AVOIDING TRAGEDY IN POWER POLITICS:

When and why do states adopt new grand strategies? According to a “neoclassical realist” model, changes in international conditions are the chief cause of long-term adjustments in grand strategy, while domestic political-military cultures help specify the precise grand strategies chosen by state officials. What results are outcomes that appear surprising or skewed from a realist perspective. I test the neoclassical realist model against the cases of u.s. strategic adjustment in 1918–1921 as well as 1945–1948 and find that the long-term trajectory of America's rise to world power is best explained by international pressures. The precise strategies chosen in each period, however, were heavily influenced by American political-military culture. The implication is that theoretically inclusive forms of realism can provide convincing explanations for changes in grand strategy; furthermore, states can remain somewhat “differentiated” in terms of their foreign policy behavior, for cultural reasons, and in spite of international pressures to the contrary.     

Illusion or Intention? Talking Grand Strategy into Existence

Richard Betts argued that strategy—the idea that a state's political ends could be reliably linked to its coercive means—is a necessary illusion. Without strategy, war is mindless killing; but its rationales cannot guide state choices because there is a yawning gap between the macro level where strategy is articulated and the micro level of day-to-day choices. That gap is particularly insurmountable when beginning, as Betts does, from a rationalist model of action. I propose that grand strategy is best understood as a case of collective intentionality, a concept that amends the rationalist framework in a way that makes it possible to clarify an analytic pathway from grand strategy to state behavior. Crucial to this pathway are legitimation processes found in forums, and I argue that grand strategies can pull state behavior when they are tied to forums. Focusing on the interstate case, I develop a causal mechanism from the forum, to ways of talking, to commitment-consistent behavior. I illustrate the argument with an example from the Concert of Europe. Stacie E. Goddard and Ronald R. Krebs propose that legitimation processes might be particularly successful where institutions are weak. My framework helps flesh out that proposition: even in anarchy, action commitments can affect states’ behavior through the mechanisms of the forum.     

How Grand was Reagan's Strategy, 1976-1984?

This article disputes the assertions of the new Reagan literature. Drawing upon radio broadcasts, speeches, correspondences, and documents from his presidential library, as well as recently published diaries from his White House years, it argues that Ronald Reagan had no grand strategy in the years 1976-1984. Indeed, throughout this period, he possessed two less-than-grand strategies I label “peace through strength” and “a crusade for freedom.” Each of these contained its own respective set of goals and employed its own corresponding set of tactics. Yet there was no grand strategy for ending the Cold War.     

ASEAN cooperation: the legacy of the economic crisis

This article examines the implications of domestic politicalchanges in the post-1997 era for ASEAN's regional cooperationand institutionalization. The conceptual framework traces regionalrelations to the makeup and grand strategies of domestic coalitions(internationalizing, hybrid, backlash). Had some predictionsin the immediate aftermath of the crisis been fulfilled, theadvent of domestic backlash coalitions would have portendedlower levels of regional cooperation. Alternatively, in theabsence of changes in the fundamental nature of most rulingcoalitions after the crisis, ASEAN's cooperative thrust wasexpected to be maintained. The article explores the extent towhich ASEAN's activities in the post-crisis era supports eitherof these two propositions. It finds that a shock of major proportionsin Southeast Asia led to some immediate challenges to bilateralrelations. At the same time, the aftermath of the crisis ledto considerable multilateral and bilateral cooperation on economicissues, expansion, intervention, and security. Furthermore,cooperation may have indeed improved despite subsequent crises,including 9/11 and its aftermath. Yet no linear progressionor irrevocable process towards internationalization or regionalcooperation can be assumed. Alternative coalitions, and theirpotential for changing regional trajectories, must be reckonedwith.     

Second Face of Security Strategies: Anglo-German and Anglo-Japanese Trade Concessions During the 1930s

Great powers can pursue deliberate Trojan horse policies to transform rising and threatening states into followers and supporters rather than challengers by altering their domestic political and economic institutions. I contend that a great power can use trade concessions, rather than punishment, to enable a favorable foreign policy coalition in a target country. The intent is to strengthen the political power of state and societal elites who have a stake in deepening international ties, while opponents of such policies will be weakened politically and economically. The societal winners will then apply pressure on the government to support their preferred outward-oriented grand strategy. I term this process the second face of security since it entails a less direct and more nuanced method of creating security. I examine Britain's commercial policies toward Germany and Japan during the 1930s to better understand second-face strategies. I argue that the intent of Britain's industrial and commercial policy was to strengthen conservative business, government officials, and economic circles in banking, light industry, and finished goods, and even heavy industry in order to steer Berlin and Tokyo away from rearmament, extreme autarky, and war.     

Yeager,M. P. and Carter,C. (Eds) (2012). Pacts and Alliances in History. Diplomatic Strategy and the Politics of Coalitions

This article disputes the assertions of the new Reagan literature. Drawing upon radio broadcasts, speeches, correspondences, and documents from his presidential library, as well as recently published diaries from his White House years, it argues that Ronald Reagan had no grand strategy in the years 1976–1984. Indeed, throughout this period, he possessed two less-than-grand strategies I label “peace through strength” and “a crusade for freedom.” Each of these contained its own respective set of goals and employed its own corresponding set of tactics. Yet there was no grand strategy for ending the Cold War.     

Explaining Changes in U.S. Grand Strategy: 9/11, the Rise of Offensive Liberalism,and the War in Iraq

This paper proposes a model for explaining shifts and variations in U.S. grand strategy. The model is based on a distinction between four ideal-type grand strategies or ideational approaches to security according to the objectives and means of security policy: defensive and offensive realism, and defensive and offensive liberalism. While the four approaches are continually present in the U.S. policy community, it is the combination of two systemic conditions—namely the distribution of capabilities and the balance of threat—that selects among the competing approaches and determines which grand strategy is likely to emerge as dominant in a given period. Great power parity is conducive to realist approaches. In contrast, a situation of hegemony encourages the emergence of ideological grand strategies, which focus on ideology promotion, according to the ideology of the hegemon. In the case of a liberal hegemon, such as the United States, liberal approaches are likely to emerge as dominant. In addition, a relative absence of external threat encourages defensive approaches, while a situation of high external threat gives rise to offensive strategies. Thus, various combinations of these systemic factors give rise to the emergence of various grand strategies. This model is tested in two cases of the two most recent shifts in U.S. grand strategy following 1991. In accordance with the expectations of the model, a change in the distribution of capabilities with the end of the Cold War made possible a change from realist to liberal strategies. In the benign environment of the 1990s the dominant strategy was defensive liberalism, while the change in the balance of threat after 9/11 gave rise to the grand strategy of offensive liberalism.     

Stability and Change in U.S. Grand Strategy

Since the Global War on Terror (more recently termed the Long War) emerged as the centerpiece of U.S. grand strategy in 2001, the post–Cold War U.S. debate has narrowed significantly. Essentially three alternative strategies now compete for pride of place. Two are variants of a “primacy” strategy; one is a variant of “restraint,” sometimes termed “offshore balancing.” All three strategies take globalization as a given and as a positive development. None specifically connects U.S. military power to globalization. To the extent that globalization can be argued to have negative consequences, restraint offers a different remedy than either version of primacy. This article offers a brief characterization of globalization and speculates on its positive and negative results. The three grand strategies that remain visible in the U.S. public policy debate, and their suggested remedies, are then discussed. Finally, the U.S. military strengths and weaknesses are evaluated in order to gauge which strategy's remedies are most feasible.     

Mixing Grand Strategies: Trump and International Security

ABSTRACT

When a new President is elected in the United States, the first thing analysts do is define that President’s grand strategy; yet, naming Donald Trump’s grand strategy was a difficult task as his pre-election speeches often contradicted traditional US foreign policy norms. Trump’s ambiguous grand strategy combines two US foreign policy strategies: nationalism in the sense that his preference is for unilateral policies prioritising American interests, and a traditional foreign policy approach, as seen in the moves taken against China and Iran. Surprisingly, this grand strategy unintentionally contributes to cooperation in Eurasia, as actors like Russia, China, Turkey, India and the European Union continue to try to balance the threat from the United States instead of competing with each other, while smaller countries are reluctant to challenge the regional powers due to mistrust towards Trump.     

Dueling Security Stories: Wilson and Lodge Talk Strategy

Perhaps the most consequential effort to expound a grand strategic narrative was Woodrow Wilson's campaign to persuade the American people, the US Senate, and world public opinion to embrace his concept for making the world safe for democracy. Wilson and his interlocutors in grand strategy illustrate the role of rhetoric and narrative in managing two kinds of complexity in discussions of grand strategy: the conceptual integration of facts and values (of “is” and “ought”) in strategic persuasion and the political integration of diverse perspectives among partners in a strategic coalition. In particular, I explore the hypothesis that rhetorical and narrative persuasive devices permit grand strategists to obfuscate internal contradictions in their vision, facilitating persuasion in the short run but producing characteristic patterns of eventual policy failure and thereby serving as an engine of change in grand strategy.     

The Rhetoric of Appeasement: Hitler's Legitimation and British Foreign Policy, 1938–39

Few grand strategies have been more scrutinized than Britain's decision to appease Nazi Germany. From 1933 to 1938, Britain eschewed confrontation and attempted to settle German demands. However in the five months following the negotiations at Munich, the British abandoned appeasement and embraced a policy of confronting the German state. The roots of both appeasement and confrontation can be found in Germany's legitimation strategies. Until the Munich crisis, Adolf Hitler justified Germany's aims with appeals to collective security, equality, and self-determination—norms central to the European system established by the Treaty of Versailles. After Munich, in contrast, German politicians abandoned these legitimation strategies, arguing instead that expansion was justified as a matter of German might, and not international rights. As Britain came to see German demands as illegitimate, so too did they decide this revisionist state was insatiable, impervious to negotiation, and responsive only to the language of force.     

Intelligence and Grand Strategy

Elegant strategies can be constructed without reference to intelligence but persuading policymakers to implement them without knowing what intelligence might have to say about their likely efficacy and unintended consequences would be exceedingly difficult. Intelligence-derived information and insights should not dictate the goals of grand strategy, but they should inform decisions about what to do, how to do it, and what to look for in order to assess how well or badly the strategy is working.     

Dangerous Revisionism: On the Founders, ‘Neocons’ and the Importance of History

Debates regarding the Bush Administration's grand strategy began long before the forty-third president left office. A group of distinguished historians and political scientists have argued over the course of the last few years that the Administration's grand strategy did not represent a major break with historical precedent, as is sometimes argued, but continued the evangelical support for liberty that has always made the United States a “dangerous nation” to tyrants. Along the way, this revisionism creates straw men, and co-opts or redefines terms that are central to the traditional understanding of U.S. foreign policy. It also seems to misunderstand grand strategy itself, focusing almost entirely on continuity of ends while ignoring the rather glaring discontinuities in the ways that generations of U.S. presidents have chosen to pursue them. Overall, the revisionist project fails in both of its tasks, which are: To make the case that the Bush administration took actions of which the Founding Fathers would have understood and approved; and by implication, to justify the unnecessary, tragic war in Iraq.     

Beyond Primacy: Hegemony and ‘Security Addiction’ in U.S. Grand Strategy

The George W. Bush administration embraced a particularly aggressive counter-terrorist and counter-proliferation strategy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The “Bush Doctrine,” as it became known, reflects a “primacist” approach to grand strategy that aims not only to eliminate global terrorist networks and cowl rogue state proliferators, but also to dissuade potential near-peer competitors from challenging the American-centred international system. Critics expect that this ambitious approach to strategic affairs has become unsustainable in the face of the growing quagmire in Iraq. But “security addiction” in the post-9/11 environment has instead created conditions for a bipartisan consensus on the overall direction, if not the particular modalities, of “primacist” grand strategies. Despite the unpopularity of the Bush administration and significant American commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq, it is highly unlikely that President Barack Obama will heed calls for military retrenchment or strategic restraint.     

A Crude Bargain: Great Powers,Oil States,and Petro-Alignment

Abstract

Petro-alignment, a quid pro quo arrangement whereby great powers offer security in exchange for oil states’ friendly oil policies, is a widely used and yet undertheorized energy security strategy. One consequential aspect of this exchange is that great powers choose different levels of security commitment to keep oil producers friendly. With what criteria do great powers rank oil states? How do we conceptualize different types of petro-alignments? What exactly do great powers and oil producers exchange under each petro-alignment type? I posit that a mix of market power and geostrategic location determines the strategic value and vulnerability of individual client oil states, which then generates four corresponding types of petro-alignment—security guarantee, strategic alignment, strategic favor, and neglect. Two carefully selected case comparisons—Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1970–91, and Azerbaijan and Ecuador in 1990–2013—show how great powers created, utilized, and maintained petro-alignments under the unique logic of oil markets and across varying geopolitical settings. The findings have important implications on great powers’ grand strategies, strategic behaviors of oil states, and the role of oil in international security.     

To Coerce or Reward? Theorizing Wedge Strategies in Alliance Politics

Wedge strategy, a policy of preventing or dividing an adversary coalition, has been attracting increasing scholarly attention. In particular, Timothy Crawford has articulated the concept and claims that reward-based strategies are more effective than coercive strategies that actually strengthen the ties between enemies. Although this sounds logical, history provides sufficient cases that contradict the claim. Why? To answer the question, I develop a theory of wedge strategy by utilizing the concept of reward power. I then argue that although countries seeking to divide adversary coalitions usually prefer reward-based strategies, they turn to coercive measures when a divider state perceives grave threats as a result of a target state's strong alignment with its primary enemy but does not have sufficient reward power to split the adversaries. I examine this theory through two case studies of us wedge strategies toward the Sino-Soviet alliance during the early Cold War period. This article addresses the specific puzzle of choices between reward and coercive wedge strategies and offers broader theoretical implications regarding the utility of the concept of reward power in international and alliance politics.     

Security Studies and the Use of History: Neville Chamberlain's Grand Strategy Revisited

In The Gathering Storm, Winston S. Churchill claimed that during the 1930s British leaders were willfully blind to the German threat and failed to meet it by rearming. Accepting the Churchillian narrative, leading IR scholars regard British grand strategy during the 1930s as glaring example of strategic adjustment failure. This article reappraises British grand strategy during the 1930s and rejects both the Churchillian narrative, and the scholarly claims that Britain did not adjust its strategy to the German threat. In the 1930s, Britain did balance against Germany and focused on countering what policy makers perceived as the key threat facing Britain: its vulnerability to German air attack. Britain's grand strategic options were limited by external conditions and by domestic economic constraints. Neville Chamberlain, therefore, was playing a weak hand, and did the best that he could with the cards he was dealt. Britain's 1930s grand strategy is one of the historical cases most frequently used by IR scholars for theory testing. For that reason alone, it is important to get the history right. This is not the only reason, however. The 1930s have provided many of the concepts, images, and metaphors that have dominated the discourse about American foreign policy since World War II. Because scholarship about the events of the 1930s shapes the discourse about real-world policy, getting the history right matters.     

Rhetoric,Legitimation, and Grand Strategy

This introductory framing paper theorizes the role of legitimation—the public justification of policy—in the making of grand strategy. We contend that the process of legitimation has significant and independent effects on grand strategy's constituent elements and on how grand strategy is formulated and executed. Legitimation is integral to how states define the national interest and identify threats, to how the menu of policy options is constituted, and to how audiences are mobilized. Second, we acknowledge that legitimation matters more at some times than others, and we develop a model specifying the conditions under which it affects political processes and outcomes. We argue that the impact of legitimation depends on the government's need for mobilization and a policy's visibility, and from the intersection of these two factors we derive five concrete hypotheses regarding when legitimation is most likely to have an impact on strategy. Finally, we explore who wins: why legitimation efforts sometimes succeed in securing public assent, yet at other times fall short. Our framework emphasizes what is said (the content of legitimation), how it is said (technique), and the context in which it is said. We conclude by introducing the papers in this special issue, revisiting the larger theoretical stakes involved in studying rhetoric and foreign policy, and speculating about how changes in the technologies and sites of communication have, or have not, transformed legitimation and leadership in world politics.     

Undermining Adversaries: Unipolarity,Threat Perception,and Negative Balancing Strategies after the Cold War

This paper engages the ongoing soft balancing debate by suggesting a new analytical framework for states’ countervailing strategies—a negative balancing model—to explain why states do not form alliances and conduct arms races to balance against power or threats as they previously did. Negative balancing refers to a state's strategies or diplomatic efforts aiming to undermine a rival's power. By contrast, positive balancing means to strengthen a state's own power in world politics. I argue that a state's balancing strategies are shaped by the level of threat perception regarding its rival. The higher the threat perception, the more likely it is for a state to choose positive balancing. The lower the threat perception, the more likely it is for a state to choose negative balancing. I suggest that the hegemon provides security as a public good to the international system in a unipolar world in which the relatively low-threat propensity of the system renders positive balancing strategies incompatible with state interests after the Cold War. Instead, states have employed various negative balancing strategies to undermine each other's power, especially when dealing with us primacy. China's negative balancing strategy against the United States and the us negative balancing strategy against Russia are two case studies that test the validity of the negative balancing model.