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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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