Jack Levy is a badass.

In 1995, Jim Fearon published an article in International Organization called “Rationalist explanations for war,” which, for my money, is one of the very best articles of modern international theory. In it, he argues that prevailing realist explanations for war—anarchy, expected utility, and preventive war—and two other rationalist explanations are either underspecified or are logically reducible. A major reason for this is that states should have incentives to make agreements on the side to resolve a dispute rather than incur the costs and risk inherent in war. This perspective generates a number of clear and novel propositions, but for our purposes here, the second explanation is key. Fearon demonstrated that one reason states go to war is because, as the power of two great powers approaches an inflection point, the rising state is unable to commit not to exploit the gains from any side agreement to the further detriment of the declining state’s security or status.

This wasn’t inconceivable stuff prior to Fearon’s argument; the incentives surrounding preventive war had been the subject of much hand-wringing. But Fearon’s expression of the ideas, his connection of preventive war to the bargaining range, the incentive to conclude side agreements, a challenger’s incentive to transfer away power to prevent an attack—all of this was novel and earth-shaking. Or so I thought.

Jack Levy nailed that argument in 1987, in “Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War.” He writes that a bargaining perspective is not good enough to capture the logic of preventive war:

“The issue is not a conflict of concrete interests in which each party can easily calculate its gains and losses from different levels of concessions and negotiate accordingly, but a question of future influence over a range of diverse and partly unpredictable issues that cannot be calculated with any degree of precision and that are not easily amenable to negotiation.” This is because perceptions of the stakes vary between the parties, because “the kind of concessions most acceptable to the declining state would be those that impeded the further increase in the military power of the rising adversary,” which are precisely those that cannot be transferred away. Lastly, making that kind of deal would relegate a rising state to a permanently inferior status, making status concerns relevant. Because of this, “it is extremely unlikely that any level of concessions exists that would be both sufficient for the preventer and reasonable for the challenger. The very fact that the declining state knows that the rising adversary will probably be able to regain any concession later makes the former less likely to accept those concessions.” (96)

Incredible commitments are in there, but also some much more nuanced stuff. Don’t eff with Jack Levy. The guy’s graduate syllabus on the causes of war is 96 pages long and luminous.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Theory, War , fearon, levy, preventive war

The dubious spoils of conquest.

I don’t know the literature on this, so this might be shooting fish in a barrel but I’m all wired from a day spent giving comments on colleagues’ papers. By way of preparing for exams, I (re-?)read Peter Liberman’s “The Spoils of Conquest” [pdf] in International Security from 1993. Liberman published Does Conquest Pay? three years thereafter.

His conclusion is that, contrary to ‘liberal’ arguments that expect conquest to be less sustainable in the modern era because modernization makes economic extraction harder, conquest can indeed pay. There are plausible reasons, he says, to  suppose that modernization means that war does not pay anymore—nationalism, the expense of maintaining control, economic resistance like striking, and opportunity costs due to forgone trade. Moreover, theorists like Walt note that industrialized economies require free information, which undermines political control. However, Lieberman sides with the ‘realists,’ arguing that a repressive regime can overcome these disincentives. First, modernization means more profit to capture. Secondly, “modernization increases the efficiency of coercion.” Third, even a low-cost investment in repression exacerbates the collective action problem of resistance. He provides very compelling numbers and anecdotal from Vichy France and Czechoslovakia  to bolster the case. The implications are that containment of revisionist states is a necessary aim, that nationalism has not “rendered war among developed nations obsolete,” and that resistance to conquerors is not likely to succeed.

Notice, however, that all of Liberman’s examples come from the second World War, and none of them were protracted occupations. He does not discussion the Soviet occupations of industrialized Poland or other Eastern Bloc countries because in general the Soviets faced increasing costs to empire, which required ever-larger outlays to maintain. Wohlforth has argued that these costs were a large part of the reason for the Soviet collapse. Why? As Liberman notes, “Most industrial conquests were quickly liberated by balancing coalitions,” so “history does not provide much evidence for either side…” (148) Similarly, we can explain away the Soviet stagnation simply because they imposed inefficient centralized policies.

Unfortunately, this all adds up to pretty compelling evidence that conquest does not pay in this day and age. Why not? Well, Liberman is missing a term. He is forced to limit his study to “merciless regimes” because these are the only ones that can efficiently extract sufficient resources from industrialized populations—but there are increasing costs to being a merciless regime! First, a “coercive and repressive” conquerer must, if only by definition, administer a centrally-planned economy of the time that wrecked the Soviet Union. Secondly, being a merciless occupier incites disapproval, additional costs on subsequent political and economic policy at home and abroad, and, yeah, balancing coalitions. As the normative thickness of international society and globalization deepen with every passing year, so the strategies necessary to efficiently extract resources, makes this extraction less lucrative.

The extent to which realists would rather bury their heads in the sand than provide some explanation for why the world looks different than it did twenty years ago varies (slightly), but this is a particularly egregious example of the former case. Publish this in the fifties and you’ve got a ball game.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Theory

How much does a transaction cost?

Since the start of mature liberal institutionalist theory, which we typically date to 1984 and Keohane’s After Hegemony, the rationalist explanations for international institutions have remained remarkably consistent. Keohane’s assertion that institutions are intended to ameliorate uncertainty among contracting members (properly, risk, by bumping up enforcement mechanisms and the dispersal of reputational information) and transaction costs (by providing a centralized forum where bargaining and enforcement processes are regularized) has stood the test of time. Constructivists have added hypotheses about socialization others have offered propositions about domestic hand-typing and signaling, but especially if one includes enforcement and bargaining costs as transaction costs (which economists traditionally have), the importance of transaction costs becomes paramount. The conjectures of the Rational Design school of Koremenos, Lipson, and Snidal bear this out.

The problem is— nobody seems to know how much a transaction costs. To my knowledge, no-one has attempted to estimate these costs or adumbrate parametric conditions for when and how they vary.

International theorists have traditionally assumed that transaction costs are high. Keohane argued originally that institutions’ reduction of transaction costs made institutions attractive to states, made the cost of illegitimate bargains higher than legitimate ones, and allowed states to capture economies of scale in generating agreements through institutions, and allowed issue linkages and side payments that made agreement more likely. The rational design school argues that two of their independent variables (number of participants and [risk] between them) exert the leverage they do through transaction costs (so centralized control of international institutions should increase as number increases, flexibility should decrease, and so on).

An excellent recent article by Daniel Verdier in International Organization posits even further-reaching effects for transaction costs. Multilateralism and bilateralism are not substitutes for states but rather complementary strategies: states wishing to found a regime will institute a multilateral contract among states for whom the cost of the institution is relatively low, complement this institution with bilateral deals to buy the next level of states (with moderate costs), and exclude states with too-high costs of compliance. This segmented arrangement is attractive to regime-founding states because the transaction costs of bilateral arrangements are prohibitively high to deal with this way, and multilateralism economizes on them. The Nonproliferation Treaty, he says, exemplifies this logic.

But what if transaction costs are low? Verdier’s multi-level arrangement looks less necessary: as transaction costs fall, more can be accomplished through bilateral bargains and both other options, multilateral institution and exclusion, become rarer. Likewise, we can invert other hypotheses depending on transaction costs: issue linkage would be rarer, institutions should be less centralized, more flexible, and less appealing generally. (And there are myriad other propositions of this type that not included here that would evince similar adjustments.)

But how much rarer, how much more and how much less? Well, more (less, rarer) than we thought previously—but beyond that it would be difficult to say without some numerical value. This is hard to estimate because the costs are hard to observe and vary by situation: the category presumably includes the cost of forum shopping, the time involved for negotiations to come to agreement, the opportunity cost of spending time on negotiation, the salaries of diplomats, and so on. These will vary by issue area and by institution, but the costs of each will also vary by the contracting states involved, each of whom will have their own unique utility function for each of these terms. For states with a strong interest in a given agreement become accomplished in a certain way, transaction costs may be so marginal to the utility of concluding an agreement that states will not assess them completely. States that employ large contingents of international lawyers (the United States and the EU) will find transaction costs less burdensome. States that do a good deal of business, or are naturally amiable toward one another, may confront lower transaction costs. (And so on and so forth.)

If these conditions could be codified as hypotheses, the far-reaching influence of transaction costs in the institutionalist literature may make the findings of a formal model or specific estimation very drastic indeed. But maybe not. They’re just transaction costs, after all.

a.j.m.

Filed under: International Organization, Theory , Keohane, transaction costs

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

On Deudney’s Bounding Power

Dan Deudney’s Bounding Power might be the worst-titled book in recent memory in international theory, but the innovation of his epic reinterpretation of all international theory along the lines of republican security theory is phenomenal: he shows how an alternative reading of international theory makes most existing thought on international organization obsolete. Deudney shows, as Donnelly, Weber, and others have in recent years, that the rigid distinction between hierarchy and anarchy is untenable—but he offers an alternative somewhat more satisfying than ‘hierarchy amidst anarchy.’ Rather, he shows that republican confederations can coordinate units without abrogating their sovereignty. To the contrary, ‘for any world government to be built firmly on negarchical principles, the clear starting point must be union as an expression of sovereignties rather than as their abridgment, and the organs of the union must be unambiguously circumscribed by a constitution of the negative.’ (263) The reason is that ‘the extremes of anarchy and hierarchy are fundamentally alike because neither provides adequate restraints upon the application of violence to human bodies.’ (31) So ‘appropriately configured authoritative international organs are not threats to republican sovereignty, but rather serve its security needs.’ (272)

In theory—and I think in practice—an interstate confederation should be able to promote the autonomy of nations by ensuring its security, promoting their interests, securing for them standard means of exchange and relation, and so on. In this way, interstate confederation could accomplish similar ends as domestic contractarian theorists and contemporary capabilities liberals sought to secure for their peoples. ‘In order to be free,’ a theory professor at Georgetown is fond of saying, ‘we must be bound.’ The move is analogous to the liberal insight (most eloquently articulated by Amartya Sen) that unfreedom can come from material deprivation as well as governmental tyranny—the source of oppression and unfreedom doesn’t matter, only the fact of it, in whatever form. Deudney’s illustration with respect to nuclear weapons is appealing enough: the weapons should be taken out of the hands of a few opaque executives, whether by dismantling them and letting deterrence rest on the possibility of rearmament (what I called tacit deterrence on this page), subjecting them to international consortia, and establishing concurrent decision-making requirements—or doing all three at once.

A republican arrangement is particularly appropriate for the present day, he writes, because the fact that technology allows us to coordinate the planet means that the confederation would not require a foreign policy that would exert centralizing pressures on the units, putting its constituent states in danger of despotism. (277)

Deudney’s primary difficulty is his conflation of agential and structural explanations. The thrust of Deudney’s book is a structural argument about how material technological and geographical contexts make certain forms of political organization more likely; this is not particularly relevant to his practical conclusions (which suggest we should take concerted—agential—action to make of our material-contextual situation what we will). ‘All things considered,’ he writes, ‘it may well be that the most likely outcome of the current and emergent constraints and opportunities is not a nuclear union of restraint.’ (264) Deudney can say no more than that material context makes a confederation ‘appropriate;’ at most, he can be read as saying the context provides conditions that in the past have been used to inaugurate a republican arrangement. The fact that he has advocated such an arrangement means that here some national-agential decision will produce the political forms he is discussing, as it has in past occasions. That the work is primarily one of intellectual history and advocacy about the practice of international theorizing prevents Deudney from making positive, determinative claims about forms of republican government.

His uncommon justification for the American interest in democratization is burdened with similar problems. Wanting to think of state policy as a function of that state’s violence interdependence (the ability of other states to cause it harm), Deudney comes to the following formation—

‘…the republican security agenda of liberal internationalism seeks to populate the international system with republics and to abridge international anarchy in order to avoid the transformation of the American limited government constitutional order into a hierarchical state… In this view, the success of American foreign policy is ultimately measured not by the magnitude of American power relative to other states, but by the extent to which the United States is situated in a nonhierarchical international system populated by republican states.’ (186-7)

In previous chapters he has asserted (but not quite demonstrated convincingly) the historical correlation between external insecurity, imperial overstretch, and internal centralization that eventually culminates in despotism. These worries, he writes, underlay arguments against manifest destiny, Wilsonian internationalism, the United Nations, and contemporary arms control and democratization projects. 

This seems to me to be overstating the point: countries pursue external security and a peaceful world because it is in the interests of their citizens, not because our external environment has an indelible effect on our domestic politics. Deudney’s error is common to most structuralist models of politics: he assumes that automatic mechanisms apply where structural impulses are in fact mediated by enormous agential discretion. Of course we have a choice about how we respond to external insecurity, for two reasons: firstly, because threat is a subjective and contingent condition; secondly, and more to the point, because the proximate cause of authoritarianism is the actions of certain political figures and is not in the least automatic. External threat may well create domestic conditions that will be amenable to steps toward authoritarianism, but we hope and expect that our leaders would not take these opportunities even if they become available (because to some extent they always are). It is still another example of why it is crucial to acknowledge that we do have a choice to make and this choice confers responsibility.

The luxury of structural theorizing is that there is no burden to describe the scope of agency because structure represents aggregate patterns of agency—as long as your predictions are structural ones i.e. ‘balances of power have a tendency to form’ rather than ’states will balance.’ (‘States have an incentive to balance’ is a middling case that depends on ancillary arguments.) WhenSo  you move to the level of foreign policy, a complete explanation of outcomes requires stipulating the scope of agency and anticipating its results.

All this is relatively mundane. The broader point is that from an ethical standpoint, our international projects cannot be justified by virtue to domestic effects, be they political, economic, or moral. We cannot endeavor to transform the world because it helps preserve our system of government (if it did), brings us parochial welfare benefits, or makes us feel good. To be justified, our international projects must be grounded in the international interest. Only a democratization that is in the interests of global stability, regional peace, or international development can be ethically justifiable or really successful; only arms control projects that are construed for global disarmament improve our security; only those international economic policies that intend to raise all boats will genuinely create new markets for our products.

Likewise, a global republic of the sort Deudney wants to advocate cannot be justified by its (dubious) affect on American domestic politics. It’s been said, and will be said again: broadly speaking, the international interest is the national interest. The strength of Deudney’s argument (which I think he understands but only occasionally slips out of) is that a international republican organization can very well serve the international interest because the problem of domestic restraint operates for all states and all peoples.

For what it’s worth, the rote constructivist response also applies here: violence interdependence and its technological and geographic components depend on constructed understandings of material facts. To take the hardest case, society and technology determine the scope of a state system, which in part determines the geographical environment. The problem is one endemic to balancing propositions (See Kaufman’s Balance of Power in World History): The Greek international system expanded to admit Persian balancing; the Indian system to admit Roman, and so on.

 —a.j. mount

 

Filed under: Theory , agency, Deudney, IO, 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

Toward a tacit deterrence

Might not deterrence under hierarchy face different requirements than deterrence under the acute bipolar anarchy of the Cold War? Recent high-profile procurement changes might point the way to transition to an offshore balancing force posture.

To those who follow such things, the news of the Navy’s cancellation of the new DDG-1000 destroyer will not be unfamiliar, and not only because the move was anticipated. The decision to halt the advanced class of guided missile destroyers after the Navy takes delivery of the first two ships in the line and instead continue to expand the current complement of DDG-51 Arleigh Burkes resembles other recent high-profile procurement decisions from recent years. The Army’s stealth reconnaissance Comanche helicopter was axed in favor of renovating existing helicopter fleets; the large Typhoon-hunting Seawolf submarine was halted after three boats in favor of the smaller, cost-saving Virginia class; and of course the quantity of F-22 Raptor jets has been revised downward by the Secretary of Defense over the objection of Air Force planners.

These compromises in procurement ambition were taken primarily for financial reasons—the Comanche program is widely thought to have risked bankrupting Army aviation—the decisions should be seen as separate from the larger strategic context. Incursion of large cost overruns to develop advanced weapon systems developed specifically to counter other advanced weapons systems simply cannot be justified. In each case, the system in question was slighted to maintain emphasis on less capable but more numerous weapons platforms: the navy cancelled the DD(X) destroyer to attempt to meet their goal of expanding the fleet to 313 ships, while the diversity of the Army’s existing helicopter fleet can provide greater coverage for less cost. Pentagon planners have eschewed a concentrated, survivable force posture in favor of projecting American power more widely and diffusely—the army of empire.

Of course, our conception of our place in the world may not lead us to a need to sustain projective military hegemony on the same terms. Notice that if we commit ourselves to a more modest force posture that draws more from offshore balancing than constant global management, these sorts procurement decisions might still be rational moves.

The conventional model of deterrence requires that assets must be held in reserve to make any attack sufficiently expensive to obviate its benefit. The anarchy that governed the Cold War required that we have survivable nuclear weapons at sea and in hardened remote areas to make any Soviet first strike impossible; likewise, the security dilemma meant that any Soviet motion toward dominance of a strategic environment (submarine, space) must be countered in turn. But the attenuation of this security dilemma means our deterrence requirements are subject to adjustment. Liberal and constructivist models of security allow us to supplant a probabilistic deterrence for a possibilistic one; this is why Congressional appropriators have difficulty justifying advanced weapons platforms.

Notice that for all intents and purposes, a shift away from advanced weapons platforms does not impair our deterrence against the threats of other state or substate actors. The development of two Zumwalt-class destroyers, three Seawolfs, or even two Comanche prototypes effectively grants us these capacities. The enormous economic capacities of the U.S. means that any serious threat is likely to raise sufficient political will to field these platforms for all but the most abrupt surprise attacks. To some extent, we can focus on deterrent potential rather than constant quantitative deterrence: a tacit deterrence instead of an overt one.

Doing so maintains our research and development programs and secures technological spillover to other economic sectors, while forcing defense corporations to compete over innovation rather than incentivizing cost overruns. Technological advancement will in turn improve this tacit deterrence by gradually widening the capability gap: limited production lines holds down proliferation of new weapons systems, alleviating security dilemmae, and contributing to deterrence. Meanwhile, humanitarian and existing security needs can be met by heterogeneous fleets of existing systems and combined with limited numbers of new projects, which affords for more selective application of assets appropriate for specific roles. In a world where we face a multitude of sporadic and unique threats, economies of scale do not serve us well. Meanwhile, some advanced weapons systems can be applied to some existing assets (the Navy is studying applying SPY-3 radar and guided gun systems from the DD(X) ships to future Arleigh Burkes).

The force posture is well suited to a period of transition from global empire to a more modest offshore balancing role, which requires small numbers of fast and advanced craft. Whether or not the future security environment allows us to complete this transition, a gradual shift to tacit deterrence now would be a cheaper, safer, progressive first step.

The post Cold War world need not be in a constant state of war if we choose to stop acting like it. This is yet one more way the social construction of anarchy is not based entirely on contingency; it is also a matter of choice. The Pentagon’s impulse to eschew advanced systems is the right one for the world we find ourselves in—even if their imperial strategic planning doesn’t admit its full potential.

—a.j.mount

Filed under: Grand Strategy, Theory, the next order , choice, modesty, Offshore balancing, procurement, weapons systems