Diary of a traveling blogger

Rounding up my first day at the International Studies Association annual meetings, in beautiful midtown Manhattan:

Began by chairing a panel on the forthcoming book Balance Sheet: The Iraq War and U.S. National Security, edited by John Duffield of Georgia State and Peter Dombrowski of the Naval War College. This collection will be out from Stanford University Press in June, and is an excellent attempt to conduct a scholarly assessment of the war’s impact on U.S. security interests. There are chapters by Steve Simon on the war on terror, Mike O’Hanlon on military readiness, Joe Cirincione on proliferation, Greg Gause on the Middle East region, and Clay Ramsay on public opinion. The editors sum it up in their conclusion and also attempt to wrestle with the obvious counter-factuals: what would have happened if we hadn’t gone in? Or if we had sent more troops from the beginning? Or if Saddam had ‘fessed up, or if the inspectors had continued longer? etc. The basic verdict is that the war has been bad for overall U.S. security interests, but the picture painted is not as consistently grim as some of you might think.

The book is important because Iraq remains a political football, and you can bet that Democrats and Republicans will continue to debate both the original decision and the subsequent conduct of the war, and will do so in an explicitly partisan fashion. The belief that Iraq is a disaster helped propel Obama to the Oval Office, but you can already see the neoconservative architects of the war preparing their own “stab in the back theory.” The core of this version is the argument that “the surge worked, and victory is at hand.” So if anything bad happens subsequently, it is all Obama’s fault (or so the argument will run).

That’s why a book this is valuable: academic scholars don’t have pick a side in this fight; their comparative advantage lies in providing as even-handed and fair-minded an assessment as they can. And that’s what this book tries to do. Not the last word on the subject, perhaps, but an important contribution.

Then on to another panel on unipolarity, with several excellent papers. One highlight was University of Chicago Ph.D. student Nuno Monteiro’s paper “Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity is Not Peaceful.” His basic argument is that the dominant state in a unipolar system (i.e., the unipole) will be tempted to try to maintain or improve its advantage, and especially to prevent weak states from acquiring a nuclear deterrent, which the weak state could use to constrain the unipolar’s actions. Accordingly, the logic of unipolarity will tend to provoke conflicts between the unipolar and any lesser powers who refuse to accept its dominance.

It’s a very creative argument, although one can raise at least two questions. First, if Monteiro’s logic is correct, why didn’t the United States do more to stop North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran from getting a nuclear capability? We did fight a war with Iraq to prevent that from happening, but the argument suggests the U.S. should have fought these other states too. Second, if we have been in a unipolar world for the past fifteen years or so, what are the implications of the economic meltdown? Will economic constraints undermine America’s dominant position, and drive us back to multipolarity?

A second highlight was Todd Sechsers’s paper “Goliath’s Curse: Asymmetric Power and Effectiveness of Coercive Threats.” Using a simple bargaining model, Sechser (from the University of Virginia) argues that great powers often fail to get their way when they issue coercive threats (which is surprising at first glance), and that this problem may in fact get worse the more powerful they are. The basic logic here concerns reputation: weak states will worry about giving in to a great power’s demands (even when the demands are fairly minor), because they will fear that the great power will just demand more later. So they resist now, to enhance their reputation for being stubborn and to convince the great power to leave them alone in the future. The core of the problem is that a very powerful state can’t make a credible commitment of restraint; it can’t reassure the weak state that it really, truly, wants just a modest concession, one that the weak state might be willing to grant if it were confident that this would be the only demand. And the bigger and stronger the coercing state is, the harder it is for that state to reassure the weak power that its aims are actually limited.

Sechser illustrates his model with a nice case study of Finland’s refusal to bow to Soviet demands in 1940, a refusal that triggered the Russo-Finnish war. But I kept thinking about the United States and Serbia in 1998-99 and the United States and Iran today. In the latter case, we have issued demands that we think are actually quite reasonable, and we’ve also said we will provide some positive benefits if we get a deal. But what if Iran is still worried that we really do have more ambitious goals (such as regime changfe) and that we will take advantage of any concessions they might make and up our demands later? If that is their view, then making relatively modest demands and offering generous incentives may not work. Paradoxically, his paper implies that we might have a better chance of cutting a deal with Iran if our position in the region were somewhat weaker, because Tehran would be less worried about the long-term implications of giving up its nuclear program. It also implies that great powers like the United States have to think about how they can provide credible reassurances to weak states, as a way of making them more willing to cut a deal.

I’ve oversimplified both these papers considerably; nonetheless, it was reassuring to see several scholarly projects that are directly relevant to current policy issues. If you know the ISA, this is not something one can always count on at these meetings.

Tomorrow’s highlight: a panel offering a posthumous award to Samuel Huntington for his contributions to international studies. It is a shame that Sam won’t be here to receive it himself, though I’m sure he would have been embarrassed by all the fuss.