. In the name of “popular sovereignty,” they promise to liberate their people by creating new, independent, sovereign states such as Georgia, Quebec, Scotland, or South Sudan. They promise that these new states will empower their citizens and turn old power relationships on their head: levers of government will be controlled by Eritreans rather than Ethiopians, Latvians rather than Russians, East Timorese rather than Indonesians. Independence will purportedly transform not only the institutions of government but also wealth and property rights, social and cultural patterns: the privileges of oppressors will be stripped away. “Foreigners” and their fellow travelers who enriched themselves under the unjust old regime will be divested. The natural wealth of the homeland, including its land, forests, and resources, will be returned to its rightful owner: the nation. Campaigns for independence promise that the speakers of a national language and the faithful 1
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of a national church will be freed from humiliation and oppression. The symbols of the nation will be elevated to a revered place on the national flag, its heroes recognized in monuments, and its history taught in public schools.1 The consequences of these changes do not stop at the borders of the new imagined state. For the common-state government—the jurisdiction that is currently recognized as the sovereign authority over the secessionists’ nation and homeland—the campaign’s promises are threats.2 Secession of Crimea, the Donetsk Republic, and Novorossiia (New Russia) threatened to divide Ukraine almost in half and leave it as a landlocked rump. Secession by East Pakistan threatened to shrink Pakistan’s territory by more than an eighth, its economy by almost two-fifths, and its population by more than half.3 Secession by Slovenia and Croatia threatened to upset a delicate balance among republics within Yugoslavia and initiate an unraveling that would dissolve the federation. Secession by the Baltic states similarly threatened to initiate the unraveling of the Soviet Union. For their neighbors these secessions promised and threatened to change power relations in South Asia, transform the politics of the Balkans and Europe, topple a superpower, and replace global bipolarity with a new world order. Since 1991 great-power confrontations over secessionist crises in Crimea, Kosovo, and South Ossetia have raised fears of a new global cold war. Yet most attempts to initiate a campaign for independence never get off the ground. Most national-secession projects, such as the Mountain Republic, Transcarpathia, and Turkestan, never get on the international public agenda. Most of their platform population—the population that the campaign claims to constitute a nation with a right to a state of its own—is “bought off,” in the secessionists’ worldview, by the false consciousness, intimidation, and bribes of the status quo. The world may be populated by thousands of nation-state projects, yet most of these have remained the pipe dreams of lone intellectuals or the cherished possessions of small circles that never attract followers beyond the walls of their clandestine meetings. Ernest Gellner is noted for his speculative estimates that the world may contain as many as 800 “reasonably effective nationalisms” and another 7,200 “potential nationalisms.” Subtracting the roughly 200 independent nation-states, he estimates that 7,800 potential nation-states have yet to gain independence.4 Still, only a few of these projects—as is shown in chapter 2, only about 2 percent of these—have become what I label “significant” national-secession campaigns by attracting international attention. Campaigns for independence can become unusually persistent, and their disputes with existing states may become intractable—with secessionists unwilling to concede or compromise. Victory in a secessionist dispute typically does not come easily or quickly—if at all. The campaign to establish an independent Euskadi
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for the Basques, which has sometimes been visible and public, but oftentimes invisible and clandestine, has continued for more than a century. The campaign for an independent Ukraine—often small, clandestine, and ignored by most of its platform population, but episodically boisterous and violent—persisted for over seven decades before independence.5 The campaign for an independent Eritrea—usually violent, but sometimes not—continued for over four decades.6 Negotiations over independence for Abkhazia, Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Transdniestria—what have come to be known as the “frozen conflicts” of the post-Soviet space—have dragged on with little apparent progress more than two decades after their initial declarations of independence. Negotiations over independence for the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus have failed to reach agreement for more than three decades. Campaigns for independence can become intense—for example, by provoking deadlock in common-state politics or destruction through violence—yet it is only a few that account for the mayhem associated with national secessionism. Still, those few campaigns that do become intense can upset the politics of the common-state, the region, and the world.7 The conflicts over such national-secession projects as Republika Srpska, South Sudan, and Tamil Eelam unleashed broad destruction, leaving victims dead, wounded, homeless, displaced, or orphaned. In just twenty-three years of national-secession insurgencies from 1989 to 2011, over a quarter-million lives were lost in battle-related deaths alone, and the highest estimates put this closer to 400,000 deaths. In these same years more than 28,000 lives were lost in terrorist acts attributable to groups associated with these national-secession campaigns.8 To cite just one of these conflicts: in the thirty-year-long armed struggle for Eritrean independence, according to the estimation of David Pool, “around 65,000 fighters had died, 10,000 were disabled, an estimated 40,000 civilian deaths were directly associated with the fighting and around 90,000 children were left without parents.”9 Wars associated with national secessionism have tended to last longer, to be more resistant to negotiated settlement, and to recur more frequently than other civil wars.10 The intensity of these campaigns for independence often touches lives well beyond the borders of the common-state from which they seek to secede. Secessionist projects in Kashmir (from India), Tamil Eelam (Sri Lanka), and Air and Azawad (Mali) have brought neighboring countries into conflict with one another. The conflicts for independence within Yugoslavia dragged in participants not just from the Balkans and Europe but also from around the world. Campaigns for independence have spilled over national borders with spectacular terrorist attacks, so even countries with no significant indigenous national
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secessionism, such as Austria, Germany, Greece, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, have become targets of terrorist attacks attributed to national secessionists with grievances against other common-states. Nevertheless, even among campaigns that drew international attention, most struggles do not resort to violence. Indeed, as will be documented in succeeding chapters, the relationship of campaigns to violence needs to be specified far more carefully, for national-secession campaigns seldom initially emerge in wartime, subsequently engage in violence, or achieve their objectives on the battlefield. The central question of this book can be stated very simply: how and under what conditions do national-secession projects (1) become significant campaigns, (2) give rise to intractable disputes with their common-state governments over independence, and (3) sustain protracted intense struggles? As will be explained more precisely in later chapters, significance refers to getting a claim on the international public agenda; intractability refers to the inability to reach agreement with the common-state on the issue of independence; intensity refers to the means or public acts mounted by the campaign, such as forcing deadlock within the government, mounting demonstrations on the streets, or launching terrorist attacks; and protraction refers to the length of time that this situation persists. The answer developed in this book can be summarized in an equally simple formulation: the key is coordination of expectations in a platform population—such that other members will see the national-secession program as authentic and realistic. This coordination of expectations concerning the response to the campaign’s goals is something broadly overlooked in the literature. As explained more fully in later chapters, authenticity refers to the expectation that members of the platform population actually see themselves as a nation; realism refers to expectations that statehood is a practical possibility. In this context, authenticity and realism are not issues of one’s belief but rather of one’s expectations about others in the platform population. Coordination of these expectations can have profound consequences: national-secession projects become significant campaigns only if the leaders coordinate expectations within the platform population around a program for independence. Intractability is a natural consequence of successfully coordinating the platform population’s expectations around this program. Protracted intensity in a national-secession campaign is possible only when there is already substantial coordination of expectations and is typically a tactic used to build and maintain this coordination and therefore to reinforce intractability. This analysis builds on the strategy most commonly used by national-secessionist campaigns—the strategy of programmatic coordination—and argues that this strategy should guide the ways in which we analyze national secessionism: our
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primary focus shifts to the choices made by campaign leaders and their platform populations. The primary loci of their activities are not battlefields but meeting places where programs are drafted and explained, campaign strategies to achieve programmatic goals are designed, cadres are inducted, tactics are selected and taught, and the platform population is persuaded. Our primary analytic attention shifts from sensational acts, such as terrorism and battlefield violence—although these can be important tactical choices made by some campaigns—to seemingly prosaic acts to persuade populations.
Constraints: Bold Ambitions, Weak Forces The analysis in this book begins from the observation that most national-secession campaigns pursue lofty strategic objectives without the operational capabilities to achieve them. The popular mythology, and the story that secessionists often tell about themselves once they gain independence, constructs images of a bold, direct challenge to the common-state that brings victory over oppressors. During particularly intense periods of a struggle, campaign leaders will inspire the platform population with exhortations that they are about to deliver a decisive blow against the enemy. Yet this is seldom true. And few strategically minded campaign leaders who calculate the likely responses of the common-state government can reasonably expect armed victory. Most national-secession campaigns are far too weak to challenge the common-state directly—a constraint that I label operational weakness. Indeed, even among the 171 significant secessionist campaigns tracked here, the median platform population constituted just over 3 percent of the common-state’s population. With such limited capabilities, attempts to achieve spectacular victories would spell disaster for most campaigns. Instead, they must await opportunities to receive or pick up independence rather than seize it; that is, they must engage in strategic opportunism.11 Moreover, because they are so weak, most campaigns cannot influence the timing of these opportunities, nor can the campaigns forecast the nature of those opportunities with certainty—a constraint labeled forecast uncertainty. Instead, campaigns must await a fortuitous development such as collapse of the central government brought on by its other domestic opponents or international intervention. These opportunities typically come as exogenous shocks to which the campaign must respond rapidly. Even the few secessionist successes give campaign leaders little evidence that planning for armed victory on the battlefield is a prudent strategy. The reality of strategic opportunism and forecast uncertainty is revealed by the twenty-six national-secession campaigns that actually did achieve independence between
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1946 and 2016. None achieved independence by marching to the stronghold of the common-state government and imposing victory. Instead, since World War II, and as described more fully in chapter 2, only two states (Croatia and Slovenia) come close to the myth of armed victory. Over half of the secessionist states achieved independence by simply walking away from a collapsing central government. Another quarter achieved independence after international intervention imposed or guaranteed independence from a resistant or reluctant common-state government. Indeed, in the face of overwhelming central governments and their own strategic weakness, national-secession campaigns are often open about their objectives of influencing international intervention or waiting for collapse.12 For example, in China’s two most substantial campaigns, many secessionists expect that outside intervention or collapse of the central government in Beijing is the only way that they can achieve independence. In Tibet, Warren Smith reports that when it embraced the goal of independence, the Tibetan government-in-exile focused its campaign on building international political support.13 In Xinjiang, Gardner Bovingdon reports that when attacking the Public Security Bureau in Lop County, “the protestors are reported to have shouted, ‘We’ll invite the U.S. and NATO to come, and we’ll blow up Xinjiang.’ ”14 Bovingdon also recounts a conversation with an unusually outspoken Uyghur editor in 1995: “Minutes later, he mentioned what would happen when China ‘disintegrated’ (jieti), using the very term that had been applied to the Soviet breakup. Taking my lack of expression for skepticism, he assured me that China would follow the Soviet example.”15 For weak campaigns, preparing for intervention or collapse is typically the only prudent strategy. When operating under these constraints, campaign leaders must prepare a capacity not to force independence on a resistant central government but to demonstrate to leaders of major foreign powers that the campaign’s platform population is coordinated around the program of independence, that the proposed nation in control of its homeland will be able to fulfill the obligations of a sovereign state, and that alternative programs offered by the common-state or other campaigns are not viable options. That is, their objective must be to build the capacity to demonstrate programmatic preemption. For example, in more than two-thirds of the successful campaigns, referenda on independence demonstrated programmatic preemption by delivering strong support for independence—and in most votes more than 90 percent support.16 These victories at the ballot box came after long groundwork to coordinate the platform population behind the programmatic goal. A campaign may seek to wear down the common-state government, to influence third parties to create an opportunity to walk away with independence, or simply to await collapse at the center,
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but in each of these scenarios the campaign must be ready to demonstrate programmatic preemption. Preparing for these opportunities, the campaign must coordinate its platform population around the goal of independence so that local players, whatever remains of the common-state, and the international community conclude that independence is the only viable solution.
The Strategy of Programmatic Coordination In order to achieve programmatic preemption, national-secession campaigns typically employ a strategy that I label programmatic coordination. That is, national secessionists undertake a broad campaign of persuasion, choosing words and deeds for their persuasive power in order to create programmatic preemption. Arguably the foremost theoretician and practitioner of this type of campaigning was Vladimir I. Lenin. Even though he was not a secessionist, Lenin had enormous impact on secessionist campaigns around the world. Prior to the October Revolution, in 1917, Lenin linked his revolutionary cause to the demand for national self-determination within the “prison house of nations” and after the revolution established support for national-secession campaigns as a prominent thesis of Leninism. In the 1920s and later, the Comintern reaffirmed the proclamation of its Fifth Congress on the “nationality question” that “one of the basic principles of Leninism” requires “the resolute and constant advocacy by communists of the right of self-determination (secession and the formation of an independent State).”17 The Leninist strategy was propagated among national secessionists by the Short Course (an instructional manual commissioned by Joseph Stalin), by formal institutions such as the Communist University of the Toilers of the East and the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West, by clandestine schools for insurgents, by sympathetic university classes and discussion groups, and later by the Internet.18 Mao Zedong, Vo Nguyen Giap, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and others developed and elaborated variants of this strategy. This strategy was employed by national secessionists in such exemplary campaigns as Northern Ireland, the Basque country, Turkish Kurdistan, Eritrea, and Tamil Eelam.19 The retelling of this strategy had global impact, so even campaigns that are seemingly remote from global influences have adopted key elements of this common strategy of programmatic coordination.20 Lenin stressed that the critical tasks in building and sustaining a campaign are fostering and maintaining identification with the goal, linking the individual demands of parochial audiences such as peasants or students to the broader cause, sustaining an organization of professional revolutionaries (leaders and cadres) through the hard and often dull times by continuing political education,
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8 CHAPTER 1
and developing a surge capacity that can bring a sudden expansion in participation in order to strike at the right moment with demonstrations of broad support for the common goal. In order to fulfill these operational objectives, it is necessary to “give the ‘worker in a given field’ of revolutionary activity the consciousness that he is marching with the ‘rank and file,’ the consciousness that his work is directly essential to the Party, that he is one of the links in the chain that will form a noose to strangle the most evil enemy. . . .”21 As an anonymous Algerian nationalist noted, “strength exists when the masses are mobilized and penetrated by ideas. . . .”22 In national-secession campaigns the main operational objective for campaign leaders is convincing members of the platform population that independence is their objective, will serve their individual purposes, has a significant possibility of achieving success, and is likely to be embraced by many other members of the platform population. That is, the strategy of programmatic coordination stresses propagation of this program in order to build the capacity to demonstrate to the platform population and international community that the core claim of nationalism is empirically accurate—that the platform population does, in fact, think of itself as a nation with a right to a sovereign state of its own. As explained in later chapters, arguments to the public on the basis of its self-image (identity) or self-interest (material reward) will vary with the audience, and the importance of adding different audiences will vary with the developmental stage of the campaign. The campaign leaders must not only explain to these diverse audiences how the demand for independence is the logical extension of being a member of the nation. Leaders must also take control of other political issues dear to special interests, link these to the nation-state project, and explain to the platform population how independence will fulfill these diverse and often parochial concerns. To create this programmatic coordination and the surge capacity to demonstrate programmatic preemption requires many organizational developments commonly noted in studies of mobilization, particularly a cadre corps that can disseminate the program, explain its implications to different parts of the platform population, and manage the auxiliaries that will keep the participatory reserve ever ready for mobilization but not continuously mobilized. The hardest tasks confronting leaders of a national-secession campaign may be maintaining this staff, programmatic coordination, and surge capacity during the longueur—the long, dull periods when there are few opportunities for heroic public acts and victory is not within sight. The propagation of the program breathes life into these organizational tasks. The strategy of programmatic coordination stresses that the key to survival and ultimate programmatic preemption is a compelling goal and a credible plan to achieve it that are brought together in a political program.23 With an authentic and realistic program, leaders can sustain a staff through the longueur and
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mobilize widespread surges of participation in coherent activities at particular moments to press forward to independence. The goal within a national-secession program is formulated as a nation-state project for a specific population (purportedly a nation) to become self-governing within a sovereign state of its own.24 Typically this includes an elaborate justification for why this population does, in fact, constitute a nation and does, indeed, have a legitimate claim to its homeland, but elaborate ethnographies and histories are not necessary elements of a national-secession program. The program pairs the project with an action plan outlining concrete steps to bring about the proposed outcome of independence. National-secession programs concern the foundations of the ultimate political community and the proper boundaries of this state within which programs for social, economic, and political institutions typically must compete. National-secession programs seek to create new states—the meta-institutions within which more-mundane constitutional changes, such as the transition from authoritarianism to democracy, or presidentialism to parliamentarism, or socialism to capitalism, are negotiated and implemented. Yet, as Valerie Bunce poignantly observes, “Nationalism is wanton. It can couple with a wide variety of regimes.”25 Nationalist doctrine does not itself present an answer to the question of the proper social, economic, or political institutions within the new nation-state other than that they should be “of, by, and for” the nation.
Consequences of Programmatic Coordination This strategy has profound consequences for the campaign: an immediate concern becomes uniting individuals with diverse public, parochial, and personal motives behind a common goal. Using the vocabulary of military science and business, while the campaign must constantly keep in sight the strategic goal of independence, the operational objective in the strategy of programmatic coordination must be to establish programmatic preemption, and this operational objective will in turn shape the choice of tactics such as violence.26 And as this programmatic coordination deepens and broadens, the campaign is more likely to draw the attention of the global community (significance), to produce a deadlock with the common-state government over the issue of independence (intractability), and to find the means and reasons to conduct a broader, more costly, and longer struggle (protracted intensity).
Coordinating Motivational Heterogeneity The strategy of programmatic coordination brings into the campaign individuals who represent very different types with diverse personal motivations, and this
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motivational heterogeneity makes the operational tasks of campaign coordination even more important. The founders of national-secession campaigns are typically enthusiasts who fervently believe that their platform population constitutes a nation with a right to a sovereign state of its own—even when most members of that platform population have not (yet) realized this. Enthusiasts derive satisfaction from contributing to the cause of independence but, particularly in the early stages of a campaign, are usually rare. They may attract a few expressionists, who derive satisfaction from engaging in a struggle of protesting, organizing, and even violence. Yet much of the platform population typically comes to the campaign not on the basis of some romantic belief or revelry through action, but on the expectation that independence will address their most pressing needs. That is, with respect to the campaign’s claim, they are pragmatists. It is the common goal of independence and not the multiplicity of private purposes that gives rise to campaign unity, so programmatic coordination is a continuing concern for campaign leaders: as seen more fully in later chapters, campaign leaders must link these different types, energized by different motivations, to a campaign for a common goal that offers one solution to their diverse purposes.
Choices of Tactics This operational objective will shape the national secessionists’ choice of tactics or means. National-secession campaign leaders have little control over the timing or nature of the opportunities that will permit their campaigns to move closer to their strategic goal of independence. Therefore, national-secession campaigns must persuade different members of the platform population to prepare themselves to demonstrate coordination around the goal of independence in whatever opportunities arise in the future, such as voting for a candidate or party, joining in a demonstration or armed action to sway foreign governments, or ratifying independence in a referendum. The tactical options may include conspiratorial organizing, parliamentary struggle, street protests, terrorism, guerilla warfare, or broad military operations. The choice of one of these tactics will vary with the opportunity created by others, with the developmental stage of the campaign, with the mix of types within the campaign at that moment, and with the anticipated response of their platform population at that stage. Except during the penultimate moment leading to independence, a key operational objective in the choice of any tactic is to achieve still greater programmatic coordination. In particular, the operational objective influences the use of violence: a national-secession campaign employing the strategy of programmatic coordination typically uses increasing intensity such as violence to build towards
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programmatic preemption. That is, violence most often is propaganda (that is, persuasion) by other means. The contribution of violence to programmatic preemption can be substantial: it may awaken support for independence in a platform population by showing that others are willing to make costly commitments on its behalf; raise expectations among potential recruits that independence is a possibility; make the campaign organization appear competent, energetic, and state-like by defending or avenging the nation; maintain discipline among members of the nation and deter “traitorous” defections to other causes or to the common-state; or provoke countermeasures from the government that will reinforce solidarity within the platform population. Campaign leaders sustain intense struggles to make it more difficult for members of the platform population to collaborate with the common-state, for other members of the platform population to develop competing campaigns for alternative nation-state projects, and for the international community to hope that holding together the common-state is a viable option.27 Yet the choice of violence—just like the choice of any tactic—must be subject to the stricture, articulated by Lenin, that a campaign at different periods “applies different methods, always qualifying the choice of them by strictly defined ideological and organizational conditions.”28
Significance, Intractability, and Protracted Intensity The strategy of programmatic coordination, as it gets closer to achieving programmatic preemption, increases the likelihood of significance, intractability, and protracted intensity. In order to get the attention of the international community and particularly the attention of the governments of the major powers that control admission to the community (significance), a national-secession campaign must offer a program that has coordinated, or is likely to coordinate, the platform population around the goal of independence. Foreign governments are likely to dismiss any campaign that they deem has little prospect of such coordination. The campaign is more likely to get on the international agenda as it approaches programmatic preemption and demonstrates that the platform population supports the claim that no viable alternative to independence exists. Deadlock on the substantive issue of sovereignty between national-secession campaigns and common-state governments (intractability) is a consequence of programmatic coordination: when expectations in the platform population align around the program for independence, campaign leaders are less likely to compromise with the common-state government. More members of the platform population see little gain from defection to or collaboration with the common-state. They come to see the enticements offered by the common-state government as less attractive when they suspect that potential collaborators will
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be attacked by their neighbors as traitors to the nation and possibly stripped of their gains. Successful coordination behind a national-secession program can also have important blowback for the campaign leaders: by making compromise with the central government unacceptable, secessionist leaders tie their own hands because compromise has become too costly for them as well. In sum, disputes with the common-state government become intractable as a consequence of a strategy designed to maintain unity within the campaign’s leadership and staff, to develop a following within the platform population so that it conceives of itself as a nation seeking a sovereign state, and to deter defectors and compromisers from within the leadership, staff, or platform population. Intractability is often seen outside the campaign as an undesired deadlock, but for campaign leaders who seek independence, intractability can sustain second-best outcomes such as de facto statehood. Protracted intense struggles require the capacity that comes from substantial programmatic coordination but typically are sensible undertakings only when campaign leaders expect protracted intensity to move the campaign closer to programmatic preemption. That is, programmatic coordination is both a constraint on and an operational objective of violence. Strategically minded campaign leaders are less likely to attempt a protracted intense struggle if they expect that doing so will reveal opposition to the goal of independence within their own platform population. It is possible only when the leaders can rely on a platform population tightly coordinated on the goal of independence as the solution to their own particular concerns. At the same time, strategically minded campaign leaders are more likely to use violence when they expect that this propaganda by deeds will deepen and broaden programmatic coordination.
Programmatic Theory The next chapters introduce an analytic approach that complements earlier approaches but in no way seeks to displace them. Still, programmatic theory places at the center of analysis the publically articulated goals of political actors and their strategies to achieve these goals. And this leads the analysis in the following chapters to diverge from earlier approaches in some very significant details.
Bringing Political Goals Back In National-secession conflicts have been described as battles for hearts, bellies, and more-private parts of human anatomies.29 Instead, the programmatic theory emphasizes battles for people’s minds. To use Eric Hoffer’s words, campaigns
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promise platform populations “sudden and spectacular change in their conditions of life.” This promise offers a bold and visionary goal: “Those who would transform a nation or the world . . . must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.”30 This requires a credible program, and it requires the labors of many propagandists and agitators to link individuals with diverse and often narrow, personal concerns to a campaign for a common public goal. Indeed, Lenin stressed that the constant task for campaigns seeking to transform states is to link belly concerns to the campaign’s goal. If the campaign permits these material concerns to take precedence and transforms the campaign into a war for bellies, then the campaign is at risk of becoming merely reformist. Similarly, the battle for minds trumps the battle to grab more-private parts. Mao, in the heat of the war against Japan and the Kuomintang, lambasted “the so-called theory that ‘weapons decide everything’ ” and underscored that “it is people, not things, that are decisive.” And even in a “contest of strength,” such as war, a strategist must look to the “contest of human power and morale.”31 In short, an analytic subtext in programmatic theory is a claim that analysis should take seriously the public demands of political actors, the goals around which they coordinate their members, and the substantive disputes to which these give rise. This diverges from both the raw behaviorism of some studies of movements, protest, and violence and the presumption of unconscious or hidden motivations of much of the micro-motivational literature on greed and grievances. The programmatic approach stresses that even though individuals may bring deeper, disparate, and parochial motivations to a national-secession campaign, what ties them together and shapes their behavior in common patterns is the pursuit of the common public goal of independence. The focus on political goals and the persuasive efforts on behalf of these goals requires a precisely defined unit of analysis, and here this is a campaign. In this usage a campaign is constituted by the persuasive efforts on behalf of a specific goal. It is the programmatic goal that gives the campaign integrity and continuity. A campaign typically exists independently—prior to and after—specific organizations, movements, episodes of mobilization, or civil wars. Studies of these other phenomena follow campaigns only through phases of their development or activism and entirely ignore most campaigns because they do not exhibit the features studied. A campaign survives if persuasive efforts on behalf of its goal continue, even as the personnel, organization, alliances, and tactics of the campaign vary over time. Although the other, more commonly used concepts, such as social movements, may describe phenomena characterized by diverse and changing goals, campaigns are defined by the consistent pursuit of a specific goal.32 A campaign may form alliances in order to forge movements which embrace groupings that pursue complementary operational objectives but do not share
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programmatic goals; in other words, movements may embrace multiple campaigns. For example, large parts of the Basque independence campaign coexisted within the Basque movement alongside competing campaigns for Basque autonomy within the Spanish state and for cultural preservation without explicit statehood goals. Within these movements or alliances of campaigns, an independence campaign may become hegemonic—even if only temporarily—but may also find itself subordinate to, marginalized by, or abandoned by co-nationals whom the independence campaign leaders see as compromisers, collaborators, and/or traitors to the cause of independence. Nevertheless, the campaign has a life of its own. Survival of the campaign is measured by the efforts to persuade members of the platform population that independence is the only viable option. Extreme marginalization of national-secession campaigns is common, but death of a national-secession campaign is far rarer, except when a campaign achieves its goal of independence.33 In the analysis of campaigns, programmatic theory gives special attention to the role of propagation to achieve programmatic coordination, distinguishing this from the focus on organization and mobilization that is central to the study of social movements. As chapters 3 and 4 elaborate, the “ideological” in Lenin’s formulation is at least the equal to the “organizational” in “ideological-organizational work.” Although the tangibility of formal organizations makes these attractive objects of study, their coherence and ability to work together towards a common goal such as independence depend on the persuasive efforts to propagate a campaign’s goal and action plan. Thus, in the analysis that follows it is the tasks of propagation to further programmatic coordination that define the developmental stages of a campaign and the engagement of different types within the platform population. These serve the prime operational objective of building towards programmatic preemption: campaigns achieve success by persuading members of one or many organizations that they have a common goal which will reward them all.
Rational Use of Limited Information and Emotions This book takes a rationalist political-cultural approach. The analysis focuses on the relative power of different goals to coordinate expectations about the responses of others. It directs analysis to the power of persuasion and the processes of argumentation through appeals to what are believed to be, on the evidence of observable cues, common knowledge. It privileges the rational process of human calculation, assessment, and choice in linking the private to the public and coordinating on a common goal, but recognizes the power of diverse emotions, private catharsis, and self-expression to energize individuals. Thus,
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programmatic theory does not jump into the old debate on whether national secessionism is either rational or irrational; it must use the former to harness the latter, and it needs both. Emotions in a population are likely to be heterogeneous, short-term, and evolving within individuals as different rates.34 The success of a campaign’s appeals depends on the ability of its program to persuade potential recruits that the goals of the campaign are authentic and realistic in the assessments of many others who have diverse personal motivations but who are in some essential way “just like one another.” Only in this way can the program bring together the energies of diverse motivations behind a common goal. This model does not assume that either leaders or members have superhuman powers: its strategically minded actors are simply reasoning problem solvers. The analytic model assumes that both campaign leaders and members of the platform population assess the authenticity and realism of the program for independence with what Samuel L. Popkin calls “practical reasoning about government and politics” based on low information. For both leaders and members, the program for independence offered by a national-secession campaign must ring true with the evidence that is available to them. The analytic model begins with abstract, ideal-type reasoning problem solvers who have limited information: both the leaders and members of the platform populations know well their own worlds but have limited information about the others’. Leaders know more about high politics and the complex concept of a nation-state, but the platform population knows more about the interface of the state with the nation’s lives—at least in their small parts of the nation. The campaign seeks to link these two worlds in the name of the whole nation. When campaigns introduce a new idea to the platform population about nation-states, members of the platform population weigh this imagined community, the political project for independence, and the claims about its consequences by reality tests based on information shortcuts drawn from what they do know. As elaborated in chapters 5 and 7, they look for cues that other members of the platform population are likely to see as corroboration of the authenticity of the program’s nation-state project and the realism of its action plan. It is by surviving such reality tests that, as Popkin explains, “campaigns attempt to achieve a common focus, to make one question and one cleavage paramount. . . .”35 Campaigns need not try to change worldviews but to draw out the connections between the program and individual worldviews. Campaigns gather new adherents through persuasion—argumentation about logical connections and cause-and-effect relationships.36 The focus of programmatic coordination is not on individual belief and behavior but on the convergence of expectations among many individuals that supports collective action. For reasoning problem solvers, national independence is a prudent goal only if others can be expected to support it. Thus, this
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analysis stresses the processes of coordination of actors’ expectations about the assessments and behaviors of others, and particularly of the platform population at large. On this coordination within the platform population hinges the expectations of campaign leaders, staffers, reservists, potential recruits, and the international community about the prospects that a campaign will achieve programmatic preemption. The programmatic account brings together elite and popular expectations. Thus, to the earlier debate whether nationalism is an elite or popular (“mass”) phenomenon, this says that it must be both.37 Although intellectuals and campaign leaders write programs for independence and constitute the vanguard of struggles for independence, they are unlikely to initiate, let alone sustain, a campaign for nation-statehood unless they expect to enlist the support of the platform population. Throughout the process of programmatic coordination, both campaign leaders and members of the platform population try to assess the extent to which other members of the platform population will see a particular nation-state project as both authentic and realistic.
Common Goals but Diverse Motivations The programmatic approach begins with an assumption of motivational heterogeneity. This premise and the focus on political goals as the way to build coalitions among individuals with diverse particularistic, parochial, and sometimes personal concerns represent a return to an earlier understanding of politics: a central problem confronting national-secession campaign leaders as political leaders is building a coalition among participants who are diverse in the extent to which identity, grievances, and greed (micro-motivations) take precedence in their assessment of a political project. They are also diverse in their orientations to the campaign’s goal as an end in itself or as a means to other ends: as elaborated in chapter 4, enthusiasts see the campaign’s goal as an end in itself and derive satisfaction from working towards this goal, expressionists see the campaign as an occasion for a struggle that is an end in itself, and pragmatists see independence as a means to achieve other, often material rewards. Recently in the social sciences, for the sake of rigor, empirical theories often make simplifying and homogenizing assumptions about the motivation or type of actors. Rather than jump into the stale debate among realists, positive political economists, political sociologists (or culturalists), and political psychologists who ascribe some single static motivation to secessionists, the programmatic approach begins from an assumption that coordination in the context of motivational heterogeneity is a central problem confronting campaign leaders. Successful secessionist campaigns typically must build a coalition of true believers (a focus of sociological approaches), expressionists (a focus of psychological approaches), the aggrieved (a focus of social psychological approaches), politicians (the focus
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of realist approaches), and homines economici (the focus of political economic approaches). This coalition building is at the core of programmatic coordination. The coalition process influences the way in which programmatic theory conceptualizes the relationship of agency to structure. The analysis in the following chapters stresses the role of strategically minded actors who make strategic, operational, and tactical choices under the constraints (both obstacles and opportunities) that nature deals to them. Agency does not constitute structure, but it can be artful in the use of those conditions. For example, campaign leaders link the national identity defined by the nation-state project to a variety of ethnic identities or link the campaign goal of independence to the solution of a variety of private or parochial sources of grievance or ambition. Even when confronting obstacles and opportunities that are immutable, campaign leaders can manipulate the ways that the campaign links its goal to these. Not all obstacles and opportunities create equally strong constraints on programmatic coordination by the campaign, so a central analytic task of programmatic theory is to distinguish those elements of structure that are more remote and less constraining from the more proximate and constraining structural obstacles and opportunities. Thus, this analysis diverges from the many studies of national secessionism in recent years that emphasize the role of exogenously determined identities, grievances, and greed by giving more credit to agents who can make artful use of these in linking them to a campaign goal. None of the commonly identified structural factors force the conclusion that a platform population should have a sovereign state of its own; these are no more than cues to the authenticity and realism of that claim. That is, the link from structure to programmatic preemption is indeterminate. Alternative identities can be linked to a specific nation-state project, different motivations can energize a campaign for independence and be solved by the goal of independence, and so campaign leaders pick which parochial concerns to activate on behalf of the cause of independence. That is, the most commonly cited motivations are typically substitutable for one another in different circumstances in building toward programmatic preemption. The programmatic theory developed in this book privileges the central role of the agency of campaign leaders and propagandists in linking these specific structural features to the campaign’s goal.
The End of Bargaining Programmatic coordination that creates intractability in exchanges between a common-state and an operationally weak party gives rise to situations that are not best characterized as variable-sum games. The parties define the issues that divide them as a nondivisible, nonfungible goal. This diverges from the currently
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hegemonic metaphor that sees national-secession conflicts and civil wars as bargaining.38 Yet with successful programmatic coordination, exchanges between leaders of national-secession campaigns and common-state governments cease to be bargaining relationships and evolve into championships. As a consequence of advancing programmatic coordination, exchanges of substantive offers and escalation of means increasingly come to be propaganda by other means addressed not to the party “across the negotiation table” but to an audience of one’s platform population and the international community. This particularly applies to the use of the bargaining metaphor to analyze the use of violence. In the programmatic account, violence is a tactic that strategically minded campaign leaders use when it contributes to the campaign’s operational objectives and strategic goals. For national-secession campaigns, most of which operate under the constraint of strategic weakness, using violence to prevail in a contest of arms with the common-state government is seldom a prudent tactical choice. Alternatively, violence can be a valuable continuation of propaganda by other means targeted at the audience observing the exchanges between secessionists and central governments. In these campaigns, violence is designed to persuade the audience, and in particularly to reinforce programmatic coordination, rather than to induce the common-state government to cry uncle. The constraints that determine the likelihood of victory in a contest of arms, which have been the focus of a lively literature on civil wars, tend to be remote from the calculations of most national-secession campaign leaders most of the time. Similarly, for these situations, bargaining models of violence, which have been so fruitful in the analysis of contests of violence among sovereign states, are often inappropriate starting points in the analysis of internal wars involving operationally weak national-secession campaigns. This book offers an explanation for which national-secession campaigns become significant by getting their claims on the international public agenda, give rise to intractable disputes with their common-state governments over the issue of independence, and engage in protracted intense struggles. Its answer is campaigns that are more successful at programmatic coordination—that is, campaigns that foster the expectation that their platform populations will rally behind national independence. The structural conditions that favor this are cues to the authenticity and realism of the campaign’s nation-state project and action plan. In these conflicts, supporters of a national-secession project challenge an existing state by demanding the right to take “their” part of its population and territory out of the jurisdiction of the current government and into another, usually newly independent sovereign state. This book presents an analytic model of national-secession campaigning drawn from the prescriptive strategic advice
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offered by some of the most-successful leaders of major revolutions and independence campaigns. Whatever their many differences, these leaders knew their craft, were masters of campaigning, and distilled their insights in a vibrant strategy of programmatic coordination that has guided many nationalists in their pursuit of independence. Although this micro-model focuses on the problems of building a successful national-secession campaign, this book does not take sides between secessionists and common-state governments. This book’s purpose is to offer a general theory and to explain patterns of significance, intractability, and protracted intensity. This book is self-consciously “social scientific” but spares the reader many of the lengthy methodological discussions in the main text and places these in the appendices. Hypotheses in chapters 5 and 7 describing macro-level empirical patterns of significance, intractability, and protracted intensity are derived from the micro-model. And my claim throughout is that these follow logically from the main premises and processes described in the abstract theory elaborated in chapters 3 and 4. Empirical corroboration of hypotheses in chapters 5 and 7 rests on macro-level evidence from a multitude of cases compiled in statistical data sets. These data sets permit assessments of the generalizability of claims through global coverage from 1945 to 2010.
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