Login
Exclusive: Backbenchers tell Michael Gove they may oppose bill designed to stop sanctions separate to those set by government
Michael Gove is on a collision course with a handful of Conservative MPs over his plans to stop public bodies boycotting Israel.
A group of Tory backbenchers have made clear to the levelling up, housing and communities secretary they have concerns about the economic activity of public bodies bill, which is due to return to the Commons within weeks for a second reading.
Continue reading...Guest post by Costantino Pischedda and Andrew Cheon
Drone strikes targeted Moscow last week. Though much remains unknown about it, the episode appears to be part of a series of unclaimed coercive attacks that US officials attributed to Ukrainian government personnel, including the killing of the daughter of a Russian nationalist, the sabotage of the North Stream pipelines, and drone attacks on the Kremlin.
With unclaimed coercion, perpetrators impose costs on adversaries to signal their resolve to prevail in disputes while denying involvement or simply not making any claim about responsibility. Unclaimed coercion is not unique to the war in Ukraine. Russia launched cyber attacks in 2007 to extract concessions from Estonia, though Moscow denied responsibility, and in 2010 Seoul claimed North Korea torpedoed a South Korean warship, Pyongyang’s denial notwithstanding.
Unclaimed coercion may have strategic benefits. Without unmistakable evidence about the identity of the perpetrator, the absence of a claim of responsibility creates plausible deniability, which, some argue, allows coercers to send intelligible, credible messages to targets while containing escalation risks. It may also reduce the costs of being seen as a norm violator. For instance, Austin Carson observed that, though both Saudi Arabia and the United States viewed the 2019 attacks on Saudi oil facilities as part of an Iranian coercive campaign, the absence both of conclusive evidence and a claim of responsibility prevented Riyadh and Washington from carrying out a tough military response, which would have looked “illegitimate while jeopardizing allies’ support.”
But there may also be drawbacks. Some research suggests that unclaimed acts muddle communication, leaving targets unsure about what is being demanded, making compliance less likely. Even if the coercive message is clear to targets, it may not be credible. If plausible deniability is seen as a way for perpetrators to shield themselves from the costs of appearing as norm violators by third parties and to contain escalation risks, targets may perceive unclaimed acts as cheap. A cheap action may signal unwillingness to engage in costlier and riskier overt acts to prevail in the dispute—that is, low resolve—which could embolden targets to resist.
Furthermore, the absence of a claim of responsibility could reduce the credibility of perpetrators’ reassurances implied in a coercive act (“if you do as I say, I will stop hurting you”). Targets may interpret perpetrators’ unwillingness to acknowledge responsibility as an indication of their deceitful nature, suggesting that promises to end hostile acts in exchange for concessions would likely be violated, in turn reducing incentives to comply.
Besides offering limited coercive leverage, unclaimed acts may fail to contain the risk of escalation. Targets, angry at being attacked, may confidently attribute attacks to the perpetrators despite a lack of evidence—and decide to retaliate. Incidents can engage targets’ reputation and honor, and thus be provocative, even when culpability is uncertain. For example, after the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Cuba, “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!” became the popular rallying cry for war, even though it was unclear whether Spain was behind it.
Despite the growing interest in plausible deniability, there has been little empirical analysis of the effects of unclaimed coercion. Our research helps fill this gap, leveraging a vignette experiment, fielded in May 2022 on a sample of 854 US residents, recruited using sampling quotas to match Census statistics for gender, age, and education. The experiment exposed respondents to a fictional scenario depicting a major explosion at a NATO base in Poland used to funnel weapons to Ukraine during the ongoing war. All respondents were told that President Putin had previously warned of “unpredictable consequences” if NATO continued providing weapons to Ukraine and that both intelligence agencies and independent analysts identified Russia as the likely culprit without, however, ruling out the possibility of an accidental detonation. By randomizing whether Russia claimed or denied responsibility for the explosion, we were able to assess the effects of plausible deniability on targets’ views about complying with Putin’s demands and taking escalatory actions in response.
We found that when the attack is unclaimed, respondents are less likely to favor complying with Russia’s demands for interrupting the flow of weapons to Ukraine. Moreover, the absence of a claim of responsibility does not seem to affect respondents’ preferences for escalation. In our analysis of two possible escalatory responses by the United States to the explosion—an air strike against a Russian military base on Ukrainian soil and going to war against Russian forces in Ukraine—we found no statistically significant difference between the two groups of respondents. Thus, plausible deniability appears to reduce coercive leverage without the benefit of containing escalation.
Unclaimed attacks are among the possible tools at the disposal of governments, whose effects may vary depending on the circumstances. Policymakers considering resorting to unclaimed coercion—or fretting about its use by adversaries—should be aware that the payoffs are likely to be limited. For Ukraine, denying responsibility for attacks on Russian soil might offer the advantage of limiting reputational damage in the West, which would not be captured in our analysis. However, the evidence indicates that unclaimed attacks are unwieldy tools of coercion and are unlikely to reduce the risks of Russia’s escalatory responses.
Costantino Pischedda is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Miami. Andrew Cheon is Assistant Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins SAIS.
A recent headline from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes a familiar event: “West Bank Palestinian Village Residents Flee Amid Ongoing Settler Violence.” In many respects, this is old news. Settlers have been terrorizing Palestinian residents for decades, and 2023 appears to be a particularly horrific year. In response to these criminal acts, the Israeli army and government have tended to look the other way. The military is often slow to react or a no-show when settlers take to the streets and rampage through Palestinian villages or uproot olive trees. The Israeli government rarely attempts to arrest or punish the offenders, often citing a lack of evidence or persuasive identification of suspected perpetrator, but the dominant reasons range from ideological sympathies with the settlers to the indirect benefits of keeping Palestinians in fear.
The international community has developed a moral register and set of possible responses for such situations: a responsibility to protect. The general claim is that when the state fails in its responsibility to protect its citizens and civilians, then the international community inherits this duty. The original formulation applied to situations of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, but it has expanded over the years to include less severe events and apartheid. These and other state-sponsored or state-enabled actions now sometimes go by the name atrocity crimes. Additionally, the United Nations and other international bodies have a protection of civilian mandate, as do many humanitarian and human rights agencies.
These various protection discourses and mandates were built for situations like the territories. Israel has routinely violated international law, including that related to refugees, human rights, and occupation. In addition, it has demonstrated an unwillingness to provide protections for Palestinians from the growing number of settlers. But the international community—specifically the West—has failed to act for two major reasons. It tolerated these abuses and arbitrary rules in the name of the peace process. The peace process led Western states to hold their tongues, creating something of a human shield for Israel. Relatedly, the US, for reasons owing to the peace process and domestic politics, played the role of protector of last resort in various international bodies and, most visibly, in the UN Security Council, where it reflexively vetoes any resolution that is critical of Israel. Only in the last days of the Obama administration did it find the “courage” to abstain. The US has been Israel’s “get out of jail free” card.
The peace process has been dead for at least a decade and there is now a “one-state reality” from the river to the sea. In this one-state reality, Palestinians have few rights or protections and Jewish privilege is enshrined in various laws and rules that systematically discriminate against Palestinians, providing strong evidence for claims that Israel is now an apartheid state.
The question is: what is the US and the international community prepared to do to stop these mass violations of human rights? The recent history of efforts by the international community and the UN to protect civilians gives little reason for optimism. Where the international community has intervened, it has usually been in cases of active war, which does not currently apply to Israel. There is much less success with lower levels of violence. Without enforcement mechanisms, human rights law has little effect. That said, human rights monitors do have a record of compelling better behavior from those in power. Humanitarian agencies attempt to protect civilians through provision of life-saving resources such as food, water, medical care, and shelter, but have little ability to stop combatants that are determined to harm and terrorize civilians. States, meanwhile, often hide behind sovereignty to deny access to those who want to protect populations at risk. Israel has played this card, even though it has control but not sovereignty over these territories.
The best thing the US and others who have protected Israel can do is change their role from an enabler of the oppression of the Palestinians to an erstwhile guardian. The US should stop reaching for the veto every time a resolution on Israel and its violations of international law comes to the Security Council. Israeli actions should cease being called an “obstacle to peace” and instead be labeled as violations of international law. The US should consider suspending or reducing its aid package, and scrupulously ensure that its financial assistance does benefit Israeli hold over the territories. The international community might consider a role for human rights monitors or using drone and satellite technology to monitor Israeli actions in the territories, and make public their observations and findings. There are many American-born settlers, and if they are involved in violence in the territories they should be prosecuted in a court of law alongside other American-born terrorists. The West might consider placing smart sanctions on Israel and leaders that benefit from Israel’s hold over the territories, or introducing trade restrictions. The European Union and other countries that provide fast-track visas for Israeli citizens should remove this highly desired perk.
Sticks like sanctions often do not work in deterring or compelling action. They often do not hurt enough because the targeted state can often escape them by developing other arrangements and alliances. Alternatively, for states like Israel that might see their cause as integral to the existential identity or security, then they are likely to absorb the pain of the sanctions. But sanctions and other kinds of discursive condemnations can have important symbolic effects. Israel likes to present itself as part of the West and having shared values with the US and other Western countries. Western countries can stop propping up the idea of a “special relationship” built on shared values, now that Israel ceases to share them. It can expel Israel from the Western bloc in the UN and other international bodies.
The international community has developed a range of options for attempting to deter states that trample on the rights of civilians. Few of them have the necessary impact and they often have unintended consequences. But even a serious conversation by the US and the West would be a momentous moment and possibly cause Israel to recognize that its policies have a cost.
Frances Gavin’s recently declared that “the gap” between policymaking and academic research “has been bridged!” As evidence of International Relations’ newfound influence on the making of U.S. national-security policy, Dr. Gavin points to a handful of scholars who, having crossed the Gap on their own two feet, now occupy prominent government positions. This underscores, he argues, that programs like the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network and the Nuclear Studies Research Initiative—as well as his own Texas National Security Review—have successfully constructed a communications channel between academia and policymakers.
This is a common line of argument among “gap-bridgers”—scholars who emphasize the importance of forging close connections between the academic study of international relations and the world of policymaking. The Bridging the Gap team’s recent, thorough review provides a good example. It focuses on opportunities and challenges for connecting academic knowledge to policymakers, while also celebrating the influence of a number of scholars on the policy landscape.
The gap-bridgers do, indeed, have much to celebrate. But I worry that the bridges that they aim to construct and maintain suffer from some critical design flaws. Chief among them: they are made by academics for academics. The engineers ask little of the policymakers on the other side.
Bridge-building must move beyond catering to policymakers. Academics bridge no gaps if they, for example, content themselves with providing validation for policymakers’ existing beliefs. It means little if someone with an academic background occupies an influential policy position if they perform their role no differently than would any other appointment.
The problem is that gap-bridgers tend to start with the wrong set of questions. Instead of asking “What do policymakers want from us?” we need to ask ones like “What should policymakers want from us?” and “What do we want from policymakers?”
Perhaps no scholar did more to advance the conversation about the divide between academia and policymaking than Alexander George. In Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy, he identified three types of policy-relevant knowledge: abstract conceptual models of foreign policy strategies, generic knowledge (that is, empirical laws and causal patterns), and actor-specific behavioral models.
Other scholars have built upon George’s arguments. Dan Reiter wrote that scholars help policymakers know their tools. Michael Horowitz offered four measures of policy-relevant knowledge: policy significance, accessibility, actionability, or agenda-setting impact on the public debate.
None of this knowledge matters, however, if government officials ignore it. Henry Kissinger, perhaps the most (in)famous academic-turned-policymaker, noted that policymakers have no time to study while on the job; they can only bring to the table what they learned before entering the policy arena.
Bridge-builders encourage scholars to ‘hide’ their methods and evidence
“Even the most highly developed general knowledge of a strategy cannot substitute for competent policy analysis within the government,” Alexander George wrote. But participants in the policy process suggest that, in recent years, it has gone from bad to worse. A report from two influential officials called the State Department’s clearance process “hell.” Putatively serious analysis in foreign policy occurs infrequently, and much of what does emerge is ad hoc rather than rigorous and systematic. It almost never includes consultations with academics or draws from scholarly research.
Even if policymakers do engage with academic work, there’s no guarantee that officials will understand it. Preparation for careers in foreign policy rarely emphasize training in methods and methodology. Surveys of policymakers demonstrate their deep distrust of social science methods.
Many, as I have learned in my frequent interactions with policymakers, are downright hostile to them.
Gap-bridgers must pay more attention to the degree that the foreign policy community simply dismisses much of the knowledge produced by social scientists. “It’s almost impossible to quantify what we do, and in fact, I think that there’s a great danger in trying,” said an influential former Ambassador at a recent event on the State Department’s Congressionally-mandated Learning Agenda. A high-ranking official concurred, “Diplomacy is an art, not a science.”
When policymakers extol the art of foreign policy, they are advancing a theory of knowledge—that is, they are taking a position on epistemology that ex ante rejects a lot of what we do in social-scientific research.
This is not, at heart, a matter of ‘qualitative versus quantitative methods,’ or ‘constructivism versus rationalism.’ Rather, their stance entails a rejection of the usefulness of systematic method altogether. It is a claim that the most important tools for policymaking are rooted in the ‘gut instincts’ and idiosyncratic beliefs of professional policymakers—and that the only ones qualified to assess foreign-policy decisions are, naturally, those who share the necessary experience to develop comparable instincts and hunches.
Dominant methods of policy analysis and decision making are badly outdated
The epistemology of the U.S. foreign-policy community bears a strong resemblance to what scholar Robert A. Kagan termed “adversarial legalism.” Instead of prioritizing solutions aimed at achieving policy objectives, the policy process weighs legal and political risks between entrenched bureaucratic interests. The “right policy” is whatever emerges from that process. The “top expert” is the official who has achieved decision-making authority.
Social-scientific epistemology is very different. Its goal is to produce the “right” answers. Even if one believes—as many academics do—that we will probably never know the exact “truth” or provide the “best” answers, social-scientific training emphasizes self-consciousness and transparency when it comes to epistemic choices.
The defining features of academia—the practices of citations, peer-review, hypothesis testing, university training and certification, a focus on methodology, and so on—aim to facilitate intellectual progress. In principle, scholarly authority derives from the quality of scholarship, not the other way around.
Efforts to “bridge the Gap” need to better wrestle with these differences.
Bridge-builders often encourage scholars to ‘hide’ their methods and evidence when speaking with policymakers. But this renders even the best scholarship indistinguishable from opinions, guesses, and even misinformation.
It is this state of affairs, not the nature of social science itself, that makes “lab leaks” from social science so dangerous.
At the very least, academics should avoid validating the anti-scientific views of many policymakers who dismiss social science as irrelevant.
Alexander George understood the challenge. In Bridging the Gap, he explained:
Quite obviously, substantive knowledge of foreign affairs can have no impact on policy unless it enters into the process of policymaking. Substantive knowledge must combine with the effective structuring and management of the policymaking process in order to improve the analytic (versus the political) component of policymaking.
But George never answers the question of how policy analysis within the government should work. One of the most important tasks of bridge-building involves providing answers.
Scholars should push policymakers to think more like scientists.
At the very least, scholars need to use their privileged position to hold policymakers accountable for making decisions that violate basic scientific norms. They must speak up when officials subordinate hard-won substantive knowledge to intuitive judgment and parochial political considerations. In the words of the longest-serving member of Congress in history, John Dingell, “If I let you write the substance and you let me write the procedure, I’ll screw you every time.”
Dominant methods of policy analysis and decision making are badly outdated, if not outright anti-scientific. Rather than expecting scholars to conform to policymakers’ ‘ways of seeing,’ scholars should push policymakers to think more like scientists.
If social scientists believe their work has value, then they (necessarily) believe in the value of their methods and epistemological beliefs.
Scholars have the tools and training to help improve every stage of the policy process. An improved foreign policy epistemology must:
Upgrading policy processes might include finding ways to improve, for example:
In short, a true “bridge” between scholarship and foreign-policy making should be constructed around the evidence-based policy movement and other efforts to improve the effectiveness of foreign policy.
The U.S. foreign policy community can learn a great deal from those other sectors of government that foster a much closer connection between research and practice, including public health, economic policy, and education. Even within the national security community, some agencies do a better job than others. Evidence-based methods play a larger role in international development, the intelligence community, and the Department of Defense than in the State Department or the National Security Council.
The good news is that bureaucratic footholds are emerging for scholars interested in advancing more scientific foreign policymaking. The Department of State recently launched its Learning Agenda, which Congress requested in the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018. The Global Fragility Act is prioritizing evidence and learning to reform the way the US government prevents and responds to conflict. Both the Departments of Defense and State are making high-profile investments into analytics and data.
Ultimately, the responsibility of building a bridge does not lie solely with academics. Those of us who care about the quality of foreign policy must help policymakers help close the Gap between research and practice. Neither academics nor policymakers have all the answers. But Americans – and billions around the globe affected by our decisions – deserve the best possible foreign policy.
Guest post by Patricia L. Sullivan
During her recent trip to Africa, US Vice President Kamala Harris announced a $100 million commitment over ten years to West African Nations to fend off the increasing threat of extremist groups. The announcement followed President Biden’s pledge of $55 billion to the continent for the next three years. While these promises reveal a US commitment to greater engagement with African states, the often-dodged question is whether citizens of these states will benefit. Will US security aid improve human security in fragile and conflict-affected African states? How is US security assistance likely to affect governance and state repression for citizens that often suffer at the hands of both extremist groups and their own security forces?
The empirical record is mixed. Between 2002 and 2019, the US spent almost $300 billion on security assistance and trained at least one million foreign military personnel. In some countries, such as Ukraine, these programs have improved both the capability and professionalism of the state’s armed forces. In others, they escalated human rights abuses and increased the risk of coups d’état. Take the example of Kenya—one of the largest recipients of US military training and equipment in East Africa. The state’s security forces have been found to engage in torture, extrajudicial killings, mass arrests, and forced disappearances. Or the Philippines, where President Duterte employed the country’s military—armed and trained by US aid programs—in a brutal war on drugs that took the lives of thousands of civilians.
Although some studies have found that security assistance can reduce civilian targeting by state security forces, there is mounting evidence that it often fuels human rights violations. Recent research suggests that the risk of civilian harm is greatest when donors transfer weapons to postconflict states or provide aid to states with fragmented, “coup-proofed” security forces. On the other hand, effective institutions to constrain executive power in recipient states, and the provision of some forms of “nonlethal” security assistance—like military education for officers and defense institution building—appear to mitigate the potential for civilian harm.
As the War on Terror spread from Afghanistan to the African continent, the US greatly expanded the use of security assistance—funding, weapons, equipment, and training provided to a state’s security sector by external actors—to build the capacity of weak states to take on the counterterrorism mission without sacrificing American troops in ground combat. According to data collected by the Security Assistance Monitor, funding to train and equip foreign security forces increased more than 300 percent in the ten years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Over the past two decades, the US has provided security sector assistance to more than two-thirds of the sovereign states in the world. Between 2015 and 2020, $4.8 billion in security aid went to sub-Saharan Africa.
While the goal is to reduce the threat posed by violent non-state actors, Kristen Harkness at the University of St. Andrews points out that most aid went to “repressive, heavily coup-proofed authoritarian regimes,” even though boosting military capacity in non-democratic states can fuel grievances that drive recruitment to extremist groups and increase political violence.
When “lethal” aid—weapons, military equipment, and combat skills training—reaches countries that lack effective institutional constraints on executive power, as in many autocratic and anocratic regimes, the risk of extrajudicial killings at the hand of security forces spikes, according to data that follows low- and middle-income recipients of US security force assistance between 2002 and 2019.
In the absence of effective legislative or judicial constraints, leaders can use military aid to buy the loyalty of their security forces and incentivize compliance with orders to repress dissent. Of course, lethal aid also directly increases the capacity of state security forces to quell civilian threats to the regime with force. Security assistance signals that a foreign patron is invested in regime survival. While soldiers ordered to use deadly force against the civilian population might experience moral conflict, or fear facing consequences for targeting civilians if the regime is overthrown, foreign security aid increases the odds that repression will succeed, the regime will survive, and soldiers will be rewarded for their loyalty.
One way to avoid the risk that US assistance increases human rights violations is to provide aid only to countries with effective legislative and judicial institutions. But many regions where extremist groups are active would offer a limited menu. An alternative is providing safer forms of aid.
Separating “non-lethal” security aid—a broad category encompassing professional military education, security sector reform, defense institution-building, and a variety of other types of assistance—from “lethal” aid—which includes material aid, direct combat assistance, and combat training—reveals divergent effects on state violence. While increasing lethal aid significantly raises the risk of extrajudicial killing, non-lethal aid appears to have a dampening effect. The exception is authoritarian states in which leaders have created overlapping and competing security institutions to “coup-proof” their regime. In these states, all forms of security assistance are associated with civilian harm. In post-conflict countries, one study shows that while weapons transfers and military aid increase human rights abuses, levels of Official Development Assistance (ODA) are associated with improved human rights protections.
Moving forward, as the US promises a new wave of security assistance to African states, it has a choice. Considering the recipient country’s institutional context, the state of its security forces, and the type of military aid, can decrease the risk that those resources are used to commit human rights violations.
Patricia Lynn Sullivan is an associate professor in the Department of Public Policy and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.
Feminist foreign policies (FFP) are considered the latest contribution of feminism to global governance. Eleven countries around the world have embraced FFP, aiming to “systematically integrate a gender perspective throughout” foreign policy agendas.
In recent years, FFP has spread to Latin America: Mexico introduced an FFP in 2020 and the newly elected Chilean and Colombian governments have expressed their intentions of adopting the framework.
This growing interest in FFP across Latin American raises important questions: What exactly is this feminist foreign policy and what is there to gain by naming foreign policies “feminist”? Should Latin American feminists engage, support, critique, or be suspicious of this global trend? What does FFP look like in a Latin American context?
FFP is emerging as a new subfield in feminist international relations. Building on women’s rights and peace movements around the globe, feminism occupies an important position within academic and political spaces since it provides a powerful source of intervention against different forms of discrimination.
The theoretical foundations of FFP, however, are still not clearly defined. What an FFP looks like depends largely on a government’s interpretation of the concept.
Sweden first proposed a general FFP model built on what they call the three R’s: resources, representation and rights. Their model went on to define “six long-term external objectives” centered on policy making with a gender perspective: freedom from different types of gender-based violence; women’s participation in preventing and resolving conflicts, and post-conflict peace building; political participation; economic rights and empowerment; and sexual and reproductive health and rights. This initial Swedish proposal served as a basis for other countries’ policies.
For many foreign policy observers and feminist activists these objectives were still too vague and ambiguous. First, what does foreign policy entail? This question underlies the discussion among academics and activists about feminism being co-opted for neoliberal economic purposes, or if it maintains its potential as a critical proposition. There are also questions concerning contentious topics for feminists. For instance, how is the gender perspective incorporated into defense and security? Given the long tradition of pacifism in the feminist movement globally and its demand for an active commitment to disarmament, how can countries like Canada simultaneously export arms and pursue an FFP?
International organizations have tried to provide definitional clarity. In its most ambitious expression, UN Women proposes that an FFP should aspire to transform the overall practice of foreign policy—including a country’s diplomacy, defense and security cooperation, aid, trade, climate security, and immigration policies—to the benefit of women and girls.
Feminist civil society, however, tends to take a more critical stance. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Germany believes that “fixating on the production of a universally acceptable and concrete definition of a feminist foreign policy fails to consider the different and varied political realities that shape our global landscape.” Thus, it proposes five concepts to inform policy development that better accounts for this variation: intersectionality; empathetic reflexivity; substantive representation and participation; accountability; and, active peace commitment. Regardless of the concrete definition, FFP aims to achieve explicit normative and ethical goals. Yet, as Jennifer Thompson notes, FFP is a state invention in which foreign policy goals are often shaped by state interests rather than feminist activists’ normative principles. While civil society often formulates FFP demands, states implement foreign policies. In other words, it is states that ultimately decide what counts as FFP and what does not. As a result, FFPs may not fulfill their ethical promises—particularly in countries without strong accountability mechanisms. Mexico’s attempt to develop an FFP is a case in point.
In September 2022, Internacional Feminista, a Mexican feminist organization that I co-founded, published the first evaluation of Mexico’s FFP. My colleagues and I concluded that there is no clarity as to what the FFP actually entails and no policy roadmap detailing the FFP’s actions, outcomes, indicators, and intended impact. The Mexican FFP has stalled.
Regarding the question of what constitutes foreign policy, the Mexican FFP has a broad and ambitious scope. The Secretariat of Foreign Affairs seeks to mainstream gender perspectives across all foreign policy areas as one of its core objectives, yet we found this does not happen in practice. Discussion of the FFP is most visible in Mexico’s rhetoric in multilateral fora. However, tangible evidence that Mexico is actually considering a gender perspective is largely absent from other foreign policy issues, such as defense, trade, and diplomacy.
One innovation of Mexico’s FFP was prioritizing gender parity within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its diplomatic corps. Nonetheless, it is not possible to assess whether there is gender parity across the ranks as the Secretariat has no available records of personnel demographic data, disaggregated by gender or rank. The lack of available data disaggregated by gender suggests that this is not as much of a focus area as it’s made out to be.
Another feature of the Mexican initiative was its aim of strengthening the protocols to address and prevent gender-based violence within the foreign ministry. However, there is very little information available regarding how these are implemented and if they have achieved their intended outcomes. The absence of information again suggests that this was not a priority task. In fact, two cases call into question Mexico’s commitment to FFP: one involved failures in consular attention to a Mexican woman victim of gender-based violence in Qatar, and another involved an attempt to appoint a man accused of sexual harassment as Mexico’s ambassador to Panama.
In its FFP plan, the Secretariat also announced funding for intersectionality-related efforts. However, data shows that the budget remained constant from 2018 to 2020. Following the austerity policies of the current administration, no additional resources were granted to support these efforts. Moreover, the budget document labeled these resources as “Expenditures for equality between women and men.” By continuing to interpret “intersectionality” and “gender perspective” as synonymous, the Mexican FFP dilutes the disruptive spirit of intersectionality that accounts for multidimensional identities beyond binary gender categories.
Without clear implementation guidelines and evaluation criteria, Mexican officials have struggled to navigate the contradictions within the government. The most notorious is the lack of support from the president himself who, according to Mexico’s Constitution, is responsible for defining foreign policy objectives. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is openly hostile towards the feminist movement, and a recent leak indicates that the Secretary of Defense spies on feminist activists. Yet, diplomats continue to uphold feminist principles in multilateral forums. The president’s hostility and the mismatch between secretariats obstructs necessary dialogue with feminist civil society and blocks the chances of effective policy accountability.
The Mexican experience highlights the challenges of implementing FFPs in Latin America.
First, it is clear that FFP is not as boundary-pushing as its supporters suggest. It is limited by the lack of accountability mechanisms, broad political support and budget constraints. As a result, FFP is often insufficient to drive change on critical issues. Yet, feminism in the region, as Claudia Korol puts it, “is a rebellious movement in which the plural and diverse bodies and the different struggles seek their place, and demand to be named.” In other words, feminism is in tension with the circles of institutionalized, disciplined and ordered practices, such as government-led foreign policies.
In countries with rampant economic inequality and high rates of gender violence against women, feminist principled policies are sorely needed. Due to institutional resistance, however, policy implementation is far from guaranteed. The design and implementation of foreign policies in the region have historically been a space for male elites and, as the example of Mexico illustrates, the FFP has been insufficient to break this inertia. In the words of feminist scholar Angela Davis, “if standards for feminism are created by those who have already ascended economic hierarchies and are attempting to make the last climb to the top, how is this relevant to women who are at the very bottom?”
After recent elections in Chile and Colombia, leaders are now developing their foreign policies and both countries have declared their interest in adopting an FFP. As consultations develop in Bogotá and Santiago, it is worth remembering that simply labeling a foreign policy as feminist without implementing policies that account for gender perspectives or advance women’s rights creates an illusion of change, while keeping systems of oppression intact and further setting back gender justice.
Genuine efforts to advance gender justice ought to reimagine traditional international relations and diplomacy. As I have argued elsewhere, this can be achieved by more fully considering local dynamics and actors in developing foreign policies. Feminist civil society has been at the forefront of driving successful changes in domestic policies—and we ought to incorporate their strategies and insights into foreign policy development.
Guest post by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Molly Wallace, and Ned Dobos
Ukraine has received tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid since the Russian invasion began one year ago. The international consensus seems to be that supporting Ukraine means financing its war effort. But a few dissenting voices have emerged of late, more ambivalent about the prudence—and ethics—of the current policy. Colonel Douglas MacGregor, a former advisor to the US Secretary of Defence, has warned that the choice of cure could turn out to be worse than the disease.
At least 7,000 Ukrainian civilians have already perished in the war. Thousands more have been injured, and millions have been displaced. MacGregor’s primary concern is that the bleeding will continue for as long as the fighting does. Russian forces advance, Ukrainian forces resist with violence, Russia responds with counter-violence, and the bodies continue to pile up. The Ukrainian state retains its sovereignty, but eventually we get to a point where, to quote MacGregor, “There are no longer any Ukrainians left!” This is hyperbole, of course, but that should not distract from the valid point MacGregor is making. States exist for the sake of their citizens, not the other way around. Therefore, if a given method of defending the state is causing its citizens to be killed or to flee en masse, that is a compelling reason to explore alternatives.
What is often overlooked about armed resistance is that, when it “works,” it does so by producing a mental rather than physical effect. Wars are won by breaking the enemy’s will to fight, not necessarily its ability to fight. Victory usually comes, if it comes, long before there are no enemy soldiers left; it comes when those soldiers who remain and/or their leaders are no longer motivated to fight, or in more extreme cases, when the soldiers are so demoralized that the leaders can no longer mount enough coercive pressure to make them continue fighting. Everything hinges on how the remaining members of the opponent group react to the destruction of their compatriots’ lives and their military or civilian infrastructure, not on the destruction itself.
Once we realize that the condition of surrender is not physical but psychological, it is only natural to wonder: Is there no way to change minds except through violence against bodies?
Nonviolent resistance is an alternative strategy for breaking the will of the aggressor. Protests and fraternization can engage the moral sentiments of the aggressor’s functionaries and citizenry, leading to a loss of popular support. Boycotts and blockades can alter the material cost-benefit equation of the aggression, so that it is no longer worth it. And nonviolent sabotage can directly diminish the aggressor’s capabilities by physically disabling military, transportation, or communications infrastructure.
Ukrainians have been engaged in various forms of such nonviolent resistance since the Russian invasion began. It took more visible forms at first—ordinary civilians demonstrating in Ukrainian colors or standing between Russian tanks and their towns—and has since shifted to less visible, more dispersed methods in response to Russian occupation and repression—graffiti, non-cooperation with Russian authorities, alternative communication, and governance institutions. There were even overtures to the Russian public and soldiers, eliciting responses from significant scientists, clerics, and journalists.
Unlike the militarized resistance, however, the nonviolent resistance has received no significant material support from the international community. Consider for example the Ukrainian government’s early offer of money and amnesty to Russian deserters, which circulated via SMS messages containing instructions on how and where to surrender and collect payment. According to The Times (UK), there was some initial uptake—a Russian soldier was photographed surrendering himself and his tank to Ukrainian forces in March, in exchange for cash and an offer of permanent resettlement in Ukraine. But consider what might have been.
Suppose the international community were to double the Ukrainian government’s offer of $50k per deserting soldier, as economist Bryan Caplan suggested. Desertion is a risky proposition, but for twice the payoff perhaps many more Russian soldiers might have considered the risk worth taking. Additionally, countries besides Ukraine could have offered Russian deserters amnesty and even citizenship within their own borders. This way deserters would need not worry about Russia eventually winning the war, occupying Ukraine, ousting its government, and taking its vengeance against them. The recent involvement of Wagner Group mercenaries on the Russian side only underscores the utility of economic incentives to alter the motivation of soldiers.
Of course, we cannot say for certain that a nonviolent approach will work. But we cannot say for certain that violence will work, either. So far it hasn’t.
If there are nonviolent ways to break Russia’s will to fight, why the reluctance to exploit them?
One possible reason is the widespread belief that nonviolence, although it can be effective, is not nearly as effective as military force. But this belief is more an a priori assumption than a rational conclusion based on an impartial appraisal of the evidence. Scientific research suggests that, during 1900–2006, nonviolent resistance outperformed violent resistance by a ratio of almost 2:1.
Maybe our desire to see wrongdoers not simply thwarted but punished explains the preference for violence here. Perhaps our sense of justice recoils at the thought of paying Russian combatants to desert, instead of making them suffer for what they have done—though this stance ignores the coercion and manipulation that Putin’s government has used against its own armed forces.
In any case, surely what matters most in all this is the welfare of the Ukrainian people. The reality is that massively financing the war effort has produced a state of attrition with no end in sight. Persisting with the current policy regardless, expecting things to change while the casualties mount, is a combination of delusion and depravity. We should now turn the spotlight onto those Ukrainians who—despite the loud calls for military weaponry—have been steadily engaged in various forms of nonviolent resistance and defense since the invasion. Their actions deserve more support—both moral and material—than the international community has so far provided.
Alexandre Christoyannopoulos is a reader (associate professor) in politics and international relations at Loughborough University, and his publications are listed on his website. Ned Dobos is a senior lecturer in international and political studies at UNSW Canberra, and author of Ethics, Security, and the War Machine: The True Cost of the Military. Molly Wallace is adjunct assistant professor in conflict resolution at Portland State University, senior contributing editor at the Peace Science Digest, and author of Security without Weapons: Rethinking Violence, Nonviolent Action, and Civilian Protection. The three of them are the editors of the new Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence.
The government of a country makes explicit or implicit threats to another: “if you cross this line, we will inflict harm upon you.” The threat fails; the government crosses the designated line. Has deterrence failed?
Well, yes. Of course. By definition. It is, for example, unequivocally true that the United States did not deter Russia from invading Georgia in 2008, nor Ukraine in 2014, nor Ukraine (again) in 2022. Should you have any doubts about this, you can always go read a nearly four-thousand word Foreign Policy article on the subject.
I agree with its authors, Liam Collins and Frank Sobchak, that U.S. policymakers made a number of mistakes in handling Russia. Trump’s rhetoric concerning NATO, Russia, and Ukraine did not exactly help make U.S. deterrence credible; then again, Trump wasn’t in office when Putin ordered the invasion. In retrospect, Obama’s decision to withhold lethal aid from Ukraine was probably mistake, as not much seemed to happen when the Trump administration reversed course. But do we really think that providing more javelins in 2015 or 2016 would have deterred Putin’s invasion?
Apparently, yes. For Collins and Subchak, Washington’s failure to deter Russia means that U.S. policymakers should, ipso facto, have adopted a more hardline policy toward Russia. But much like the opposite claim—that Georgia and Ukraine “prove” that the U.S. should have adopted a more accommodating approach toward Russia, for example, by not expanding NATO—we’re looking at reasoning that is less “ipso facto” than “post hoc ergo propter hoc.”
That is, just because X preceded Y does not mean X caused Y. In the context of policy analysis we might add that just because Y is bad doesn’t mean Y’ would be better.
Sometimes, X isn’t even X. The fact that ‘deterrence failed’ doesn’t imply that any attempt to accommodate Russia was a capitulation to Moscow. Sometimes the opposite is true.
For instance, Collins and Sobchak argue that Ukraine shows the folly of Obama’s decision to cancel the “Third Site” anti-ballistic missile system, which involving placing radar in the Czech Republic and interceptors in Poland.
But the Obama administration replaced the “Third Site” with the European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA), which (as the Russians soon figured out) was easier for the United States to upgrade into the kind of system Moscow worried about. EPAA also entailed eventual deployments in Romania; Obama committed to stationing Patriots on Polish territory, as well “left open the door to stationing new types of missile defense interceptors in Poland, an offer the Poles later agreed to accept.” Moreover, at the Wales NATO summit Obama convinced NATO to affirm that missile defense was part of its collective mission.
Given all of this, it seems bizarre to claim, as Richard Minter did in 2014, that after “Obama delayed deployment of missile defenses in Eastern Europe, Putin knew he had a free hand to reassemble the old Soviet Union piece-by-piece. Invading his neighbors would now be cost free.”
Now, Collins and Sobchak don’t write anything quite so ridiculous. But they sometimes land come within striking distance.
Consider the very opening of the article, which discusses the U.S. response to the Russia-Georgia war:
Recall the aftermath of the 2008 invasion of Georgia. The Bush administration airlifted Georgian soldiers serving in Iraq back to Georgia to fight, provided a humanitarian aid package, and offered tersely worded denouncements and demarches. But it categorically rejected providing Georgia with serious military assistance in the form of anti-tank missiles and air defense missiles and even refrained from implementing punishing economic sanctions against Russia. The United States’ lack of resolve to punish Russia for its gross violation of international law was underscored when U.S. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley’s remark “Are we prepared to go to war with Russia over Georgia?”—made during a National Security Council meeting after the war started—was later released to the media.
Keep in mind that they’re talking about an effort to proved anti-tank missiles and air-defense systems during a war that lasted five days—one in which Russia systematically annihilated the shiny systems that the United States and its partners had previously provided. If the argument is that the United States should have given Georgia anti-tank weapons or air-defense missiles after the conflict, then (while that might have been a good idea) it’s not clear to me how that would’ve signaled U.S. resolve.
(Stephen Hadley’s remark first appeared, if I remember correctly, in Ron Asmus’ book about the Georgia war. So the passive voice is definitely doing some work here. At the time, Hadley refused to comment on the specific quotation but did confirm that the Bush administration decided that the risks of using force outweighed the benefits. This “revelation” shouldn’t have surprised anyone, including Moscow, since, you know, the United States did not, in fact, use force. What’s particularly strange about this example is that it’s backwards. What surprised people was the extent of support within the administration for a more aggressive response. The headline of the Politico article that I linked to above wasn’t “The United States didn’t risk war for Georgia.” It was “U.S. pondered military use in Georgia.”)
It is not obvious that the United States could have secured support for, say, more punishing sanctions. The Georgia War did not deter France from closing a deal to sell two Mistral-class helicopter carriers to Russia. Paris only cancelled that sale after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, when Hollande (rather than Sarkozy) was president (interesting side note here).
But, as is typical for this genre, the article never seriously considers either the viability or the downside risks of alternative policies. This is… problematic… given that it is very difficult to assess what the world would like after fifteen years of concatenating changes produced by different policy decisions.
None of this means that we shouldn’t evaluate past policies and work through conterfactuals. That’s a crucial element of policy analysis, social-scientific inquiry, and policymaking, Collins and Sobchak, like too many others, don’t even do the bare minimum—in their case, despite writing a piece that runs as long as a short academic article in International Relations.
That failure is particularly pernicious when an obviously “bad outcome” makes it easy to gloss over. In fact, the last sentence of Collins and Sobchak’s article gives the game away:
The sad irony is that U.S. leaders, of both parties, chose to avoid deterrence for fear of escalating conflict—only to find themselves continually escalating their support once conflict started. Time after time, the United States chose the option that was perceived as the least provocative but that instead led to the Russians becoming convinced that they were safe to carry out the most provocative action of all: a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The United States ignored the eternal wisdom of the Latin phrase Si vis pacem, para bellum (“If you want peace, prepare for war”) and instead hoped that half-steps and compromise would suffice. While so far those decisions have prevented direct conflict between two nuclear-armed superpowers, they have caused Russia and the West to be locked in a continuing series of escalations with an increasing danger of a miscalculation that could lead to exactly that scenario.
If you are interested in U.S. military basing policy, you have a lot of good work to read these days.
Some recent contributions to this literature—Michael A. Allen et al.’s Beyond the Wire: U.S. Military Deployments and Host Country Public Opinion and Sebastian Schmidt’s earlier Armed Guests: Territorial Sovereignty and Foreign Military Basing—have already been covered on The Duck. Claudia Junghyun Kim’s new book, Base Towns: Local Contestation of the U.S. Military in Korea and Japan, is just the latest entry in a burgeoning field.
Much of this work is motivated at least in part by an increasingly powerful China and debate about the extent to which overseas U.S. bases will allow it to project sufficient power to deter Chinese revisionism in the region. (This similarly motivates recent work that seeks to specify different types of revisionism.) The debate on the efficacy of “tripwire” forces, for example, is oriented toward such concerns.
Given such interest in current U.S. basing arrangements, this literature tends to focus on basing as it has been practiced since the end of World War Two (or, instead, since the Spanish-American War of 1898). There is often good reason to do so, but as I will discuss in an MPSA presentation next week, I believe that there is more continuity in the history of U.S. military basing policy than is typically assumed.
Allen et al. offer a helpful starting point in thinking about this continuity. As they write, “The US has a long history of using military bases to expand its influence. The process of westward expansion across the North American continent was accompanied by the construction of numerous military bases to aid in the projection of military power against Great Britain, Spain, France, Mexico, and Native Americans, as it sought to assert control over the increasingly vast territories settlers occupied.”
Allen et al. ultimately distance this pre-1898 basing from post-1898 basing: “[T]he US ultimately sought to extend direct control over these territories, making them a part of the country itself. …The US began actively sending troops overseas on long-term deployments after the Spanish-American War.”
If the United States used early military bases “to expand its influence” through the concentration of military power in strategic locations, however, is that so different from the ways bases are used today?
We might also reconsider the foreign/domestic distinction that often divides pre- and post-1898 basing. The United States did construct bases on territory that others claimed as their own earlier in its history; policy-makers simply did not recognize those claims. That is, to contrast early “domestic” basing with later “overseas” basing elides Indigenous claims to sovereignty that gave rise to violent contestation.
For example, the U.S. military’s eventual success in the Northwest Indian War depended largely on the construction of forts in the Northwest Territory. That land had been ceded by Britain to the United States in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, but in the Ohio River Valley, groups such as the Shawnee and the Miami claimed the land as their own. The United States would go to war to enforce its claims by 1790.
After early battlefield defeats, the United States only managed to more effectively project power by creating a string of forts in the region. Those forts served varying roles—some served primarily to maintain supply lines while others served more clearly offensive or defensive purposes—but they were all designed to enable the projection of power and the expansion of U.S. influence.
If I’m right in arguing that there is more continuity here than is typically appreciated, research on modern U.S. military basing might more frequently turn to the pre-1898 period to consider how, for example, anti-base contestation and elite legitimization of basing arrangements manifested on the early American frontier. Similarities or differences in those earlier practices may help us to better understand practices of the more recent past and present.
Guest post by Marta Furlan
In 2014, the Houthis, a Zaydi Shia armed group from the Sa’ada region of northern Yemen, aligned with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had been removed following the Arab Spring uprisings. Together, they defeated the government led by President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, and established control over the Yemeni capital of Sana’a and the entirety of northern Yemen.
At that time, Iran began to progressively increase its support for the Houthis, seeing partnership with the group as an opportunity to advance its revisionist agenda in the region and establish its influence in the southern Red Sea, an area of immense strategic significance. Threatened by aggressive Iranian expansionism at its doorstep, in March 2015, Saudi Arabia entered the war alongside Hadi. As Iran sided with the Houthis and Saudi Arabia sided with Hadi, Yemen became the battlefield of both a domestic competition for power between different local factions and a regional competition for influence between Teheran and Riyadh.
The complexity that characterizes the Yemeni conflict is not unique. In the modern Middle East, countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Libya also experienced civil wars that developed into multi-layered conflicts involving local, regional, and international actors. In Syria, for instance, the confrontation initially involved the Assad regime, the secular opposition, a plethora of jihadist groups, and the Syrian Kurds. It grew, however, into a competition between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey over the regional status quo and a competition between the United States and Russia over influence in the Middle East. Despite the civil war scholarship suggesting that one-sided victories become harder with the passing of time, the Syrian conflict ended de facto with the one-sided victory of Bashar al-Assad, supported by Russia and Iran.
As far as Yemen is concerned, the conflict is still ongoing. A major development, however, occurred two weeks ago when Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to restore diplomatic ties and reopen embassies within two months, seven years after they severed relations. Following the signing of the agreement, which was brokered by China, questions emerged as to whether the deal might have positive implications for the war in Yemen.
Prospects aren’t promising. The conflict in Yemen is at its heart a civil war between Yemeni factions, which is driven by social and political tensions that emerged in Yemen following the country’s unification in May 1990. On the background of those tensions, the inception of the current conflict can truly be traced back to the early 2000s, when six rounds of confrontation saw the government and the Houthi movement fight each other in Sa’ada. Rather than being a simple binary confrontation between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government, the war in Yemen is a complex mosaic of multiple armed factions fighting against and, at times, alongside each other. Within the anti-Houthi camp, there is a significant degree of military and political fragmentation, with different militias harboring different interests and visions. Some of those include the Southern Transitional Council (STC); al-Islah; the National Resistance Forces led by Tareq Saleh; and the National Shield Force formed by Saudi Arabia.
A reconciliation between Iran and Saudi Arabia will not address the deep-rooted and long-harbored hostility between the Houthis and their opponents, nor will it address the tensions and differences that dominate the anti-Houthi camp. At the very best, the Saudi-Iranian détente will facilitate the bilateral talks that have been ongoing between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis. Those talks were initiated last October, when a six-month-long ceasefire expired, yet no side (Houthis, Saudi Arabia, the government) was willing to return to the battlefront amidst war fatigue. However, the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC, Yemen’s de facto government) has been excluded from the Houthi-Saudi negotiation table. Its exclusion inevitably makes any Houthi-Saudi deal that might be reached in the future with Iranian support hardly consequential for the country’s peace and stability.
Will Yemen see a one-sided victory, similar to what happened in Syria? That’s unlikely. The Houthis and the government-aligned forces reached a mutually damaging stalemate in Marib that left them all weaker. Under these circumstances, academic research suggests that the warring parties could either take steps toward a negotiated settlement or persist indefinitely in a costly, stalled conflict.
The regional dimension of the war might gradually be moving toward a negotiated settlement between the Houthis and Iran, on one hand, and Saudi Arabia, on the other. Pummelled by years of fighting, the Houthis and Saudi Arabia seem to view bilateral negotiations favorably. But the domestic dimensions of the war continue to evade any negotiated settlement between Houthis and the PLC and between different PLC-affiliated militias. As the civil war literature suggests, the trajectory of the conflict will depend on how those parties assess what they can gain or lose from fighting versus negotiating. As the Houthis appear once again determined to resort to force, prospects for peace do not look particularly encouraging.
Marta Furlan is a research and policy consultant at Auswärtiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office) in Germany.
Since marginalized communities tend to suffer disproportionately when governments make contemptible policy choices, it stands to reason that those communities might develop a heightened sensitivity about the merits of new policies. At the very least they have reason to cultivate a perspective and preferences that differ from people with resources (money, power, societal standing) to buffer them from the consequences of poor policy stewardship.
That perspective has a kernel of wise counsel.
There’s an abundance of evidence that policies ranging from de-industrialization since the 1970s to the “drug war” of the 1980s and 1990s to the pandemic response today dramatically harmed Black communities more than white or affluent ones. Same goes for the distribution of pain that comes with structural poverty and economic recessions.
But I’m thinking about foreign policy. Specifically, I have a hunch that Black Americans have a comparatively good bullshit detector about statecraft.
Why? Not because of anything innate or “biological,” but because of their historical experience in the United States and their overrepresentation in structural (and literal) violence as a consequence of US policy choices. Greater personal stakes means greater attentiveness to costs and risks, and therefore better judgment.
The caveat is that African Americans are far from monolithic, and that sometimes extends to how they view US foreign policy. The US decision to enter World War I was exceedingly controversial and regrettable, but even prominent Black intellectuals of the time saw the war as a chance to secure their place in American society by supporting it.
Black opinion about World War II—a war that offered some social mobility for African Americans—was more uniformly favorable. Even though it was a war of empire against empire, it was not only that, and the greater evil was clear enough to most.
In Vietnam, Black opinion was almost entirely critical of the war. Not only because Black Americans were being disproportionately drafted, court-martialed, and subsequently killed. And not only because, as Martin Luther King, Jr. decried, Congress used the cost of the Vietnam War as an excuse to cut anti-poverty programs that helped Black America.
But also because their quarrel was not with those seeking freedom abroad (the Vietnamese) but rather those denying their freedom at home (the Cold Warriors). As Muhammad Ali said in refusing to be drafted:
My enemy is the white people, not the Viet Cong or Chinese or Japanese. You’re my opposer when I want freedom. You’re my opposer when I want justice. You’re my opposer when I want equality.
And of course, Black Americans were mostly opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, even though, perversely, that war and the larger War on Terror construct gave Black Americans the chance at societal inclusion, so long as they became patriotic “terror warriors.” I was active duty Air Force during the early War on Terror years, and the only sustained critiques I was exposed to came from hip-hop.
So at the risk of oversimplifying, the Black community would have counseled in favor of World War II, against Vietnam, and against both Iraq and the War on Terror. Sounds like good judgment to me.
And yet the idea that the public—in whole or in part—is fit to judge foreign policy is alien to Washington.
By tradition, foreign policy is both an elite and elitist activity. The business of national security and diplomacy involves short reaction times, state secrets, bourgeoise social networks, and growing planetary complexity—all of which lends itself to elitism and technocracy. Foreign policy practitioners have long since taken a Lippmann-esque turn away from any conception of participatory democracy in foreign policy in favor an elite stewardship model that disavows the existence of a public mind or public will.
When I worked as a foreign policy practitioner, I recall having a haughty, dismissive attitude toward the public—much like my peers and superiors. I’ve since struggled with the problematic of how to do foreign policy in a way that makes it more participatory beyond just greater diversity in the diplomatic corps.
As the United States retools its economy and military to combat Russia, contain China, and prolong US global primacy, we find ourselves in another moment when US foreign policy is structuring the reality that the rest of us have to live within. One of several aspects that troubles me about all this “great-power competition” stuff is that it has proceeded entirely as a Washington-elite project. It has not answered to the public—to say nothing of the Black community—in any meaningful way.
In that context, I recorded an episode of my podcast with Christopher Shell at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was a wide-ranging discussion anchored in survey results of Black Americans’ views of the military, Ukraine policy, Taiwan, and US interventionism abroad. His findings told an interesting story that reveals gaps between Black American opinion and the overall thrust of US policy.
Black Americans have an overwhelmingly favorable view of the US military, but:
There’s much more than that in the data, and class position affects a lot of these views—the least economically secure tend to be opposed to war, which should not be surprising given what wars usually mean for those who are already hard up or oppressed.
Policy practitioners should be keenly attentive to what Black Americans think generally. It’s not just a matter of fidelity to an ideal of participatory democracy; there could be strategic merit to centering their perspective in the conduct of policies ostensibly done in their name. It might be a way of avoiding more Vietnams and Iraqs, or worse.
This is cross-posted at Van’s newsletter.
Twenty year recollections of the 2003 invasion of Iraq are popping up. Some are debating whether there were any positive outcomes from the war, others reflecting on what it meant for those who fought (on the US side) or suffered (on the Iraqi side). The Iraq war has played a big role in my career, but I wanted to talk about what it means for the liberal internationalist orientation to the world.
In the first lecture of my classes, I tell my students that the 9/11 attacks were my second week of college, and discuss what a big impact they had on my choice of career and research area. That’s true, but I really should talk about the Iraq war as well.
As the build up to the war began, my classmates and I at my isolated lefty college were shocked. How could anyone want to start a second war after just invading Afghanistan? How could anyone think Iraq had anything to do with 9/11? How could anyone believe this was a good idea?
I soon realized it didn’t matter what I thought. Conservative friends and family members were swept up in post-9/11 patriotism/panic.
Some have argued that neoconservative adventures like the Iraq war are the end result of liberal internationalism, and it should be abandoned
And then, during spring break, the war began. I watched in shock as the United States unleashed its might on Iraq. I was torn. I wasn’t one of those lefties who defended Saddam Hussein (we had some at my college). I wanted him gone. But even at 20 I knew this wasn’t the way to do it.
I continued with my plan to work in the US intelligence community while also pursuing scholarly studies. I got an internship with a defense contractor, was assigned to an intelligence agency. A few years into my career, I got accepted to a PhD program, was offered a promotion at my firm, and was offered a permanent job with the government agency. I went the PhD route (whether or not that was the right choice is the topic for another post).
I said this post wasn’t going to me about me, and I meant it. I gave this background to explain how I became involved in the bigger debate about the Iraq war: whether it invalidated liberal internationalism. While I was working in DC I also became part of a foreign policy group, the Truman National Security Project, meant to revive muscular liberal internationalism within the Democratic Party. I left after a few years, but the debates we had there stuck with me.
Liberal internationalism is a specific orientation towards the world. Advocates believe there is an international order that can be mutually beneficial. States should resolve disputes peacefully and multilaterally, through the United Nations and other international organizations. Human rights should trump narrow security interests. And states’ foreign policy should focus on upholding this international order.
Historically it had been tied to the US Democratic Party. This changed with the Bush Administration. A group of thinkers within the Republican party–growing out of the Reagan Administration’s aggressive anti-Soviet policies–sought to ensure US primacy while also defending democracy and human rights. They saw the response to 9/11 as a way to advance these goals, as signified in the 2002 National Security Strategy. Bush drew on similar language when justifying the Iraq War.
The Bush Administration’s use of liberal internationalist arguments to justify the Iraq War did trap some liberal internationalists. For example, the prominent liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff supported the Iraq War. This has given rise to the pejorative “liberal hawk” moniker-the claim that liberal internationalists are basically war-mongers. We’ve seen this deployed against Democratic figures like Hillary Clinton from both the left and the right.
As a result, some have argued that neoconservative adventures like the Iraq war are the end result of liberal internationalism, and it should be abandoned. To these policy thinkers, liberal internationalism is an “increasingly unsustainable grand strategy.” Others have gone further to question the validity or even the existence of a liberal international order, which liberal internationalism is meant to sustain.
But liberal internationalism is not dead.
First, Americans do not support an isolationist or restrained foreign policy. A 2019 report from the Center for American Progress found that US voters are “weary” of military interventions, but have not rejected American leadership in the world.
The irony is that many calling for restraint in US foreign policy for the sake of the world are as US-centric as liberal hawks.
Second, there is more to liberal internationalism than military interventions. This is what restrainers tend to suggest-that, since liberal internationalists tend to just be hawks a liberal internationalist grand strategy will lead to another Iraq war. And, to be fair, the liberal side isn’t helped when prominent members like Anne-Marie Slaughter praised Trump’s poorly-thought out air strikes on Syria. But there is a lot more to liberal internationalism- multilateralism, respect for human rights, upholding international institutions.
More importantly, those who assume the Iraq war damned liberal internationalism seem to ignore its relevance outside the United States. Many countries around the world look to the UN to reflect their views and advance their interests. This is why Trump’s decision to pull out of the UN Human Rights Council was concerning: other states take this, and other UN bodies, very seriously. The rest of the world–especially the Global South–has an interest in a robust UN, which only a liberal internationalist grand strategy can ensure.
Additionally, many countries depend on the liberal international order for support. The UN, while far from perfect, performs services no state can legitimately do on its own, such as supporting economic development, protecting cultural sites, and keeping the peace between combatants. Persistent security threat–like that of ISIS and other militant groups in the Sahel–require the international community’s assistance.
The irony, then, is that many calling for restraint in US foreign policy for the sake of the world are as US-centric as liberal hawks. They approach the relevance of liberal internationalism only in terms of whether America will invade another Middle Eastern country.
It gets a little tiresome when debate over US international action boils down to “but the Iraq war was bad.” Reducing the debate to pro/con military intervention makes it hard to effectively respond to crises, as arguably occurred in the Obama Administration’s response (or lack thereof) to the Syrian civil war. It also leads to poor analysis, such as when Middle East experts, viewing everything through the lens of another Iraq war, assumed that Saudi Arabia would pull America into a war with Iran.
But liberal internationalists are also at fault. They’re attached to US primacy, from Madeleine Albright’s invocation of America as the “indispensable nation” to Joe Biden’s foreign policy promise to “place America at the head of the table.” They seem obsessed with looking tough–which I suspect is behind the cheerleading of air strikes. They haven’t figured out a way to support human rights and a robust US international presence while also criticizing the Iraq War.
And that is the issue. Liberal internationalism is still viable, and much of the world depends on America’s continued support of this grand strategy. But US foreign policy debates revolve around that horrific and illegal invasion of March 20th, 2003, rather than the full set of policies we could adopt.
UPDATE: Edited to fix a typo
Guest post by Mark Nieman and Doug Gibler
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine set off a security spiral in Europe. Despite US President Biden’s pledge to “defend every inch of NATO territory,” Poland increased its military budget by a whopping 60 percent and asked to have US nuclear weapons based on its territory. Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia also announced sizable defense increases, with Latvia re-instating compulsory military training.
Why didn’t Biden’s pledge reassure these NATO members? Is the alliance’s famed Article 5 promise—that an attack on one member is an attack on all—a less than ironclad guarantee?
NATO is an unprecedented and unique organization of formidable military might. It is also an alliance made up of democracies, which are generally considered more reliable alliance partners: they form more lasting alliance commitments, and honor them at higher rates than autocracies. So why then are the NATO members most vulnerable to Russian aggression also the most skeptical about NATO’s commitment to defend them?
Democracies are often put on a pedestal. It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged among scholars of international relations that democratic countries are qualitatively different from authoritarian regimes—nicer, better, and more cooperative—especially when they interact with one another. Democracies do not fight wars against other democracies, though they are just as likely to fight autocracies as autocracies fight one another. Democracies are more likely to win the wars they do fight. And democracies are more likely to trade with other democracies.
But our research suggests that what drives the effectiveness of alliance isn’t democracy or shared values. Our recent article in The Journal of Politics shows that alliance reliability is driven by strategic geopolitical context and opportunities to renege, rather than domestic institutions.
What exactly would make democratic countries any more reliable allies than autocracies? Standard arguments focus on the nature of democratic norms and institutions, often pointing to their legalistic culture, foreign policy stability, or concern for international reputation. All of these explanations are valid, and many have been backed with sound empirical analysis. But they miss a key difference between democracies and autocracies: geography. A quick glance at a map reveals heavy geographical concentration among democratic countries. What distinguishes these areas of concentration—Western Europe, in particular—is a long history of violent conflict, which, once resolved, has been followed by a long history of peace. The geographical areas of concentration of authoritarian countries, in contrast, are characterized by periods of relative peace, followed by continuous or intermittent violence. This violence often centers around a small set of unresolved contentious issues, with those related to conflicting territorial claims being the most violent.
This geopolitical context matters for tests of alliance reliability: alliances are most likely to be called upon and violated when their geopolitical environment is hostile. In contrast, alliances in peaceful environments are less likely to be called upon, so they are less likely to be broken. So while democracies might appear to be better alliance partners, this is only because their commitments are rarely tested. Indeed, peaceful environments may themselves produce democratic counties. Without the threat of attack by a neighbor, states can devote fewer resources to the military, concentration of power devolves, and focus more on economic development and diversification. Threatening environments, in contrast, encourage greater militarization and power concentration, increasing the prospects of a garrison state and authoritarian regimes. To paraphrase Charles Tilly, war makes the state, but it is much more likely to make an authoritarian state than a democratic one.
In short, once the geopolitical environment is accounted for, democracies have the same reliability as other types of regimes. Instead, it is the strategic environment that seems to best predict whether alliances are honored: the riskier the environment, the more likely allies are to abrogate their commitments.
So are Finland and Sweden right to rush their NATO accession in response to the threat of Russian aggression? Will a formal membership make them safer than a mere promise? Yes, but this answer has nothing to do with the virtues of democracies. Alliances deter aggression, but they do so through the aggregation of capabilities rather than any enhanced commitments stemming from the domestic institutions of its members. Shared democratic institutions did not prevent France from abandoning Czechoslovakia in 1938. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given rise to similar fears of abandonment among NATO’s eastward members. These countries rightfully question whether Germany and France would come to their defense should they become the next target of Russian aggression.
Unable to trust their democratic allies, Eastern European countries are openly calling for assurance from NATO’s long-standing bedrock, the US. When push comes to shove, NATO’s junior partners are smart to not put their faith in a piece of paper and demand more tangible acts of support, such as troop deployments, training, and arms transfers. A promise, even by a democratic state, must be backed by action.
Mark Nieman is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Trinity College at the University of Toronto, and an affiliate of the Data Sciences Institute. Doug Gibler is a Professor of Political Science in the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Alabama.
If American leftists take seriously their commitment to self-rule and loathing of foreign aggression, they should shed their ambivalence about supporting Ukraine.
Guest post by Alexandra Byrne, Zoha Siddiqui, and Kelebogile Zvobgo
Haitian officials and world leaders are calling for an armed humanitarian intervention backed by the United Nations (UN) to defeat organized crime. Gangs in Haiti have reportedly kidnapped and killed hundreds of civilians and displaced thousands. Gangs are also limiting access to fuel and blocking critical humanitarian aid to civilians. Add to this a resurgence of cholera.
The United States asked the UN Security Council in October to approve a targeted intervention, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield underscored “extreme violence and instability” in Haiti and proposed a mission led by a “partner country” (not the United States or UN peacekeeping forces).
There is nominal support for the mission. In the coming weeks, Canada will send naval vessels to Haiti’s coast, and Jamaica has offered some troops, but no country is taking the lead. Critics argue that past missions in Haiti did more harm than good. In 2010, UN peacekeepers even reintroduced cholera into Haiti. Nonetheless, the United States is pushing for an intervention.
What is an armed humanitarian intervention and would it be legal under international law? Here’s what you need to know.
An armed humanitarian intervention is a use of force to protect, maintain, or restore peace and security in a target country and internationally. Armed humanitarian interventions differ from ordinary military operations because they aim to protect populations from severe human rights abuses.
Past armed humanitarian interventions achieved limited success in places like Somalia, where troops initially stabilized the country but failed to improve the country’s security environment long-term.
Armed interventions fundamentally clash with state sovereignty—the idea that states control activities within their territories—because they can be conducted without the target state’s consent. While sovereignty is important in international law, it can nevertheless be sidestepped to stop atrocities and restore international peace.
The prevailing law on international interventions is the UN Charter, which binds all UN member states. Chapter VII of the charter governs international interventions and comprises thirteen key articles. Article 39 establishes that the Security Council may determine when international peace and security are breached or threatened. The article also gives the council authority to take all necessary measures to restore peace.
The remaining articles elaborate on those measures. Article 41 authorizes actions “not involving the use of armed force,” such as economic sanctions, while Article 42 permits “action by air, sea, or land forces.”
So, the Security Council decides whether, how, and why state sovereignty may be infringed, including through the use of force. States may only use force without council authorization in response to an armed attack, under Article 51, but they must still notify the council.
Security Council-authorized interventions may be conducted by UN peacekeeping forces or by UN member states’ troops. (Regional armed interventions require approval under Chapter VIII, Article 53.)
The Security Council has not always authorized armed humanitarian interventions, notably failing to prevent genocide in the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s. To avoid repeating those failures, the UN in 2005 adopted the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle.
R2P delegates to all states the responsibility to protect all people from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Under R2P, the international community must be prepared to take collective action through the Security Council “should peaceful means be inadequate,” a line taken from Chapter VII.
R2P was invoked once in Kenya, not to justify armed intervention, but to rally international mediation. R2P was also used in Côte d’Ivoire to deploy additional UN peacekeeping forces. (These forces completed their mandate in 2017.) One of the largest military actions authorized by the Security Council under R2P was the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, which has since been criticized for poor planning, increasing instability, and pushing regime change.
Possible Legal Armed Intervention in Haiti
If the US resolution for an armed humanitarian intervention in Haiti is approved by the Security Council, the operation would be legal and, if it focused solely on humanitarian objectives (i.e., opening aid delivery channels, providing aid, and protecting civilians), it could succeed. Still, there is the risk of failure. A more ambitious plan, seeking to change the country’s overall security environment, could also fail, as in Somalia.
But even if the intervention complied with international law and was invited by Haitian officials, critics argue it would be unethical, undermining Haitians’ sovereignty.
If the United States fails to gain Security Council support for an armed humanitarian intervention in Haiti, there are other measures available. The United States can increase the humanitarian aid it already provides, and provide tactical equipment and armored vehicles to the government. The Biden administration could also reverse recently expanded immigration restrictions, and instead provide asylum to Haitian migrants while also supporting struggling transit countries.
For its part, the Security Council could expand the economic sanctions and arms embargoes it adopted against criminal actors in Haiti. But such measures take time to implement and might not be felt for months.
The biggest challenge to mitigating the crisis in Haiti is the gangs that are blocking the delivery of food, fuel, and medical supplies to civilians. The challenge for the United States and the broader international community is to not repeat past mistakes—either by intervening too little, too late, or too much.
Alexandra Byrne is a research fellow in the International Justice Lab at William & Mary. Zoha Siddiqui is a 1693 scholar, a research fellow in the International Justice Lab at William & Mary, and an incoming George J. Mitchell Scholar at Queen’s University Belfast. Kelebogile Zvobgo is an assistant professor of government at William & Mary, a faculty affiliate at the Global Research Institute, and founder and director of the International Justice Lab.
By Timothy Sisk
The row between International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over potential Russian and Belarussian athlete participation at Paris 2024 exposes the Achilles’ Heel of the Olympic Games: the peace-promising celebrations are inescapably ensnared in nation-state power politics.
The IOC announced on January 25 a proposal to facilitate participation in the 2024 Olympic Games for individual athletes from Russia (and close ally Belarus) individually and neutrally in the Paris games. The statement reversed an IOC Executive Board decision from February 28, 2022, to impose more sweeping participation sanctions on Russia following the Ukraine invasion.
The International Paralympic Committee announced on January 23 that it would “follow” the IOC decision for the paralympic events, with President Andrew Parsons noting that “We wish to reiterate that we hope and pray that the conflict comes to an end, that no more lives are taken, and that we can run sports and politics separately.” Parsons gave a rousing denunciation of the Ukraine invasion from the podium in his opening-ceremonies speech as the Russian tanks rolled toward Kyiv, demanding “dialogue and diplomacy, not war and hate.”
The potential of Russian athletes participating at the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris while the horrors and war crimes unleashed by Russia in Ukraine and documented by a United Nations independent commission continue to unfold would constitute, Zelensky said, “a manifestation of violence.” Addressing a February 10 meeting of 35 foreign ministers convened to consider a boycott if Russians were to appear in the Olympic arena, he said, “If the Olympic sports were killings and missile strikes, then you know which national team would occupy the first place.” Reversing her earlier stance, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said she supports Zelensky’s call and journeyed to Kyiv on February 9 in solidarity.
Olympic powerhouses including the US, UK, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand together with Nordic and Baltic states are drawing a line in the beach-volleyball sand against Russian and Belarussian participation at Paris. Some want to allow for a “dissident team” from these countries to be formed.
In a slope-side appearance at the World Alpine Skiing Championships in Courchevel on February 12, Bach defended the IOC’s position: “No, history will show who is doing more for peace.”
The IOC’s approach to addressing the thorny question of Russian participation in the 2024 Games is similar to the sporting world’s response to the sprawling Russian state-sponsored doping scandal and cover-up when it hosted the 2014 winter games in Sochi. In December 2019, the World Anti-Doping Agency slapped a set of four-year sanctions on Russia, including banning Russian teams from Olympic-related events, barring use of its flag and anthem, and imposing diplomatic and other sanctions. Athletes could participate but could not represent Russia as such, but rather the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC).
No worries for Russia, however, as the ROC and individual athletes easily evaded the athlete-representation sanctions. The uniforms of the Russian athletes at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games were fashion-forward, black splashed with the colors of the Russian flag. Nancy Armour writes in USA Today Sports that in Tokyo 2020 (which happened in 2021, delayed by the pandemic), 45 of the Russians’ 71 medals were won by members of the Russian Army’s Central Sports Club, according to the Ukrainian foreign ministry. Russian gymnast Ivan Kuliak was slapped by the International Gymnastics Union with a year-long ban for “shocking behavior” for sporting on his chest the invasion-related “Z” symbol on the podium standing next to a Ukrainian athlete (Kuliak won bronze; the Ukrainian, Illia Kovtun, won gold).
Despite rules against political speech, athletes are increasingly turning to tattoos, nail polish, hairstyles, and other clever non-verbal ways to communicate patriotism while staying just inside the non-political appearance rules of the IOC and the sport federations. Symbols are amorphous and consistently changing, so the IOC wages a Sisyphean struggle to contain political speech within the Olympic arena. In the run-up to Tokyo 2020, following the recommendations of the IOC’s Athletes Commission, the Executive Board reformulated its Rule 50.2 code on athlete political speech to allow more personal political speech outside its venues, ostensibly to prevent future “Black Power”-type salutes from the podium as courageously seen in the 1968 Mexico City games.
The IOC appears to see national de-identification as a way to cope with its Achilles’ Heel vulnerability to power politics. It touts the idea of a modern-day Olympic Truce similar to that found in the ancient Greek Olympics, on which the modern spectacle is at best loosely based; the truce allowed athletes to travel to the festivals unimpeded.
The IOC and sport federation bodies need the Russia participation question to be resolved soon, as qualifying events for Paris 2024 are in motion around the world. But the row continues. The Olympic Council of Asia has apparently invited Russian and Belarussian gymnastics and wrestling athletes to qualify through its auspices, while two United Nations special rapporteurs have backed the IOC approach on the basis of athlete human rights.
Russia’s February 2022 invasion rendered any Olympic truce a scrap of paper. The Kremlin unleashed the deadly operation on Kyiv just days before the Opening Ceremonies of the 2022 Beijing Paralympic Winter Games. In the year since, a reported 228 Ukrainian athletes and coaches have been killed.
In waging war while the Olympic flame burns, Russia is a serial offender: its military invaded Georgia in the period between the 2008 Olympic and paralympic events, and then seized the Crimean peninsula in 2014, in a similar window between these events.
The close association of the Olympic Games with the power politics of nation-states may well explain why the IOC, its president, nor any global sports body or figure have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in its 121-year history roughly commensurate with the Olympics. (The Prize was won by an Olympic medalist in 1959—UK diplomat Philip Noel-Baker—but not for his Olympic achievement; the Norwegian Nobel Committee cited his disarmament efforts).
The power-politics Achilles’ Heel of the Olympics disables its potential for furthering international peace. For how sport might contribute to peace, one must look elsewhere in youth-based development and peacebuilding programs, in the public good work of celebrity and everyday athletes, coaches, and humanitarian organizations, or in the Olympic Refugee Team which debuted in Rio 2016 that allows athletes displaced abroad to participate.
Beyond the Olympic Refugee Team, it is time for any athlete as an individual to have a path to qualifying for the Olympic Games with no broader representation of national identity beyond legal citizenship. Such a step might begin to free the Olympics from its disabling ensnarement in the power politics of nation-states and begin to give meaning to the right of individuals to participate in global sport outside of truce-destroying nation-states.
One year ago, Russia launched an illegal war on Ukraine, committing horrific war crimes against the people of Ukraine. Analyses and memorials abound, and I’m probably not the only person writing about this on the Duck today.
I wanted to address a specific aspect of this war, though: why Russia’s carefully cultivated ties with far-right forces in Western Europe and the United States failed to undermine Western opposition to the war.
Last year, as Russia was about to launch its invasion of Ukraine, I was finishing a chapter on Russia in my new book. The book, forthcoming with Cornell University Press, explores how states use religious appeals as a tool in power politics (Religious Appeals in Power Politics is the working title).
As Goddard and Nexon discussed in an article on power politics—or the efforts to form or break apart international coalitions—states use more than just military and economic tools. They also turn to cultural and symbolic instruments of power. Appeals to religion—shared faith, shared religiosity—I argue, are one such instrument of power.
One chapter looks at Saudi appeals to Islam to form an anti-Egyptian alliance in the 1960s. Another explores US appeals to “moderate Islam” and religious engagement in the Global War on Terrorism. One includes brief discussions of several other cases, such as China’s Confucius Institutes, the Pope’s mobilization against military intervention in Syria, and the early 2000s border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand.
The chapter that ended up being most relevant to current events, however, is the one on Russia.
Putin has expressed desire to control his “near abroad” connected to Russia as former Soviet states and ethnic Russian ties; this is often referred to as the Russky Mir, or Russian world. As part of this, he fostered ties with far-right groups in the West, presenting Russia as a like-minded power.
Some refers to these efforts as “civilizational,” “sharp power,” “soft power,” or “traditional values” (for my related complaint about the stretching of the term soft power, see my article in International Studies Perspectives).
I prefer to call them what they are: religious appeals (I have a whole other post planned about scholars and policy experts’ allergy to just calling religion religion). For example, in a December 2013 speech, Putin pushed back on Western criticism of Russia’s anti-LGBTQ laws, attacking the West for “treating good and evil equally;” he argued that Russia’s “traditional family values” were “the foundation of Russia’s greatness and a bulwark against ‘so-called tolerance.’”
These religious appeals seemed to have worked. US conservatives see Putin as a defender of “traditional Christian values.” Far-right forces in Europe see Putin as a defender of “true” Western values.
But this hoped-for transnational far-right coalition didn’t fracture the West and give Putin an easy victory in Ukraine. Western European states, which had struggled to unite on many issues, came together to oppose Putin’s victory. Many Orthodox figures criticized Putin.
So what happened?
Some could argue this shows that cultural and symbolic instruments of power (we need a better name for that) like religious appeals ultimately matter less than material concerns. Western Europe is militarily threatened by Russia’s aggression, so even right-leaning figures won’t support Putin.
This is partly true. As I argue in the book, religious appeals’ effects depend on the interaction between the credibility of their wielder and the material incentives facing the target. I based this on Busby’s work on moral movements in foreign policy.
It could also just be bad timing (for Putin). If Putin had invaded Ukraine while Trump was still the U.S. President (or if Trump had won in 2020) the outcome may have been much different. Trump and his allies have been much more antagonistic towards Ukraine, so the US-led aid to Ukraine may not have materialized.
But I’d argue (and expand on this in the book) that it has to do with the nature of religious appeals themselves.
Religion is a powerful force (it’s hard to find a good single article overview, but you could read my summary of research on religion and terrorism). This makes it a useful tool when it mobilizes domestic publics or persuades leaders to change their policies.
But this power also makes it unwieldy and unpredictable.
Religion increases the stakes of any interaction (just think of that old joke about never discussing religion and politics at dinner). Religious arguments are complex, and can easily be reinterpreted to suit conflicting interests or even turned back on their originator. And conventional statecraft tends to be based on secular language, so religious appeals are confusing and produce uncertainty.
In my book, I break slightly with Busby, and argue that the intermediate combinations of material incentives and credibility still matter.
Material incentives to cooperate combined with a lack of credibility on religious appeals (the situation during the US Global War on Terrorism), produce convenient coalitions that can easily fall apart or be redirected against the interests of the originator. Credibility on religious appeals combined with material disincentives to cooperate lead to a tense, unsettled situation in which the appeals roil international relations.
I’d suggest this is what happened with Putin’s religious appeals, and explains their limited effect on the Ukraine war.
First, they still had some effect. As I discussed above, Putin did gain some political benefits from his appeals. And there are lower-level benefits he’s still enjoying. The recent arrest of a German government agent spying for Russia seems to be tied to his right-wing views. It’s likely Putin’s appeals generated sympathy and made it easier to recruit him.
Moreover, Putin’s appeals may have led some to sympathize with Russia, but they increased mistrust of Russia among many others. U.S. Democrats previously supported engagement with Russia, but they have grown increasingly hawkish on such efforts. Moreover, some of the opposition to Putin has drawn on appeals to Western values, suggesting part of the reaction has to do with Putin’s religious appeals.
Putin’s failure to break apart Western opposition to the war on Ukraine prevented the easy victory he hoped for. This failure arguably occurred due to the issues arising from religious appeals in power politics. I’d even argue that if Putin had stuck to conventional geopolitical discussions, Western mistrust would have been more minimal (he may have lost domestic support, but that’s another post).
We shouldn’t relax yet, however.
If it is true that the German spy is tied to right-wing parties, and if he was radicalized through Putin’s religious appeals, this is cause for concern. Even if Putin’s religious appeals never form a durable pro-Russian coalition, they will continue to disrupt and roil Western politics.
David Pierson at The New York Times:
While many in the world see the Chinese spy balloon as a sign of Beijing’s growing aggressiveness, China has sought to cast the controversy as a symptom of the United States’ irrevocable decline.
Why else would a great power be spooked by a flimsy inflatable craft, China has argued, if not for a raft of internal problems like an intensely divided society and intractable partisan strife driving President Biden to act tough on Beijing?
This gets at why “the balloon incident” genuinely scares me; it suggests that the United States is doomed to the ratchet effects of domestic outbidding over who can be “tougher” on China.
That’s a recipe for threat inflation, poor policy decisions, and (even more) toxic domestic politics.
The government of Guam has appointed a Commission on Decolonization, but U.S. control means that all of the island’s options, including the status quo, have substantial downsides.
What follows is my general philosophy on China issues, by way of answering the hardest of hard defense framing questions regarding China. After my most recent piece in Foreign Affairs, I got a note from a semi-prominent friend in Washington’s foreign policy community basically praising it but also posing some tough questions about China policy. In my view they’re the wrong questions. But we’ve known each other a long time, and my response, I think, might be useful for others to consider. So I’ve anonymized bits but otherwise include the entire note below.
Hey [anonymized],
[some anonymized stuff]
I know that generally speaking we have very different projects going these days, so was pleasantly surprised by this generous note. I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear both that you too can see the discourse getting disturbingly slanted and that you find my Foreign Affairs arguments largely on target. My ego thanks you :).
I agree too with your general point—vibrant debate seems like a missing check on shitty foreign policy decisions, and the inability for substantive debate to even occur ensures we keep drawing bad lots (not sure debate solves things, but its absence creates hella problems).
It’s probably clear enough by now that I think competition is the wrong—or at least a conceptually muddled and self-harming—way to deal with China, so I suppose that doesn’t need belaboring. I certainly get that the drive to one-up, counter, check, and now contain the Big Bad responds to some valid concerns.
But I guess one of the problems I see is that I think only some of the concerns are valid while most are inflated or unfounded.
Even where valid concerns exist, I have a hard time seeing how the policy toolkit that gets deployed in the name of competition actually addresses them. Washington has a China-fetish problem, and if my personal experience is any indicator, it owes partly to the fact that China (and now Ukraine) allows deflection from having to face incongruities and contradictions in the DC worldview.
Not that China and Ukraine are issues unworthy of attention and response; only that they facilitate deflection. Perhaps too meta for an email but I increasingly see liberal internationalism as an ideology that externalizes—rather than confronts—our problems as Americans, which has much to do with why I’m so invested in conjuring up alternative policy vistas.
On your question about China’s military build-up, you’re not wrong to see it as kind of orthogonal to the Foreign Affairs piece. And I get that for the Beltway, handling the military questions is the Sinatra test (or maybe a hoop test, actually), if you will, for an alternative foreign policy paradigm—if your policy agenda has a sellable theory for how to account for and respond to PLA (People’s Liberation Army) modernization, then it’s unquestionably the better alternative to the status quo.
That’s a high bar, of course. To engage on your terrain directly, I’ll try to respond to each of your questions explicitly.
I believe this is an imprecise way to view the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait. The correlation of forces shifted unfavorably back when we were still in the Pentagon and we’ve been living with that ever since. Like, when was the last time we could claim to assert air superiority around Taiwan?
The PLA’s naval boom is a real thing, and to that extent you can say things are shifting, but its significance is marginal compared to the integrated air defenses (IADs) and deep-strike/long-range standoff problems that predate naval expansion.
I don’t see how we can establish sea control or sea denial while bracketing off both nuclear escalation and air superiority, and air superiority is something we gave up when we decided the scenario should be inside the ring range of China’s IADs (and Taiwan contingencies will always be inside Chinese IAD range).
All of that is a detailed way of saying that the most dramatic shift in the balance of power in specifically the Taiwan Strait happened some time ago.
The reason that matters is because we’ve been living with an unfavorable correlation of forces in that specific place and it’s been ok because the calculation of the balance is a separate analytical question from the meaning of the balance at any given point. It’s distinct from China’s revisionism or willingness to use force, is only an input into (not a determinant of) questions of deterrence, and how stabilizing or destabilizing it is depends entirely on how we respond to it.
Responding with a qualitative arms race achieves nothing.
I imagine you know all this, and I suppose you could say I’m still skirting the question, “So what is to be done about the shifted/shifting balance of power?” My answer to that is that we must show a degree of both creativity and restraint in military force structure and regional force posture that we’ve been unwilling to even consider.
How does that cash out? Many ways, the most obvious being to shelve the trillion-dollar nuclear modernization project, gaming out a “forward balancing” strategy, or embracing buckpassing to regional allies, including Taiwan, while drawing up more limited-aims contingency scenarios that don’t require striking the Chinese mainland. We’re already proliferating conventional weapons to allies—no reason to pay the steep price of US primacy while doing that.
And to be clear, what I’m describing is just the military level—to make even these alternatives work requires a larger project of statecraft aimed at changing the relational context of Sino-US rivalry, which was the thrust of my post-primacy Foreign Affairs take.
I don’t actually believe that you can take the narrow analytical question of the Taiwan Strait balance apart from the larger ecology of great-power relations and regional order—these things affect each other in major ways.
More broadly, any answer to “What is to be done?” in response to your question must be based on a theory of why the PLA is modernizing. Most/all prescriptions in DC lack a theory of PLA modernization, which makes them inherently unpersuasive and dangerous.
Like, intellectually people know the Wikipedia realities about China’s bureaucratic production of doctrine and forces, but there’s nothing in that or the US force structure response to PLA modernization that resolves the fundamental problems that follow from the already-shifted balance of power in the Taiwan Strait.
And look, the PLA’s gonna do what PLA’s gonna do—I’m not under any illusion that if we disembowel ourselves militarily that they will follow suit.
But we have a large margin of advantage outside of Taiwan, and it seems rather obvious that they’re indexing their modernization goals against our ever-modernizing military capabilities from our position of ongoing global advantage.
I mean, does anyone think PLA modernization has nothing to do with its primary competitor’s absurdist levels of military capabilities and defense spending? Acknowledging that some of what they do responds to what we do is crucial (and part of what I’m trying to get at in Pacific Power Paradox).
It means that we have to spend more effort weighing the tradeoffs between war optimization and war avoidance. The prevailing discourse is almost entirely the former without recognizing how it undermines the latter.
Finally, while this is a very reasonable question, it’s worth reiterating that we retain a favorable balance of power almost everywhere in the world except the Taiwan Strait (we can quibble about the East and South China Seas but they’re lesser included cases).
So we enjoy a kind of unchallengeable military dominance relative to other powers basically everywhere except this one place—and that’s the one place we obsess about because it logically stands between us and the claim to unfettered global military dominance. We have to learn to live with not dominating, which is asking a lot given the culture we come from. I firmly believe that dominance is, in the final analysis, never sustainable and always counterproductive.
The left disagrees about this. I’m of the view that we should not be passive if China tries to take over Taiwan so long as Taiwan’s people resist Chinese encroachment. Never fully relent to an oppressor. But two things.
One, we have to hold an anti-oppression standard consistently, not just in Taiwan, which means we have some soul-searching to do when it comes to everything from Guam’s self-determination to Palestine to siding with neofascists abroad to how Black communities get policed and starved of capital in America. This shit is connected.
More than that, invoking any kind of principle in defense of Taiwan that’s not extended beyond Taiwan gives the lie to what we’re doing. Living by principles means not being hypocritical in how you operationalize them.
Two, circling back to Taiwan specifically, how to resist, where to push back, and how hard to push back if China tried to do the Hong Kong re-colonization move to Taiwan depends on context.
Right now, Wang Huning is coming up with an alternative theory for a post-“One Country, Two Systems” world, because China now recognizes that the Hong Kong model has been discredited. I don’t believe we can really think through what to do with defense policy on China apart from knowing how China’s new Taiwan policy will shake out.
But as a general commitment, unless we’re absolute monsters, we must take the path of least-harm for Taiwan, so if what we do leads to nuclear war, well, that would violate the least-harm principle since that would be pretty bad for Taiwan. And resistance need not always (or necessarily ever) take the form of conventional military operations or a five-phase military campaign.
Basically yes, but with caveats. What they do depends on what we do—international relations is relational, even if we insist on analyzing it as if it were not.
My view is that under a previous status quo (say, circa 2017), China was unlikely to take any military aggression against Taiwan so long as Taiwan didn’t formally declare independence. Under current rivalry conditions, which are increasingly bleak, it seems clear enough to me that China is actively deterred from invading Taiwan militarily, though I think our policies are actively incentivizing China toward more of a coercive signaling posture.
A blockade would be at the more extreme end of possible Chinese actions, but as you know from previous convos about US distant blockade options, that’s a hard posture for any great power to sustain and the juice needs to be worth the squeeze.
I think the view of people like M. Taylor Fravel need to be taken seriously here—China is deterred from overt aggression under the status quo, but if we do things that lead them to conclude that war is inevitable, there’s nothing we can do to dissuade or deter them.
That means the situation across the Strait is basically a security dilemma. And if that’s true, well, what’s the way out of a security dilemma? Lots of folks smarter than us have weighed in here.
The answer then becomes restraint. Carrots over sticks. Reassurances. A whole package of policies and signals meant to convey not a willingness to nuke the world but rather our conditionally benign intentions. Including showing that we prioritize war prevention over war preparation. But the thing is, do we have benign intentions?
Hard to say, depends on who’s steering policy…
I don’t think that’s a realistic scenario. And I don’t think we would ever have to stop agitating in support of Taiwan’s self-determination, even if China were to successfully occupy the place.
But if we make those giant assumptions anyway, this is where I think a lot of the geopoliticians are showing their asses. “If Taiwan falls, then Japan falls” is the most unreasonable, unfalsifiable assertion you could ever make prior to Taiwan “falling,” and with the highest stakes. It has traction because its simplicity flatters those looking for solutions to problems that don’t require looking at what we do, or how what we do affects what they do.
It’s the same bullshit formulation as domino theory, or as the claim of “swing states” and “pivot points” on the map. I tend to see those as seductive grifter claims that ignore the most important aspects of international relations. But YMMV.
Asia is full of states that will organically resist (and some are currently resisting!) anything resembling Chinese hegemonic ambitions. An Asia in which China “has” Taiwan (which, again, is a premise I protest) will not be more fractious than the Asia we’re making now in real-time.
I have an academic article (open access) that just came out trying to address this. It’s not anchored in defense policy, but you might find it of interest, or at least it will give you a better a sense of where I’m coming from.
I don’t know what you think about any of this—I know I’ve gone on for a long time—but these are not simple questions. And they were worthy of a serious though-through response. [some anonymized stuff]
Best,
Van
This is cross-posted at Van’s newsletter.
FreshRSS 