The following has been excerpted from a much longer paper that contained fairly lengthy case studies on the history and feasibility of employing space weapons. I intend to detail the idea of the international interest more fully soon, but those wishing to skip to the theoretical upshot of practical arguments (the purpose of the paper) can find them in the last three paragraphs. —a.j. mount
The technological advancement that motivated arms races during the Cold War takes a different meaning in the age of American hegemony. Prior to the Cold War, advanced technology could be applied militarily to gain major tactical and strategic advantage that altered the characteristics of the international system. During the Cold War, the destructive potential of military technology made it unusable. In the age of American hegemony, we might well find that its characteristics may even make advanced weaponry un-developable. This happens in two ways. First, the liberal character of American hegemony permits—even invites—the claims and preferences of other countries to affect U.S. security policy by promoting change in the character of anarchy, and a denser normative environment. Both of these factors mean that deploying radical and threatening technologies becomes socially more difficult. Secondly, technological progress creates dynamics of deterrence and compellence unique in human history by a) creating the possibility and incentives for acute asymmetric warfare, if it came to that; b) deepening our modern dependence on technological assets for business, communications, and security, which creates unique dynamics whereby dual use technologies become vital national interests.
It is fairly clear that other great powers have not made this choice to balance the United States: U.S. behavior is not generally seen understood as threatening. Indeed, much of the behavior realists identify as soft balancing may not be directed at the United States but is simply acquisition of autonomous capacities, for which they may have previously depended on the United States. The advanced ascendant space programs around the world detailed in the second section are cases in point. {…}
The natural implication is that while common action taken for communal purposes gives potential balancing countries a stake in American hegemony, American pursuit of relative gains and reservation of parochial security systems promotes dissenting behavior. The alternative to pursuing relative gains is to develop either common multilateral capacity or, most crucially, a unilateral capacity directed toward civilizational goals. Just as Pape is incorrect to imply that multilateralism is intrinsically benign—aggressive behavior can be multilateral, especially for the global unipole—unilateralism is not intrinsically unsettling to other countries. For example, Pape submits that the unipole’s pursuit of relative gains is likely to incite balancing. America’s unilateral scientific space programs have produced relative gains in the form of technological externalities and dual-use abilities, but there seems to be something unique about space exploration that is not reducible to the benefits that accrue from access to space, technological externalities, and dual-use capacities. Indeed, we can see civilian space exploration as a sort of public good: sending the Voyager probes into deep space or the Mars landers to roam the surface of that planet do not serve American interests except insofar as they lend experience in constructing and testing space launch and advanced robotics. Indeed, the United States does not undertake space exploration for simple material benefits; we explore space to advance human knowledge, not just American knowledge: the exploration of space advances civilization, not the United States. No nation feels threatened by American civilian space programs.
We can therefore call a global hegemon that acts to advance civilizational goals, rather than parochial ones, a progressive hegemon.
The point in all this is that the practical upshot of processes of subjective interpretation of threat have not been fully articulated for U.S. foreign policy. The implication of a subjective concept of security is that actions and perceptions that would be considered irrational and confused affect U.S. security in meaningful ways. For example, even though an American Ground-based Midcourse Defense or a global long-rod penetrator capability launched from a satellite network would not improve the United State’s offensive or defensive capacities nearly as much as continued work on conventional missile and bombing abilities, it is the former that are incurring stronger reactions and so decreasing American security. Likewise, U.S. policymakers should be wary of perceived utility of novel weapons systems that would yield little practical benefit. Prospective actions should be evaluated for how they are perceived around the world: procurement or deployment decisions face not only financial but also social costs and the competent management of hegemony requires the management of perception at least as much as the management of power balance. And because international norms are also normative prescriptions about behavior, the United States will have to consider international standards for moral conduct.
These ruminations are not conceivable in terms of either realist or liberal foreign policy traditions but require a separate conception built around an idea of a socially constituted international interest. Spinning out this concept fully recommends a number of interesting policy postures, some of which I have hinted at here, some of which I will, and some I will not—but foremost among is a force posture analogous to that seen in offshore balancing, a shift to what I have called tacit deterrence, respect for what Rawls called reasonable nonliberal peoples, and, above all, the practice of progressive hegemony.
Filed under: Theory, the next order , Offshore balancing, modesty, progressive hegemony, TII, law of peoples
