Benign Neglect: America's Threat to the Anglo-American Alliance

The United States can ill afford to lose the loyalty of proven allies. Yet it risks currently weakening one of its most important and enduring friendships. British popular support for America has been shaken and elite commitment to the special relationship faces a potentially formidable array of contrary strategic and partisan arguments. Some of these are overstated but there is a further danger that is little mentioned but just as corrosive—American benign neglect. If in the pursuit of new allies and objectives America is not to squander extant assets, then it must do more to nurture the reflexive British Atlanticism that has helped sustain Anglo-American relations through their numerous crises.     

Beyond FATA: Exploring the Punjabi Militant Threat to Pakistan

Pakistan has a long history of patronizing militant proxies, and in recent years it has become a victim as well as a supporter of terrorism. The evolution of the jihadist insurgency in Pakistan's Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and neighboring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Pashtun militants leading it, efforts to counter the insurgency, and the overall strategic threats to the state have merited significant study. With some notable exceptions, less attention has been paid to the role Punjabi militant organizations and their splinters have played in bringing the insurgency to Pakistan's heartland. The involvement of these actors in the revolutionary jihad against the state gives the FATA-based actors leading this insurgency power projection capabilities throughout the country. This article helps to fill that knowledge gap by bringing a more detailed level of analysis to the understanding of how anti-state Punjabi militant networks function at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels. In doing so, it illustrates that the introduction of new loci of jihad at the macro-level, simultaneous integration and atomization among militant groups at the meso-level, and greater portability of fighters at the micro-level impedes covert control by Pakistani intelligence services and decreases the utility of even sincere counterterrorism efforts by the Pakistani state.     

Balancing and the Bible: A Pre-Thucydidean View of Threat

This article uses the case of King Saul, David, and the Philistines, drawn from the Hebrew Bible (books 1 and 2 Samuel), to argue that leaders of states with contested or immature authority structures often elect to prioritize threats to their personal rule over external threats to the integrity and welfare of the states which they lead in a manner not predicted by neo-Realist international relations theory. In making this argument, this article not only makes a contribution to the Realist literature on threat prioritization but introduces a new, novel, and ancient data set which can be used both to generate new theories and to test existing theories within international relations.     

试论"中国威胁论"

50年来,中国与非洲都发生了巨变,非洲国家对中国的看法也在发生变化,在中非关系主流方面看好的同时,在非洲也出现了对中非关系不和谐的看法和论调,甚至出现了非洲版的所谓"中国威胁论".毫无疑问,它们源于西方,其表现也涵盖了西方的说辞.至于其成因,首先在于西方的恶意离间,其次在于中国"三高依赖"问题的存在,以及中国在非洲人员的失当行为使然,而中国的和平发展对不发达国家的影响,以及非洲国家对中国的模糊认识也是重要原因.虽然所谓的"中国威胁论"会随着中非关系的继续巩固而消逝,但采取积极措施,予以必要的有力回应,则更有利于消除所谓的"中国威胁论".     

“中国威胁论”的虚妄和悖谬

近年来,随着中国经济的快速发展,国际上各种正反面的评说也纷至沓来.由于中国政府不懈地宣示与践行和平外交路线,国际社会对中国的快速发展基本能持一种平和与理解态度,对中国的内外政策作出较为客观的评价.但另一方面,"中国威胁论"的刺耳鼓噪也时有所闻,什么中国"军事威胁论"、"经济威胁论"、"能源威胁论"、"文化威胁论"、"技术威胁论"等等,不一而足.在各色各样的表演中,美国的一些鹰派人物和日本的右翼势力及其媒体无疑是充当了吹鼓手的角色,很有一股子"谎言重复千次就成真理"的韧劲.究竟是谁在让世界感到不安,是谁在让别人感到威胁,还得让事实来说话.     

Simplicity and Spook: Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggeration

It has been common, at least since 1945, to exaggerate and to overreact to foreign threats, something that seems to be continuing with current concerns over international terrorism. This paper sketches threat exaggeration during the Cold War and applies the experience from that era to the current one. Alarmism and overreaction can be harmful, particularly economically. And, in the case of terrorism, it can help create the damaging consequences the terrorists seek but are unable to perpetrate on their own. Moreover, many of the forms alarmism has taken verge on hysteria. The United States is hardly "vulnerable" in the sense that it can be toppled by dramatic acts of terrorist destruction, even extreme ones. The country can, however grimly, readily absorb that kind of damage, and it has outlasted considerably more potent threats in the past.     

威胁认知:美国对中国发展的错误知觉

认知学派认为,决策者由于存在不可避免的认知局限而产生错误知觉,其认知中存在着夸大对方敌意的判断,从而产生威胁认知。基于这种威胁认知,决策者有明显敌意的外交决策可能使行为体之间的负面互动最后成为现实冲突。美国对中国发展的负面认知主要表现为“中国威胁”的错误知觉。从认知心理角度看,这种错误知觉的产生是基于主体认知结构和逻辑推理而对威胁信号进行选择性的心理推论。要改变美国这种错误的威胁认知,作为认知主体的美国和认知客体的中国需要进行良好的沟通,尤其是美国迫切需要用全新的视角来“理解中国”。     

The GCC Monarchies: Perceptions of the Iranian Threat amid Shifting Geopolitics

ABSTRACT

The systemic shift triggered by a progressive retrenchment of the United States (US) from the wider Middle East region has been a fundamental game changer in the security perceptions of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) monarchies. The retrenchment activated a security dilemma in US-GCC relations, especially in relation to their view of Iran. However, the impact was uneven. While the dilemma triggered fears of abandonment in the three more hawkish players – Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain –, it generated fears of entrapment in the three less hawkish players – Oman, Kuwait and Qatar. The key differences between these two camps lie on their threat perceptions. Seemingly shaped by state ideology and religion, narratives of identity, socio-political demography and, finally, leadership cognition, these fears interact with domestic factors such as structural vulnerabilities, to affect the perception of Iran as an existential or non-existential risk.     

Nativism or Economic Threat: Attitudes Toward Immigrants During the Great Recession

To better evaluate the weight of economic versus cultural factors in determining individual attitudes toward open borders, this article reports on a survey experiment conducted over the course of the Great Recession. Over the course of the recession, we measured changes in attitudes on both immigration and trade policies, controlling for economic circumstance. Based on the data provided by respondents on both their current salaries as well as a subjective assessment of their economic well-being, we illustrate how both objective and subjective perceptions of the economy interact with cultural factors and influence attitudes on open borders. The panel provides a unique picture of the “stickiness” of policy attitudes in hard economic times, and by extension, the level of commitment in the United States to globalization.     

A Strategy for the ISIS Foreign Fighter Threat

American efforts against the ISIS foreign fighter threat largely have failed because they underestimate the malignance of ISIS recruits. This article proposes a modified strategy comprising three aspects: 1) a counter-narrative stressing ISIS's attacks on Sunni Muslims, questioning their religious credentials, and accurately describing conditions in ISIS-controlled territory; 2) a comprehensive effort to disrupt ISIS recruitment on social media; and 3) countering foreign fighter mobility through a comprehensive international effort to identify foreign fighters, suspending their passports, and revoking their citizenship. Unfortunately, even these efforts will only be a partial fix for the vastly larger problems of jihadism and radical Islam.     

Assessing the balance

Save for the single issue of balance of power theory's relevance to the current system, where we and some of our critics are in real disagreement (and they are wrong), every aspect of this symposium has been highly productive. Our critics do not directly dispute the proposition that a rapid end of a single superpower world is extremely unlikely. They generally endorsed our core finding that the systemic constraints featured in IR scholarship are largely inoperative with respect to a United States that remains the sole superpower. These essays are consequently devoted mainly to discussing the implications of our findings and the future research agenda. In particular, they developed serious challenges to the idea of US led institutional revisionism, generated new ideas about both systemic and non-systemic constraints, and suggested potentially powerful theories about constraints on other states besides the United States.     

Politics and Threat Perception: Explaining Pakistani Military Strategy on the North West Frontier

Abstract

Analysts and policymakers agree that the Pakistani military has engaged in selective repression of and collusion with armed groups. Yet beyond this general observation, fine-grained theory and evidence do not exist to systematically explain patterns of military strategy across groups and over time. This paper provides a theoretical framework for explaining regime perceptions of armed groups and the strategies state security managers pursue toward different types of groups. It then probes this framework using a combination of new medium-N data on military offensives, peace deals, and state–group alliances in Pakistan’s North West and four comparative case studies from North and South Waziristan. We argue that the Pakistani military—the key state institution in this context—has assigned armed groups to different political roles reflecting both their ideological affinity with the military and the operational benefits they can provide to the army. This mixture of instrumental and ideological motivations has created a complex blend of regime threat perceptions and state–group interactions across space and time. A clearer understanding of how the military views Pakistan’s armed political landscape can inform policy debates about the nature of Pakistani counterinsurgency, as well as broader theoretical debates about order and violence.