Soft Power in a Hard Place: China, Taiwan, Cross-Strait Relations and U.S. Policy

Soft power, like so much else in relations between the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, is asymmetrical and freighted with implications for U.S. policy and U.S.-China relations. For China, soft power largely serves—or strives—to reduce alarm (or at least reaction) among other states concerned about China's new-found hard power or, perhaps more realistically, the hard power that China's economic rise can underwrite. Much of the value for Beijing of soft power is—and is likely to remain for quite some time—its potential contribution to reducing the likelihood that other states will react to China's rising hard power in ways that could threaten China's interests.     

American Grand Strategy from the Cold War's End to 9/11

Grand strategy is about making sense of complexity; it is the wisdom to make power serve useful purposes. After the end of the Cold War, American policymakers sought to create a new grand strategy for the United States, but they failed in this endeavor. They failed because of difficult domestic and international circumstances. They also failed because of conceptual limitations. This article traces the efforts at strategy formulation in the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and it analyzes their shortcomings. Bush had process without purpose; Clinton had purpose without process. The article encourages readers to think about how future strategists might improve upon this legacy with clearer and more disciplined attention to priorities, capabilities, and trade-offs. Making grand strategy in a democracy is not easy, but it is necessary. The absence of effective grand strategy in the 1990s contributed to the crises of the early twenty-first century.     

Dereliction of Duty Redux?: Post-Iraq American Civil-Military Relations

The protracted war in Iraq has exacerbated existing tensions and dysfunctional elements inherent in American civil-military relations. Many in the national security community were worried that civil-military relations were far from satisfactory well before the war.¹ For too long this dimension of “the American way of war” had been allowed to drift without resolution. The Iraq conflict could result in a further deterioration in this crucial component of strategic effectiveness due to mutual “scapegoating, blame-avoiding and willful institutional refusal to recognize and act on the sources of defeat.”² This essay explores the current precarious nature of civil-military relations in this country. It also explores the emergence of a “stab in the back” thesis among the military community, and various issues raised by the ongoing Long War. Based on this evaluation, the article concludes with some proposals to remedy or lessen the strains that exist today. These remedies seek to better define the compact and code of conduct that governs the overall relationship between the masters of policy and the dedicated servants we ask to carry out those policies.     

Blood and ink! The common-interest-game between terrorists and the media

It has often been pointed out in the literature that a symbiotic relationship exists between terrorist groups and the media. As yet, however, no formal model has been built based on this issue and only very little empirical research has been done in this field. The present contribution builds a simple game theoretic model, focussing on the strategic interactions between terrorists and the media. The model has features of a common-interest-game and results in multiple equilibria. After a discussion of the policy implications of the model, an empirical analysis is performed. Using newspaper coverage, terror incidents and terror fatalities data, it is shown that media attention and terrorism do mutually Granger cause each other, as predicted by the model. Moreover, it is explained why terror attacks tend to be “bloodier” in developing countries than in Europe and the United States.