Rivalry and Rapprochement in Early Cold War Central America

Under what conditions does a common threat cause rival states to achieve rapprochement? To inform not only contemporary policy debates about coalition-building against terrorism and insurgency, but also theoretical debates about obstacles to cooperation and conflict resolution, this article examines the pattern of rivalry and rapprochement among Central American states—non-Communist allies under the Rio Treaty—in the shadow of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Given a common threat, why did Honduras and Nicaragua shift from rivalry to rapprochement while Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and El Salvador and Honduras, did not? Drawing on rarely explored published primary sources in English and Spanish, the article argues that the major obstacle to cooperation was the parochial interest of the armed forces in perpetuating the old mission of international rivalry despite the attractive new mission of internal security, and that presidents were able to achieve rapprochement only where state resource constraints compelled a trade-off between the old and new missions. This argument is tested against realist alternatives including balancing and bandwagoning, and liberal alternatives including democratic peace and counterrevolutionary ideology. The article demonstrates that spoilers within the state can perpetuate international conflict, but also indicates conditions under which they can be convinced to support international cooperation.     

伊拉克战争中的民族、宗教因素解读

伊拉克战争前后贯穿着复杂的民族、宗教因素。就美国而言 ,一方面布什把伊拉克战争看成是捍卫以美国为代表的基督教文化和美国式民主的战争 ,另一方面美利坚民族也将伊拉克战争视为“改造世界”的宏伟计划的步骤之一。而伊拉克国内宗教派别与民族间的矛盾也在一定程度上促使伊拉克难以共同对敌 ,在战争中速败。除伊拉克之外的中东国家则由于伊斯兰教传统观念而在伊拉克战争的立场问题上陷入两难境地。对伊拉克战争中民族、宗教因素的分析也给予我们颇多启示。     

Regime Change and War: Domestic Politics and the Escalation of the Ethiopia--Eritrea Conflict

The 1998-2000 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea seems to defy rationalist explanations. This paper contends that the escalation of the war, from an isolated border clash to the largest conventional war of the past decade, has its roots in the domestic politics of each of the two states. Quasi-democratisation in both countries created environments in which political elites were able to bolster their popular legitimacy by utilising nationalist and aggressive foreign policy rhetoric. The Eritrean leadership believed that a rapid escalation of the border clash to full-scale war would undermine domestic popular support and topple the Ethiopian People's Democratic Front (EPRDF) regime. War escalation had the opposite effect, strengthening the EPRDF domestically and provoking a massive Ethiopian retaliation. War thus served nation- and state-building goals in both countries. This paper provides a theory of the domestic political roots of international conflict in transitional regimes and applies this theory to explain the escalation of a localised border conflict into a highly destructive, full-scale war.     

An Autocracy at War: Explaining Egypt's Military Effectiveness, 1967 and 1973

In the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Egypt shocked the world with its atrocious performance in battle, only to stun the world again with its remarkable military turnaround in the October 1973 war. Existing studies, which emphasize culture, social structure, and regime type, have a difficult time explaining why this single autocratic state, in such a short period of time, exhibited such extremes in its military competence. None can explain both why Egypt performed so poorly in 1967 and improved so significantly in 1973. Other explanations such as military strategy and learning explain the puzzle in part, but they alone cannot account for the outcome. This article presents a theory that accounts for the divergence in effectiveness, focusing on underlying differences in the fabric of the autocratic regime. It argues that changes in the balance of civil-military power in the state—born from more fundamental differences in domestic politics in the autocracy—shaped three areas of military activity critical to military effectiveness: strategic assessment, command, and control, and leadership. In developing this argument, the article both contributes to growing scholarship on the sources of states' military effectiveness and explains why Egypt's performance varied so significantly in these historically consequential wars.     

Russia-U.S.Rivalry in the Context of Power Imbalance

Compared to Soviet-U.S.relations of the Cold War era,contemporary Russia-U.S.relations are less decisively influential in shaping the global strategic situation.While evolving,the new relationship between the two sometimes registers dramatic events—Syria and Ukraine,for example—that seem to endanger a proposed ＂reset＂ of their bilateral relations.This reset,first mentioned during the presidencies of Dmitry Medvedev in Russia and the first term of Barack Obama in the U.S.,was not launched.Since the onset of the global financial crisis,the international strategic situation has further readjusted,and big power relations have remained out of equilibrium.Progress toward improved relations witnessed ＂apathy＂ after Vladimir Putin returned to power.Both countries pay less attention to each other in their respective foreign agendas but they are wrestling fiercely in the fields of politics,security and geopolitics in spite of an accelerating imbalance of strategic power.     

Aftershocks: Postwar Leadership Survival, Rivalry, and Regime Dynamics

Under what conditions are leaders replaced after a war? Past research has reported that the outcome of the war and regime type affect postwar leadership tenure. Yet, this does not exhaust the conditions that could potentially influence political survival. In this article, I reexamine the links between regime type and leadership replacement after a war. I show that past research has failed to account for the dynamics of political leadership, and in the process has misrepresented the evidence supporting previous theories. I then show, using event history techniques, that both internal and external factors can alter leadership trajectories after a war. Specifically, war outcomes significantly affect the job security of a leader outside of international rivalry, but have less of an effect within rivalry. Additionally, relaxing various assumptions concerning the relationship between leadership survival and regime type leads to a richer understanding of the process of postwar leadership turnover. Finally, several propositions concerning the interaction between regime type and the costs of war are not supported in this analysis.     

信息化战争的新境界——太空战

人类对太空的探索经历了认识太空、进入太空和利用太空三个阶段。前两个阶段中,人类处于探索和寻求突破太空束缚的状态。发展到第三个阶段,人类发现太空在通信、导航、气象以及地质勘探等领域具有重要意义,也注意到将太空技术用于情报搜集、指挥通信、武器导引等方面的潜在价值和巨大优势。因此,拥有先进太空技术的国家开始将太空列为国家发展战略的重要内容,人类也进入了以控制太空为目的的新阶段。在研究如何控制太空的过程中,以美国和俄罗斯为代表的军事强国提出了太空战理论,从而将争夺太空控制权的斗争具体化。     

Air and Space Power, Lead Turning, the Future

To optimize security investment for the future, the Department of Defense (DoD) should adopt an approach that rewards the services for developing innovative methods to attain national security objectives with the least risk in both blood and treasure. To accomplish this, the DoD may have to re-visit its former practice of providing each service with relatively equal slices of the military budget. Under such an approach, the services are motivated to make incremental changes to the concepts and weapons of the previous war and have little reason to take risks to increase productivity of man and machine alike. What is needed—particularly in these times of increasingly complex national security challenges, rising costs, and shrinking budgets—is a plan for going forward that is centered on a shared vision of the variety of threat conditions we are likely to face, an honest evaluation of their significance, and a mature appraisal of what will be required to deal with them. We should dedicate ourselves to crafting an overall defense strategy that will allow us to shape the environment and act flexibly across the entire range of operations, and that will also provide a framework upon which to base our jointly focused resource and investment decisions.¹     

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.     

Globalization,Systems Integration,and the Future of Great Power War

Contemporary economic globalization differs from past increases in global commerce, especially because modern foreign direct investment and systems integration techniques allow factories in different countries to specialize in the design and production of parts rather than complete products. Stephen Brooks has argued, based on both liberal and realist logics, that this new form of globalization might bring a “commercial peace,” at least among the great powers. But economic globalization did not simply appear by itself. Firms and governments made conscious decisions through a process of systems integration and strategic planning that led to a wide variety of international economic relationships. That diversity of economic connections combines with the variety of strategic situations in the international environment—variations in geography, national intentions, policy history, etc.—to suggest a range of possible constraints on countries' offensive capability and on the prospects for economic gains from conquest. As has always been the case, conquest in the future will sometimes prove valuable and other times will not. Globalization does not imply the dawn of an era of commercial peace.     

Power, sovereignty, and the great republic: Anglo-American diplomatic relations in the era of the Civil War

Historians have tended to view the American Civil War (1861-65) as a milestone in Anglo-American relations. It marked the transfer of dominance from Great Britain to the United States in the Western Hemisphere. As Great Britain backed the losing side overwhelming American power brought about a British withdrawal. This article argues that this is a very oversimplified interpretation of their relations in this period. Britain did not intervene in the Civil War because it was not good policy; throughout the British relied on deterrence because, save for the war years, American power could not be translated into military power. The British secured most of their policy objectives thanks to a combination of prudent and conciliatory conduct, and a desire to avoid war, but also due to calm resolution that belied belligerent and sometimes outlandish public statements. British leaders have often been criticized for hypocrisy and double standards, but such criticisms seem unfair. Their belief that the Civil War was futile resulted from a humanitarian desire to halt the killing. It should be remembered that although the nineteenth century witnessed many local conflicts, great wars seem to have disappeared. It therefore appeared to be a laudable objective to attempt to arbitrate in what turned out to be the greatest war after 1815. It is also important to recall that Europeans were less interested in this conflict than the Americans themselves, and that preoccupation with affairs closer to home led to hasty and erroneous judgements.     

War and Peace in Space and Time: The Role of Democratization

Democratization reduces the risk of war, but uneven transitions toward democracy can increase the probability of war. Using country-level data on democratization and international war from the period 1875–1996, we develop a general additive statistical model reassessing this claim in light of temporal and spatial dependence. We also develop a new geopolitical database of contiguities and demonstrate new statistical techniques for probing the extent of spatial clustering and its impact on the relationship between democratization and war. Our findings reaffirm that democratization generally does reduce the risk of war, but that large swings back and forth between democracy and autocracy can increase war proneness. We show that the historical context of peace diminishes the risk of war, while a regional context plagued by conflict greatly magnifies it.     

Revolutionary Power and Socialization: Explaining the Persistence of Revolutionary Zeal in Iran's Foreign Policy

Why do states stay revolutionary for so long? The question of why and how some political players of a country successfully pursue a revisionist strife against the status quo has neither theoretically nor empirically received systematic attention. I use a current policy issue, the crisis regarding Iran, as a single-case study to examine the issue. This article argues that answers are found in the interconnected realms of domestic politics and revolutionary ideas. In Iranian politics specifically, it is both the ideological conservative faction's occupation of key constitutional positions and pursuit of revolutionary ideas, which have caused the recurring and large degree of revolutionary zeal. In turn, this has had a significant effect on the extent of the Islamic Republic's socialization to regional and international politics.     

Power Preponderance and Domestic Politics: Explaining Regional Economic Integration in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1960-1997

As the global economy expands, there is an increasing opportunity for trade between diverse regime types. Simultaneously, human rights have become an increasingly important issue as regimes are faced with greater pressure to adopt democratic policies. As a result, it is common for contemporary western political rhetoric to advocate the use of trade policies in an attempt to deter human rights violations. Within the political science literature, the liberal position asserts that increased trade will lead to improved human rights practices. Critics of this view, on the other hand, argue that trade policies do not alter a regime's treatment of its citizens. The extent to which the level of trade in a country affects human rights remains a point of contention. This paper sets out to empirically test the liberal perspective regarding the effect of trade on human rights practices. A pooled cross-sectional time series analysis is utilized to investigate the effects of trade on human rights. We examine developing countries from 1976 to 1996. We find support for the liberal position, specifically that trade is negatively related to human rights violations.     

Balance of Power or the State-to-Nation Balance: Explaining Middle East War-Propensity

The Middle East is one of the most war-prone regions in the international system. What is the most powerful explanation of the war-propensity of this region? I argue that neither realism nor liberalism are able to account for variations in regional war-proneness. Instead, I advance an alternative explanation based on the concept of the state-to-nation balance in the region. This balance refers to the degree of congruence between the division of the region into territorial states and the national aspirations and political identifications of the region's peoples. The balance also refers to the prevalence of strong versus weak states in the region. Thus, I explain the Middle East's high war-proneness by focusing on its relatively low level of state-to-nation balance. This imbalance has led to a powerful combination of revisionist ideologies and state incoherence. While other regions suffer from state incoherence, powerful revisionist nationalist forces, notably pan-nationalist and irredentists (the “Greater State”), aggravate this problem in the Middle East. These revisionist forces are often transborder and are especially powerful in the Middle East because of the high degree of external/transborder incongruence in comparison with all other regions. The combination of nationalist revisionism and state incoherence has made the Middle East more prone to violence than most other regions.     

Norms and Military Power: nato's War Against Yugoslavia

Norms are fundamental constitutive elements of modern military power. Because norms influence military behavior and force structure, contemporary Western military power is produced only by interaction of normative and material factors. Two norms—the civilian casualty avoidance norm and Western societies' demand that their military forces take minimal casualties, or the force protection norm—more strongly influenced the origin, conduct, and outcome of nato's 1999 war against Yugoslavia than the material disparities of mismatched adversaries. Many actors, including the Yugoslav government and the Kosovo Liberation Army, notice the linkage of norms to Western military force structures and operational behavior and therefore strategically use norms instrumentally against states that adopt them. Such strategies generate technological and tactical responses, leading in turn to counter-responses—a dynamic interaction of material and normative factors that increasingly influence military operational outcomes.