South Korea’s Nuclear Options

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In response to North Korea’s recent nuclear test, a debate has reemerged in South Korea about whether the country should deploy nuclear weapons of its own. Last week, Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn declared that the government maintained its official position that South Korea would not possess or develop nuclear weapons. This is not the first time this debate has bubbled up to the surface. In November 2010, when it was revealed that North Korea had built an advanced plant for the production of highly enriched uranium (HEU, which can be used to construct a nuclear weapon), the South Korean defense minister raised the possibility of reintroducing US tactical nuclear weapons.

Some background: South Korea has a sophisticated infrastructure for the production of nuclear energy and cooperates closely with the United States on the development of its nuclear industry. South Korea did pursue a nuclear weapon of its own during the 1970s, but it abandoned the program under pressure from the United States and signed the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1975 as a state not permitted to develop nuclear weapons. The United States stationed tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea during the Cold War, but these weapons were withdrawn in 1991, when North and South Korea signed a declaration calling for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. You can learn more about the history of South Korea’s nuclear programs from the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

South Korea continues to enjoy a military alliance with the United States that lends it protection under the “nuclear umbrella.” That is, the United States would respond to any nuclear attack on South Korea (presumably, one launched by North Korea) by launching a nuclear strike against the attacker. By this logic of “extended deterrence,” South Korea enjoys the protection of the American nuclear arsenal without having to acquire weapons of its own.

It will be interesting to see whether confidence in the nuclear umbrella begins to erode if and when North Korea develops a missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to the United States. Currently, they do not possess such a missile, and the succession of failed tests suggests that they are still a long way from such a capability. If, however, North Korea were in a position to launch a nuclear attack on the United States, then South Korea may start to wonder about the United States’ nuclear guarantee. As long as North Korea cannot hit back after a retaliatory strike by the United States (in response to the North’s nuclear attack on the South), then the United States does not have to fear for its own safety when it launches the retaliatory nuclear strike against North Korea. If, however, North Korea might be capable of launching a nuclear weapon after the United States’ retaliatory strike, then the calculation becomes quite different. South Korea may find itself wondering whether the United States would be willing to sacrifice Los Angeles to respond to an attack on Seoul. In other words, South Korea (and others) may find itself questioning the credibility of the United States’ nuclear deterrent and may start to wonder if it really does need nuclear weapons of its own.

Questions exactly like these arose among the United States’ western European allies during the Cold War, when the United States was similarly pledging to retaliate against a Soviet attack on western Europe (either conventional or nuclear, depending on the time period) with a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. In fact, doubts about the credibility of the American deterrent helped spur France to pursue its own nuclear weapons program. Hopefully we are still a long way from the day when South Korea will find it necessary to act on similar doubts.

 

Regime Type and Icelandic Feminism

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In my research project about decision-making during the Second World War, I am examining how a state’s “regime type,” i.e., the type of government it has (democracy, autocracy, or something in between) affects its foreign policy. I am also examining whether the regime type of a state’s opponent or potential opponent affects foreign policy outcomes. So, for example: does the fact that a potential opponent is a democracy affect a state’s decision to launch a war against it? In the world of international relations, we refer to such theories as “second image” explanations of international political behavior.

In addition to tracking down and interpreting the relevant archival sources on the decisions in question, one of the most challenging aspects of conducting research like this is deciding how to classify a particular state’s regime. Ask yourself this question: how do we determine whether a state is a democracy or not? One obvious answer might be that the state must hold elections. Okay, so….elections for what? For the head of state? For the head of government? What about representatives in the national assembly? What about judges? How many candidates or parties must be running to count as a “real” election? And who is voting? These are just a few of the many criteria that researchers must consider in determining whether we should classify a state as democratic or not. In an earlier post I argued that many of the criteria researchers use to evaluate whether a state qualifies as a democracy are actually measures of how similar a particular state is to the United States, not how well the state measures up to some objective standard.

To me one of the most important criteria for determining whether a state should be counted as democratic is that adults are not excluded from voting in national elections based on their race, gender, or socioeconomic standing. So, for example, it is inappropriate to refer to the United States of 1850 or 1915 as fully democratic because major categories of adults were ineligible to vote (African Americans in 1850 and women in 1915, although we know that African Americans were effectively disenfranchised long after they were officially granted the right to vote, further complicating our assessments).

Back to my research: my project examines the British invasion of Iceland in 1940 (and the planned attack on Norway that was thwarted by Germany’s own invasion of that country). Over the past few weeks I have been researching Iceland’s political system, and I discovered that Icelandic women were granted the right to vote in 1915, before the same right was extended to women in the United States. I also learned that in 1980, Iceland elected Vigdis Finnbogadottir as president, making her the first democratically elected female head of state in the world. A fascinating article by Kirstie Brewer ties this remarkable electoral feat to a day in 1975 when 90% of all women in Iceland went on strike, refusing to attend their jobs outside the home, to perform housework or to look after children in order to call attention to their demands for equal rights with men.  Icelandic fathers dubbed this day “the Long Friday” while they scrambled to entertain children at their workplaces and bought out easy-to-prepare sausages for their kids from the local shops. For many the day was heralded as a wake up call for women demanding equal rights with men.  It’s a fascinating article about the path taken by a state that many have dubbed the most feminist country in the world, and worth thinking about in a U.S. election season where feminism and gender have become major stumbling blocks for the Democratic party.

The Decline of Violence in Human Society

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A recent and provocative opinion piece in the Washington Post by Ali Wyne is titled, “The World is Getting Better. Why Don’t We Believe It?” Indeed, it can be difficult when the evening news seems to be dominated by IS beheading videos and warnings about impending epidemics to believe that, on average, things are actually improving for most people around the world. Wyne cites a number of development indicators that suggest things are looking up for human civilization: the rate of extreme poverty fell from 37 % to 10% from 1990-2015; life expectancy increased by 5.8 years for men and 6.6 years for women between 1990 and 2013. Yes, there are several armed conflicts raging around the world and we may be in the midst of a long period of transition among the world’s most powerful states, but for most people in most places, life has actually been getting better since the end of the Cold War.

Wyne does not discuss a related argument (and one that is more relevant to the focus of this blog): that the world has become a much, much less violent place for the vast majority of humanity over the last thousand years (or more). Steven Pinker makes this argument in his tome, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2011). This book has been out for a few years, but I finally got around to reading it last summer and it has stuck with me since then.

In Better Angels, Pinker marshals an impressive body of evidence to document the decline of dozens of types of violence in human society—from homicide, to deaths from war and privation, to slavery, to domestic violence and infanticide. Many of the descriptions in the book are stomach-churning (medieval torture, sadism), but I think this is what makes the book effective: yes, we have isolated acts of violence in contemporary society and there are some places around the world where shocking violence still occurs, but the “average” human of today faces a much lower risk of violence from both what we might call “spectacular” causes (interstate war) and the more “everyday” (child abuse).

I don’t think Pinker succeeds in his attempt to develop a general theory to explain this decline in human violence, but he does present a mountain of empirical evidence to document these trends, most of it very convincing. I think he could have done more to explore what we might call structural or institutionalized violence, e.g., the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States, nor do I think he gives adequate treatment to structural violence directed against women in contemporary society.

I do think it is important, however, to document and acknowledge long-term trends like these, especially when we (quite naturally) focus on rare, shocking, discrete episodes of violence we see on the evening news. This does not mean that there is not still work to be done or that these trends will never be reversed, but Pinker is correct to highlight one of the most important trends in the decline of human violence in recent history: the absence of war between the most powerful states in the system. There are a few competing theories in international relations about why this is the case (why the United States, China and Russia are not constantly at war one another today, as major powers often were in prehistory or the middle ages in Europe), but I won’t get into them here. It is important to keep in mind that, as frightening as terrorist attacks may be, the human devastation they cause is a mere fraction of the violence that would have been unleashed in a nuclear confrontation between the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War, or even in a conventional war between China and Russia today. In this election season, we can and should demand that both our current and prospective decision makers keep things in perspective rather than opt for fear as a motivator.

Special Operations and War on the Cheap

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My book Cheap Threats:  Why the United States Struggles to Coerce Weak States is now available for pre-order from Georgetown University Press and Amazon.  In Cheap Threats, I argue that the United States struggles to use threats[1] effectively against weak states (like Iraq, Libya and Haiti) because it has adopted many strategies that render the use of military force relatively cheap.  Because force is cheap, the threat to use force does not convince weak targets of the United States’ compellent threats that the United States is highly motivated.  These targets will resist in the face of a cheap threat–even one issued by the state with the world’s most powerful military–because the cheapness of U.S. military action suggests that the United States lacks the motivation to pursue a long and costly victory against them.  In other words, by making the use of force cheap, we have made threats against weak states less effective.[2] This is a problem because the United States often chooses to launch costly military operations when the threat of force alone is insufficient to change the targeted state’s behavior.

How can I possibly argue that the use of force is cheap for the country that spends nearly as much as the rest of the world combined on defense each year? The first chapter of the book explains in detail the strategies that the United States has adopted to minimize the human, political, and financial costs of employing force—including the use of deficit spending to fund major military operations like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I won’t repeat these arguments here, except to highlight one of the major cost-minimizing strategies that I discuss in the book: the transformation of the American military since the 1970s.

Before 1973, the United States relied on some type of conscription, i.e., compulsory military service, to fight its wars. After the backlash against selective service in the Vietnam War, during which privileged young men were better able to escape the necessity of military service, the United States eliminated conscription and has since relied on an all-volunteer force (AVF). This has led to an increase in education, retention, and professionalization in the service, but the U.S. military is not a representative institution: new recruits are disproportionately drawn from the lower socio-economic classes; the southeastern states tend to be over-represented; minorities are over-represented in the enlisted ranks while whites dominate the officer corps, etc. As a result, the wealthy, educated individuals who are most likely to be members of the decision-making class (members of Congress, scholars at think tanks, i.e., those responsible for making decisions about when and where we fight wars) are insulated from the burdens of military service and increasingly unlikely to have any direct connection to the military themselves. In addition to opting for a volunteer force that shields the vast majority of the American public from the privations and sacrifice of military service, the United States has also relied increasingly on private military contractors to perform functions formerly reserved for the military. The casualties suffered by these individuals are not counted in official figures, which helps to further insulate the general public from the true human toll of America’s military conflicts.

Why does this matter? It matters because strategies that minimize the impact of the use of military force on the American population make it much, much easier for policy-makers to choose to use military force. (Can we imagine that the George W. Bush administration would have been able to sell the war in Iraq if conscription had been in place in 2003?) The AVF makes it much less politically costly to use force, and hence makes it more likely that force will be used. My book demonstrates, however, that such strategies that make the use of force cheaper also undermine our ability to successfully threaten weak states with the use of force.

An op-ed by former Army Captain Matt Gallagher in last Sunday’s New York Times highlights an important and related trend: the growing national obsession with special operations forces (Army Rangers, Delta Force operators, Navy SEALs, etc). “The mythos of Special Operations has seized our nation’s popular imagination, and has proved to be the one prism through which the public will engage with America’s wars…We like our heroes sanitized, perhaps especially in murky times like these.” In the midst of an overall downsizing of the U.S. military, the number of special operations forces continues to rise. Perhaps more importantly, these types of forces conduct their missions in the shadows, with limited Congressional and public oversight of where they are sent (139 countries in 2015, many of these for training missions). Out of sight, out of mind.

As the American public becomes increasingly enchanted with the myth of the commando running secret missions in bad neighborhoods while bathed in the green glow of night vision goggles, it is pushing the United States further down this path of seemingly cheap, low-commitment, sanitized military force. As Cheap Threats argues, however, this will continue to undermine our ability to wield threats of force effectively.

 

 

[1] For example, the United States might threaten a small state with air strikes if it does not admit weapons inspectors.

[2] The theory I advance in the book suggests that threats against more powerful states will be more effective because they are more costly to issue and to execute. See the book for a more thorough explanation.

Intelligence and Truth about Syria

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I promised myself at the start of 2016 that On Security would not devolve into On Syria, All the Time, but today I cannot resist the opportunity to discuss a piece by Seymour Hersh in the January 7 issue of the London Review of Books. If you are looking for a different perspective on the United States’ Syria policy, this is the article for you. If you think that Assad must go and that the United States cannot cooperate with Russia, then this is definitely the article for you, because it exposes why these and other assumptions are hindering our ability to combat IS in Syria.

The article is really about two related themes: efforts by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to funnel intelligence to the Syrian Army via Germany, Israel, and Russia that would enhance its ability to fight IS and related groups in Syria; and the consequences of failing to pursue closer cooperation with both Russia and China to combat IS and related terrorist groups. The article highlights efforts by Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 2012-2014, to warn the Obama administration about the consequences of its insistence that Assad must go. Hersh notes that, “his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border.” Flynn claims that these warnings “‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt they did not want to hear the truth,’” he said.

This “truth” was the fact that there was no effective “moderate” opposition on the ground in Syria and that toppling Assad would invite a takeover by extremists. It was in the wake of these assessments that the JCS decided to share intelligence about jihadist groups via other militaries that had direct contact with the Syrian forces. Hersh notes, “There was no direct contact between the US and the Syrian military; instead, the adviser said, ‘we provided the information…and these countries could do with it what they chose, including sharing it with Assad…The JCS could conclude that something beneficial would arise from it—but it was a military to military thing, and not some sort of a sinister Joint Chiefs’ plot to go around Obama and support Assad. It was a lot cleverer than that.’”

In some ways, it is surprising to read that the US military was indirectly channeling intelligence to the Syrian Army, given that the public policy of the US government remains that Assad and his regime must go. It may surprise you to know, in the current climate of media coverage, that Syria actually cooperated with the United States quite a lot on anti-terror efforts after the September 11 attacks, even after George W. Bush decided to target Assad for some of his “axis of evil” rhetoric. The article does not paint a flattering picture of the CIA’s efforts to funnel arms and training to the illusory “moderate” opposition (discussed here), and it goes into too much detail to summarize succinctly here. Suffice it to say, Flynn’s tenure at DIA did not survive his truth-telling crusade. According to Patrick Lang, retired Army colonel who had served in DIA, “Flynn incurred the wrath of the White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria…He thought truth was the best thing and they shoved him out.”

The rest of the article challenges the dominant narrative on Russia and the United States’ refusal to cooperate with it on Syria. To a lesser extent, it also explores the limits to US cooperation with China. All three countries, in Hersh’s view, share a similar interest in combating Islamic terrorism and extremism, and yet cooperation on these challenges remains remarkably limited—part of which he attributes to a persistent, Cold War-era “us vs. them” mentality. If transnational terrorism really is the greatest threat that the United States faces, then why are we allowing Russia’s actions in the Ukraine to stand in the way of cooperation that would likely prove greatly beneficial in the fight against IS? Is it because terrorism really isn’t that big of a deal? Or because we’re convinced that cooperating with other strong states threatens our own position atop the global hierarchy? The latter is an interesting question and one about which international relations theory has developed a variety of perspectives, but I will save those for another day.

“The four core elements of Obama’s Syria policy remain intact today: an insistence that Assad must go; that no anti-IS coalition with Russia is possible; that Turkey is a steadfast ally in the war against terrorism; and that there really are significant moderate opposition forces for the US to support.” Hersh accurately sums up the state of US policy on Syria at the start of 2016, and his article provides persuasive evidence for why all four of those elements are either counterproductive to the effort to fight IS (Assad must go, no cooperation with Russia) or simply inaccurate (Turkey as ally, moderate opposition). I am inclined to agree with this assessment, as is much of the defense intelligence community, apparently.  But what chance does the “truth” have when the people in charge don’t want to hear it?

Iran Nuclear Agreement: Diplomacy Bears Fruit

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Over the weekend, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) certified that Iran had met all of its commitments to roll back and limit its nuclear programs under the terms of a U.S.-backed deal reached last summer. In exchange, some economic sanctions have been lifted and the West will unfreeze roughly $100 billion in Iranian assets. The lifting of these sanctions should open up new opportunities for investment in Iran’s economy, particularly in oil. The deal also included a prisoner exchange in which five Americans were freed from Iranian custody.

Under the terms of the agreement, Iran has shipped 98 percent of its nuclear fuel to Russia, shut down a reactor designed to produce plutonium, and dismantled more than 12,000 centrifuges used in the production of highly enriched uranium, among other initiatives. The New York Times has a great series of graphics explaining how the deal limits Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon here.  It is important to note that most aspects of the American trade embargo remain in place.  This nuclear deal lifts many international sanctions on Iran’s oil and financial industries, which will provide the country with much-needed cash in a period of low oil prices.

There are, of course, no guarantees that this agreement will permanently eliminate Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon. The long-term success of the agreement depends on the IAEA’s ability to access and monitor sites in Iran to verify continued compliance. This proved to be a major stumbling block in US-Iraq relations in the 1990s, but it should be noted that the Iraqis never did succeed in restarting a program capable of producing a nuclear weapon during all those years of fighting about IAEA inspections. (More on this in my forthcoming book, Cheap Threats, which I will be discussing on the blog in the coming weeks.)

As I argued this fall and as the Obama administration has consistently asserted, this agreement is the best available means for curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The administration should see the successful implementation of this agreement as a major foreign policy achievement—one that took years of painstaking negotiations without the instant gratification of bombing or other short-term military instruments. Critics assert that the deal leaves the United States and its allies vulnerable, that it does not do enough to disarm the “rogue” Iranian regime, that negotiating makes the United States look weak…there is no shortage of articles (or Presidential candidates) criticizing it. Are there reasons to be concerned about Iran’s foreign policies? Absolutely—but the same can and should be said about its rival Saudi Arabia.

Iran’s compliance with the agreement also dovetails nicely with last week’s discussion of North Korea and the concept of rationality. Critics have long alleged that Iran, like North Korea, is a rogue nation with crazy leaders bent on hastening the arrival of the apocalypse. This deal demonstrates that it is possible to negotiate with regimes that we do not necessarily understand and that do not necessarily share our own views of the international system. Of course, comparing Iran and North Korea is a little like comparing apples and oranges, and North Korea has successfully manipulated international negotiations to its own benefit on several occasions. We can, however, take this agreement as evidence of the promise of diplomacy in a world that CNN would like us to believe is teetering on the brink of meltdown.

North Korea’s Latest Provocation

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North Korea claimed on January 6 that it had conducted an underground test of a hydrogen bomb. If this claim is true, it would mean that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has advanced beyond the production of the more basic atomic weapons it has tested in the past. At this point, scientists are still collecting data to try to determine what actually happened. Most seem to dispute the claim that North Korea successfully tested a true hydrogen bomb, although they may have succeeded in testing a “boosted” atomic weapon, which is far less advanced and far less destructive than an H-bomb. Experts currently estimate North Korea’s test had a yield of roughly 6 kilotons; a Soviet test of a hydrogen bomb in 1961 produced a blast of 50,000 kilotons. (A yield of 1 kiloton is equivalent to the explosion of 1,000 tons of TNT. “Real” hydrogen bombs produce a staggeringly large explosion.) The New York Times has a great series of graphics explaining the basic science behind the different types of weapons here.

Interestingly, North Korea also released footage last week claiming to show the recent successful launch of an SLBM, or submarine-launched ballistic missile. Experts now claim that the video has been doctored with images from 2014, and that the heavy manipulation of the footage was an attempt to obscure the fact that the test seems to have been a failure.

These tests coincided with the January 8 birthday of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. It is not unusual for North Korea to launch provocative military displays around key calendar dates or for its leader to use such displays to try to shore up his own power. What is somewhat unusual about this latest provocation is the fact that China has joined the international community in condemning the nuclear test. China has also indicated that it would support punitive action by the UN Security Council—presumably, additional sanctions. China has been reluctant to break ties with North Korea in the past and tends not to be thrilled about Security Council sanctions in general, so this may be a significant development in the international campaign to contain the North Korean regime.

I am always struck by the extent to which news coverage and commentary on North Korea refers to the country and its leader as delusional, insane, or irrational. We have a history in the United States of labeling certain leaders of other countries as crazy and treating them as such—Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein are two obvious examples. This has the unfortunate consequence of leading us to believe that such leaders do not respond to international pressure (convenient if you are trying to drum up support for a regime-change campaign), and to both over- and underestimate their competence. That is, we view such leaders as both possessed of the ability to wreak unparalleled destruction in the international community and incapable of responding to the basic strategic realities of international politics.

Since 2001, the United States has invaded or overthrown the regimes of several countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya—none of which possessed nuclear weapons. It has, however, refrained from invading North Korea, which has both one of the worst human rights records of any state on earth (far worse than that of Libya, which everyone was so eager to liberate in 2011), and (as of 2006, i.e., after the U.S. invasion of Iraq), a small arsenal of nuclear weapons. I don’t think this is a coincidence and I certainly don’t think North Korea views it as one, either.  We may have a hard time viewing Kim’s behavior as “rational” in terms that fit with our own worldview, but it is a dangerous oversimplification to view him as a deranged clown and doing so can distort our long-term strategy for managing North Korea.

 

 

On Holiday

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On Security will be on holiday until 2016.  My dogs, Admiral Horatio Nelson and Sir Winston Churchill, and I extend our warmest wishes for a happy holiday and for a healthy and happy new year. I want to thank you, dear readers, for supporting this blog in its first few months, and I look forward to many exciting new posts in 2016.

dogs.holiday.2015

Review: Restraint by Barry Posen (or, the On Security gift guide)

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Still looking for a last-minute gift for your Dad, your poli sci roommate, or your aunt who listens to NPR? Or perhaps for something to read on a long flight or train trip home for the holidays? Might I suggest Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, by Barry Posen,[1] the Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the Security Studies Program at MIT. In this book, Posen explains how the grand strategy of “Liberal Hegemony” has come to dominate the American security establishment since the end of the Cold War, explains why this grand strategy is “more active, and more militarized than seems necessary” (23) given the high level of security that the United States enjoys, and outlines his argument that the United States should adopt a grand strategy of “Restraint.”

Posen defines grand strategy as, “a nation-state’s theory about how to produce security for itself” (1). I think we can be a little more specific. A state’s grand strategy includes both that state’s understanding of its goals and the principal threats it faces, and the means—both military and non-military—by which the state plans to achieve these goals and protect itself from the identified threats. During the Cold War, the United States pursued a broad grand strategy called “Containment,” aimed at forestalling Soviet advances around the world (and in some formulations, rolling them back). When the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of the 1980s, the United States suddenly found itself searching for a new grand strategy to guide its foreign policy, and Liberal Hegemony eventually bubbled up to fill this vacuum.

Restraint is well written and very accessible for those who do not happen to be experts in political science or security studies. Posen tells a convincing and compelling story about how Liberal Hegemony has become the consensus on American grand strategy in the post-Cold War world. Both of the major political parties now agree on the vast majority of the principles embodied in Liberal Hegemony: the belief that the United States should maintain its position atop the global military hierarchy, that it should use its military might to promote liberal values like democracy and free markets, and that the principle threats in the world arise from rogue, failed, and/or illiberal states. Yes, the political parties do disagree on some specifics—notably the role of international institutions—and not everyone thinks we should be keeping all Muslims out of the country as Donald Trump has recently suggested, but with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, there are no serious candidates currently running for President from either party who are questioning any of these core principles. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton proved herself to be a key champion of Liberal Hegemony during her tenure as Secretary of State.

Posen argues that instead of Liberal Hegemony, we should pursue a much more restrained grand strategy that acknowledges that the United States is actually very safe. The most important threats to the United States will emanate from strong and powerful nation-states or peer competitors, not from floundering failed states. The United States should pull back from the activist foreign policy that has characterized the last twenty years and has made the United States a more attractive target for terrorism. We should scale back our military commitments overseas, stop stationing so many troops abroad, and instead rely on a maritime, i.e., naval presence, around the world to provide security for global commerce and to facilitate counter-terror and counter-proliferation efforts. In sum, we can continue to enjoy a high level of security at much less cost and without angering so many people around the world. Posen also includes a detailed analysis of the implications of Restraint for key regions around the world.

I enthusiastically recommend this book. I suspect, however regretfully, that Posen’s ideas will have a hard time making headway in Washington. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1. The political consensus on Liberal Hegemony is firmly entrenched within both parties, within the national defense industry, and within much of the military leadership. Liberal Hegemony also permeates the so-called mainstream media to an extent that events and arguments that challenge its bedrock assumptions go unreported or simply do not make it into the discussion. 2. Washington is not staffed by people who want the United States to “do nothing” in international affairs. That is, one does not rise through the ranks at the State Department, the Department of Defense, or any of the other braches of the foreign policy bureaucracy (or even the dominant think tanks) by arguing that the United States should refrain from using its power. That is simply not the message people want to hear, and more importantly, I don’t think it’s the message believed by the kind of person who works eighty hours a week for several years (or decades) for a chance at a political appointment. Arguments for restraint are more often believed by the kind of person who finds herself in academia, writing books and blog posts.

[1] (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).

The Politics of Climate Change

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The 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, otherwise known as the Paris Climate Talks, is currently underway in Paris, France. The goal of this conference is to build on previous negotiations to reach an international agreement that will limit the rise of Earth’s temperature to 2°C by the year 2100 by establishing limits and/or reductions on the emission of greenhouse gases. The conference has a great website where you can learn more about the negotiations, their history, and the science behind the UN’s targets here. According to the UN, if current emission rates continue, Earth’s temperature is likely to rise by 3.7-4.8°C by the end of the century. To stay within the 2-degree increase, emissions must be reduced by 40-70% below 2010 levels by 2050. (Scientists believe that global temperature increases above 2°C will have dire consequences, including an increase in disastrous weather events. More information here.)

When I was teaching international relations as a graduate student at Columbia and as an assistant professor at UMass Amherst, climate change was often the issue in which students were most interested, and about which they were most often frustrated. Climate change is happening, they would argue—why can’t the United States and world leaders do something about it? Today I’m going to focus on three explanations from international relations theory about why this is such a difficult problem for the international community to tackle. This list is by no means exhaustive, but I think it covers three of the main obstacles.

1. Uncertainty over the trajectory of emissions and over the impact of the proposed solutions

Even if we, like the vast majority of scientists, acknowledge that climate change is a real phenomenon influenced by greenhouse gases produced by human activity (like burning fossil fuels), there is inherently a lot of uncertainty about how much the climate will change, how this will affect humans, and whether and to what extent the curbing of future emissions will mitigate the worst of the projected outcomes. This matters both in terms of trying to coordinate the behavior of multiple states and in terms of the policies pursued by the leader of any individual state. Any time we ask organizations or individuals to tackle hypothetical problems that may be realized at some point in the future by applying a solution that may or may not have the desired outcome, it’s going to be difficult to coordinate behavior—particularly when states face many pressing and immediate problems that are actually happening, right now, and when many of the officials responsible for setting national policy probably won’t be in office long enough to see the results of either implementing or failing to implement an agreement. In a world of uncertainty, it’s much easier and politically much safer to go for short-term solutions to immediate problems. This is true regardless of whether the officials in question are elected or not.

2.  Unequal distribution of the costs and responsibilities of climate change

One of the thorniest issues in tackling climate change is the fact that poor, developing countries are likely to suffer most from the impacts of a changing climate, but they are least responsible for current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These countries are also the least capable of coping with the natural disasters, famine, etc., that experts believe will accompany climate change, and they are also the least well equipped to make the changes to their economies that will help reduce global emissions (for example, investing in renewable energy sources rather than burning fossil fuels). One of the major components of the agreement being hammered out in Paris is a pledge of aid from developed countries to help poor countries cope with climate change. Similarly, climate change negotiations have often become hung up on questions of responsibility and fairness: the countries that have already developed (the United States and western Europe, for example), had the luxury of burning all the fossil fuels they wanted in the 19th and 20th century and are now asking that developing countries not avail themselves of this path to development. It’s not difficult to understand why this is hard for developing states to accept: they are least responsible for climate change, will suffer from its effects the most, and to top it all off, are being asked to pursue future development under terms more restrictive than those faced by the world’s largest emitters (China surpassed the US as the world’s largest emitter in 2007).

To try to combat these inequities, past climate change treaties—including the Kyoto Protocol of the 1990s, the first attempt at limiting emissions under the auspices of the UN Framework—set different targets for emissions reductions for different countries. Rich polluters like the US were expected to shoot for greater reductions in emissions than developing countries. This was the key issue that blocked ratification of the Kyoto protocol in the United States. Although the President has the authority to negotiate and sign treaties, the Senate must approve (ratify) a treaty for it to go into force for the United States. In the 1990s, senators refused to okay the Kyoto protocol because, they argued, the emissions targets would have placed the US at a competitive disadvantage relative to other states that were not being asked to cut back their emissions as much.

3.  Enforcement

Related to the last point above: there is no international government with the ability to enforce international agreements as there is in domestic society. In international relations, we refer to this as “the condition of anarchy in the international system.” Adherence to emissions targets, and even the accurate reporting of national emissions, are on a voluntary basis. Yes, there are intergovernmental groups like the UN, but the UN does not have the ability to punish lawbreakers the way that the police and courts do in domestic society. For example, if and when a state violated its emissions target as set by the Kyoto protocol, it was punished by being required to make additional reductions to its emissions. So, if you broke the rules, you were asked to follow the rules even more closely in the future.

This is not a unique feature of climate change agreements but rather a general problem with the making and enforcement of international agreements. You may find people out there arguing that we live in a world of international laws and regulations, but the reality is that when a state—particularly a powerful state—violates its commitments to an international treaty, there’s not much that other states can do about it.

The difficulty of enforcing international agreements means that everyone has to worry about the possibility that other states will cheat on their obligations. This is a very real obstacle to attaining an effective agreement to reduce emissions: if I think my nearest competitor is going to cheat and continue to pollute at current rates rather than spend the money to change production methods or switch away from fossil fuels, then I am going to be sorely tempted to cheat on my own commitments. Cheating becomes even more attractive when we realize that the emissions generated in one state do not simply stay in that state but instead float up into the sky contribute to the overall level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Knowing that all the signatories face these incentives to cheat, states may be reluctant to sign onto an agreement and actually commit to the required changes.

In sum, there are reasons to be cautious about the prospects for a successful, effective agreement resulting from the Paris climate talks. Even President Obama, who gave a speech at the start of the negotiations and pledged US support for reducing global emissions, admits that he would be unable to get any signed agreement past the Republican-controlled US Congress. Obama has still made pledges to cut US emissions, but the unwillingness of the United States to become a signatory to this latest treaty certainly won’t help its prospects for success.