With Friends Like These
US Military Aid and Recipient State Cooperation
Patricia Sullivan, Brock Tessman & Xiaojun Li
Foreign Policy Analysis, July 2011, Pages 275-294
Abstract:
What can states expect to receive in return for the military aid they provide to other states? Can military aid buy recipient state compliance with donor objectives? In this study, we systematically investigate the effects of US military assistance on recipient state behavior toward the United States. We build on existing literature by creating three explicit theoretical models, employing a new measure of cooperation generated from events data, and controlling for preference similarity, so that our results capture the influence military aid has on recipient state behavior independent of any dyadic predisposition toward cooperation or conflict. We test seven hypotheses using a combination of simultaneous equation, cross-sectional time series, and Heckman selection models. We find that, with limited exceptions, increasing levels of US military aid significantly reduce cooperative foreign policy behavior with the United States. US reaction to recipient state behavior is also counterintuitive; instead of using a carrot-and-stick approach to military aid allocations, our results show that recipient state cooperation is likely to lead to subsequent reductions in US military assistance.
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Chronic Misperception and International Conflict: The U.S.-Iraq Experience
Charles Duelfer & Stephen Benedict Dyson
International Security, Summer 2011, Pages 73-100
Abstract:
Why did the United States and Iraq find themselves in full-scale conflict with each other in 1990-91 and 2003, and in almost constant low-level hostilities during the years in-between? The situation was neither inevitable nor one that either side, in full possession of all the relevant information about the other, would have purposely engineered: in short, a classic instance of chronic misperception. A combination of the psychological literature on perception and its pathologies with the almost unique firsthand access of one of the authors to the decisionmakers on both sides - the former deputy head of the United Nations weapons of mass destruction inspection mission in the 1990s, the author of the definitive postwar account of Iraqi WMD programs for which he and his team debriefed the top regime leadership, and a Washington insider in regular contact with all major foreign policy agencies of the U.S. government-reveals the perceptions the United States and Iraq held of each other, as well as the biases, mistakes, and intelligence failures of which these images were, at different points in time, both cause and effect.
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Pattern in Escalations in Insurgent and Terrorist Activity
Neil Johnson et al.
Science, 1 July 2011, Pages 81-84
Abstract:
In military planning, it is important to be able to estimate not only the number of fatalities but how often attacks that result in fatalities will take place. We uncovered a simple dynamical pattern that may be used to estimate the escalation rate and timing of fatal attacks. The time difference between fatal attacks by insurgent groups within individual provinces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and by terrorist groups operating worldwide, gives a potent indicator of the later pace of lethal activity.
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Jonathan DiCicco
Foreign Policy Analysis, July 2011, Pages 253-274
Abstract:
Investigation into an often-overlooked Cold War episode reveals a tipping point in the Reagan administration's approach to the Soviet Union. In November 1983, NATO military exercise "Able Archer 83" reportedly touched off a crisis atmosphere among Soviet officials who feared a surprise nuclear attack. Intelligence reports about the war scare startled US President Ronald Reagan, altering his understanding of Soviet threat perceptions and prompting him to embrace his moderate advisers' recommendations that the administration take a more conciliatory approach toward the country Reagan had earlier labeled the "evil empire." By highlighting Soviet fears of the United States, intelligence stemming from Able Archer 83 cracked Reagan's mirror images and catalyzed a policy shift from hostile confrontation toward cautious cooperation. The case study identifies facilitating conditions for the shift and yields counterintuitive insights relating to international crises, perception and misperception, and the domestic politics of rivalry.
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Saddam, Israel, and the Bomb: Nuclear Alarmism Justified?
Hal Brands & David Palkki
International Security, Summer 2011, Pages 133-166
Abstract:
Efforts to understand Saddam Hussein's strategic thought have long been hampered by the opacity and secrecy of the Baathist regime. Newly available, high-level Iraqi archival documentation demonstrates that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Saddam viewed nuclear weapons through a fundamentally coercive, revisionist lens. He had long hoped to wage a grinding war of attrition against the Israeli state, and he believed that Iraqi acquisition of the bomb would neutralize Israeli nuclear threats, force the Jewish state to fight at the conventional level, and thereby allow Iraq and its Arab allies (with their larger economic and population base) to prosecute a prolonged war that would displace Israel from the territories occupied in 1967. These findings have implications for the existing theoretical literature on the causes and consequences of nuclear proliferation, as well as for the growing body of work on "nuclear alarmism." The Iraqi case undermines the thesis that states proliferate primarily because of defensive concerns. Saddam certainly viewed possession of the bomb as a means of enhancing Iraq's security, but his attraction to nuclear weapons revolved around offensive objectives. Saddam hoped to exploit the deterrent balance with Israel to initiate a bloody conventional war that would have likely been immensely destructive and destabilizing for the Middle East as a whole. In other words, though Saddam never obtained nuclear weapons, his views on their potential utility give good cause for both pessimism and alarm.
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The last stand of the psychocultural Cold warriors: Military contract research in Vietnam
Joy Rohde
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Summer 2011, Pages 232-250
Abstract:
In 1966, the social scientists of the Simulmatics Corporation arrived in Saigon. Tasked by the Pentagon with helping to pacify South Vietnam, they conducted political and social psychological research on Viet Cong defectors, government soldiers, and Vietnamese villagers. This essay argues that Simulmatics's work captures some of the ironies of Cold War social science: its tendency to mask militarization behind the rhetoric of peaceful nation-building, its blurring of data collection and intelligence gathering, and its ambitious dedication to revealing the unseen contents of hearts and minds while remaining ignorant of the historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts in which its subjects lived.
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The Rubicon Theory of War: How the Path to Conflict Reaches the Point of No Return
Dominic Johnson & Dominic Tierney
International Security, Summer 2011, Pages 7-40
Abstract:
A major paradox in international relations is the widespread fear and anxiety that underlies the security dilemma in times of peace and the prevalence of overconfidence or "false optimism" on the eve of war. A new theory of the causes of war - the Rubicon theory of war - can account for this paradox and explain important historical puzzles. The "Rubicon model of action phases," which was developed in experimental psychology, describes a significant shift in people's susceptibility to psychological biases before and after making a decision. Prior to making decisions, people tend to maintain a "deliberative" mind-set, weighing the costs, benefits, and risks of different options in a relatively impartial manner. By contrast, after making a decision, people tend to switch into an "implemental" mind-set that triggers a set of powerful psychological biases, including closed-mindedness, biased information processing, cognitive dissonance, self-serving evaluations, the illusion of control, and optimism. Together, these biases lead to significant overconfidence. The Rubicon theory of war applies this model to the realm of international conflict, where implemental mind-sets can narrow the range of bargaining options, promote overambitious war plans, and elevate the probability of war.
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International Trade and US Relations with China
Benjamin Fordham & Katja Kleinberg
Foreign Policy Analysis, July 2011, Pages 217-236
Abstract:
US relations with China are critically important for the future of world politics. They are also a useful case in which to test the individual-level implications of the liberal commercial peace argument. A plausible case can be made on both sides of the claim that China poses a security threat to the United States. China's economy is growing far faster than the United States' economy, while the country remains a communist autocracy. At the same time, trade between the United States and China has expanded dramatically in the last three decades. Its dual role as a major trading partner and a growing international rival generates substantial uncertainty about China's future status as friend or foe. Using data from a recent survey by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, we find that economic interests help explain individual Americans' assessment of China as a threat and their views concerning hostile policies toward that country. Those who stand to benefit from trade with China hold more positive views of the country and oppose conflictual foreign policies with respect to it. Those whose incomes are likely to decline because of trade with China tend to take the opposite position on these questions.
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Revisiting Osirak: Preventive Attacks and Nuclear Proliferation Risks
Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer
International Security, Summer 2011, Pages 101-132
Abstract:
Thirty years after the Israeli attack on the Osirak reactor in June 1981 the consequences for Iraq's nuclear weapons program remain hotly debated. A new history of this program, based on several new Iraqi sources, yields a net assessment of the impact of the Israeli attack that differs from prevailing accounts. The attack had mixed effects: it triggered a covert nuclear weapons program that did not previously exist, while necessitating a more difficult and timeconsuming technical route to developing nuclear weapons. Notwithstanding gross inefficiencies in the ensuing program, a decade later Iraq stood on the threshold of a nuclear weapons capability. This case suggests that preventive attacks can increase the long-term proliferation risk posed by the targeted state.
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Bryan Marshall & Brandon Prins
Presidential Studies Quarterly, September 2011, Pages 521-545
Abstract:
We examine two competing arguments relating to the role of Congress in explaining presidential decisions to use force from 1953 to 2000. We offer a policy availability rationale that suggests Congress matters in the decision to use force because presidents are motivated by their ability to influence legislative policy making. The models demonstrate that presidential success in Congress is the significant factor determining military action, not party control. Presidents employ force when their ability to influence policy is weak and avoid military actions when Congress supports the president's agenda. The results speak to the intersection of two important literatures, namely, presidential unilateralism and conventional theories on domestic politics and the use of force.
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Democracies, Territory, and Negotiated Compromises
Steven Miller & Douglas Gibler
Conflict Management and Peace Science, July 2011, Pages 261-279
Abstract:
Multiple studies have confirmed that democracies are more likely than other regime types to resolve their militarized disputes through negotiation and compromise. We argue that these findings have not controlled for the types of disputes that are most likely to involve democracies. States have often resolved their most dangerous disputes, involving territorial issues with neighbors, prior to becoming democratic. Thus, the issues involving democracies are of less salience and are more easily negotiated with compromise. Using Militarized Interstate Dispute data from Correlates of War Project, 1816 to 2001, we confirm this explanation. The pacifying effect of regime type disappears once controls are added for proximity and issue type. We find that territorial issues among contiguous states are among the most difficult issues to resolve, and democracies are unlikely to be involved in these disputes. Our findings are an advancement of the territorial peace argument and present a first step in a re-examination of the broader empirical regularities associated with democratic peace theory.
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A Crude Threat: The Limits of an Iranian Missile Campaign against Saudi Arabian Oil
Joshua Itzkowitz Shifrinson & Miranda Priebe
International Security, Summer 2011, Pages 167-201
Abstract:
The United States and its Persian Gulf allies have been increasingly concerned with the growing size and complexity of Iran's ballistic missile programs. At a time when the United States and its allies remain locked in a standoff with Iran over the latter's nuclear program, states around the Persian Gulf fear that Iran would retaliate for an attack on its nuclear program by launching missiles at regional oil installations and other strategic targets. An examination of the threat posed by Iran's missiles to Saudi Arabian oil installations, based on an assessment of Iran's missile capabilities, a detailed analysis of Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure, and a simulated missile campaign against the network using known Iranian weapons, finds no evidence of a significant Iranian missile threat to Saudi infrastructure. These findings cast doubt on one aspect of the Iranian threat to Persian Gulf oil while offering an analytic framework for understanding developments in the Iranian missile arsenal and the vulnerability of oil infrastructure to conventional attack.
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Perceptions and attitudes following a terrorist shock: Evidence from the UK
Carlos Bozzoli & Cathérine Müller
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Transnational terrorism in Western countries has raised questions about security measures that constrain civil liberties. This is the first paper that uses a terrorist attack, that in the London 7/7/2005, as an exogenous source of variation to study the dynamics of risk perception and the effect on the readiness to trade off civil liberties for enhanced security. In this framework we show that willingness to trade off security for liberties is dramatically affected by changes in individual risk assessments due to a terrorist attack. We document the extent of persistence of changed attitudes.
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Borders, Rivalry, Democracy, and Conflict in the European Region, 1816-1994
Karen Rasler & William Thompson
Conflict Management and Peace Science, July 2011, Pages 280-305
Abstract:
Should peace be attributed mainly to democracy or to some intervening variable that influences both democracy and conflict? A second, perhaps related question is whether or to what extent democratization is driven by external drivers of threat. If regime type helps explain external conflict, does external conflict also help explain regime type? By examining the relationships among strategic rivalry, unstable boundaries, democracy, and interstate conflict in a regional context, we find that rivalry and unstable boundaries are alternative manifestations of external threat. Both have significant, if not identical effects on stimulating interstate conflict. Regime type does not appear to have an independent effect on interstate conflict when we take either rivalries or unstable boundaries into consideration. At the same time, we also find that external threat indicators negatively predict changes in democratization. In short, greater threat is associated with less democratization.
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Carla Martinez Machain, Clifton Morgan & Patrick Regan
Foreign Policy Analysis, July 2011, Pages 295-316
Abstract:
Global terrorism and local rebellion are observed rather frequently; solutions appear to be rather sparse. A common strategy adopted by governments is to attempt to deter potential rebels from engaging in acts of violence, often by responding to attacks with violent reprisals directed at the populace from which the rebels are recruited. The logic supporting such a strategy follows from a theory of deterrence that we believe is underdeveloped. This theory focuses heavily on the credibility of the deterrent threat and on ensuring that the cost imposed by retaliation is high. This ignores the flip side of the deterrent threat-that is, the promise that if one does not misbehave (by engaging in acts of rebellion), one will not suffer retaliatory punishment. Policy designed to ensure that punishment is swift and severe (and perhaps disproportional) can undermine deterrence and actually encourage more potential rebels to become active. Using a game-theoretic model, we show that successful deterrence requires a strategy in which retaliation is proportionate and directed only at the guilty, as well as being certain. Moreover, potential rebels must believe that the innocent will have attractive opportunities outside of joining the insurgency as well as that the innocent will not be punished. We provide empirical illustrations of our thesis from participants in the Palestinian uprising, including several who have taken up arms against Israel.