A Theory of Change

Today, as we steer a new course at the United Nations, our guiding principles are clear: We value the U.N. as a vehicle for advancing U.S. policies and priorities, and universal values…We work for change from within rather than criticizing from the sidelines. We stand firm in defense of America’s interests and values, but we don’t dissent just to be contrary. We listen to states great and small. We build coalitions. We meet our responsibilities. We pay our bills. We push for real reform. And we remember that in an interconnected world, what’s good for others is often good for America as well.

—UN Ambassador Susan Rice, speaking today at NYU.

Brian

Filed under: Grand Strategy, International Organization, Liberalism, Practicing Politics, Who We Are, the next order

Why not unilateral disarmament?

George Perkovich and James Acton, who have recently and rightfully positioned themselves at the forefront of the new nuclear abolitionists, have a piece in the most recent Bulletin that rebuts certain caricatures of the mature disarmament position. The strongest thread that comes out of the piece is this: ‘as long as other states have nuclear weapons, the United States should maintain a credible nuclear deterrent. Period.’ Noting that ‘nuclear disarmament isn’t an end in itself; it’s a means to enhanced national and global security,’ they argue that the United States should not ‘give them up until the threats that require them have ceased.’ The authors are to be commended for taking an holistic and pragmatic view to nuclear disarmament; if we are to abolish nuclear weapons, it will probably have to be through these means. To be certain, this is the only argument that will command any sort of following among those of influence in the United States.

But is it right? I’m less certain of that. For one, this op-ed, and the longer report from which it derives, seems to make security a prerequisite for disarmament—which, as we have said, is meant to be a means to security. If disarmament cannot demand its intended effect as prerequisite, it must be a cautious starting point by itself.

Beyond the critical point, there are two ways to go about making the argument that Perkovich and Acton are being unnecessarily cautious. The first is to assert that in any endeavor, some country must lead and leadership entails costs. This is a typical solution to collective action problems taught in first-year undergraduate courses. The United States, for example, incurred enormous costs in lives and finances to lead what was intended to be a global war on terror. The costs of leadership with respect to nuclear disarmament would be assessed in terms of increased risk in the event of war or surprise attacks from the remaining nuclear states, or perhaps an increased inability to successfully deter the opponents of our allies. The same moral holds here as they do in our intro courses: the hegemon is uniquely well-positioned to incur these costs, in this case because of a favorable geostrategic position and our overwhelming preponderance in conventional deterrence. By leading the way, we could prove that the costs are not great and can be tolerated; the more states that join in the process, the lower the costs become.

While I think this argument could very well be decisive, I think it is not the right one. I think it is more accurate to say there are so few costs to unilateral disarmament as to make the previous reflections irrelevant. Conventional arms can deter at least as well as nuclear arms, given the unlikelihood of nuclear retaliation even in response to a nuclear attack. Furthermore, the risk of nuclear surprise attack is vanishingly small: China is perhaps the only adversarial country with the capacity to attack us with a nuclear weapon; despite the discussion this scenario receives, it really should be too farfetched to contemplate.

Pavel Podvig asked in the Bulletin recently: what if North Korea were the only nuclear state? He concluded: it would probably be a more comfortable one in which they are the ninth. The strategies of the most powerful states in confronting North Korea would change not at all and so it would suffer not at all: ‘nuclear  weapons add nothing to existing nuclear weapon states’…abilities…’ to confront proliferators.

The obverse argument is this: what if the United States was the first modern post-nuclear state? Probably nothing negative of consequence, and perhaps enormous good. Note that the arguments above are not positive ones about the good of unilateral disarmament. That post comes tomorrow (perhaps).

For now let me end where Perkovich & Acton do: what next? If the United States were to pursue unilateral disarmament, the first step would be to signal our intentions to our allies and attempt to gain supporters. (There are recent indications that the United Kingdom would be particularly amenable to taking that step.) Then, declare our intentions and a timetable to coincide with a buildup of conventional arms in the DMZ and other difficult spots. At the same time, offer to put in place a collective security system by which the United States and its allies underwrites the security of all disarming states from attack. Futhermore, establish an international consortium to provide low enriched uranium for nuclear power plants under the same model that URENCO does currently, and subsidize its production to make costs for nuclear fuel appreciably cheaper than parochial secret programs could produce.

The United States is the only country that can make clear in no uncertain terms that nuclear weapons are the implements of a past that humanity wishes to transcend, and that nuclear states are barbarous, backward states. It should.

Filed under: Arms Control, Grand Strategy, the next order , disarmament, abolition, perkovich & acton, podvig

Preemptive adherence to international law.

The Jerusalem Post has a fascinating article today about growing concern within the IDF about the legal fallout over how they prosecute wars or interventions. The rising concern has encouraged the IDF to take steps to limit their legal exposure, like attaching legal advisors “to commanders from the Brigade level up and are present when the target banks are drawn up, where questions are asked about whether the target is purely military or has a dual purpose” and also being proactive about investigating incidents internally to forestall questions from international jurists or advocacy groups.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the following unattributed quote was indicative of many in the IDF, though: ”There are hundreds of petitions, cases, legal opinions and actions cropping up across the world. The phenomenon is very wide and growing. The other side has a lot of money that comes from countries and people not friendly to Israel. This is another front in the war, and if we don’t realize it we’ll have a problem,” the senior defense source said.

It’s unfortunate to see such virulent and parochial resistance to the spread of international norms of military conduct, but it is a testament to their power. Furthermore, it seems that this is a deep difference in spreading norms qua norms or norms attached to legal enforcement. An international norm cannot receive compliance until a) a tipping point in the number of states that subscribe to it can levy overwhelming normative pressure, or; b) the state in question comes to accept it. Furthermore, international norms can be effectively contested: as Charlie Kupchan and I argued in Democracy, the current effort to redefine sovereignty is encouraging a disproportionately large blowback among recalcitrant states; international legal norms, at least among relatively-socialized states, face no such possibility because of the strength of the condemnation involved in a war crimes claim. The spread of international legal norms does not occur at the edge of their expansion; in this case, compliance outstrips the spread of enforceable legal statutes. In short, legal norms may carry with them an multiplier for compliance, while rhetorical norms might face a penalty for efficacy.

I’m generally skeptical of the utility of international law, but this is a pretty good argument. Because the senior defense source can complain all he can, or ensure compliance with the letter rather than the spirit of the law, but in any case it is progress.

Filed under: Middle East, the next order , international law, international norms, Israel, war crimes

The Autonomy Rule

Charles Kupchan and I have a piece in this quarter’s Democracy, which comes out this week, called The Autonomy Rule. Readers of this page also familiar with Kupchan’s immense corpus will know that he and I come at the piece from very different angles. For Charlie, it was another tack on his skepticism about the utility of democracy promotion for achieving America’s interests abroad; for me, the piece is a very cautious step toward grounding a new international order predicated on minimal and shared moral principles. For both of us, it is an attempt to demonstrate that the more internationalist, more just path that must be taken forward is not inimical to American political tradition, or indeed to American interests. We have received some excellent feedback so far (thanks if any of you are reading this)—and we have much more on the subject coming soon, thoughts from which I hope to have the time to post here.

Those here for the first time should not that this page is not updated regularly, due to the exigencies of our academic lives and will likely not be before the end of the academic year. This is more of a scratchpad for incomplete ideas than public commentary on current events. Still: welcome.

—a.j. mount

Filed under: Housekeeping, the next order , Autonomy rule, Kupchan, TII

The length of the arc.

Tonight, on a night when a hundred Indians and foreigners have died in Mumbai at the hands of a coordinated and vicious terrorist attack it may not seem the time to wax sanguine about terrorism—but of course the experience of the last eight years have taught us that is exactly what is required. We, the world together, should state it plainly: terrorism is not an existential threat to our society; terrorism does not threaten us externally; terrorism is not an act of war; it is an act of dissent. Terrorism cannot represent a plan to overthrow our global society, which is too entrenched, too accomplished, too beneficial; terrorism represents a desperate and confused act of impedance. This act was not done by soldiers, warriors, or revolutionaries, but by criminals. These hundred lives lost pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions India has pulled from poverty in the last decades.

Let us be thankful today that we live in a world that, increasingly, has the basic insight right: society exists to promote the autonomy of its citizens. We are thankful that we are stronger than extremists and tyrants expect us to be. We are thankful that we live in a world so secure that we are shocked at this atrocity, for the aberration that it is.

Let us grieve, heal, recover, harden, be thankful.

—a.j. mount

Filed under: the next order , hysteria, India, terrorism

Now What? Cabinet Sweepstakes Edition

It’s true that structural constraints limit an administration’s ability to bring about sweeping change. It goes without saying, however, that some of the wiggle room, so to speak, is defined by the people Obama chooses to fill top cabinet positions.

Remember that early in the primary season, Hillary Clinton and Obama ended up splitting (Bill) Clinton’s foreign policy luminaries. Holbrooke sided with Clinton; Tony Lake backed Obama. The debate was framed in the blogosphere and the media as the centrist hawks breaking for Clinton while the more liberal internationalist members of the Clinton foreign policy team backed Obama. The distinction was a little convenient, but not entirely inaccurate.

Some of us were encouraged to see Obama’s staff comprise younger, more innovative national security specialists. Sure, Richard Danzig has been around a while. And Samantha Power and Susan Rice are not newbies by any standard. But Rice and Power haven’t held top positions in either Clinton administration.  Their respective academic pedigrees were indicative of a newer tack on foreign policy: Rice studies Africa, and Power is an expert on genocide. This is all a matter of degree, obviously. The ideological distinctions between Susan Rice and Anthony Lake are hard to define, and yet Lake was the grandfather of the rogue state doctrine. But the differences in Samantha Power’s outlook and Richard Holbrooke’s are significant.

Aside from the token Republicans (more on that later) the short lists for Obama’s top national security positions are dominated by the most moderate of Clinton’s team. Both Politico and the NYT have similar short lists. Tim Fernholz’s list has some overlap, but his can be read more like an upper bound than an adequate predictor. There’s no science here: it’s likely that convergence is less a reflection of the accuracy of these claims than a product of imitation and reproduction. But, hey, it’s fun to speculate.

Filed under: Grand Strategy, the next order , 44

Why moral consistency?

Forgive me if I leave this here as a marker for myself and don’t explain the idea fully—but it has recently struck me as odd that so many international theorists assume a value equivalence between internal and external ideational systems. This is to say: most assume that when a polity coheres around a set of normative commitments at home that these will be necessarily externalized in their conduct with other nations. This is the primary neoconservative wager; it motivates Christian Reus-Smit’s (lovely) model of moral purpose of the state and international normative structure; maybe my favorite example can be found in David Halloran Lumsdaine’s arguments and a whole litany of others.

But there are a number of good reasons, empirical and theoretical to think this is not always (or even usually) the case. Realist suppositions of the causal force of anarchy are the least among these. The fact of nationalism is usually argued to require differential duties toward our fellow citizens relative to foreigners, for example, which immediately establishes differential moral systems for domestic and foreign policy. There may be problems of aggregating pluralistic domestic moral conceptions. Domestic normative structures may combine with other equivalent (but not identical) structures abroad in unexpected ways. Path-dependency in international conduct may impede direct symmetry—and so on.

In practice, I think the United States do apply different moral standards to the two areas of policy: domestic policy is predicated more on issues of fairness, equity, common action, toleration, assurance; foreign policy tends to turn on probity, transparency, even, occasionally, assistance (and this is only when we mean to act morally—most often we do not). Not only are these lists drastically different, but the former tends to take priority over the latter when the two are seen to conflict, and this is taken to be a moral stance in and of itself. The two do bear resemblance to one another, and it might be true that this resemblance cleaves along different patterns for different types of states—democracies prefer transparency; empires prefer hierarchical domination—but it is not clear to what extent this is based on institutional facts rather than moral consistency; but the fact is that even slight specifications of a change in value system commits us to widely differing structures of obligation.  

We think about domestic and foreign policy in dissimilar moral terms, and our international theory encourages this result. I think this is problematic both theoretically and in practice—a moral cosmopolitanism is at the heart of incorporating some conception of the international interest into our policy. But note that there is no reason that moral cosmopolitanism should press us to make institutional changes: to say that we should value life abroad like we value life at home is not to commit us to abrogating our sovereignty or forming a world state. But politics are politics and people are people—why should we adhere to different moral systems depending on the hat we happen to be wearing?

In terms of international theory, the consequences should be clear: rather than thinking of a direct equivalence between domestic and foreign political moral systems, theorists should expect to have to specify some mechanism by which domestic values are transmitted into international norms. If it is true that the relationship is nonnecessary, we should also consider the possibility that state agency allows a polity some purchase in altering this relation—that states can choose how to apply their domestic values internationally.

Filed under: Theory, Who We Are, the next order , agency, GJT, morality, TII

Progressive Hegemony and the International Interest

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. {…}

Filed under: Theory, the next order , law of peoples, modesty, Offshore balancing, progressive hegemony, TII

Our limits on nationalism.

From a legal perspective, humanity sees nationalism almost as a virus. Our nations, in which we take pride and lend us community and opportunity, are bounded on all sides: by other nations, and normative prohibitions against the subversion of or expansionist attack against other nations (as in the U.N. Charter); by international waters, underwritten by Grotian mare liberum; by the Antarctic Treaty System to the South, which prohibits countries from promulgating or recognizing claims of sovereignty on that continent; and by the reaches of space above us, which the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 protects from ownership, parochialism, aggression, and even deception. The story of exploration in the last centuries has been one of restraint; as we have discovered new frontiers, we have placed ever stricter limits on national claims to subvert them. We commit ourselves to the political freedom of the space around us, and expand the global commons ever wider.

Of course, the cause of much of this body of jurisprudence has been the unwillingness to tilt the tenuous balance of power that prevails among our various corners of land—but I think it also depends on some basic recognition that nationalism cannot be infinite. (If these are not the proximate causes, the acceptance and durability of these treaties is probably acknowledgement of their normative import.) Alex Wendt has detailed internal logics of conflict that produce ever increasing levels of political aggregation—in the form of technologies of violence, and autonomy claims—but it is also worth recognizing that to some extent we have thrown our body of law ahead of ourselves.

We should remind ourselves that in the long-term—which is the term that matters most—our limitations on our own capabilities (in arms, in personal rights, in space) are our greatest assets and should be respected and maintained as such. Man will go into space, in search of material, knowledge, space, and wonder; if we are able to develop normative constraints now that cause us to leave our nations behind when we go will be maybe the greatest progressive achievement in the history of human civilization. The transition will be incredibly delicate and nations will face huge incentives to arrogate pieces of territory—but if we could resist…

It’s an easy enough next step to ask how we can promote normative constraints, but the answer is equally simple: steps toward the weaponization of space now, including a national missile defense system, start to degrade the commonality of space. If hegemony is distinguished from unipolarity and empire by a hegemon’s provision of common goods, American hegemony is only justifiable if it furthers common purposes; a parochial weaponization of space aimed at capturing relative gains from a global commons is in direct contrivance of this principle and should provoke resistance. It is an enormous responsibility to lead the international community at a time of such progress because it is we who have the most sway over the next order: if we mortgage the future of the earth to preserve our preponderance for a few short years, we will have failed this responsibility spectacularly.

Hegemony carries a responsibility to humanity.

Filed under: Arms Control, Space, the next order , law, limit, nationalism, wendt

The unordered order.

That Russia has just sent troops into South Ossetia, only the most recent invasion of Georgian sovereignty, is only the latest evidence that the notion of an alternative, non-liberal order predicated around the inviolability of national borders is overstated. Russian and Chinese declarations of the paramount importance of state sovereignty is not, I think, indicative of an alternative, anti-globalization ideology that an alternative order can be built around, but rather a natural rhetorical reaction to the U.S. pressure for democratization and human rights that run counter to the perceived interests of these states (see Sudan, Eastern Europe, Moldova, as well as the Chinese and Russian homelands). It does not apply to small democratic states. If these are not consolidated ideologies, American policies may actually be socializing these countries to undesirable positions by presenting an aggressive alternative. Disentangling this ideological market failure won’t be a simple matter, but understanding it will be the first step in doing so. 

I’d go on, but there will be more on this soon elsewhere.

Filed under: the next order , democratization, sovereignty