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Above: In democratic systems, voters can influence foreign policy by removing (or threatening to remove) leaders who make unpopular decisions. In 2014, thousands of protesters in London let their government know how they felt about renewing military engagement in Iraq.
4 Domestic Politics and War T HE PU Z Z L E War is costly for states, but what if there are actors within the state—such as
politicians, businesses, or the military—who see war as beneficial and who expect to pay few or none of its costs? Do states fight wars to satisfy influential domestic interests?
139
On March 30, 1982, thousands of demonstrators marched in the streets of Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, denouncing the country’s military government for its harsh economic policies and oppressive rule. Riot police used tear gas, rubber bullets, and water can- nons to break up the protests, and over 2,000 people were arrested. A week later, the streets of Buenos Aires filled with demonstrators once more, but this time the demonstrations voiced enthusiastic support for the mili- tary regime, as many of those who had earlier called for the government’s ouster now joined in the outpouring of praise. What changed in the course of a week? On April 2, Argentine naval forces invaded a small group of islands 300 miles off the Argentine coast that were the subject of a long-standing dispute between Argentina and Britain. Is there any connection between these events? Did the Argentine government provoke a war with Britain in order to revive its popularity with its people?
In 1954, representatives of the United Fruit Com- pany went to Washington, D.C., to voice concerns about the leader of Guatemala, a man named Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz had pushed a land reform program that led to the seizure of almost 400,000 acres belonging to the
American company. Arbenz offered to compensate United Fruit to the tune of $1.2 million, the value of the land that the company claimed for tax purposes. The U.S. government insisted on behalf of United Fruit that the company be paid almost $16 million. In June of that year, rebels armed and trained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) invaded Guatemala. Fearing a full-scale American invasion, parts of the Guatemalan military revolted, Arbenz resigned from office and fled the coun- try, and a pro-American leader was installed. The oper- ation cost the CIA just under $3 million.1 Did the United States overthrow a foreign leader to benefit a single com- pany at the expense of American taxpayers?
Our first look at the puzzle of war in Chapter 3 con- sidered this problem from the perspective of states. We assumed two states in conflict over a particular good, such as a piece of territory, and trying to arrive at a settlement that would avoid the costs of war. This kind of analysis is very common in international relations scholarship, where
1. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, “CIA’s Role in the Overthrow of Arbenz,” Job 79-01025A, Box 153, Folder 3, www.state.gov/r/pa/ ho/frus/ike/guat/20181.htm (accessed 11/07/07).
140
Thinking Analytically about Domestic Politics and War To answer the questions posed here, we must con- sider the different interests that domestic actors have in terms of war and peace. Simply identifying these interests is not enough, however, since not all actors within the state have equal say over foreign policy choices and hence not all interests are represented equally. Which domestic interests drive foreign policy choices depends on two factors: the strategic inter- actions between actors, which determine which indi- viduals and groups can exert effective influence and which cannot; and the institutions within the state, which determine how different actors have access to the decision-making process. Further, we have to recall that war is not the choice of a single state, but rather an outcome of the interaction between or among multiple states. Hence, as we consider domestic influences on foreign policy, we need to examine how these factors shape bargaining at the international level.
it is often referred to as the unitary state assumption: the treatment of states as coherent actors with a set of inter- ests that belong to the state. While this assumption can be a useful starting place for analysis, we must remember that states are legal and political constructs, not beings capable of taking actions. The choices and actions of states are made by people. Decisions about waging war are made by a state’s political leaders. Military plans are drawn up by military officials and carried out by soldiers.
Others within the country may also be able to influ- ence foreign policy choices, even if they have no direct say over them. There may be interest groups such as business or ethnic lobbies that influence decision mak- ing through their organizational and financial resources. In democratic systems, voters influence policy decisions because of their ability to remove leaders who make unpopular choices. Looking inside the state reveals new actors with varied interests, as well as variation across states in the political institutions that determine who affects decision making.
How does our understanding of the causes of war change when we look inside the state and consider the interests, interactions, and institutions within it? In Chapter 3, we argued that to understand why wars hap- pen, we need to understand why states at times cannot solve their conflicts peacefully, in a way that avoids the costs associated with fighting. This argument rested on the assumption that war is costly to those engaged in the interaction. These costs create a bargaining range, or a set of deals that both states prefer over fighting. The assumption that war is costly makes sense when we think of the state as a unitary actor, but once we look inside the state, it is clear that the costs and benefits of war are not distributed equally within the country.
Different actors within the state may place more or less value on the issue in dispute. A disputed territory might represent a source of livelihood, profit, or national pride to some, a tract of worthless land to others. The persecution of a minority group in a foreign country might arouse outrage in some, perhaps owing to ethnic attach- ment to the victims, while others greet it with indiffer- ence. Most Americans in 1954 had little or no stake in the land reform policies of the Guatemalan government; to the United Fruit Company, however, millions of dollars’ worth of land were at risk.
The costs of war are also distributed unevenly. Some people, such as those who might be drafted to serve in the military, can expect to pay very high and direct costs
from war. Others may see the costs of war in economic terms, if the need to finance the conflict leads to higher taxes. In contrast, there are some groups within a coun- try that may profit from war financially or professionally: arms manufacturers benefit from increased purchases of their products; for military officers, combat experi- ence leads to opportunities for medals and promotions; and for unpopular governments, such as the Argentine junta in 1982, war can build support domestically and solidify their hold on power.
These observations raise a number of questions: To what extent is war rooted not in the information and com- mitment problems discussed in Chapter 3, but rather in the interests of domestic actors who see personal benefit and little or no cost to war? Do wars serve the national inter- est or the narrow interests of office-hungry politicians, multinational companies, and/or a “military-industrial complex” composed of glory-seeking militaries and profit- seeking arms merchants? How do domestic institutions, such as democracy, influence a government’s decisions and the likelihood of war between states?
141Whose Interests Count in Matters of War and Peace?
Whose Interests Count in Matters of War and Peace? In the previous chapter, we observed that international disputes generally arise over territory, policies, and the characteristics of countries’ domestic regimes. Why these conflicts of interest arise in the first place is a complicated question with no single answer. One view, referred to in this book’s Introduction as realism, is that states’ interests are largely, if not entirely, dictated by external factors. States want to preserve their sovereignty and territorial integrity. To do so, they need power—primarily, military power. Hence, they seek opportunities to expand their own power and/or to diminish the power of those that threaten them. In this view, states’ interests are fixed, determined largely by their material resources and geo- graphic position, and they are not shaped by domestic factors.
Although this argument is sometimes useful in understanding sources of con- flict in the world, it is also overly simplistic. The interactions among states at the international level can be fundamentally affected by interactions among actors at the domestic level.2 Look inside any country, and there are a large number of indi- viduals and groups motivated by a variety of different interests: workers who want a job and secure income, companies that want to increase their profits, organizations that want to further a cause they care about or extend the reach of their ideology or religion, and politicians who want to wield political power for personal or ideologi- cal ends. The interaction of these interests within the context of domestic political institutions can fundamentally affect the interests that the national government pursues and the choices it makes when dealing with other countries.
National versus Particularistic Interests In considering the kinds of domestic interests that can influence foreign policy, it is useful to distinguish between general interests and narrow or particularistic inter- ests. A general interest is something that most, if not all, actors within the country share. For example, virtually everyone has an interest in the country’s physical secu- rity and economic well-being. If most people within the state share a common reli- gious or ethnic identity, then the state’s foreign policy interests likely reflect those identities. It makes sense to refer to such interests as national interests, or interests that are so widely shared that they can be attributed to the state as a whole. Narrow or particularistic interests are those held by only a relatively small number of actors within the country, such as a particular business, an ethnic minority group, or indi- viduals within government.
To make this distinction concrete, consider the case of oil. The United States has long professed, and acted on, an interest in ensuring a steady supply of oil,
2. Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International Organization 42 (1988): 427–60.
142 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
particularly from the oil-rich countries in the Middle East. In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt declared that the defense of Saudi Arabia was vital to the defense of the United States, and an American com- pany, the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), became the main player in developing and exploiting the oil fields there. The commitment to defend Saudi Arabia was reinforced on a number of occasions. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, putting Soviet forces on the doorstep of the Middle East and American allies in the Persian Gulf. President Jimmy Carter responded by articulating what became known as the Carter Doctrine: “Any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” And the need to preserve stability and American influence in this region was cited to justify both the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War.3
Why has the United States had such a consistent interest in oil and the Middle East? A national interest– based argument hinges on the observation that oil is vital to U.S. power because a modern military of tanks and airplanes consumes large quantities of fuel.
It is no coincidence that Roosevelt’s concern for Saudi Arabia arose during World War II, at a time when American war planners were worried about running out of gas. The Cold War that followed did nothing to alleviate concerns about maintain- ing access to this strategically valuable material that was crucial to the economic and military might of the United States and its allies. In this view, the U.S. interest in oil stems from a national interest in ensuring its military power and security.
An alternative argument, also based on general interests, revolves around the U.S. economy’s dependence on stable and plentiful oil supplies. The U.S. economy runs on oil—to fuel cars, to transport goods around the country, to heat homes and power businesses. Shocks to the price of oil can thus have substantial effects on the economic welfare of U.S. citizens, influencing inflation, unemployment, and dispos- able income. As Figure 4.1 shows, the price of oil over time has been highly sensi- tive to events in the Middle East, with major spikes occurring during times of war and revolution. Such dramatic price increases can affect people in a variety of ways, sparking inflation and unemployment and eating into consumers’ pocketbooks.
When the Guatemalan government seized property belonging to the United Fruit Company in 1954, arguing that it belonged to the workers of Guatemala, United Fruit asked the U.S. government to intervene. Here, a banner by Guatemala’s General Confederation of Workers hangs in front of a United Fruit hiring hall.
3. For a comprehensive history of the role of oil in international politics, see Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Free Press, 1991).
143Whose Interests Count in Matters of War and Peace?
Hence, American citizens have a general interest in ensuring stability in the Middle East in order to prevent oil price shocks that would hurt the economy.
Set against these views of the United States’ national interest is one that sees the pursuit of oil as benefiting a small group of businesses: oil companies. After World War II, U.S. companies like Aramco played a direct role in pumping and selling Mid- dle Eastern oil, making huge profits. Since the 1960s and 1970s, producer countries have generally nationalized their oil industries, meaning that oil companies have to negotiate deals with these governments. U.S. firms like ExxonMobil profit from their participation in the exploration, drilling, refining, and marketing of oil, but their access to these activities depends on the willingness of foreign governments to do business with them. It is possible, then, that U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East is driven by these companies’ desire to expand and protect their profits.
In this view, firms use their influence over policy makers to ensure that the United States defends friendly regimes (like that of Saudi Arabia) and undermines hostile regimes (like that of Iraq under Saddam Hussein) that are bad for business. Because these policies can impose costs on American soldiers and taxpayers, this view sees U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East as benefiting a narrow set of inter- ests within the country at the expense of everyone else.
As this discussion suggests, the distinction between national and particularistic interests is easy to make in the abstract but harder to observe in practice. While oil clearly influences U.S. policy in the Middle East, it is difficult to say with confidence whether the general or narrow interests are more important. Nonetheless, the distinction is crucial for thinking about what causes war. Recall from Chapter 2 that an actor is a group of individuals with similar interests. To the extent that groups or individuals within the state have different interests over the outcomes of international bargaining, the analytical utility of assuming that the state is an actor diminishes—and we have to start looking within the state for new actors.
Year
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Iranian revolution/ Onset of Iran-Iraq War
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Iraq invasion of Kuwait/ Persian Gulf War Onset of
Iraq War
Arab Spring uprisings
FIGURE 4.1 The Price of Oil, 1960–2018
Figure source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Spot Crude Oil Price: West Texas Intermediate (WTI) [WTISPLC], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred. stlouisfed.org/series/WTISPLC, March 19, 2018.
* In 2017 U.S. dollars.
144 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
This quest is important because the analysis of war presented in Chapter 3 assumed that war is a costly outcome for the actors engaged in inter- national bargaining. These costs ensure the exis- tence of deals that all sides prefer over war, and they underpin an understanding of war that focuses on the information, commitment, and divisibility problems that can prevent such deals from being reached. If, however, the benefits of war are enjoyed by a different set of actors from those that pay the costs, then this view may need to be revised. Does war arise not because of obstacles to the bargaining interaction, but because war furthers the interests of particular actors within the country?
Interactions, Institutions, and Influence When we drop the unitary actor assumption and look within states, an enormous number of individ-
uals and groups, with a variety of interests, come into focus. Which actors matter, and which interests are likely to influence foreign policy decisions? The answer lies in institutions and interactions. Recall from Chapter 2 that institutions are sets of rules and decision-making procedures.
Within each country, domestic institutions help determine who runs the gov- ernment, how decisions are made, and how disputes are resolved. In a monarchy, for example, the ruler is determined through a system of succession often based on birth order. In other systems, the leader is the person who commands the great- est support within the military and therefore can repress challengers with force. In democratic political systems, leaders are selected through regular elections in which winners are decided by the amount of popular support they can muster. Domestic institutions also determine how much power an individual leader has to make decisions. In some political systems, rulers can dictate the state’s policies on their own or with the support of a relatively small number of key actors. In other systems, the institutions of government may distribute decision-making power among more than one body, such as a president and a legislature.
By shaping how leaders obtain power and make decisions, domestic institu- tions determine which actors’ interests are taken into account. Leaders whose hold on power is unchallenged may not have to consider the interests of anyone else, and they can act on the basis of their personal interests or whims. More commonly, a ruler may only have to worry about maintaining the loyalty of the military by cater- ing to that organization’s interests.
In democratic political institutions, by contrast, the need to win elections forces leaders to think about how the voting public will respond to their policy choices. It also makes them dependent on organized groups that are willing to donate money
In 1973 and 1979, conflicts in the Middle East led to gasoline shortages in the United States, and some stations ran out of gas entirely. The dependence of the U.S. economy on gasoline means that American consumers have an economic interest in the stability of the oil-rich Middle East.
145Whose Interests Count in Matters of War and Peace?
and time to election campaigns. Although voters and organized interest groups are not literally in the room when decisions are made, democratic institutions force those who are in the room to take those actors’ interests into account. Thus, institu- tions determine which actors and interests have a (figurative) seat at the table.
Some domestic actors may also have strategic advantages that magnify their influence. In Chapter 2 we introduced a strategic dilemma known as the collective action problem. This problem arises when a group of individuals with common interests seeks to act collectively to further that interest. As we saw, such efforts can fall short if each individual prefers to free ride on the efforts of others. One implication of this insight is that relatively small groups can be more effective at cooperating to further common interests than large groups are. Indeed, small groups of highly motivated and informed individuals are better able to organize and coordinate their activities and prevent others from free riding. By contrast, large, dispersed groups in which each individual has only a small stake in or knowledge about the policy decision are generally very hard to organize. For example, whereas United Fruit stood to lose millions of dollars of property in Guatemala, the inter- vention cost each U.S. taxpayer only a few pennies. Had taxpayers been opposed to having their money spent this way, they would have had a hard time cooperating, since no individual had any incentive to spend time and money on such an effort. To the extent that a group’s political influence depends on the ability of its members to cooperate, this strategic problem favors the few over the many. Thus, a relatively narrow interest group can successfully demand a policy that benefits that group at the expense of everyone else.
Appreciating the role of institutions and interactions, we can organize a discus- sion of domestic interests around four different kinds of actors, depicted in Figure 4.2.
Leaders
Bureaucracy
Interest Groups
General Public
FIGURE 4.2 Key Domestic Actors in Foreign Policy
146 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
The first type consists of the leaders who make foreign policy decisions. State leaders decide when to make threats, what demands to issue, and ultimately, whether to wage war. These individuals matter the most because, by whatever rules of politics operate in their country, they have the authority to make these decisions. The next type com- prises organized groups that have sufficient resources and information to influence the decisions made by the political leaders. Two such groups are of particular rele- vance: bureaucratic actors and interest groups.
The state apparatus is made up of a variety of different organizations collec- tively known as the bureaucracy. These organizations—which include the mili- tary, diplomatic corps, and intelligence agencies—may wield considerable influence because of their institutional resources and knowledge. The military in particular, by virtue of its coercive power, organizational discipline, and expertise in war fight- ing, can shape decisions about the use of force both through its role in implementa- tion and through its influence over political leaders.
Interest groups are groups of individuals with common interests that organize in order to push for policies that benefit their members. Of particular importance in the present context are economic interest groups, such as companies or groups of companies, and ethnic lobbies comprising people with similar policy interests owing to their common ethnic background. In later chapters, when we turn to issues like human rights (Chapter 12) and the environment (Chapter 13), interest groups that organize around other principles will come to the fore.
The final type of actor to consider is the most numerous but rarely the most powerful: the general public. As already suggested, the influence of ordinary citi- zens varies considerably with domestic institutions. In democratic countries, free and fair elections provide individuals with a low-cost way to participate in deciding who governs. In other kinds of countries, it is harder for individual citizens to have much influence, since political leaders do not depend on their support. As long as the regime can count on the repressive power of the police and military, general- public interests can be ignored. Given this situation, the question of how the general public matters is largely a question of how democracy matters.
As we proceed through this chapter, we will walk down the pyramid in Figure 4.2 and consider arguments and evidence about the behavior of actors at each level.
Do Politicians Spark Wars Abroad in Order to Hold On to Power at Home? As noted earlier in this chapter, Argentina sparked a war with Great Britain in 1982 when it invaded a set of nearby islands that had been in dispute for a century and a half: the “Falkland Islands” to the British, the “Malvinas” to Argentines. This war was surprising in a number of respects. First, the islands were not particularly valuable pieces of territory. At the time of the war, the islands had a population of less than 2,000, and their primary source of income was sheep farming. Indeed,
bureaucracy The collection of organizations—including the military, diplomatic corps, and intelligence agencies— that carry out most tasks of governance within the state.
interest groups Groups of individuals with common interests that organize to influence public policy in a manner that benefits their members.
147Do Politicians Spark Wars Abroad in Order to Hold On to Power at Home?
just prior to the war, Britain had taken steps to weaken its hold over the islands. In 1981, Britain readied plans to withdraw the last of its naval vessels in the region and passed an act that stripped the islanders of full British citizenship.
Second, the war was surprising because of the imbalance in military power between the two states. Though separated from the islands by a larger distance, Britain had a far superior naval force. After Argentina invaded and occupied the Falklands on April 2, 1982, it took only 74 days for British forces to retake the islands. There were 255 dead on the British side, 635 on the Argentine side. So why did Argentina pick a fight with such a formidable foe, and why did Britain react so strongly to defend its right to islands that seemed to be of diminishing importance?
A large part of the answer to this puzzle lies not in international considerations, but in the domestic political interests of the countries’ governments. At the time, leaders in both countries had pressing domestic problems to which military conflict may have seemed the perfect solution. The Argentine government—a group of mili- tary officers known as a junta—had seized power in 1976, and its rule had become increasingly repressive and unpopular over time. In the early 1980s, Argentina suffered a severe economic downturn, which led to civil unrest and splits within the ruling group. Facing a dire threat to its rule, the junta leader, General Leopoldo Galtieri, decided that an attack on the Malvinas might help solve its problem.
Knowing that most Argentines resented British control of the islands, Galtieri hoped that a bold move to seize the islands would stir up nationalist sentiment, distract people from their economic hardships, and give the military government a popular achievement that would bolster its prestige and legitimacy. Indeed, the invasion of the Malvinas had precisely this effect. Hence, Galtieri was seeking more than just territory when he seized the islands; he was also looking to solidify his hold on power.4
On the British side, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also had to worry about her political survival. Like Argentina, Britain in 1982 was in the midst of a severe recession. With unemployment soaring, Thatcher’s popularity dropped precipi- tously. In February 1982, the month before the invasion, only 29 percent of Britons said that they approved of the job she was doing. Thatcher’s firm response to the Falkland Islands crisis caused her poll numbers to soar. By May, with British operations to retake the Falklands under way, Thatcher’s approval rating jumped to 44 percent. By the end of the war, her approval stood at 51 percent. The Brit- ish prime minister rode this wave of popularity to electoral victory a year later. Hence, Thatcher’s unexpectedly strong response to the Argentine invasion not only restored British control over the Falklands, but also revived her political fortunes.5
4. Jack Levy and Lily Vakily, “External Scapegoating in Authoritarian Regimes: Argentina in the Falklands/Malvinas Case,” in The Internationalization of Communal Strife, ed. Manus Midlarski, 118–46 (London: Routledge, 1992).
5. Approval figures are from David Butler and Gareth Butler, eds., British Political Fact 1900–1994, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1994), 256. There is some controversy over how much the Falklands War contributed to the Conservative victory in 1983. See Harold D. Clarke, William Mishler, and Paul Whiteley, “Recapturing the Falklands: Models of Conservative Popularity, 1979–83,” British Journal of Political Science 20, no 1. (January 1990): 63–81.
148 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
What Do Leaders Want? The leaders of states are not solely, if at all, statesmen or stateswomen looking out for the best interests of the nation; they are also individuals with many var- ied interests of their own. Some may have very strong ideological beliefs that increase their willingness to pay costs or run risks in foreign policy. It is hard to understand World War II, for example, without ref- erence to German leader Adolf Hitler’s extreme ide- ology, which motivated him to seek out Lebensraum (“living space”) for the German people by attack- ing Poland and then the Soviet Union.6 Even in the absence of such extreme motivations, different lead- ers may come into office with different ideas or prior life experiences that shape how they think about foreign policy, including the desirability of using mil- itary force (see “How Do We Know?” on p. 149).7
State leaders may also have more prosaic per- sonal motivations. As the story of the Falklands War reminds us, leaders are also politicians, people who
benefit from holding political office. Being in office confers all manner of benefits: the ego boost of having power, opportunities to enrich oneself and one’s friends, the ability to shape policy in desired ways. As a result, politicians think a lot about how to obtain office and, once in power, how to secure their hold on it. This means that political leaders make choices with an eye toward how those choices will influence their chances of staying in power.
How could these motivations affect leaders’ decisions about war and peace? At the most general level, the desire to stay in power means that leaders have to be responsive to the interests of those who control their political fate, whether voters, organized interest groups, the military, or other groups. As a result, the assumption that political leaders want to remain in office plays a key role in almost every aspect of this chapter, since it helps account for the influence of special interest groups that can provide resources useful for maintaining power; it contributes to an under- standing of the role of the military, whose support is often necessary for a govern- ment to stay in power; and it is a necessary element in arguments about the effects of accountability in democratic political systems. In short, leaders’ desire to hold office explains how the interests of actors within the country can matter at the level of policy making.
6. There is a debate among historians about how much of Hitler’s foreign policy is explained by his personal ideology. For a balanced view, which ultimately concludes that ideology played an important role, see Allan Bullock, “Hitler and the Origins of the Second World War,” in The Origins of the Second World War: A. J. P. Taylor and His Critics, ed. William Roger Louis, 117–45 (New York: Wiley, 1972).
7. See, for example, Elizabeth N. Saunders, Leaders at War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); and Michael C. Horowitz, Allan C. Stam, and Cali M. Ellis, Why Leaders Fight (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, here visiting troops in the Falkland Islands, benefited politically from the Falklands War. Before the war, poor economic conditions in Britain had helped bring Thatcher’s public approval rating down to just 29 percent. Once the war began, the British public rallied behind their leader, sending her approval rating up to 51 percent.
HOW DO W E K NOW ?
A remarkable global trend in recent decades has been the increasing number of countries led by women. While his- tory provides examples of queens and empresses, female heads of state have been rare in the modern era, with the numbers taking off only since the 1980s (see Figure A). The figures are still low in absolute terms—in 2018, only 13 of the 193 countries in the world had a woman chief executive—but the recent growth is part of a broader trend that has also seen increased representation of women in legislatures and militaries. What impact does the gender of the leader have on a state’s foreign policy?
A wealth of research on the general population shows that, on average, women are less aggressive than men and more likely to seek compromise solutions to disputes. Sur- vey data show that women are less likely than men, partic- ularly in Western countries, to support the use of military force. Evidence also suggests that states with more gen- der equality domestically, including more women in the legislature, use less violence in international crises and spend less on their militaries.a
So, does having a female leader make a state less likely to wage war? To answer this question, Michael Horowitz, Allan Stam, and Cali Ellis collected informa- tion on all heads of state from 1875 to 2004. They then examined whether leaders’ propensity to threaten or use military force against other states depends on a variety of personal characteristics. The authors found that, on average, gender has little effect on dispute behavior, and if anything, women are more conflict-prone than men. While 30 percent of male leaders initiated at least one mil- itarized conflict during their tenure, 36 percent of female leaders did.b This finding replicates earlier work, focused on democratic countries, indicating that female presidents and prime ministers engage in more conflictual behavior internationally than men do.c
What might explain this result? One explanation is that, even if there are differences across men and women in the general population, those differences do not hold among the subset of individuals who become heads of state. The process of leader selection may penalize women who are seen as insufficiently “tough.” Particularly when voters are concerned about foreign threats, women candidates face a disadvantage, forcing them to compensate by acting in a manner that runs counter to the gender stereotype.d
A second explanation hinges on the beliefs and behav- ior of other states when confronting a female leader. Military conflict is the outcome of a strategic interaction between at least two states, not the choice of a single individual. If adversaries expect female leaders to be more dovish, then they will make greater demands on them, thus increasing the risk of conflict. Women may also need to use greater levels of force to persuade opponents of their resolve.e
Overall, then, while the literature suggests that increasing gender equality has a number of beneficial effects, the rising prevalence of female heads of state does not necessarily portend a more peaceful world.
Are Women Leaders More Peaceful than Men? HOW DO W E K NOW ?
FIGURE A Number of States with Female Leaders, 1900–2018
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Source: Archigos: A Database of Political Leaders, version 4.1; Henk E. Goemans, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and Giacomo Chiozza, “Introducing Archigos: A Data Set of Political Leaders,” Journal of Peace Research 49 (2009): 269–83. Updated to 2018 by Curtis Bell, The Rulers, Elections, and Irregular Governance Dataset (REIGN) (Broomfield, CO: OEF Research, 2018). Available at oefresearch.org.
a. For a review of findings on gender effects on international relations, see Dan Reiter, “The Positivist Study of Gender and International Relations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 59 (2015): 1301–26.
b. Michael C. Horowitz, Allan C. Stam, and Cali M. Ellis, Why Leaders Fight (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 158–77.
c. Michael T. Koch and Sarah A. Fulton, “In the Defense of Women: Gender, Office Holding, and National Security Policy in Established Democracies,” Journal of Politics 73 (2001): 1–16; see also Mary Caprioli and Mark A. Boyer, “Gender, Violence, and International Crisis,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 45 (2001): 503–18.
d. See, for example, Jennifer L. Lawless, “Women, War, and Winning Elections: Gender Stereotyping in the Post-September 11th Era,” Political Research Quarterly 57 (2004): 479–90.
e. Caprioli and Boyer, “Gender, Violence, and International Crisis,” 508.
150 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
But an interest in holding on to power does not turn political leaders into mere instruments of other actors. Strategic politicians can use their control of policy to shape their political environment, rather than just respond to it. In the case of war and peace, a common argument is that leaders sometimes use force abroad not to further any national interest, but rather to enhance their hold on power at home.
The Rally Effect and the Diversionary Incentive The idea that leaders can further their own political interests by fighting a war flows from the rally-’round-the-flag effect, or rally effect for short. The term rally effect refers to people’s tendency to become more supportive of their coun- try’s government when it experiences dramatic international events, such as wars. This effect is most apparent in countries in which public opinion polling regularly measures the level of support for a leader.
Often, approval ratings jump up at the onset of a war or some other inter- national crisis, as in the case of Thatcher’s approval ratings at the outset of the Falklands War. The most dramatic rally event ever recorded followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which caused President George W. Bush’s approval rating to jump immediately from 51 to 86 percent, eventually reaching as high as 90 percent. Even in countries without opinion polls and approval ratings, we see cases in which the start of war caused an upsurge of national unity and support for the government. As we noted at the outset of this chapter, in 1982, Argentina’s mili- tary government reversed a tide of public discontent by invading the Falkland Islands.
Why do people rally around the flag at times of international crisis? There are a number of explanations. Social psychologists have shown that members of a group often feel greater attachment and loyalty to the group when they experience conflict with outsiders.8 Hence, international conflict can cause an upwelling of patriotism, and the leader derives increased support as the protector of the group’s interests. At the same time, political opponents may decide to dampen their criti- cism of the government at a time of national crisis, and the government may use the emergency to crack down on dissent. This means that the government dominates the political discourse and can frame the public’s evaluation of its policies without fear that opposing voices will split public opinion.9
International conflict can also create a diversion from problems that might otherwise drag down a leader’s popularity, such as economic troubles or scandals. Foreign policy crises tend to drive other issues out of the news headlines, redirect- ing people’s attention away from the domestic issues that divide and disappoint them and toward the more unifying challenge of meeting a foreign threat. Finally, international conflict may give embattled leaders an opportunity to blame foreign- ers for the country’s problems—a phenomenon known as scapegoating.
8. See, for example, Lewis A. Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1956). The pioneering work of the rally effect in the United States is John E. Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: Wiley, 1973).
9. Richard A. Brody and Catherine R. Shapiro, “A Reconsideration of the Rally Phenomenon in Public Opinion,” in Political Behavior Annual, ed. S. Long, 77–102 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989).
rally effect The tendency for people to become more supportive of their country’s government in response to dramatic international events, such as crises or wars.
151Do Politicians Spark Wars Abroad in Order to Hold On to Power at Home?
The existence of rally effects suggests that political leaders may at times face a diversionary incentive: a temptation to spark an international crisis in order to rally public support at home. This idea was popularized in the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, in which a scandal-plagued national leader hires a movie director to produce news footage of a fake war in order to boost his approval ratings. The logic, how- ever, long precedes Hollywood. In William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, a dying King Henry advises his son, Prince Hal, that to prevent plots against him he needs to “busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels.” This advice echoes in the words of a Russian minister who, during a 1904 dispute with Japan, reportedly told the tsar, “What this country needs is a short, victorious war to stem the tide of revolution.”10 Whether the tsar found this argument persuasive or not, Russia and Japan declared war on each other on February 10, 1904.
The danger posed by the rally effect should be clear from the discussion in Chapter 3. There, it was assumed that a state’s first-best outcome in a crisis is to get its way without having to fight. Fighting, after all, imposes costs that the state should prefer to avoid. A diversionary temptation could alter the balance of costs and benefits. If those who control the state’s foreign policy think that using force abroad would greatly improve their chances of staying in power, then they may prefer war over a negotiated settlement, even one that gives them most of what they want.
Just a few days before invading the Falkland Islands, the Argentine government faced massive protests and calls for the overthrow of the ruling junta. Rioters confronted police, and thousands were arrested. The war with Britain provided the Argentine junta a (temporary) reprieve from these problems by shifting the public’s attention away from domestic issues.
10. This quotation is attributed to Russian interior minister Vladimir Plehve. However, the authenticity of the quotation is unclear, and it has been suggested that it was attributed to Plehve only later by his political enemies.
diversionary incentive The incentive that state leaders have to start international crises in order to rally public support at home.
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These benefits may be particularly tempting to leaders who are insecure domestically because of discontent with their policies or hard economic times. Such a leader may decide that doing nothing would mean losing office, so waging war and invoking the rally effect may be an appealing gamble. This phenomenon has been called gambling for resurrection: taking a risky action, such as starting a war, when the alternative is certain to be very bad.
A sports analogy is useful here. Hockey teams trailing in the final minutes of a game sometimes pull their goalie in order to replace him with an additional attacker. Doing so increases the chances that they can even the score, but it also makes it easier for the other team to score against their undefended net. The gam- ble makes sense because a loss is a loss regardless of whether a team loses by one goal or by many. Consequently, the downside risk of pulling the goalie is small com- pared to the upside potential of tying the game. Political leaders who are certain they will lose office because of poor economic conditions, such as the Argentine junta in 1982, might similarly see a large upside to starting a war and gambling that the outcome will be positive.
Do Leaders “Wag the Dog”? Do leaders routinely gamble for resurrection by starting wars abroad at times of political need? Given the intuitive nature of this argument, it may come as a sur- prise to learn that scholars have found little consistent support for the hypothesis that leaders systematically resort to force when they are in trouble domestically. Numerous studies have sought to determine whether the likelihood that a state will get involved in military conflict increases when the leader is unpopular, the country is in a recession, or citizens face high unemployment or inflation, or, in the case of democratic countries, when a well-timed rally shortly before an election could be particularly useful. Although some studies have shown such effects, the results have been neither consistent nor particularly strong. Rather than a straightforward rela- tionship between, say, economic problems and international conflict, effects tend to depend on a number of factors; that is, some kinds of governments may be sensitive to certain kinds of economic conditions at some times.11
In addition, some research suggests that the relationship between international conflict and leaders’ political security is the opposite of what diversionary theory suggests: international conflict is more likely to be initiated by leaders whose hold on office is relatively strong.12 For example, in democratic systems, leaders are more likely to start wars right after elections, not right before them as diversionary theory would suggest. A democratic leader is most secure just after an election, since the next election is, at that point, several years away.13
11. See, for example, Philip Arena and Glenn Palmer, “Politics or the Economy? Domestic Correlates of Dispute Involvement in Developed Democracies,” International Studies Quarterly 53 (December 2009): 955–75; and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and Brandon C. Prins, “Rivalry and Diversionary Uses of Force,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48 (December 2004): 937–61.
12. See Giacomo Chiozza and H. E. Goemans, “Peace through Insecurity: Tenure and International Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 47 (August 2003): 443–67.
13. Kurt Taylor Gaubatz, “Election Cycles and War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 35, no. 2 (June 1991): 212–44.
153Do Politicians Spark Wars Abroad in Order to Hold On to Power at Home?
This is not to say that diversionary incentives never play a role in particular cases; in fact, historians cite many examples in which such logic contributed to the onset of war. What these results do suggest, however, is that leaders do not system- atically use international conflict for diversionary purposes or to gamble for resur- rection. In other words, even if diversionary incentives have contributed to war in some cases, they account for only a portion of the conflict behavior we observe.
Why might this be the case? If sparking international conflict serves leaders’ political interests, why do we not see stronger evidence of this effect? One possible answer is that most political leaders are not as cynical as we assume and they would not actually start a war simply to maintain their hold on power. Although we can- not rule out this possibility, there are other conceivable explanations for why even cynical leaders might not start a war to further their own political interests.
The first explanation is that the domestic political benefits of war relative to peace have to be large—perhaps unrealistically large—in order to eliminate the pos- sibility of a peaceful bargain. Recall the simple bargaining framework we illustrated in the previous chapter, now depicted in Figure 4.3. As shown in the top panel, the size of the bargaining range is determined by the sum of the war costs to both sides. Now imagine that the leader of State A expects to reap political benefits from waging war. This benefit increases the value of war to the leader as indicated in the
WAR OUTCOME
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FIGURE 4.3 Rally Effects and the Bargaining Range The top panel shows the expected outcome of a war between State A and State B, as well as the resulting bargaining range. The lower panel shows how the bargaining range shrinks if the leader of State A expects political benefits, in the form of a rally, as a result of war. This benefit increases the value of war to A, offsetting some or all of its costs, but as long as the benefit does not exceed the costs of war to both states, a bargaining range still exists.
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lower panel. This added benefit shrinks the bargaining range, but even if this benefit is greater than the costs to State A—so that the leader sees a net benefit rather than a net cost to war—a bargaining range could still exist, as shown.
The size of this new bargaining range is given by the sum of the net costs (the total costs to both states minus the additional political benefit). Only if this benefit exceeds the sum of the war costs to both states does the bargaining range vanish, making war inevitable. Hence, even if the leader of one state expected large politi- cal benefits from waging war, these benefits would be sufficient to cause war only if they outweighed the war costs to both sides. This condition becomes more likely if the leaders of both states expect political benefits from war, as was the case in the Falklands War. Notice also that the political benefits from war mean that State A can demand a better deal from State B than it otherwise could. Knowing this, poten- tial targets might avoid picking fights with politically vulnerable leaders, thereby depriving them of the opportunity to use force opportunistically.14 These observa- tions remind us that war is the product of an interaction between at least two actors and not the choice of a single actor.
The Political Costs of War A second reason why diversionary effects might be weak is that war can impose domestic political costs in addition to promising benefits. This is evident from the Falklands case as well. While Thatcher rode her postwar wave of support to a resounding electoral victory in Britain, the Argentine junta that lost the war met a very different fate. Following Argentina’s defeat, angry protesters once again filled the streets. Galtieri and other members of the junta resigned or were stripped of their posts, and several went to prison.
The story of the Russo-Japanese War has a similar ending. Far from the short, victorious war the Russians hoped for, the war actually lasted almost two years, and the Russians suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Japanese. Rather than stemming the tide of revolution, as the Russian minister reportedly predicted, successive defeats on the battlefield increased unhappiness with the tsar’s regime and helped usher in the revolution of 1905, when the tsar was forced to make polit- ical concessions to his opponents. Full-scale revolution would hit Russia in 1917, in the midst of yet more battlefield defeats in World War I. Indeed, the initial surge of patriotism that generally accompanies the onset of war can quickly give way to discontent and rebellion if the war goes badly.
One way to see the relationship between the costs of war and its domestic political repercussions is to consider how public support for war changes as the costs mount. Figure 4.4 shows the relationship between public support and battle deaths for major U.S. military operations since and including World War II. As the graph shows, most operations started with very high levels of public support, but
14. See, for example, Benjamin O. Fordham, “Strategic Conflict Avoidance and the Diversionary Use of Force,” Journal of Politics 67 (February 2005): 132–53; and Brett Ashley Leeds and David R. Davis, “Domestic Political Vulnerability and International Disputes,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 41 (December 1997): 814–34.
155Do Politicians Spark Wars Abroad in Order to Hold On to Power at Home?
this support generally fell off as the number of U.S. battle deaths mounted. The only wars that remained popular throughout were World War II—a war of national sur- vival that followed the Japanese attack on the U.S. homeland—and the Persian Gulf War, which caused relatively few deaths on the American side.
Moreover, in cases in which support for the war collapsed, the presidents’ approval ratings also suffered. During the Korean War, President Truman saw his approval rating fall to as low as 22 percent, and he declined to run for reelection in 1952. The unpopularity of the Vietnam War similarly doomed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who dropped his bid for reelection in March 1968. The Iraq War dragged down President Bush’s approval ratings, causing his Republican Party to lose control of Congress in 2006 and contributing to the election of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008. More generally, research has shown that leaders who fight losing or costly wars are more likely to be removed from office than those who win wars.15
The evidence suggests that in terms of their political interests, leaders should see war not as a pure opportunity, but as a gamble—and one that has a downside risk. Hence, in thinking about how reelection incentives influence the way leaders think about war and peace, we need to set the costs of losing a war against the potential benefits of the rally effect. These costs may explain why we do not see strong or sys- tematic evidence that politically insecure politicians engage in diversionary conflict.
In light of this observation, it is worth recalling that the scandal-plagued leader in the movie Wag the Dog does not start an actual war; instead, he hires a movie producer to stage a fake war for public consumption. The attraction of doing this is clear: when you script the war yourself, you can make sure the right side wins. In the real world, war is a risky gamble—not just for the state, but also for the political interests of its leaders.
Persian Gulf War (1991)
Intervention in Somalia (1993)
War in Afghanistan (2001-14) World War II (1941–45)
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(1965–73)
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FIGURE 4.4 U.S. Battle Deaths and Public Support for War
Figure sources: Numbers for World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and Somalia come from Eric V. Larson, Casualties and Consensus (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1996). Other poll numbers come from Gallup, http://www.gallup.com/file/ poll/183590/Mistake_Going_ into_Iraq_and_Afghanistan_ 150612.pdf (accessed 11/22/17). Casualty figures for Iraq and Afghanistan are from www .icasualties.org (accessed 01/20/15).
15. See, for example, Hein Goemans, War and Punishment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
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Do Countries Fight Wars to Satisfy the Military or Special Interest Groups? From 1898 to 1902, Great Britain engaged in a costly and divisive war with the Boer states in South Africa. The Boer War, which lasted three years and claimed about 50,000 lives, was a climactic episode of a larger process in which the European states carved up and colonized the continent of Africa, as described in Chapter 1. To the British economist J. A. Hobson, this scramble for colonies and the bloody wars that it gave rise to presented a puzzle. Why had Britain expended so many young lives and so much money to acquire and defend an empire in Africa, as well as in Asia and the Americas?
The answer that Hobson arrived at was unsettling. He calculated that although imperialism did not benefit the British nation as a whole, it was extremely profi- table for a few small groups within the country. The primary beneficiaries, he argued, were rich people with the ability to invest overseas. With colonial posses- sions came many opportunities for profitable investments. Wealthy people could invest in railroads, mines, and other properties and receive very high rates of return. They could lend money to colonial governments at favorable interest rates. In pushing for colonial possessions, Hobson argued, financial interests found allies in powerful places: military leaders seeking glory and larger budgets, and arms man- ufacturers seeking profits. In his view, these groups used their power and influence to force British governments to pursue a policy that benefited them at the expense of the greater good.16
Hobson’s theory of imperialism is not without critics, but the general thesis— that wars are fought to benefit military and business interests—is a familiar one. It echoes famously in the words of U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, who warned of the influence of a military-industrial complex, an alliance of military leaders and arms manufacturers that presumably have an interest in an aggressive foreign policy.
In this section we consider the influence of the military and interest groups with respect to questions of war and peace. As we will see, there are times when these actors might be expected to have hawkish interests, because they antici- pate benefits from war and/or pay few of the costs. These two sets of actors also have strategic advantages that they can exploit in their interaction with politi- cal leaders and others within the country. That said, we will see that the primary effect of hawkish actors is not to cause wars per se—by eliminating the bargaining range—but rather to expand the scope of the state’s ambitions and to increase the conditions under which the state would consider fighting a war. Hence, hawkish domestic interests do not lead directly to the breakdown of bargaining, but they do create more opportunities for such failures to occur.
16. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: James Nisbet, 1902).
military-industrial complex An alliance between military leaders and the industries that benefit from international conflict, such as arms manufacturers.
157Do Countries Fight Wars to Satisf y the Militar y or Special Interest Groups?
Bureaucratic Politics and the Military Although the ultimate decision to wage war may lie in the hands of a few individ- uals, the actual machinery of government that deals with matters of war and peace is much larger and more complex. The leader of a modern state sits atop a large bureaucratic apparatus: a collection of organizations that manage many of the details of governance. Wars are planned and implemented by the state’s military— usually a massive organization with thousands and, in some cases, millions of indi- viduals. Negotiations with other countries are conducted by a host of diplomats around the world, typically overseen by a ministry of foreign affairs (known in the United States as the State Department). Information about other countries’ military capabilities and intentions are collected and analyzed by intelligence organizations, like the United States’ CIA, Britain’s MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6), or Russia’s SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service). Given all the tasks that governments have to perform and all the individuals that are needed to carry out those tasks, such organizations are a necessary part of any modern state.
This observation opens up the possibility that decisions about war and peace are shaped not only by state leaders, but also by the interests of the bureaucratic organizations involved in the decision-making process.17 While such organizations care about what is best for the country, they may also care about the resources that they control and the influence that they themselves wield. They generally seek bigger budgets, more input on policy making, and opportunities for personal promotion. As a result, they may press for policies that boost their own status or fit their own worldview.
For example, prior to the 2003 Iraq War there were serious disagreements within the U.S. government between the Defense Department and the State Depart- ment. Civilian leaders at the Pentagon generally expected war to be easy, while those at the State Department were more cautious and emphasized the need for international diplomacy. There were also disagreements over which agency should take the lead role in rebuilding Iraq politically and economically in the aftermath of the conflict. These debates reflect a common aphorism about bureaucratic politics that “where you stand depends on where you sit”—that is, the leaders of bureau- cratic agencies often take policy stands that reflect their own organizations’ needs. In the end, the Defense Department won these scuffles.18
As this example suggests, the military is usually the most influential bureau- cratic actor in matters of war and peace. Up to now, our discussion has treated the military as an instrument of the state—a tool that states use to increase their lever- age in international bargaining. What happens when we think about the military as an actor in its own right?
There is a compelling—although, as we will see, incomplete—argument to be made that the more influence the military has over foreign policy decision making,
17. The classic investigation of bureaucratic politics is Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1999).
18. See, for example, Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
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the more aggressive the state will be. This argument rests on the assumption that members of the military have ideological, organizational, and professional inter- ests in policies that make war more likely. Ideologically, leaders in the armed forces may be predisposed to seeing military solutions to foreign policy problems, overes- timating the effectiveness of force relative to other alternatives. As an organization, the military can demand larger budgets and more personnel when the state is fre- quently engaged in international conflict than when it is at peace. And profession- ally, military officers find that combat experience is crucial to being promoted to the highest ranks. All these considerations suggest that the military sees benefits to war that other actors may not.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of how military influence can lead to aggressive foreign policy is the case of Japan in the 1930s. During this period, Japan pursued a relentless campaign of expansion against its neighbors, ultimately bringing the country into war with China, France, Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. This aggressive turn in foreign policy coincided with a creeping takeover by the military, which undermined the democratic system that had been developing in the country.
In 1931, elements of the Japanese military provoked a war with China and seized a region known as Manchuria, which military leaders prized for its coal and iron. A year later, the prime minister of Japan was assassinated by a group of naval officers—an event that ushered in the end of civilian control of Japanese politics. The Japanese military became the main instigator of that country’s expansionist policies. This case is an extreme example, but there is broader evidence to sug- gest that countries in which civilian leadership has weak control of the military are more likely to initiate militarized conflicts.19 (See “What Shaped Our World?” on p. 159 for another example.)
Nevertheless, it is important not to automatically equate the military with militarism. One study examined the advice that military leaders gave U.S. decision makers in about 20 key crises during the Cold War, comparing how aggressive the officers were relative to the president’s civilian advisers. The study found that mili- tary advisers were no more likely than civilians to advocate the use of force in a cri- sis; rather, the main difference between the two groups was over the level of force that should be used in the event of an operation, with military advisers consistently preferring larger deployments. The author concluded that the “stereotype of a bel- ligerent chorus of generals and admirals intimidating a pacific civilian establish- ment is not supported by the evidence.”20
Similarly, a study of elite opinion in the United States shows that military leaders are inclined to advocate the use of force in a narrower set of cases than
19. Todd S. Sechser, “Are Soldiers Less War-Prone than Statesmen?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48, no. 5 (2004): 746–74. The idea that civilians can lose control of the military also plays a large role in explanations of World War I. See Stephen Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” International Security 9, no. 1 (Summer 1984): 58–107; and Samuel R. Williamson Jr. and Russel Van Wyk, July 1914: Soldiers, Statesmen, and the Coming of the Great War (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2003).
20. Richard K. Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 4.
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One of the more dangerous episodes in modern history started rather quietly in April 1999, when Pakistani military forces secretly infiltrated across the Line of Control (LoC) that separates the Pakistani- and Indian-controlled areas of the disputed Kashmir region. When the incursion was dis- covered, India mobilized to repel the attack. Over the next several weeks, the two countries fought a war in the high mountains near the town of Kargil. This was neither the first nor the bloodiest war between the two countries, but it was the first that took place under the specter of nuclear war. Only a year earlier, the two countries had openly tested nuclear devices. It was also a rare example of war between two democratic countries. How can we explain this episode?
Interests At the root of the conflict is a long-standing territorial dispute over the region of Kashmir, which both India and Pakistan claim on historical and religious grounds (see Map 3.1 on p. 94). But even while both states want to possess the entire region, actors within each country place different values on it and are willing to pay different costs to obtain it. In particular, the military in Pakistan has gen- erally been more willing than the country’s civilian leaders to run a risk of war with India.
Interactions The conflict over Kashmir has led to repeated episodes of bargaining in which force has been threatened and used, including full-scale wars in 1947, 1965, and 1971. Even so, only weeks before the Kargil War broke out, the countries’ leaders had met to affirm their desire for a peaceful resolution. The infiltration of Pakistani forces across the LoC thus represented an unexpected escala- tion, designed to bolster Pakistan’s bargaining power. Once India responded, the subsequent fighting took place in the shadow of deterrent threats. Pakistan put its nuclear forces on alert and threatened to use every weapon in its arsenal if India invaded; India responded by putting its own missiles on alert. With the risks so high and foreign pres- sure mounting, Pakistan had little choice but to pull its forces back behind the LoC. So why did Pakistan initiate such a dangerous gamble?
Institutions The answer lies in the country’s domestic polit- ical institutions. Even though Pakistan has a democratically
elected government, its military is very powerful and has on several occasions ousted civilian leaders that it did not like. Indeed, shortly after the Kargil War, the prime minis- ter, Nawaz Sharif, was deposed and replaced by the army’s chief of staff, General Pervez Musharraf. The danger of removal by the military has led to weak civilian control and oversight of that organization.
Although there are many unknowns about Pakistan’s decision making in the lead-up to the war, there is good reason to believe that the military command manipulated Sharif into starting a conflict he did not fully understand.a When India accused Pakistan of crossing the LoC in May 1999, Sharif claimed that the invaders were local Kashmiri insurgents operating on their own initiative. Sharif and others claim that when he was briefed on the plan to sup- port the insurgency, he was not told that Pakistani military forces would cross the LoC in large numbers. In addition, U.S. officials reportedly believed that the move to put Paki- stani nuclear forces on alert during the war was done without Sharif’s knowledge.
As this episode suggests, military organizations may sometimes be willing to run greater risks than are the civilian authorities whom they are supposed to serve. When the military wields enormous influence and civilian control is weak, this behavior can have dangerous conse- quences for the country, its neighbors, and the world.
W H AT SH A PE D OUR WOR L D ?
The Kargil War and Military Influence in War
a. This discussion is based on Owen Bennett Jones, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 87–109.
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are civilian leaders without any military experience.21 Indeed, by all accounts, U.S. military officers were much more reluctant to go to war against Iraq in 2003 than was the civilian leadership at the Pentagon and White House. Many top command- ers thought that war with Iraq would be costly and that conducting it successfully would require larger commitments of manpower and money than the civilian lead- ership was willing to make.22 Such observations suggest that, in some contexts at least, the military’s interests push in a conservative direction—more appreciative of the limits of what can be achieved through force and more sensitive to the human costs of war, which are, after all, borne by its personnel.
Interest Groups: Economic and Ethnic Lobbies The possibility that special interest groups can influence foreign policy in a man- ner that furthers their particular interests is familiar to most people. In the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Vice President Richard Cheney’s former com- pany, Halliburton, was awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure and supply American troops. By the end of 2006, the company’s stock was worth four times its value when the war started. Consid- ering also that President Bush himself had once been an oil industry executive, some observers speculated that the Iraq War was fought at the behest of oil companies interested in Iraq’s oil and of military contractors interested in taxpayer dollars.
Such charges are not new. U.S. interventions in Latin American countries have often been ascribed to the influence of American businesses whose properties in those countries were at risk. The previously mentioned case of Guatemala, where United Fruit feared a major loss at the hands of an unfriendly government, was by no means unique. The United States also intervened in Cuba (1961), the Domin- ican Republic (1965), and Chile (1973)—all places where American investors had substantial assets.
Although economic actors such as companies and industries figure most prom- inently in such stories, not all interest groups organize around economic motives. Interest groups that organize around ethnic ties are another influence on foreign policy. For example, governments may respond to pressure from politically power- ful ethnic groups to intervene in neighbors’ civil wars on behalf of ethnic kin who live across the border.23
In the United States, two particularly influential groups stand out. One is the pro-Israel lobby: a collection of individuals and groups who want the U.S. govern- ment to support and defend the state of Israel—a stance that often brings the United States into conflict with Israel’s adversaries in the region. The main lobbying arm of
21. See Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
22. See, for example, Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2006).
23. Stephen M. Saideman, The Ties that Divide: Ethnic Politics, Foreign Policy, and International Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
161Do Countries Fight Wars to Satisf y the Militar y or Special Interest Groups?
this group is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is con- sidered one of the most effective lobbying groups in Washington.24
The second standout is the anti-Castro lobby—groups that represent Cuban Americans opposed to the communist regime in Cuba. A large number of Cubans fled after Fidel Castro took over in 1959 and seized their property. Cuban American groups have lobbied the U.S. government to take strong actions to contain and undermine the Castro regime, including supporting a failed invasion by exiles in 1961 and imposing a strict economic embargo on the country. In 2014, President Barack Obama announced that he would restore some diplomatic and economic ties with Cuba, arguing that more than five decades of isolation had failed to change the regime. Nonetheless, the effort to lift the embargo faced resistance from the Cuban American lobby and its supporters in the U.S. Congress, and President Donald Trump took steps to reverse the opening after he came into office in 2017.
Why do interest groups care about the state’s foreign policy? In cases like the pro-Israel and anti-Castro lobbies, group members are motivated by ethnic attach- ment or ideological interests to support or oppose a particular country or regime. In the case of economic actors, preferences over foreign policy arise whenever an actor’s income depends on events in other countries or on the relationship between countries. A multinational company like United Fruit may have production facili- ties in numerous countries. If those countries experience political instability that threatens to disrupt the company’s business, or if they have unfriendly regimes that might confiscate the company’s property, then the company might lobby for some form of intervention to protect its interests.
Similarly, an investor that owns stock in a foreign company or a bank that has lent money to a foreign government might lobby its own government to use mili- tary force to ensure the return on its investment or the repayment of its loan. Such lobbying could lead to intervention against unstable or unfriendly regimes. In the extreme case that Hobson considered, economic actors with international invest- ments might even lobby their governments to extend direct imperial control over other countries. Although establishing and maintaining such control was costly, imperialism made it safer to invest overseas, since there was less danger that invest- ments would be wiped out by instability or hostile governments. A smaller set of economic actors, primarily those that make and sell military armaments, also have a direct interest in their country’s foreign policy, since a belligerent foreign policy keeps them in business.
However, the interests of economic actors need not always lead to a preference for aggressive policies. Indeed, economic actors who depend on peaceful rela- tions with other countries in order to do business could press their governments to pursue friendly relations or even formal alliances with profitable partners. For
24. For a recent study arguing that the pro-Israel lobby wields a great deal of influence on U.S. foreign policy, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). This book generated a great deal of controversy not only because of the content of the claims, but also because of concerns about the quality of the evidence. For a sample of the dispute, see Robert C. Lieberman, “The ‘Israel Lobby’ and American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 7 (2009): 235–57, as well as the response by Mearsheimer and Walt in the same issue.
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example, American banks and companies that had important trade, financial, and investment interests in Western Europe played a significant role in lobbying for a strong U.S. commitment to defend Western Europe at the outset of the Cold War. Similarly, banks that depended heavily on loans to Asia lobbied for strong alliance commitments to Japan and South Korea.25
More recently, U.S. corporations interested in selling goods to China have been a political force lobbying for more cooperative relations with that country. In fact, an extensive literature suggests that trade between countries decreases the likeli- hood of war between them, in part because businesses that profit from the trade lobby against policies that could lead to conflict.26 In sum, depending on where and how they do business, economic actors can have an interest in peaceful relations with some countries and/or hostile relations with others.
How Can Small Groups Have a Big Influence on Policy? We have seen that militaries seeking budgets and prestige, businesses seeking profits, and ethnic groups looking out for their kin may all, at times, see particular benefits to war. What is remarkable about each of these actors is how small they are relative to those who pay the costs of war. The generals and admirals who run military organizations are greatly outnumbered by the enlisted personnel who bear the brunt of the fighting, as well as by the rest of the population. Multinational com- panies and ethnic lobbies tend to make up a small fraction of society. Given how extensively they are outnumbered, when and how can these narrow interests pre- vail? The answer lies in the nature of the interactions between these different actors and the institutions that regulate their relations.
The military’s influence on foreign policy decision making derives from the fact that it controls a large number of guns and people trained to use them. While militaries are generally created in order to defend a state from foreign threats, their capabilities inevitably make them key players domestically as well. In many states, the military plays a direct role in ensuring the continuation of the government. This role can either be very explicit (as with military dictatorships, in which military officers take direct control of executive power) or more subtle but no less potent.
In many countries, the military is able and willing to intervene in politics to ensure that the government is to its liking; as a result, a civilian government may have to cater to the military’s interests in order to avoid being ousted in a coup d’état. A number of countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia have experienced frequent alternations between direct military rule and civilian governments that lived under the constant threat of a coup. Moreover, authoritar- ian regimes that actively suppress popular dissent may rely heavily on the military to put down challenges to their rule. In such systems, the regime’s dependence on
25. Benjamin O. Fordham, Building the Cold War Consensus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
26. Stephen G. Brooks, “Economic Actors’ Lobbying Influence on the Prospects for War and Peace,” International Organization 67 (Fall 2013): 863–88.
163Do Countries Fight Wars to Satisf y the Militar y or Special Interest Groups?
the armed forces for its continued survival gives military leaders a prominent role in decision making.
Even when the government does not depend so heavily on the military to stay in power, the military can have strong influence over foreign policy decision making. All political leaders rely on the information and expertise of bureaucratic actors within the state. No political leader is an expert in every policy area; even if that were possible, there would not be enough time for the leader to focus on every task of government. Instead, the job of making policy proposals and analyzing the implications of different decisions rests with the specialists who staff the bureau- cratic agencies.
When making decisions about war, a leader has to rely on experts within the military and other agencies (such as those dealing with intelligence and diplomacy) to provide key pieces of information—what the country’s capabilities are, what the capabilities of potential adversaries are, what plans there are to wage war with a given country—and deal with any contingencies that might arise. The political leader’s dependence on the military for this kind of information gives military lead- ers the ability to shape decisions to their liking. A military bent on war could, for example, give the leader skewed advice about how easily the war could be won and how low the costs would be. Conversely, military officials opposed to war could give conservative estimates of the likelihood of success and magnify the potential costs. In this way, the military would shape the outcome by manipulating the information that the leader uses to calculate the expected value of war and its alternatives.
Organized interest groups also rely on their superior resources and access to information in order to exert influence over policy. Consider an intervention like the one in Guatemala mentioned at the outset of this chapter. In that case, inter- vention cost U.S. taxpayers about $3 million, and it protected property for which
In November 2017, the military in Zimbabwe unseated President Robert Mugabe in a coup d’état, prompting celebrations across Harare by Zimbabweans who welcomed the change in leadership. The ability to topple a government gives military organizations significant influence over foreign and domestic policies.
164 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
United Fruit Company demanded $16 million. Given that the taxpayers who footed the bill vastly outnumbered the stockholders of the company that benefited, it is useful to think about why the latter would get their way at the expense of the for- mer. How could economic interest groups “hijack” a state’s foreign policy for their own narrow interests?
As suggested earlier, much of the answer lies in how the costs and benefits of international conflict are distributed in such situations. Precisely because taxpay- ers are more numerous, the costs of intervention to any individual are quite low. As a result, no individual citizen has much incentive to become informed about the situation, to call a member of Congress to weigh in on the policy, to go to Washington to bang on the doors of the State Department, and so on. Indeed, in the case of Guatemala and United Fruit Company, most U.S. citizens were likely unaware of what the CIA was up to (in arming and training Guatemalan rebels) and how much taxpayer money was being spent. By contrast, the company that stands to benefit from intervention has a very large stake in the outcome. Company representatives have every incentive to become informed, to lobby representatives, and to exploit contacts within the government. Hence, in the interaction between the many who pay the costs and the few who stand to benefit, the latter have a significant advantage.
Organized interest groups can prevail because they can provide political lead- ers with things they need and want in exchange for favored policies. Sometimes what interest groups provide is money, which leaders can use to line their pockets or, if that is prohibited, to finance political campaigns. Concerns about the military- industrial complex center around the flow of money: industries give money to elected officials, who then allocate taxpayer money to the military, which then spends the money in ways that benefit the industries, such as by purchasing their arms or intervening to protect their foreign assets.27
In democracies, interest groups also gain influence by promising the sup- port of motivated voters. For example, the Cuban American lobby does not give large sums of money relative to big economic interest groups like companies, labor unions, and professional organizations. When representatives of this lobby go to Washington, they primarily remind politicians that 1 million Cuban Americans care enough about U.S. policy toward Cuba that they vote on the basis of that issue. Moreover, these voters are concentrated in Florida, a crucial state in U.S. presi- dential elections, where a margin of only 500 votes swung the 2000 election to George W. Bush. By contrast, most other voters pay little attention to this issue and do not base their votes on it. Hence, when representatives of the Cuban American or pro-Israel lobby say, “This is an issue our voters care about,” politicians tend to listen.
In principle, then, interest groups can wield considerable influence over gov- ernment policies, even if those policies come at the expense of broader national
27. This is an example of a larger phenomenon known in the American politics literature as an “iron triangle”: the mutual dependence that arises among members of Congress, interest groups, and government agencies.
165Do Countries Fight Wars to Satisf y the Militar y or Special Interest Groups?
interests. So, to what extent does this mechanism explain foreign policy choices? Can the puzzle of war be resolved by finding some group within the state that actually benefits from the conflict? Though it can be tempting to see causal connec- tions between policies and the groups those policies benefit, there are at least three reasons why we need to be cautious in jumping too hastily to interest-group explanations for wars.
The first reason has to do with evidence: How can we know that a particular policy was caused by interest-group lobbying? To put it another way, how can we be sure that government would have behaved differently if the interest group did not exist? The challenge here is significant. Just because Halliburton benefited from the invasion of Iraq, we cannot automatically infer that the company actively lobbied for the invasion or that President Bush chose to invade in order to benefit the company.
For most foreign policy decisions that bestow benefits on narrow groups, there are alternative justifications based on national interests. Hobson’s theory of nineteenth- century imperialism has been disputed by scholars who argue that imperialism was a product of military-strategic competition among the principal powers.28 U.S. interven- tions in Latin America during the Cold War were part of a larger pattern in which the United States sought to prevent the spread of communism, sometimes in countries in which U.S. investors had no significant assets. Thus, even though United Fruit bene- fited from the ouster of Arbenz, fears about his association with communism might have provoked U.S. intervention even without that company’s lobbying efforts.29 And even if oil helps explain the United States’ intense interest in removing Iraq’s regime in 2003, we have seen that exerting influence over oil-producing regions serves a variety of interests, not all of them unique to oil companies.
A second consideration to keep in mind is that in many issue areas there are multiple groups pushing in different directions. We already saw that economic considerations can just as readily create groups with an interest in peace as those with an interest in war or intervention. Arms manufacturers spend a great deal of political effort competing with each other for government contracts rather than banding together to promote general foreign policy objectives. In the case of U.S. policy toward the Middle East, pro-Israel sentiments sometimes compete with oil interests that favor closer relations with oil-rich Arab states. The United States has regularly sold advanced military technology to Saudi Arabia, even over the objections of the pro-Israel lobby. The existence of opposing groups and demands can make it much harder for any one group to “capture” the state’s foreign policy.
The final important consideration is to recall, as before, that war is the prod- uct of a bargaining interaction between or among multiple states, not a choice made by a single leader or group. Thus, to evaluate the potential influence of groups that have hawkish interests, we need to revisit the bargaining model.
28. See, for example, Benjamin J. Cohen, The Question of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1974).
29. For an argument against the interest-group interpretation of these cases, see Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), esp. chap. 8.
166 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
How Do Domestic Interests Affect International Bargaining? How could hawkish actors within a state affect the likelihood of war? The general answer is that domestic interests affect the likelihood of international conflict pri- marily by determining the extent of the state’s ambitions. By influencing the costs and benefits of conflict, such interests can widen or narrow the scope of goods over which the state’s leaders might be willing to wage war; they affect when and how often the state’s foreign policy interests will come into conflict with those of other states; they determine the size of the demands that the state will make and the risks that it is willing to run.
In short, variation in the nature of domestic interests that influence policy mak- ing will increase or decrease the opportunities for conflict. Except in rare circum- stances, however, these interests will not be sufficient to cause war in any given interaction. Thus, the influence of hawkish interests gives states more things they might consider worth fighting over, but these interests are generally not sufficient to explain why bargaining over those goods fails in some cases but not in others.
To illustrate this point, we return in Figure 4.5 to the bargaining model and ask what would happen if the interests of State A changed in response to the influence of hawkish actors. For example, imagine that the object in dispute is a piece of territory with oil in it. In the interaction depicted in the top panel, the government in State A is led by a party whose core supporters are pacifists. As a result, the government con- siders the costs of war over this territory to be rather high, as shown by the fact that State A’s value for war (the portion of the bar to the left of the red dotted line) is far smaller than the share of territory it expects from the outcome of the war.
Recall that the costs of war are measured relative to the value of the good in dispute, so they are large when the human and economic costs of war loom large and/or when the benefit associated with possessing the territory is low. Because the dovish interests that control the state see war as very unattractive, they are highly unlikely to start a crisis over this territory. Only if the status quo distribution of the territory was located at the far left of the line—very far from State A’s ideal point— would the government in State A see any potential benefit from sparking a crisis.
What happens to the international interaction if the dovish leader in State A is replaced by a leader of a party that draws support from oil companies that would profit from State A’s control of the territory? Because of the influence of these actors, the new leader places more weight on the value of the land and less on the costs of war. In terms of our model, the costs of war relative to the value of the good are smaller. The lower panel shows how the value of war changes in the eyes of this hawkish govern- ment. Since the costs of war have gone down, State A’s value for war shifts to the right.
Notice two things about the lower panel in Figure 4.5. First, status quo distri- butions that would have been tolerated by the dovish leader are unacceptable to the hawk. As a result, State A becomes more likely to initiate a crisis, and it will make larger demands on its adversary. Second, even after this shift, a bargaining range, shown in light green, still exists. As before, the costs of war ensure the existence of a set of mutually acceptable bargains.
167Do Countries Fight Wars to Satisf y the Militar y or Special Interest Groups?
This means that absent the information, commitment, or divisibility problems discussed in Chapter 3, there is no reason why the shift from a dovish to a hawkish government should, on its own, lead to a war. However, the shift does create a dan- ger of war that did not exist before. The new government in State A is more will- ing to threaten force to change the status quo. The change in governance increases the state’s demands and creates a risk of conflict where none previously existed. Whether or not this potential conflict will lead to an actual war depends on features of the bargaining interaction, such as how information is distributed and whether the states can credibly commit to live by any deal they reach.
The one exception to this claim arises if there are actors who derive benefits from war that cannot be part of a negotiated settlement, as in the case of diversion- ary conflict. For example, assume that the leader of State A represents arms manu- facturers. If there is a war, they get paid to build weapons and to replace those that are destroyed. Since they get these profits only if there is a war, then it is peace rather than war that these actors find costly. Would the influence of such interests
STATUS QUOS THAT B WILL CHALLENGE
STATUS QUOS THAT B WILL CHALLENGE
COSTS TO B
WAR OUTCOME
B
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A
COSTS TO A AS SEEN BY HAWKISH
GOVERNMENT
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STATUS QUOS THAT NEITHER WILL CHALLENGE
FIGURE 4.5 Domestic Interests and International Bargaining In the top panel, State A is led by a dovish government and considers the costs of war to be high relative to the value of the good in dispute. In the lower panel, State A is led by a hawkish government and sees the costs of war as less significant, placing more value on the good in dispute. Under hawkish leaders, State A is more likely to challenge the status quo, but a bargaining range still exists.
168 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
change the logic we just outlined? As we saw when considering the diversionary incentive, the answer is yes—but only if the net benefits from war are high enough to offset both states’ costs of war.
Hence, except in rare circumstances, the influence of groups within the state that place high value on the goods that can be acquired through force and/or see little cost to war does not itself ensure that war will happen. When such interests hold sway, they will make the state’s foreign policy more belligerent, in the sense that the state will make larger demands and come into conflict with more states, but such inter- ests alone are not sufficient to cause war in the absence of the strategic dilemmas discussed in Chapter 3. Thus, when we think about how oil interests influence U.S. policy in the Middle East, it is reasonable to say that they explain why there are issues in the region that American leaders are willing to fight over. It is harder to argue that these interests alone explain why crises over them sometimes become wars.
Why Don’t Democracies Fight One Another? For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, France and Germany were bitter rivals. France resisted the creation of a unified German state in 1870, and the two countries fought three major wars over the next century: the Franco- Prussian War (1870–71), World War I (1914–18), and World War II (1939–45). Millions died in these wars, and cemeteries in both countries are filled with those who fell in this rivalry. Today, however, France and Germany are close allies, and while they have differences of interest and opinion on important issues, it is almost inconceivable that there could be another war between them.
The turnaround in this relationship coincided with changes in the countries’ political systems, which made them more democratic. France went into the Franco- Prussian War a monarchy, but it emerged with a more democratic system, which has become stronger over time. The change in Germany was even more dramatic. Ruled by a hereditary emperor in the nineteenth century, Germany devolved into a murderous dictatorship under Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. After World War II, however, Germany was divided and occupied by the victorious Allies, and what became West Germany was remade into a democratic country. When East and West Germany were reunified in the 1990s, the reborn German state inherited this democratic constitution.
There were, of course, a number of factors that helped solidify the relationship between these former adversaries after 1945, including the existence of a shared enemy in the Soviet Union; the reassuring presence of a common ally, the United States; and growing economic and financial ties that would make these two states central partners in a European Union. Nevertheless, the emergence of shared democracy helped pave the way for a dramatic shift in how these countries dealt with each other, to the point that war between the two is now unthinkable.
169Why Don’t Democracies Fight One A nother?
Far from being an isolated example, this case is part of a larger phenomenon that scholars and policy makers call the democratic peace. The term refers to a well-established observation that there are few, if any, clear cases of war between mature democratic states. Our choice of words reflects some caveats about this observation. We say “few, if any, clear cases of war” because the strength of the claim depends in part on how one defines democracy and what events one consid- ers to be wars. Since there are some ambiguous cases, there is not a universal con- sensus on whether wars between democratic states are nonexistent or simply rare.30 We say “mature democratic states” because some studies have suggested that coun- tries in the process of becoming democracies do not fit this overall pattern.31 Even taking these qualifications into account, this is still a remarkable observation: over the 200 or so years in which democracies have existed in their modern form, they seem not to have engaged in war with one another—or, at least, they have done so less frequently than we might expect, given the overall frequency of war.
Another noteworthy aspect of this observation is that democracies are not, overall, less war prone than other kinds of states. That is, while they rarely, if ever, fight wars against other democratic states, their overall rate of war participation is roughly the same as that of nondemocratic states.32 This means that although democracies seldom find themselves at war with one another, they are more fre- quently at war with nondemocratic states. Hence, there is something special about the relationship among democracies that does not carry over to their relationships with other kinds of states.
This observation is so striking and important that it has entered into policy dis- cussions in the United States and elsewhere. President George W. Bush argued that democracy promotion should be a central aspect of American policy in the Middle East because “democracies don’t go to war with each other.”33 And during his 2009 speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Barack Obama emphasized the connection between peace and democracy in Europe and pointed out that “America has never fought a war against a democracy.”34 This interest in democratic peace has been particularly salient in recent decades, which have seen a remarkable growth in the number of democracies worldwide, as Figure 4.6 shows.
Is this absence of wars among democracies a coincidence, or is there something about democratic institutions that facilitates peaceful relations among states that have them? In what ways might shared democracy influence interstate bargaining?
30. For a discussion of the democratic peace finding, definitional issues, and some cases that raise questions, see Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), chap. 1.
31. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
32. Although there has been some controversy over the issue, this statement reflects the general consensus in the literature. See, for example, Nils Petter Gleditsch and Havard Hegre, “Peace and Democracy: Three Levels of Analysis,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 41 (1997): 283–310.
33. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “President and Prime Minister Blair Discussed Iraq, Middle East,” White House Press Conference, November 12, 2004, www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2004/11/20041112-5.html.
34. Barack H. Obama, “A Just and Lasting Peace” (Nobel lecture, December 10, 2009), www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/peace/ laureates/2009/obama-lecture_en.html.
democratic peace The observation that there are few, if any, clear cases of war between mature democratic states.
170 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
What Is Democracy? To answer these questions, we turn to the third leg of our framework: institutions. Domestic institutions determine the rules of political decision making within the state. They govern the relationship between the leadership and the people, and they help determine the extent to which citizens’ interests matter when it comes to war and peace. Although there are many different kinds of political systems, the distinction that has attracted the most attention is that between democratic and nondemocratic systems.
A democracy is a political system in which candidates compete for political office through frequent, fair elections in which a sizable portion of the adult popula- tion can vote. This definition encompasses two major aspects of democracy: the abil- ity of different individuals and groups to compete for political office and the ability of a large portion of the people to participate in the selection process through voting.
Nondemocratic countries, also known as autocracies, fall short of this defini- tion in a variety of ways.35 In some, leaders obtained office through hereditary suc- cession, as in Saudi Arabia, or on the back of a military coup, as happened in Egypt in 2012. In others, such as China, only one political party is permitted to hold power, and competition from other parties is outlawed. Still others might hold elections among multiple parties but restrict competition so that the ruling party is all but certain to win. Such multiparty or electoral authoritarianism is the most common form of nondemocratic system in the world today; examples include Venezuela, Russia, Ethiopia, and Myanmar.36 Map 4.1 on page 172 shows the type of regime in each country at the beginning of 2017.
18201800 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2016 0
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
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FIGURE 4.6 The Spread of Democracy, 1800–2016
35. Indeed, recent research in international relations has explored the effects of different kinds of nondemocratic governments; see, for example, Jessica L. P. Weeks, Dictators at War and Peace (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).
36. There is an extensive literature on the nature and role of elections in authoritarian countries; see, for example, Jennifer Gandhi and Ellen Lust- Okar, “Elections under Authoritarianism,” Annual Review of Political Science 12 (June 2009): 403–22.
democracy A political system in which candidates compete for political office through frequent, fair elections in which a sizable portion of the adult population can vote.
autocracy A political system in which an individual or small group exercises power with few constraints and no meaningful competition or participation by the general public.
Figure source: Monty G. Marshall, Ted Robert Gurr, and Keith Jaggers, “Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2016,” Center for Systemic Peace, http://www.systemicpeace .org/inscrdata.html (accessed 11/21/17).
171Why Don’t Democracies Fight One A nother?
Another term that often accompanies democracy is liberal, which we use here in its classic sense to refer to a philosophy that emphasizes the value of individual liberty. Most modern democracies are also liberal democracies, because in addi- tion to allowing competition and voting, they have numerous protections for indi- viduals’ civil liberties and political rights, such as rights to free speech, religion, political association, and a free press. Hence, liberal democracies not only choose their leaders by democratic means, but they also impose restrictions on what those elected governments can do by giving citizens rights that cannot be transgressed. We should note that not all democratic countries are liberal, as some have restric- tions on religious or press freedoms, or they give rights to ethnic or religious groups at the expense of individual rights. Indonesia, for example, has competitive and free elections, but it also has laws restricting the activities of civic and religious organi- zations, including a ban on the advocacy of certain ideas.37
With these definitions in place, we turn to the central question: How could democracies—especially mature, liberal democracies—be different when it comes to war and peace? Not surprisingly, the democratic peace observation has gener- ated a great deal of scholarly interest in this question, and there is no single, settled answer. But the framework of this book suggests two broad ways in which domes- tic institutions can affect the likelihood of war: either by influencing the interests of states and their leaders or by influencing the bargaining interaction between and among countries.
Representation, Accountability, and Interests in War and Peace A common argument for the distinctiveness of democracy is rooted in the idea that domestic institutions shape leaders’ interests in war and peace. This argument starts with the observation that the costs of war are paid by society at large but generally not by the leader who makes the decision to wage war. It is the people who lose lives or loved ones on the battlefield, who suffer the economic hardship of wars, and who may have to pay higher taxes to support a war effort. The leader, by contrast, rarely has such direct exposure to the costs of war. This disjunction between the ruler and the ruled is humorously illustrated in the 2001 movie Shrek, when evil Lord Farquaad tells his knights that he is going to send them on a mission to rescue from a fire-breathing dragon a princess whom he wants to marry. Exhorting his men to combat, the prince declares, “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
Over 200 years before this scene was digitally animated, the German philoso- pher Immanuel Kant noted a similar dilemma. Kant wrote in the late eighteenth century, when most countries were ruled by monarchs. For such rulers, he noted, “The easiest thing in the world to do is to declare war.” Kant reasoned:
War does not affect [the ruler’s] table, his hunt, his places of pleasure, his court festivals,
and so on. Thus, he can decide to go to war for the most meaningless of reasons, as if it
37. For an assessment of political and civil rights in Indonesia, see Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2014, http://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2014/indonesia-0#.VCHKsRbTXpA (accessed 09/23/14).
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MAP 4.1 Regime Types This map shows the type of government in each country at the start of 2017. While democracy can be found on every continent, it is widespread in the Americas and Europe, present in parts of Asia, and scarce in Africa and the Middle East. Monarchies and military regimes are quite rare, while most autocratic regimes have limited multiparty competition.
Map source: Regime types in 2012 were sourced from Beatriz Magaloni, Jonathan Chu, and Eric Min. Autocracies of the World, 1950–2012, Version 1.0, Dataset, Stanford University, 2013. For more information on this dataset, see http://cddrl.fsi .stanford.edu/povgov/research/autocracies_of_the_ world_dataset (accessed 01/20/15). Magaloni, Chu, and Min’s coding rules were used to identify countries that had changed types by 2017.
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174 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
were a kind of pleasure party, and he can blithely leave its justification (which decency
requires) to his diplomatic corps, who are always prepared for such exercises.38
In other words, a basic problem in such political systems was that the inter- ests of the ruler and the ruled were not aligned: the ruler enjoyed the benefit of war, while the people paid its costs. In Kant’s view, the solution to this problem was to establish a representative government, one in which the ruler would be account- able to the people: if “the consent of the citizenry is required in order to determine whether or not there will be war, it is natural that they consider all its calamities before committing themselves to so risky a game.”39 In this view, political institu- tions that foster broad representation would serve to align the interests of the ruler and the ruled, making those with the power to decide on war sensitive to the costs that their decisions impose on others.
The primary mechanism through which political institutions influence deci- sions about war and peace is accountability, the ability to punish or reward leaders for their decisions. Even if political leaders do not directly bear the costs of war, they can be punished politically if they make decisions that harm the people or groups on whom they rely to stay in power. In a democratic system, elections and other practices provide a way for citizens to punish leaders for unpopular poli- cies. Democratic leaders thus have to take into account the possibility that failed or costly wars can undermine their political support, jeopardizing their hold on office, as we saw in Figure 4.4. At the same time, by making it easier for voters to make their collective voice heard, electoral institutions weaken the potential influence of small groups that may see concentrated benefits but few costs from waging war. Thus, accountability to voters can raise the political risks of war to an elected leader and ensure representation of broader rather than particularistic interests.
Autocratic leaders may also be held accountable for their actions, but the key actors are different, so the interests that are represented in decision making are dif- ferent. Though they do not face an electorate with real power to replace them, they may still be subject to removal by a “selectorate,” the set of individuals and groups whose support is necessary for a leader to retain office. In nondemocratic systems, this selectorate can be quite small, often involving military, economic, or ethnic elites. Staying in power requires autocrats to prioritize policies that keep these actors satisfied, privileging particularistic interests over the public good. Autocrats are also protected by the fact that the actions needed to remove them, such as a revolution or coup, are risky to undertake. Thus, as long as members of the selectorate are suffi- ciently protected, paid off, or afraid, the leader can be politically insulated from the costs of war.40 For example, after losing the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, Saddam Hussein was able to hold on to power, even in the face of popular revolts, because he was able to retain the loyalty of his elite military units and core supporters.
38. Immanuel Kant, “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 113.
39. Kant, “To Perpetual Peace,” 113.
40. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
accountability The ability to punish or reward leaders for the decisions they make, as when frequent, fair elections enable voters to hold elected officials responsible for their actions by granting or withholding access to political office.
175Why Don’t Democracies Fight One A nother?
In this view, then, democracies are different because their leaders face system- atically higher costs from war than do nondemocratic leaders. Given an equal prob- ability of victory in war, a democratic leader values war less than the nondemocratic leader because the political implications of losing are worse. Given equal human and material costs of war, a democratic leader values war less, because that leader is more likely to be held accountable for those costs.
Although this logic is compelling, we must point out that losing office is not the worst or only consequence of losing a war. When democratic leaders lose an election, they can generally retire in good comfort, collect their pension, perhaps go on the lecture circuit, and even continue to participate in politics if they want. Nondemocratic leaders, by contrast, often find that life after losing office is not so pleasant. Because their removal often occurs through violent means, such as a coup or revolution, nondemocratic leaders often suffer additional punishment above and beyond simply losing office.
For the Russian tsar in 1917, the disastrous showing in World War I not only contributed to his removal from office, but he and his family were executed at the hands of the revolutionaries. The German emperor similarly faced popular upris- ings in the wake of his country’s defeat in that war, prompting him to abdicate his throne and flee into exile. And the leader of the military junta that led Argentina into the Falklands War was later tried for mishandling the war and spent five years in prison. Indeed, death, exile, and imprisonment are common punishments meted out to autocratic leaders who run afoul of their people. This suggests that the rela- tionship between the political institutions and the costs of losing a war may not be as straightforward as the Kantian logic suggests.41
How would this argument about accountability explain the democratic peace? If, in fact, war is costlier for democratic leaders, the likelihood of war could be influenced in several ways. As we have seen, an increase in the costs of war dimin- ishes a state’s willingness to contest the status quo, reducing the opportunities for conflict. If there are fewer things that a state is willing to fight for, the scope for it to come into violent conflict with other states decreases. Moreover, the logic of political accountability suggests that democratic leaders should be more selective about starting wars; that is, they should be willing to wage war when their chances of victory are sufficiently high. Leaders in nondemocratic political systems may be more willing to gamble on wars in which they have a low chance of winning. This logic would lower the probability of war between two democratic states because in such interactions it is unlikely that both leaders would simultaneously judge their chances in war to be high enough.42
But how could this argument explain the fact that, overall, democratic states are just as war prone as other states, meaning that they are particu- larly likely to fight wars against nondemocracies? A possible answer lies in the
41. Goemans, War and Punishment.
42. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith, “An Institutional Explanation for the Democratic Peace,” American Political Science Review 93 (December 1999): 791–807.
176 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
observation that constraints on the use of force can make democratic states appear to be tempting tar- gets to their nondemocratic foes. Recall how Saddam Hussein dismissed U.S. deterrent threats prior to the Persian Gulf War: “Yours is a society which cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle.”43 Although he did not say so explicitly, this statement seems to reflect a sense that American leaders would find war polit- ically too costly to fight. This belief made Hussein more likely to resist U.S. efforts to coerce him out of Kuwait.
Similarly, Japanese leaders who decided to bomb Pearl Harbor in 1941 did so, in part, under the mistaken impression that the American public would respond by opposing a war and would there- fore constrain President Franklin Roosevelt’s ability to respond. In this view, the constraints that make democracies peaceful in their relations with one another can have the opposite effect when democ- racies square off against less constrained adversar- ies, who may seek to exploit democracies by making larger demands and discounting their threats, thereby increasing the risk of war.44
Democracy and the Bargaining Interaction Another explanation for democratic peace focuses on how democracy influences bargaining interactions between states, increasing the chances that a peaceful set- tlement will be found. One version of this argument focuses on the ability of dem- ocratic states to overcome information problems. Recall from Chapter 3 that states may fail to find mutually beneficial bargains if they have incomplete information about the military and political factors that determine their value for war. Resolving this informational problem is challenging because states have an incentive to conceal or misrepresent their information in the hopes of getting a better deal.
There are several reasons to think that democratic institutions and processes make it easier to overcome informational problems. First, democratic political systems are much more transparent than nondemocratic systems because demo- cratic processes are more open and observable. For example, major policy decisions are frequently subject to public and/or legislative debate. A relatively free press can disseminate information about what decision makers are thinking, the level of popular support for war, and even details about the state’s military capabilities.
43. See Chapter 3, footnote 18.
44. Indeed, evidence suggests that conflicts between democracies and dictators are usually initiated by the latter; see Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, “Identifying the Culprit: Democracy, Dictatorship, and Dispute Initiation,” American Political Science Review 97(May 2003): 333–37.
In nondemocratic states, like Venezuela, a small group of leaders, sometimes including military officials, typically makes foreign policy behind closed doors, often limiting what can be reported to the media and the public. This lack of transparency can make it harder for foreign states to gauge the state’s capabilities and resolve.
177Why Don’t Democracies Fight One A nother?
Opposition parties can freely voice approval of or dissent from the government’s actions, thereby revealing the strength (or weakness) of the govern- ment’s political support within the country. Such practices exist primarily to ensure that the public can scrutinize what its leaders are doing—an essential element of democratic accountability. A by-product of such openness is that foreign states can also glean relevant information about a democratic state’s capabilities and resolve.
This is not to suggest that democratic states hide nothing—either from their own people or from outside eyes. Rather, the point is that democratic states are rel- atively more transparent than most nondemocratic sys- tems, in which decision making occurs without broad participation, there are restrictions on what can be reported in the media, opposition groups are actively suppressed, and disagreements within the governing group are rarely aired in public. Thus, all other things being equal, there is less uncertainty about the capabil- ities and resolve of democratic states.45
In addition, democracies may be better able to send credible signals in crises. Recall from Chapter 3 that when states have private information, communi- cating their resolve in a credible manner often requires that they take costly actions— actions that a resolute state would be willing to take but an irresolute one would not. One way they can do so is by making statements or taking actions from which it would be difficult to back down. As we have seen, such threats are costly if leaders expect to lose domestic political support for failing to follow through on them.
A study of U.S. public opinion demonstrates this effect. One group of sur- vey respondents was presented with a hypothetical scenario in which a presi- dent threatened to defend another country from invasion and then failed to do so. Another group was presented with a similar scenario, in which the president failed to defend another country but had never threatened to do so. When asked to assess the president’s actions, respondents in the first group gave the president a lower approval rating than the rating given by those in the second group—a result that is consistent with the idea that it is politically costly to back down from a threat.46
If backing down creates public disapproval, then there is reason to think that democracy magnifies the political importance of this effect. Mechanisms of accountability mean that public disapproval is more likely to result in some kind of
45. Kenneth A. Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For a dissenting view on the effects of democratic transparency, see Bernard I. Finel and Kristin M. Lord, “The Surprising Logic of Transparency,” International Studies Quarterly 43 (1999): 315–39.
46. Michael Tomz, “Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Approach,” International Organization 61, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 821–40.
Policy making in democratic states, like Canada, often involves public and legislative debate, resulting in a more open and observable process. Here, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau takes questions from legislators in the Canadian Parliament. This greater transparency makes it easier for other states to accurately assess the democratic state’s capabilities and resolve.
178 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
punishment for the democratic leader, in the form of either diminished support for his agenda or a greater chance of losing office in the next election. Nondemocratic leaders, by contrast, are more politically insulated from whatever disapproval their actions might engender. If so, then public threats made by democratic leaders are more informative because they are costlier to make. This suggests that institutions of accountability make it easier for democratic leaders to credibly communicate their resolve with lower levels of escalation.47
While the previous argument suggests that democracies can make threats more effectively when they bargain, many scholars subscribe to a more ambitious argument that shared democracy changes the nature of the bargaining interaction altogether. In this view, democratic countries are unlikely to fight wars because they adhere to norms of mutual respect and nonviolence in their dealings with one another.48 Relations among democratic states are fundamentally different from those among other kinds of countries because they regard each other as part of a community of states that share liberal values. This identity leads to greater levels of trust and more emphasis on resolving disputes through peaceful concessions rather than through threats of violence. By contrast, this courtesy is not extended to autocracies, which are seen as threatening and untrustworthy.
Several observations are consistent with this view. First, this logic helps explain why democratic states are peaceful with each other but are not more peaceful in general. While fellow democracies enjoy a presumption of friendship, autocrats are treated with suspicion and mistrust. In the extreme, autocrats may be seen as legitimate targets for regime change, as the United States argued in the case of Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Second, there is evidence that when democratic states get into disputes with one another, they are more likely to find a compromise solution and to bring in third parties to help manage the conflict peacefully.49
Finally, there is evidence that the publics in at least some democracies are less likely to support war against fellow democratic states. A survey of people in the United States and the United Kingdom showed that support for a hypothetical military strike against a state pursuing nuclear weapons was significantly lower if
47. James D. Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,” American Political Science Review 88 (September 1994): 577–92. There is some controversy over whether democracies are really special in this respect or whether some kinds of autocrats may also be able to tie their hands by invoking audience costs. For example, Jessica Weiss argues that China manipulates nationalist protests as a way to signal its resolve in crises with Japan and the United States; see Jessica Weiss, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). There is also a robust debate on whether domestic audience costs play an important role in the outcomes of international crises. For a critical view, see Jack Snyder and Erica D. Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound,” American Political Science Review 105 (August 2011): 437–56. For evidence that democracies are not particularly effective at making credible threats, see Alexander B. Downes and Todd S. Sechser, “The Illusion of Democratic Credibility,” International Organization 66 (2012): 457–89.
48. This discussion synthesizes several subtly different articulations of this idea. Main ones include Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, 30–38; Michael W. Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (December 1986): 1151–69; and Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Democratic Peace—Warlike Democracies? A Social Constructivist Interpretation of the Liberal Argument,” European Journal of Political Science 1 (1995): 491–517.
49. See, for example, Michael Mousseau, “Democracy and Compromise in Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816–1992,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 42 (1998): 210–30; and William J. Dixon, “Democracy and Management of International Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 37 (1993): 42–68.
179Why Don’t Democracies Fight One A nother?
respondents were told that the target was a democracy. People in these countries tended to view other democracies as less threatening and had greater moral reser- vations about attacking them.50
All of this evidence is consistent with the idea that bargaining among demo- cratic states is guided by norms that favor compromise over the use of force, which could explain the marked absence of war between such states.
Does Democracy Cause Peace? The preceding arguments all suggest that democratic institutions are the reason for the peace that has prevailed among states that possess them, either by altering leaders’ incentives to wage war or facilitating the bargaining interaction.. There is a well-known adage, however, that “correlation does not imply causation,” which in this context means that just because democracy and peace go together, we can- not automatically conclude that democracy causes peace. Why might that be? First, there could be some other factor that both causes states to become democratic and causes them not to fight. Second, it could be that the reverse is true—that is, that peace causes democracy. And third, there could be some other factor that causes peace among states that just so happened to be democracies. All three of these arguments have been made in the scholarly literature. We briefly introduce these arguments here both to show the richness of the debate and to stimulate thinking about what might actually be going on.
The relationship between democracy and peace could be a product of the fact that both democracy and peace share a common cause. What could this common cause be? One possibility is economic development. There is a strong tendency for democracy to emerge and survive in states that are relatively wealthy; in poorer countries, by contrast, democratic institutions are more likely to break down. While there is no general tendency for wealth alone to promote peace between coun- tries, there is evidence consistent with a “capitalist peace” among countries with free-market economies.51
Another possibility is that peace causes democracy—that democracy is more likely to emerge in regions where countries already have peaceful relations with one another.52 A menacing international environment and threats to the state’s territory tend to empower the central government and the military, making it hard for democracy to take root. Thus, democracy is more likely to emerge after states have settled outstanding rivalries and territorial disputes with their neighbors. If so, then it is peaceful borders that make democracies, not vice versa.53
50. Michael R. Tomz and Jessica L. P. Weeks, “Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace,” American Political Science Review 107 (November 2013): 849–65.
51. Erik Gartzke, “The Capitalist Peace,” American Journal of Political Science 51 (2007): 166–91; Michael Mousseau, “The Democratic Peace Unraveled: It’s the Economy,” International Studies Quarterly 57 (March 2013): 187–97.
52. William R. Thompson, “Democracy and Peace: Putting the Cart before the Horse?” International Organization 50 (Winter 1996): 141–74.
53. Douglas M. Gibler, The Territorial Peace: Borders, State Development, and International Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
180 Chapter 4 Domestic Politics and War
Finally, it has been argued that democratic peace is really a product of shared strategic interests among democratic states that have nothing to do with their domestic institutions.54 From the late nineteenth century on, the main democratic countries were united against common threats, first against Germany and then against the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, most democracies had similar stra- tegic interests because of a common perceived threat from the Soviet Union and the communist bloc (see Chapter 5).
Such common interests reduced the opportunities for conflict between dem- ocratic states and provided a strong incentive to resolve peacefully any conflicts that did arise. In addition to fighting with each other less often, democratic states in these periods also tended to form alliances with each other—an indication that they perceived common strategic interests. In this view, then, the bonds among democratic states arise not from their institutions or sense of shared identity, but from shared threats that produced common interests. Note that, to be compelling, this argument requires that the perception of threat is independent of the political institutions, rather than being shaped by them, as the survey evidence cited in the preceding discussion suggests.
In short, the democratic peace raises tantalizing questions for both scholars and policy makers, and we are likely to be debating this issue for some time. (See “Controversy” on p. 182.)
Conclusion: What if All the World Were Democratic? When diplomats and state leaders come to the bargaining table with one another, they inevitably bring a great deal of baggage from their home countries. The inter- ests that state representatives advance in international negotiations are themselves a function of interests, interactions, and institutions within the state. Political lead- ers may care about what is best for their country, but they also care about staying in office. As a result, they must think about how their foreign policy choices will impact the interests of important domestic constituents such as the military, orga- nized interest groups, and in some cases, the general public.
When these actors have a stake in the outcome of international bargaining, and when they have the strategic and/or institutional resources to punish or reward the leader, then their interests will be represented at the bargaining table. In particular, when groups with hawkish interests have superior organization and resources, they can push the state toward greater international ambition and thus a greater risk of war. As we have seen, there are times when military organizations and economic or ethnic interest groups have both the interests and the ability to push foreign policy in such a direction.
54. Joanne Gowa, Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
181Conclusion: What if All the World Were Democratic?
In contrast, when interactions and institutions empower those who bear the costs of war, they can exert a pacifying effect at the international level. Economic actors that benefit from international commerce and investment may lobby for peaceful relations with profitable partners. Representative institutions give voice to the people who bear the costs of war, thereby weakening the influence of concentrated interests that might promote conflict for their own reasons. Free, fair, and frequent elections provide a relatively low-cost mechanism for people to punish leaders who engage in failed or costly wars. The relative openness and transparency of democratic political processes can reduce informational and commitment problems that can cause bargaining to fail. Although these features may make democracies tempting targets for autocratic foes, they also help account for the relative rarity of war among democratic states.
Does this mean that a world full of democratic states would be a world without war? Certainly, the evidence to date is encouraging, although not definitive. There are at least two reasons to be cautious. First, although the number of democracies in the world has generally increased over time, the spread of democracy has experienced reversals. There have been several periods during which democracy has broken down, particularly the 1930s (leading to the low point in 1940) and the 1970s. During these periods, economic and international upheaval caused some democratic systems to fail.
It is worth remembering that Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany through relatively democratic institutions—which he then subverted before embarking on his campaign of foreign expansion. Hence, democratic systems have given birth to forces that undermined democracy and engaged in aggressive foreign policies. Even if there are no cases of war between two democratic states, there have been wars between democracies and states that were once democratic.
A second reason for caution centers on the interests that will come to be repre- sented by the spread of democracy. Recall that democratic institutions make leaders more sensitive to the interests of the citizenry. Kant, and those who follow in his tradition, assumed that citizens are generally cautious, since it is they who bear the costs of war. But what if the public is motivated by nationalist, ethnocentric, or even genocidal ideas? If fear and hatred of a rival are intense, accountability may induce belligerence rather than caution, and leaders may fear domestic political retribution for being overly “soft” toward the nation’s ethnic or religious enemies.55 The costs of war might, as a result, be offset by the political costs of compromise.
We already saw in the case of India and Pakistan that the fact that both were democracies in the spring of 1999 did not prevent a war from breaking out between them. (See “What Shaped Our World?” on p. 159.) A history of conflict and blood- shed, fueled by religious differences, has created a great deal of enmity between not just the governments but also the people in these states. Indeed, the Kargil War was popular on both sides; in Pakistan, people were disappointed only that their country did not prevail.
Hence, the international effects of democracy’s spread may very well depend not only on the institutions that take root, but also on the interests of those they empower.
55. For evidence that leaders may be punished for making concessions to a rival, see Michael Colaresi, “When Doves Cry: International Rivalry, Unreciprocated Cooperation, and Leadership Turnover,” American Journal of Political Science 48 (2004): 555–70.
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On June 30, 2012, Mohamed Morsi (below right) was sworn in as the first democratically elected leader in Egypt’s 5,000-year history. The emergence of a democratic gov- ernment in Egypt followed a succession of demonstrations and protest movements throughout the Middle East start- ing in January 2011, which brought down or challenged long-serving authoritarian governments not only in Egypt, but also in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, and Bahrain. But hopes that this so-called Arab Spring would lead to more democratic and less repressive governments in the region were disappointed, as fundamental political reform in Egypt and other countries largely failed to mate- rialize. After a year in power, Morsi faced a renewed wave of popular protest, and the Egyptian military took over in a coup d’état in July 2013. A year later, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who had led the coup, was elected president in an election lacking real competition, and his government has clamped down on dissent, jailing political opponents and journalists.
For the United States and other Western powers, the swing in Egypt from authori- tarianism to democracy and back to authoritarianism cre- ated a foreign policy dilemma. On the one hand, American and other Western policy mak- ers often stress the impor-
tance of promoting democratic institutions around the world because doing so leads to governments that are responsive to their citizens’ needs and respectful of their human rights. Moreover, the democratic peace observa- tion suggests that democratic states have more peaceful interactions. On the other hand, the majority of people in a country may have interests that are hostile to or incompatible with those of the United States and its allies. In such cases, it can be easier to deal with an autocratic leader who is free to ignore those views. In other words,
policy makers can be torn between liking democratic insti- tutions but not the interests of those empowered by such institutions.
In the case of Egypt, this tension arises from the fact that many Egyptians do not like the United States and are hostile to Israel, a key U.S. ally. Under President Hosni Mubarak, Morsi’s predecessor, Egypt had good relations with both countries on the basis of a 1979 peace treaty with Israel. In the ensuing years, Egypt became a strategic partner of the United States and a major recipient of U.S. aid. But the treaty was never popular among Egyptians, and American aid was seen as propping up a repressive government. Under the autocratic Mubarak, this popular opposition could be ignored or suppressed. The transition to democracy and the election of Morsi threatened this arrangement.
A poll taken in May 2013 showed that 63 percent of Egyptians wanted to annul the treaty with Israel and only 16 percent had a positive view of the United States.a Not only was there a danger that a more responsive govern- ment would be more hostile to Israel, but Morsi was also the leader of a party, the Muslim Brotherhood, that seeks
Should We Prefer a Friendly Dictator or a Hostile Democracy?
CON T ROV E R S Y
Applying the Concepts
Mohamed Morsi speaks at a rally in Cairo.
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to eliminate Western influences from the Arab world. During the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief period of rule, Egyptian relations with Israel were strained. By contrast, the Sisi government has largely restored the strategic partnership.
How should countries that espouse democratic values manage this dilemma between institutions that are attrac- tive but interests that are hostile? Should the United States continue to send military and economic aid to Egypt’s military government, or should it push for the restoration of democracy?
One view is that a country’s security interests out- weigh any commitment to democracy. From the perspec- tive of U.S. policy makers, democratic institutions are desirable in parts of the world where people have similar interests to America’s, but they are dangerous where they empower people with very different interests and ideas. While this is not an ethically appealing argument, it is the position that has historically shaped U.S. policy. In the case of Egypt, the United States initially held back aid and mil- itary sales after the coup but later released them. Presi- dent Obama even refused to label Morsi’s ouster a coup, since doing so would have triggered a U.S. law barring aid to regimes that came to power that way.
The decision to prioritize security interests over democracy in this case was not new. During the Cold War, the United States feared that elections would empower communist parties that would then become allies of the Soviet Union; military dictatorships, though brutal to their own people, made more reliable partners. Thus, in several countries—Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973)— the United States conspired in the overthrow of demo- cratic governments by military dictators. Supporters of this position also argue that the elected leaders who were overthrown were likely to become dictators themselves. Morsi’s opponents, for example, questioned whether the Muslim Brotherhood was committed to democracy or human rights. In fact, the military coup enjoyed a great deal of popular support because of dissatisfaction with the Morsi government and constitutional reforms that it had pushed.
The most common argument against placing security interests above democracy is based on moral consid- erations: people have a right to a government that is
responsive to their interests and respects their civil lib- erties. By installing or supporting dictators, the United States is complicit in the human rights abuses commit- ted by those regimes. In addition, one could argue that, in the long run, U.S. interests are best served by promoting democracy, even where it is inconvenient to do so in the short run.
By supporting authoritarian regimes like Egypt under Mubarak, the United States has stoked anti-American sentiment and contributed to the hostility of Egypt’s people. In some cases, this hostility has fed the ranks of terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda that have targeted the United States and its interests. In this view, the United States would be safer in the long run if it did not prop up autocratic regimes in the region and gave more support to the self-determination of people there.
a. Pew Research Center, “Egyptians Increasingly Glum,” May 16, 2013, www.pewglobal.org/2013/05/16/egyptians-increasingly-glum.
Thinking Analytically 1. Why might the United States care what kind of
government Egypt has? Do democratic states have an interest in promoting democracy abroad, or does the preference for democracy only reflect a certain kind of values?
2. What are the risks of pressuring an allied government to make democratic reforms?
A woman casts her ballot in the 2014 Egyptian presidential election that brought Abdel Fatah al-Sisi into office.
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Above: States may go to war over territory that they consider integral to their nation. Indian soldiers (above) and Pakistani soldiers are stationed along the heavily militarized Line of Control that divides the contested territory of Kashmir between the two countries, and troops occasionally exchange cross- border fire. Could tensions over the Kashmir region lead to war?
3 Why Are There Wars? T HE PU Z Z L E War is an extremely costly way for states to settle their disputes. Given the
human and material costs of military conflict, why do states sometimes wage war rather than resolving their disputes through negotiations?
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In August 1914, the major countries of Europe embarked on a war the likes of which the world had never before seen. Convinced that the war would be over by Christmas, European leaders sent a generation of young men into a fight that would last four years and claim more than 15 million lives. The fighting was so intense that in one battle the British army lost 20,000 soldiers in a single day, as wave after wave of attacking infantrymen were cut down by German machine guns. At the time, it was called the Great War. Those who could never imagine another such horrific event dubbed it the “war to end all wars.” Today, we know this event as the First World War, or World War I, because 20 years later the countries of Europe were at it once again. World War II (1939–45) claimed 30–50 million lives.
There is no puzzle in the study of international poli- tics more pressing and important than the question of why states go to war. It is the most tragic and costly phenom- enon that we observe in social and political life. The costs of war can be counted on a number of dimensions. The most obvious cost is the loss of human life. By one esti- mate, wars among states in the twentieth century led to 40 million deaths directly from combat, plus tens of millions
more deaths owing to war-related hardships. 1 In addition, wars have left untold millions injured, displaced from their homes and countries, impoverished, and diseased.
War has economic and material costs as well. Between 2001 and 2017, the United States spent $1.8 trillion fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 2 Large sums of money are also spent every year to prepare for the possibility of war. In 2016, military expenditures by all countries amounted to about $1.7 trillion—a sum that represented about $227 per person. 3 Wars can also disrupt the international economy. Conflicts in the oil- rich Middle East, including the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88),
1. Bethany Ann Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New Dataset of Battle Deaths,” European Journal of Population 21 (2005): 145–66.
2. Neta C. Crawford, “U.S. Budgetary Costs of Wars through 2016,” Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Boston University, September 2016, http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ files/cow/imce/papers/2016/Costs%20of%20War%20through%20 2016%20FINAL%20final%20v2.pdf.
3. Nan Tian, Aude Fleurant, Pieter D. Wezeman, and Siemon T. Wezeman, “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2016,” Stockholm Interna- tional Peace Research Institute, April 24, 2017, https://www.sipri.org/ sites/default/files/Trends-world-military-expenditure-2016.pdf.
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Thinking Analytically about Why Wars Happen Most disputes between states are settled without the parties resorting to war. Although wars tend to capture our attention, it is important to remem- ber that war is an exceedingly rare phenomenon; most countries are at peace with each other most of the time. Figure 3.1 shows the number of states involved in interstate wars in each year from 1820 to 2017, expressed as a percentage of the total number of states in existence at the time. As the figure indi- cates, war is a recurrent feature of international pol- itics in the sense that it fluctuates in frequency but never disappears completely. Yet war is the exception rather than the rule: in most years, the percentage of states involved in war is quite low. All this peace can- not be explained by an absence of issues to fight over.
Hence, when seeking to explain war, we need to ask not only, “What are they fighting over?” but also “Why are they fighting?” 4 In terms of the framework laid out in Chapter 2, answering the first question requires that we understand how states’ interests can give rise to conflicts over things like territory, poli- cies, and the composition or character of each other’s government. The answer to the second question lies in the strategic interactions that determine whether or how these conflicts are resolved. As we saw, the international system lacks institutions—such as leg- islatures, courts, or international police forces—that can resolve conflicts between states through legal, judicial, or electoral mechanisms. As a result, inter- state conflicts have to be settled through bargaining. Understanding why wars occur requires that we iden- tify the factors that sometimes prevent states from settling their conflicts through peaceful bargains that would permit them to avoid the costs of war.
the Persian Gulf War (1990–91), and the Iraq War (2003–10), contributed to spikes in world oil prices (see Figure 4.1 on p. 91). In short, as U.S. Civil War general William Sherman famously declared, “War is hell.”
But if everyone recognizes that war is hell, why do wars happen? The very costs that make the puzzle of war so pressing also make the phenomenon so puzzling. Given the enormous costs associated with war, why would states sometimes choose this course?
At first glance, the answer might seem straightfor- ward: states fight wars because they have conflicting interests over important issues. Often, two states desire the same piece of territory. Nazi Germany wanted to expand into central Europe; World War II started when the Poles, who did not want to give up their territory, fought back. In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, in part, to seize the latter’s southern oil fields, leading to the Iran-Iraq War. Alternatively, one state might object to the policies or ideology of another. World War I grew out of Austria- Hungary’s demand that Serbia end nationalist agitation that threatened to tear the multiethnic empire apart. The war between the United States and Afghanistan in 2001 occurred because the United States wanted Afghanistan to hand over Osama bin Laden and dismantle terror- ist training camps on its territory, something that the Afghans refused to do. Clearly, part of the explanation for any war requires that we identify the conflicting interests that motivated the combatants.
Although such explanations are correct, they are also incomplete. By identifying the object or issue over which a war was fought, they neglect the key question of why war was the strategy that states resorted to in order to resolve their dispute. In each case, the conflicts were disastrously costly to at least one and, in some cases, all the states involved. In addition to the millions of dead men- tioned earlier, World War I led to the ouster of three of the leaders who brought their countries into the war, and it hastened the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires. World War II brought about the defeat and occupation of its main instigators, Germany and Japan. The Nazi leader Adolf Hitler committed suicide, and his Italian ally, Benito Mussolini, was hung by his own people. Iran and Iraq fought to a stalemate for eight years, causing 1–2 million casualties and leav- ing Iraq on the brink of economic collapse. The Afghan government’s refusal to hand over bin Laden led to its removal from power. Given these grave consequences, it makes sense to wonder whether all participants would have been better off if they could have come to a
settlement that would have enabled them to avoid the costs of war. Explaining war thus requires us to explain why the participants failed to reach such an agreement.
4. The theory of war developed in this chapter relies extensively on James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49 (Summer 1995): 379–414.
91What Is the Purpose of War?
What Is the Purpose of War? A war is an event involving the organized use of military force by at least two par- ties that reaches a minimum threshold of severity.5 All the components of this definition are important. The requirement that force be organized rules out spon- taneous, disorganized violence, such as large-scale rioting. The requirement that force be used by at least two parties distinguishes war from mass killings perpe- trated by a government against some group that does not fight back. The minimum threshold—scholars often require that a war cause at least 1,000 battle deaths— excludes cases in which military force is used at low levels, such as brief skirmishes or minor clashes. If the main adversaries in the conflict are states, then we refer to the event as an interstate war; if the main parties to the conflict are actors within a state—such as a government fighting a rebel group—then the event is a civil war.6 In this chapter, the discussion focuses on understanding interstate wars. Chapter 6 covers conflicts involving nonstate actors, including civil wars.
Given that scholars have been trying to understand war for millennia, the num- ber of theories and explanations that have been proposed over the years is natu- rally quite large, and the bargaining model that we lay out in this chapter is only one approach. At least three other broad schools of thought have been influential in modern scholarship. While these approaches contribute important insights, they also have gaps that are filled by the bargaining approach.
18401820 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2017 0 5
10 15 20 25
35
45 50
40
30
Year
Pe rc
en ta
ge o
f S ta
te s
In vo
lv ed
in W
ar
FIGURE 3.1 The Percentage of States Involved in Interstate War per Year, 1820–2017
Figure source: Meredith Reid Sarkees and Frank Wayman, Resort to War: 1816–2007 (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010). Updated to 2017 by author.
5. See, for example, J. David Singer and Melvin Small, The Wages of War, 1816–1965: A Statistical Handbook (New York: Wiley, 1972).
6. There are also cases that have elements of both kinds of wars. In the Vietnam War, South Vietnam, with the support of the United States, fought a civil war against a communist insurgency while at the same time fighting an interstate war against communist North Vietnam, which was supporting the rebellion. See Chapter 6 for more on the international dimensions of civil wars.
war An event involving the organized use of military force by at least two parties that reaches a minimum threshold of severity.
interstate war A war in which the main participants are states.
civil war A war in which the main participants are within the same state, such as the government and a rebel group.
92 Chapter 3 Why Are There Wars?
The first, described in this book’s Introduction as realism, argues that war is the inevitable result of international anarchy (pp. xxxi–xxxiv). The absence of a central authority capable of policing interstate relations means that wars can happen because there is nothing to stop states from using force to get their way. 7 Moreover, anarchy creates insecurity and a competition for power. In this view, states fight wars either to increase their own power (such as by enlarging their territory) or to counter the power of others (such as by destroying adversaries and their allies). For this reason, realism emphasizes two primary dynamics that can lead to war. One is a preventive motive: the desire to fight in order to prevent an enemy from becoming relatively more powerful.8 The second is a phenomenon known as the security dilemma. This dilemma arises when efforts that states make to defend themselves, such as acquiring a bigger military, make other states fear that they will be attacked. If threatened states arm them- selves in response, the result is a spiral of fear and insecurity that may end in war.9
As we will see, the bargaining model of war shares realism’s presumption that anarchy leads to a world in which military force is often threatened or used to further state interests, and conflicts are addressed through bargaining rather than institutions like courts. The bargaining model also anticipates prevention and the fear of attack as two of several mechanisms that can lead to war. The main depar- ture from realism is in recognizing that the use of military power imposes costs on states, so even if threatening force is useful to get a better deal, states are generally better off if they do not have to actually use force—creating the puzzle that is at the heart of this chapter.
A second alternative approach emphasizes the role of misperceptions or mistakes. Starting from the observation that the costs of war often far exceed any potential benefits, scholars in this tradition conclude that wars must occur because decision makers inaccurately estimate their chances of winning or the costs that will have to be paid. When European leaders sent their armies to war in August 1914, most were convinced that the troops would be home by Christmas—a pre- diction that turned out to be off by four years. Both sides also expected to win the war, meaning that at least one side was being overly optimistic. This kind of argu- ment rests either on research in cognitive psychology showing that people are bad at weighing risks and often fall prey to wishful thinking, or on organizational approaches that emphasize how the ideology and interests of political and military elites can lead to incorrect and overly optimistic assessments of war.10
A concern about such theories is that while perceptual pitfalls are universal, war is quite rare, and these theories have a hard time explaining why wars happen
7. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.).
8. See, for example, Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); and Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
9. Robert Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30 (January 1978): 167–214.
10. The classic work applying cognitive psychology to international relations is Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). For an argument that military ideologies can lead to incorrect and overly optimistic assessments, see Stephen Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” International Security 9, no. 1 (Summer 1984): 58–107. The effect of military biases may depend on domestic institutions that influence how much civilians control the military; this argument is taken up in Chapter 4.
security dilemma A dilemma that arises when efforts that states make to defend themselves cause other states to feel less secure; can lead to arms races and war because of the fear of being attacked.
93What Is the Purpose of War?
at some points in time but not others. As we will see, uncertainty about the likely outcome and costs of war plays an important role in the approach developed here, but we emphasize not the psychological or organizational origins of potential mistakes, but rather the difficulties of gathering the necessary information in the strategic context of bargaining.
Finally, a long tradition of scholarship argues that wars are fought not because they serve the interests of states, but because they serve the interests of influential groups within the state, such as corporations, arms merchants, and the military.11 In this view, the puzzle of war has an easy answer: Wars are fought in spite of their costs because those costs do not fall on the actors who call the shots. Although this chapter introduces the bargaining model by treating states as the main actors, without internal politics, we will see in Chapter 4 that the potential role of domestic interests can be incorporated quite easily.
Interests at War: What Do States Fight Over? At the root of every war lies a conflict over something that states value. The pur- pose of warfare is not to fight but rather to obtain, through fighting or the threat of fighting, something the state wants. Hence, we should think about the problem of war as a problem of bargaining over objects or issues that are of value to more than one state. Using the framework developed in Chapter 2, we focus on situations in which states’ interests conflict, giving rise to a strategic interaction that involves bargaining over the distribution of whatever is in dispute. The analysis thus starts by assuming that there is an object of value—what we will sometimes refer to as a “good”—and that each state prefers more of the good over less.
What kinds of goods do states fight over? Territory has historically been the most common source of trouble. Indeed, a study of 155 wars over the last three centuries found that over half (83) involved conflicts over territory—more than any other single issue.12 States come into conflict if more than one wants the same piece of territory. There are a number of reasons why a piece of territory may be valuable to more than one state. First, it might contribute to the wealth of the state, particularly if it contains valuable resources such as oil, natural gas, or minerals. Iran and Iraq fought a lengthy war, from 1980 to 1988, in part because Iraq coveted Iran’s southern oil fields. Territory can also be economi- cally valuable simply by adding to the industrial or agricultural resources at the state’s disposal.
A second reason that territory can cause conflict between two states is its military or strategic value. For example, the Golan Heights, on the border between Israel and Syria, has a commanding position over northern Israel from which it is possible to launch devastating attacks on the towns below. Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War, and this territory has been a source of conflict between the two states ever since.
11. See citations to this literature in Chapter 4.
12. Kalevi J. Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1648–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
94 Chapter 3 Why Are There Wars?
Finally, a piece of territory might be valuable for ethnic, cultural, or historical reasons. The long-standing conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors stems from the latter’s resistance to the creation of a Jewish state on a land where many Arabs lived. In this case, the dispute goes beyond simply the location of a border, as some Arab states have refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist.13
Similarly, the long-running conflict between India and Pakistan is driven by the fact that both have historical and ethnic claims to the region of Kashmir. When the two countries gained their independence from Britain in 1947, India pressured Kashmir’s Hindu leader to join with India, which is predominantly Hindu. How- ever, because the people of Kashmir, like the people of Pakistan, are predominantly Muslim, Pakistan has claimed the territory on the basis of religious ties. Map 3.1 illustrates the current boundaries of the disputed area, which are further compli- cated by China’s claims to neighboring portions of Tibet. In territorial disputes, states threaten or use military force to compel concessions and/or to seize and hold disputed land.
Wars can also arise out of conflicts over states’ policies. Such conflicts come about when one state enacts a policy that benefits it but harms the interests of another. The conflict that led to the Iraq War centered on Iraq’s alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which the United States saw as threatening
13. Egypt recognized Israel in 1979, and Jordan did likewise in 1994.
claimed by India ,
Map note: The Line of Control, which originated as a cease-fire line after the First Kashmir War (1947–48), divides the region into Indian- and Pakistani-administered areas.
MAP 3.1 Territorial Claims in the Kashmir Region
95What Is the Purpose of War?
to its broader interests in the region. Ongoing U.S. conflicts with North Korea and Iran have similar sources. Conflict between Russia and Ukraine that started in 2014 revolved around the latter’s decision to pursue closer economic ties to the West and policies that were alleged to harm the interests of ethnic Russians living there. A state’s mistreatment of its own citizens can also spark international conflict. For example, the United States and its allies waged war against Serbia in 1999 for its repressive treatment of civilians in the Kosovo region. Similarly, the United States launched cruise missiles against Syria in 2017 after the government used chemical weapons against its own people.
When states have policy disputes, war, or the threat of war, may be a mecha- nism for compelling policy change. In the case of Kosovo, two months of bombing by the United States and its allies led the Serb government to end its military cam- paign against the Kosovars; in the case of Syria, U.S. threats led to a deal in which that regime gave up its chemical arsenal. Alternatively, war may be used to replace the offending regime with a friendlier one that will pursue different policies. This was the U.S. plan in Iraq and Afghanistan, though the effort to install more pliant regimes in those countries embroiled American forces in civil wars that lasted much longer than the initial operations to oust the former, hostile regimes (see Chapter 6).
The possibility of using military force to change regimes suggests a third kind of conflict between states: conflicts over regime type, or the composition of another country’s government. In its conflict with Ukraine, Russia sought reforms of the Ukrainian political system that would give the Russian minority there greater
States sometimes make threats or use military force to influence the policies of foreign governments. The Syrian government attacked rebel-held villages with chemical weapons in August 2013 (pictured here), and April 2017. After the second attack, the United States carried out an air strike on a Syrian air base that it believed to be the source.
96 Chapter 3 Why Are There Wars?
autonomy and influence. During the Cold War, the United States saw communist regimes as natural allies of the Soviet Union, and hence it sought to prevent the establishment of such regimes. U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was driven by the desire to protect the pro-American South Vietnamese government from internal and external enemies bent on overthrowing it. During this period, both superpowers intervened regularly in other states to prop up friendly governments or to remove unfriendly ones. The role of outside powers in civil wars, such as in Vietnam, will be addressed in Chapter 6.
As this last example suggests, conflicts over territory, policy, and/or regime may spring from deeper conflicts that give rise to concerns about relative power. The specific conflict that started World War II was a territorial dispute between Germany and Poland over a small strip of territory that lay between them. How- ever, Britain and France were concerned that a victory over Poland would fur- ther strengthen and embolden Germany, making it a more formidable foe in their ongoing struggle for influence and territory in Europe. Hence, the German-Polish territorial dispute impinged on the interests of other states because of its potential impact on their relative power vis-à-vis Germany. The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union similarly imbued many local conflicts with global importance because of their perceived impact on the relative strength of the superpowers.
Bargaining and War Conflicting interests are clearly necessary for wars to happen, but they are not suf- ficient to explain why wars actually do happen. To understand why some conflicts become wars and others do not, we have to think about the strategic interactions that states engage in when they seek to settle their disputes. In a well-functioning domestic political system, the kinds of disputes that lead to wars are often settled through institutional mechanisms. Property disputes can be resolved by courts backed by effective police powers. If one person engages in actions that harm another, the latter may turn to the legal system to solve the problem. Within states, policy disagreements and conflicting ideas over who should govern can be settled by elections. As noted in Chapter 2, however, the international system lacks reliable legal, judicial, and electoral institutions. For this reason, states must generally try to settle conflicts with one another through bargaining.14
Bargaining describes interactions in which actors try to resolve disputes over the allocation of a good. They may bargain over the distribution of a disputed ter- ritory to determine whether there is a division acceptable to both sides. Or they may bargain over each other’s policies so that objectionable ones might be modified or eliminated. Although we often think of bargaining as entailing compromise or
14. Although some interstate disputes have been adjudicated through institutions like the International Court of Justice (ICJ), these institutions lack strong enforcement mechanisms to guarantee compliance with their rulings, and disputants often engage in bargaining after an ICJ ruling to determine whether and how its terms will be implemented. Hence, these rulings are a part of, rather than a substitute for, the bargaining process. See, for example, Cole Paulson, “Compliance with Final Judgments of the International Court of Justice since 1987,” American Journal of International Law 98 (2004): 434–61.
97What Is the Purpose of War?
give-and-take, the bargaining process does not always imply that differences will be split. Indeed, in many cases, states assume all-or-nothing bargaining positions. For example, when President Bush demanded in October 2001 that the Afghan gov- ernment hand over Al Qaeda leaders responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he declared that “these demands are not open to negotiation or discussion.”15
A crisis occurs when at least one state seeks to influence the outcome of bar- gaining by threatening to use military force in the event that it does not get what it wants. At this point, we enter the domain of coercive bargaining, in which the con- sequences of not reaching an agreement can involve the use of force, including war. We sometimes refer to bargaining under the threat of war as crisis bargaining or coercive diplomacy. In all such interactions, at least one state sends the message “Satisfy my demands, or else”—where the “or else” involves imposing costs on the other side through military action.
In some cases, this message takes the form of an explicit ultimatum, such as Bush’s March 2003 pronouncement that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had 48 hours to leave the country or face an invasion. In other cases, the threat is con- veyed implicitly, through menacing actions such as mobilization of troops or mil- itary maneuvers. The Russian military incursion into Ukraine in August 2014 was preceded by the massing of troops on the border and military exercises, but not by an explicit ultimatum or set of demands (at least not publicly). Whether explicit or implicit, the purpose of such actions is clear: they seek to wrest concessions from the other side by making the alternative seem unacceptably costly.
The costs and likely outcome of a war determine which deals each side will consider acceptable in crisis bargaining. We can generally assume that the best pos- sible outcome for a state in a crisis is to get the entire good without having to fight. If the other side gives in, the state gets its most preferred settlement of the underly- ing issue and avoids paying the costs associated with war. It is quite likely, though, that a state would also accept something less than its most preferred settlement, given that the alternative of fighting is costly.
For example, imagine a conflict over a piece of territory worth $100 million. Assume a state believes that in the event of a war, it is certain to win the territory; however, the costs of war, if put in monetary terms, would amount to $30 million. In that case, the expected value of going to war for that state is $100 million – $30 million = $70 million. Hence, the state should be willing to accept any deal that gives it at least $70 million worth of the territory. Since a state has the option to wage war if it determines that doing so is in its interests, the state will accept a bargain only if that bargain gives it at least as much as it can expect to get from war. And for any deal to prevent a war, it must satisfy all sides in this way: each state must decide that it prefers the deal over fighting a war. Hence, in our simple exam- ple, war can be averted only if the other state is willing to settle for the remaining $30 million worth of territory or less.
15. Elizabeth Bumiller, “Bush Pledges Attack on Afghanistan Unless It Surrenders bin Laden Now,” New York Times, September 21, 2001, A1.
crisis bargaining A bargaining interaction in which at least one actor threatens to use force in the event that its demands are not met.
coercive diplomacy The use of threats to advance specific demands in a bargaining interaction.
98 Chapter 3 Why Are There Wars?
The discussion at the outset of this chapter implies a very simple proposition: Because war is costly, a settlement that all sides prefer over war generally exists.16 The graphic on pages 100–101 illustrates the simple idea behind this proposition. Assume that two states—call them State A and State B—have conflicting interests over the division of a particular good, represented by the green bar in each diagram on the left-hand page. To make this concrete, think of this good as a piece of terri- tory, as in the example on the right-hand page. Any line dividing the bar, such as the dotted line labeled Possible deal in panel 1, represents a possible division of the good, such as a border drawn through the territory. State A receives the share of the good to the left of that line, and State B receives the share of the good to the right. Since both states prefer more of the good over less, State A wants to get a deal as far to the right as possible, and State B wants to get a deal as far to the left as possible. Put another way, State A’s most preferred outcome, or ideal point, is at the far right of the bar, which would mean State A gets all the good, and State B’s ideal point is on the far left, which would mean State B gets all the good. (Hence, this horizontal bar is identical to the diagonal line used to illustrate bargaining in Figure 2.2 on p. 56).
Now consider what happens if the two states go to war. Moving to panel 2, the line labeled War outcome indicates the actual, or expected, outcome of a violent conflict. In the case of a conflict over territory, we can think of this line as indicating how much territory each state would control after a war. The farther that line is to the right, the better State A is expected to fare in the event of war; the farther it is to the left, the better State B is expected to fare.
Crucially, fighting entails costs. These costs diminish the value of the expected war outcome to each state. As shown in panel 3, the value of war to each state is the share of the good it expects to win, minus the costs it expects to incur. Notice that the value of war to State A (which corresponds to the portion of the bar to the left of the dotted red line) is smaller than the share of the good that it expects to get from war (the portion of the bar to the left of the War outcome line). Indeed, as the figure is constructed, State A expects to win more of the good in a war than it would get from the possible deal in the first panel, but once the costs of war are taken into account, the possible deal is actually preferable to war.
To understand how the costs affect the value of war for each state, we have to think about those costs as they relate to the value of the good. Looking at the cor- responding example on the right-hand page of the graphic, imagine that State A expects to win 70 percent of the territory, at the cost of 5,000 lives. State A’s war value hinges on how much State A values those lost lives relative to the value of the territory. If State A thinks that losing those soldiers is equivalent to losing 30 percent of the territory, then its value for war is 70 – 30 = 40 percent of the value of the territory. State B would make a similar calculation. For both states, the costs of war would effectively go up if either the number of lives lost went up or the value attached to the territory went down.
As panel 4 shows, State A prefers any deal over war that gives it more than its value for war (deals that fall to the right of the dotted red line). Deals in this range
16. See Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War.”
99What Is the Purpose of War?
give State A more than it expects to get through war, once the costs are taken into account. Similarly, State B prefers any deal over war that gives it more than its value for war (deals that fall to the left of the dotted blue line). Notice that the set of deals that State A prefers to war overlaps with the set of deals that State B prefers to war, creating a region called the bargaining range. Any division of the good in this bar- gaining range gives both states more than they expect to get from fighting a war. As this exercise demonstrates, the fact that war imposes costs on both sides means that such a range of deals always exists. Hence, in theory, there are bargains that both sides would prefer over war.
Although the preceding exercise treated the good in dispute as a piece of ter- ritory, the general framework and insight can be applied to any kind of issue over which states have conflicting interests. For example, consider the conflict between North Korea and the United States over the former’s nuclear program. In this case, the United States’ ideal outcome, which we could put at one end of the bar, is for North Korea to disarm completely and become a democratic state. North Korea’s ideal outcome, which would be located at the opposite end of the bar, would be for the United States to accept North Korea’s status as a nuclear power and recognize its existing regime.
In between are various compromise alternatives that neither considers ideal, including the current status quo, in which North Korea has a small number of nuclear devices but the United States refuses to recognize its right to them. This point is close to North Korea’s ideal point. Another point on the bar, closer to the U.S. ideal point than to the status quo, would be for North Korea to freeze its nuclear program and admit international inspectors. Though the substantive meaning of any location on the bar depends on the exact issue in dispute, the basic argument for the existence of a bargaining range holds across issues. (See “Controversy” on p. 104 for an extended discussion of negotiations between the United States and North Korea.)
This simple model is useful not because it is right in the sense that it correctly describes the complexity of real-world bargaining interactions, but rather because it forces us to think about all the ways in which bargaining could go wrong. Under- standing why wars happen even though a peaceful bargain theoretically exists for virtually any conflict is the main purpose of this chapter.
Compellence and Deterrence: Varieties of Coercive Bargaining The model is also useful for thinking about the conditions under which states might have an interest in initiating a crisis in the first place. The pre-crisis distribution, or status quo, can be represented as a line dividing the bar. Where the status quo is located relative to the states’ values for war determines which state, if any, might have an interest in changing the status quo through a threat of force. If a state is already getting from the status quo at least as much as it expects to get through war, then it generally cannot gain by threatening war to change the status quo. However, if a state expects to get more through war than it has in the status quo, then it has an interest in making a challenge.
bargaining range The set of deals that both parties in a bargaining interaction prefer over the reversion outcome. When the reversion outcome is war, the bargaining range is the set of deals that both sides prefer over war.
100 Chapter 3 Why Are There Wars?
VALUE OF WAR TO B
1. A possible deal: Two states, A and B, have conflicting interests over a good (represented by the green bar). Both states want as much of the good as possible. The dotted line represents the distribution of the good based on one possible deal. Any deal determines A's and B's shares.
2. The expected outcome of war: As they bargain, each state evaluates how much it can expect to get as a result of war. The dotted line shows the expected outcome of war. Here, A would get more by going to war than by accepting the above deal.
3. Costs of war: However, war also involves costs, and these costs must be subtracted from what each state hopes to gain. So, although war would give A more of the good than it would get under the deal in panel 1, the costs incurred reduce the value of war to A.
4. The bargaining range: Each state prefers any deal that gives it more than its expected value of war, once costs are subtracted. Because war inflicts costs on both sides, there is a range of possible deals that both sides would prefer over war.
The Model: Bargaining and War
58 Chapter 3 Why Are There Wars?
STATE A’S SHARE STATE A’S IDEAL OUTCOME
STATE B’S SHARE
POSSIBLE DEAL
A’S SHARE AFTER WAR
B’S SHARE AFTER WAR
WAR OUTCOME
WAR OUTCOME
COSTS TO A
COSTS TO B
VALUE OF WAR TO B
VALUE OF WAR TO A
STATE B’S IDEAL OUTCOME
DEALS B PREFERS TO WAR
VALUE OF WAR TO A DEALS A PREFERS TO WAR
A B
A B
A B
A B
WAR OUTCOME
BARGAINING RANGE
101What Is the Purpose of War?
WAR OUTCOME
1. A conflict over territory: Imagine two states have a conflict of interest over a piece of territory. State A would like to have the whole territory, as would State B. A deal is proposed to divide the territory at the dotted line.
2. The expected outcome of war: Based on the strength of their respective armies and other resources, a war over the territory is expected to result in State A winning the portion of the territory to the left of the dotted line.
3. Costs of war: Each side also considers the costs of war. Imagine that State A values the territory it would win as a result of war at $100 million but values the costs of war (both financial and human) at $30 million. These costs would reduce the value of war to A by 30 percent.
4. The bargaining range: Each side should prefer any deal that gives it more territory than what it expects from war, once the costs of war are subtracted from the territory it wins. Any border drawn through the shaded range divides the territory into shares that both sides prefer over war.
An Example: Bargaining over Territory
59Wh at Is t he P u r p ose of Wa r?
WAR OUTCOME
POSSIBLE DEAL
A BA B
A B
COSTS OF WAR
WAR OUTCOME
BARGAINING RANGE
102 Chapter 3 Why Are There Wars?
The top panel of Figure 3.2 depicts such a situation: in the status quo, State A’s share of the good is less than the value of war to A, even when the costs of war are taken into account. This does not mean that there will be a war, since, after all, a bargaining range still exists. But in this situation, the dissatisfied state can profit by threatening war in order to get a better deal. As the lower panel in Figure 3.2 shows, this logic divides the bar into three segments. If the status quo is to the left of the red dotted line indicating State A’s value for war, then State A has an interest in threatening war to try to get a better outcome. Similarly, if the status quo is to the right of the blue dotted line indicating State B’s value for war, then State B prefers war over the status quo and thus has an interest in sparking a crisis. Finally, if the status quo is in the bargaining range, then both prefer the current situation over war, and neither can expect to gain by waging war.
We often classify threats according to whether they are intended to preserve or change the existing relationship between states. An effort to change the status quo through the threat of force is called compellence. A compellent threat is intended to coerce the target state into making a concession or changing a current policy. Compellent threats take the form of “Give me y, or else” (where y is something that the threatener values) or “Stop doing x, or else” (where x is an objectionable policy).
A
STATUS QUO
A’S SHARE
VALUE OF WAR TO A COSTS TO A
B’S SHARE
COSTS TO B VALUE OF WAR TO B
B
WAR OUTCOME
BARGAINING RANGE
STATUS QUOS NEITHER WILL CHALLENGE
WAR OUTCOME
B
STATUS QUOS THAT A WILL CHALLENGE
STATUS QUOS THAT B WILL CHALLENGE
A
compellence An effort to change the status quo through the threat of force.
FIGURE 3.2 Bargaining and the Status Quo Here, the status quo clearly gives State A less than war would (the value of war equals the war outcome minus costs).
State A has an incentive to challenge any status quo that gives it less than war would, because it could do better by going to war. The same holds for State B. If the status quo is within the bargaining range, however, neither State A nor State B could improve its outcome by going to war, so neither state will challenge the status quo.
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The U.S. demand that Afghanistan hand over Osama bin Laden and stop harboring the Al Qaeda terror- ist network after the 9/11 attacks is an example of compellence.
Deterrence, by contrast, is used to preserve the status quo by threatening the other side with unaccept- able costs if it seeks to alter the current relationship. A deterrent threat takes the form of “Don’t do x, or else” (where x is some possible future action that the threat- ener finds objectionable). The most common deterrent threat is one that all states make implicitly all the time: “Don’t attack me, or I’ll fight back.” The effort to deter attacks on one’s own country is referred to as general deterrence, and it is an activity that states are constantly engaged in. Another form of deterrence occurs when a state seeks to protect a friend. In this case, the deter- rent message takes the form of “Don’t attack my ally x, or else.” This kind of threat is generally referred to as extended deterrence because in this case the threat- ener attempts to extend protection to another state. Extended deterrence is crucial in the context of alli- ances, a subject that we will consider in Chapter 5.
In general, crises may involve a combination of deterrent and compellent threats. When one side tries to compel another, the target may issue deterrent threats, or some third state may issue a deterrent threat on the target’s behalf. Cri- ses often involve such threats and counterthreats, as each side tries to improve its bargaining position by bringing to bear its capability to harm the other. In many cases, threats alone will succeed in bringing about an outcome that both sides find acceptable. Indeed, the most effective threats never need to be carried out, since they coerce the target into making the desired concessions or refraining from objec- tionable actions. When this contest of threats fails to generate an outcome that both sides prefer over fighting is when we observe the descent into war. This brings us back to the core puzzle: Given the costs associated with war, why does crisis bar- gaining sometimes fail to achieve a peaceful solution? The following sections elaborate several possible answers.
Do Wars Happen by Mistake? War from Incomplete Information In July 1990, Iraq was engaged in coercive diplomacy with its small neighbor to the south, Kuwait. Two years earlier, Iraq had emerged from a disastrous, eight-year war with Iran, and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein desperately needed to rebuild his
In a 2012 speech to the United Nations, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel would not permit Iran to reach the final stage of acquiring a nuclear weapon. He argued that a credible threat of military action was needed to deter Iran from crossing that “red line.”
deterrence An effort to preserve the status quo through the threat of force.
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CON T ROV E R S Y
Can We Negotiate with North Korea? North Korea has one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet. It has been governed by a dictatorship since 1948, passed down across three generations. The regime, now led by Kim Jong-Un, has murdered, tortured, and starved its people into submission. It has sealed them off from the outside world, denying virtually all contact with relatives in South Korea and with other foreigners. In foreign affairs, North Korea has waged war on its southern neighbor, spewed threats at others in the region, sold missile technology to other “rogue” regimes, and kidnapped Japanese citizens.
North Korea has also spent the last three decades developing nuclear weapons. In 2006 it test-detonated a nuclear device, and the country is now believed to have somewhere between 20 and 60 warheads. In 2017, North Korea tested a ballistic missile capable of hitting not just its immediate neighbors, but also anywhere in the United States. As a result, the United States and other countries have sought to persuade the regime to end its nuclear program and give up its weapons.
Although bargaining pro- vides a way for states to settle disputes and avoid the costs of war, the question of whether to negotiate with North Korea over its nuclear ambitions has been fraught with controversy. Disagreements revolve around whether the interests moti-
vating North Korea’s quest for these weapons make nego- tiations viable and whether, with its autocratic domestic institutions, North Korea is likely to live up to any agree- ment it signs. There is also disagreement about the role that military force should play in this interaction.
The argument against negotiating hinges on the view that North Korea neither wants a deal nor can be trusted to honor one. From this perspective, the regime’s interest in nuclear weapons stems from a desire to reunify the Korean peninsula by force. Nuclear weapons are useful because they would deter the United States and Japan from coming to South Korea’s aid in the event of war. Thus, negotiations are unlikely to succeed, and they serve only
to give North Korea time to advance its program. In addi- tion, North Korea’s closed, highly autocratic regime pres- ents a key impediment, since it can easily cheat. Because it can advance its nuclear program in secrecy, away from the prying eyes of satellites and inspectors, it could break a deal without being detected.
Doubts about negotiating are also based on a series of broken agreements between the United States and North Korea over the last three decades. After nearing the brink of war in 1994, the United States and North Korea signed the Agreed Framework, under which North Korea pledged to freeze construction and operation of all nuclear reactors. In return, the United States promised oil, two proliferation- resistant nuclear reactors, and to work toward a normal- ization of trade and diplomatic relations, which have been suspended since the Korean War (1950–53).
While this agreement froze North Korea’s plutonium production, the deal collapsed in 2002 after the United States accused North Korea of circumventing the agree- ment by engaging in uranium enrichment. Subsequent deals in 2007 and 2011 also unraveled within a year or two of signing. The end result of decades of negotiation is a nuclear-armed adversary. In light of this situation, some argue, the ultimate goal of U.S. policy should be to change the regime, not to negotiate with it.
The alternative argument is that North Korea’s inter- est in nuclear weapons stems not from ambition, but from fear: the regime is built on suspicion of outsiders and wor- ries about being overthrown. This insecurity is not unrea- sonable, since the United States has, in both rhetoric and practice, shown its willingness to oust hostile dictators. In
U.S. State Department officials return from a diplomatic mission in North Korea with boxes of information on the country’s nuclear operations.
Applying the Concepts
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2003 the United States invaded Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein on the basis of inflated claims about that country’s WMD capabilities; in 2011 the United States and its allies intervened in a civil war against Libyan leader Mu’ammar Qaddafi, who had earlier agreed to give up his nuclear and chemical weapons programs. Watching these events could have easily convinced Kim that the possession of nuclear weapons would guard against a similar fate.
In this view, negotiations might work, but only if Washington can credibly commit not to seek regime change if North Korea lowers its defenses. Such a commitment would involve economic assistance to help bolster the regime and promote development. In past negotiations, North Korea also sought security guarantees, includ- ing a formal promise that the United States would not attack it and a reduction of the U.S. military presence in South Korea and Japan. Whether a comprehensive deal along these lines could have worked when North Korea’s program was in its infancy, now that Kim actually has a nuclear arsenal and means of delivery it is unclear what concessions would convince him to give them up.
In early 2018, U.S. president Donald Trump signaled his willingness to hold direct talks with the North Korean leader. At the time of this writing, it was unclear whether such negotiations would take place or what would come out of them. Although a meeting between the heads of state would be unprecedented, failed talks or an agree- ment that soon collapses would not.
If a lasting deal is not reached, the question becomes, What role will the threat of military force play in this inter- action? Key advisers to Trump have argued that, given North Korea’s aggressive intentions and barbaric regime, the United States cannot tolerate that country’s capability to hit the United States with a nuclear weapon. In this view, the United States and its allies have to apply maximum pressure to induce disarmament, including either a lim- ited military strike to convince Kim of the costs of defiance or a broader attack designed to eliminate his arsenal.
Those who believe that the regime is motivated by fear worry that such a strategy is both unnecessary and counterproductive. If Kim is interested in his own survival,
then the threat of retaliation by the United States can deter North Korea from using nuclear weapons. If so, there is no urgency to eliminate the program by force—a prospect that carries enormous risks and costs.
An attempt to disarm North Korea by force might fail to destroy its arsenal, creating the risk of a nuclear attack on South Korea, Japan, or the United States. Even if North Korea did not use its nuclear weapons, its enormous conventional capabilities, including thousands of artil- lery pieces within range of Seoul, could inflict horrendous losses on South Korea and the U.S. troops stationed there. The United States would likely prevail in a war, but at a cost that could run to hundreds of thousands of lives. Ultimately, the price of war may mean that there is no alternative but for the two sides to talk about a way to manage this dangerous rivalry.
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un controls the country’s military and nuclear arsenal.
Thinking Analytically 1. How might Kim Jong-Un respond to a limited
military strike by the United States? How do different assumptions about his interests lead to different expectations about his response?
2. Should countries that value human rights negotiate with regimes that brutalize their own people? What are the costs and benefits of engaging a regime like North Korea?
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shattered economy. Given that Iraq was sitting on oil deposits containing an esti- mated 112 billion barrels of oil, it was not hard to imagine where money for recon- struction would come from. But Hussein was not content simply to pump and sell Iraq’s own oil, and he quickly turned his gun sights on Kuwait.
Kuwait’s 95 billion barrels of recoverable oil reserves made a tempting tar- get, and moreover, Hussein felt that his neighbor was standing in the way of his plans for economic recovery. For one thing, Kuwait was pumping more oil than it had previously agreed to. This extra supply meant that the price of oil was lower than it would otherwise be, depriving Iraq of needed revenue. Iraq also charged that Kuwait was stealing oil from oil fields that straddled the countries’ shared border. Finally, Kuwait had lent Iraq substantial sums of money during the war, and Saddam Hussein hoped to get this debt forgiven. When Kuwait refused these demands, Iraq flexed its military muscle. Beginning in mid-July, Iraq started mov- ing its forces closer to the border with Kuwait, at one point moving an entire divi- sion per day. By the end of the month, 100,000 Iraqi troops, supported by thousands of tanks, were in position near the border.
With the help of spy satellites, American officials watched the buildup, and they passed on their intelligence to the Kuwaitis. Despite their concern, most offi- cials in the U.S. government did not anticipate that Iraq would invade, nor did the Kuwaitis bow to Hussein’s demands. To many observers, the Iraqi moves looked like an effort to intimidate, not a prelude to invasion. According to reporter Bob Woodward’s account, “Everything Saddam had to do to prepare for an invasion was exactly what he also had to do if his intention was simply to scare the Kuwaitis. There was no way to distinguish the two.”17 On August 2, with Kuwait still holding out, Hussein revealed that he had not simply been bluffing: Iraqi forces swept into Kuwait and fully occupied the country in a matter of hours.
In retrospect, it is clear that Iraq was willing and able to wage war against Kuwait if its demands were not met. At the time, however, key decision makers in Kuwait and Washington were not sure of Hussein’s intentions. Would he really risk the wrath of the world by gobbling up his small neighbor? Would he be willing to put his military and his country through another war so soon after the previous one? The invasion of Kuwait happened in part because, unsure of the answers to these questions, the Kuwaitis decided that calling Hussein’s bluff was preferable to giving in to his demands. When it became apparent that the threat was not, in fact, a bluff, war was already upon them.
This episode illustrates one reason that bargaining can fail to resolve disputes and avert war. When states have poor and incomplete information about each other’s willingness and ability to wage war, two mistakes are possible, both of which can lead to war. First, a state confronted by demands may mistakenly yield too little or not at all—just as Kuwait failed to budge in the face of Hussein’s threats. In these cases, bargaining can break down because at least one state feels that it can achieve more through fighting (in this case, Iraq) than the other is willing to offer in the
17. Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York: Pocket Star Books, 1991), 200.
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negotiations (Kuwait). The second, related danger is that a state may demand too much (Iraq in this example) under the mistaken belief that the other side will cave in (Kuwait, and its protector, the United States). In this event, the state may not realize its mistake until war is already upon it. In either case, even though there might be a settlement of the issue that both sides would prefer to war, uncertainty about each other’s willingness to wage war can prevent such a settlement from being reached.
Where does this uncertainty come from? Recall that the main issue in crisis bargaining is how each state evaluates its prospects in a war. How likely is it that the state will be able to win the war? What will the human, financial, and political costs be? These assessments are important because each state’s value for war determines what bargains it prefers over fighting. If one state is uncertain of how much its adversary values war, then it is also uncertain of how much it must concede in order to prevent a war. This uncertainty will arise whenever a state lacks information about any of the myriad factors that determine its adversary’s evaluation of war.
A poker analogy is useful here. In poker, the fact that at least some cards are hidden from view means that each player knows more about the strength of her own hand than do her opponents. The hidden cards are what might be called pri- vate information: important facts that are known only to the player who observes those cards. Because no player sees all the cards, the game is played under a condi- tion known as incomplete information. All players lack information about their opponents’ hands and have private access to information about their own hands.
Incomplete information arises in crisis bargaining when states cannot read- ily observe or measure the key political and military factors that determine their adversaries’ expected value for war. The hidden cards in this context can be many and varied, and we typically differentiate between two broad classes of unknowns: capabilities and resolve. Capabilities are the state’s physical ability to prevail in war: the number of troops it can mobilize, the number and quality of its armaments, the economic resources it has to sustain the war effort. We might also include in this list the quality of the country’s military leadership and mili- tary strategies. In addition, since third parties sometimes join wars on one or both sides, any uncertainty about what those third parties will do can lead to uncer- tainty about the capabilities that each side will bring to bear in the event of war (see Chapter 5).
Resolve, a more abstract concept, refers to a state’s willingness to bear the costs of fighting and how much the state values the object of the dispute relative to those costs. How many people is the country willing to lose in order to obtain, say, a given piece of territory? How much is it willing to pay in blood and money in order to win policy concessions or change another country’s regime? Resolve not only determines whether a state is willing to fight, but also how much of the state’s potential capabilities would actually be mobilized in the event of war. We frequently make the distinction between total wars (in which states mobilize their entire military and economic resources) and limited wars (in which states fight with something less than their full potential, often because their aims are limited or of relatively low value).
incomplete information A situation in which actors in a strategic interaction lack information about other actors’ interests and/or capabilities.
resolve The willingness of an actor to endure costs in order to acquire a particular good.
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How a state evaluates the stakes of conflict determines where on this contin- uum its effort will be. World War II, for example, was seen as a war of national survival, and during the height of the war (1943–45) the United States spent about 37 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defense, and other belligerents spent half of their GDP or more. By contrast, total U.S. defense spending in 2008, in the midst of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, amounted to about 4 percent of GDP, and only a portion of that paid for those wars. Resolve is obviously a difficult quality to measure, as it hinges on a variety of political, ideological, and psychological factors. Indeed, it may be difficult for a leader to accurately assess his or her own country’s resolve, much less the resolve of its adversary.
How could such uncertainty lead to war? When states have incomplete infor- mation about the capabilities and/or resolve of their opponents, bargaining over goods that they both desire may fail to achieve peaceful settlements. A central dynamic of bargaining under this kind of uncertainty is a phenomenon known as a risk-return trade-off: essentially, there is a trade-off between trying to get a good deal and trying to minimize the possibility that war will break out.
At one extreme, a state can generally ensure peace by capitulating to all of its adversary’s demands. “Peace at any price” might not be a very attractive outcome, however. Kuwait, for example, could have given in to all of Iraq’s demands and would likely have avoided war. At the other extreme, a state can hold firm and yield nothing to its adversary. This strategy promises a good deal if it works, but doing so runs a risk that the adversary will decide to fight rather than settle for nothing—as Iraq did when Kuwait refused to give in. Between these extremes, a state will gen- erally find that it can reduce the risk of war only by making more generous offers, moving farther from its ideal outcome. Put another way, a state can improve the bargaining outcome for itself only by embracing a higher risk of war. Although war is costly and regrettable in retrospect, bargaining strategies that entail a risk of war can be perfectly rational, given the uncertainty that states face.
In September 2016, Russia initiated massive military drills, showcasing the country’s ships, cruise missiles, and antiaircraft system, off the coast of Crimea. How much of a country’s capabilities it is willing to mobilize for war can be a source of uncertainty in bargaining.
risk-return trade-off In crisis bargaining, the trade-off between trying to get a better deal and trying to avoid a war.
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Incentives to Misrepresent and the Problem of Credibility Given that incomplete information can lead to war, why can’t states simply tell each other how capable and resolved they are and thereby avoid war? Actually, a large part of what goes on in a crisis consists precisely of such efforts at communication. Crises are generally characterized by diplomatic exchanges, threats and counter- threats, mobilization of forces, movement of troops, and positioning of weaponry. These actions, in part, have a military purpose: one cannot wage war, after all, without first mobilizing the necessary forces and putting them in place. But these actions also have a political purpose: they are the language of coercive diplomacy, the vocabulary that states use to convince one another that they are willing to back their bargaining positions with the threat of force.
The problem that arises in this context is that, as much as states may have an interest in communicating their hidden information, they may not always be able to do so effectively. A crucial question that arises in crisis bargaining is whether the messages a state sends have credibility. A credible threat is a threat that the target believes will be carried out. We say a threat lacks credibility if its target has reason to doubt that the threat will be carried out. The credibility of a threat refers not only to the belief that the threatener will start a war; the target also has to believe that the threatener is willing to fight long enough and hard enough that giving in to its demands is a better option. In the case of the U.S. war against Afghanistan, the Taliban government probably had little doubt that President Bush would implement his threat to invade, but it may have doubted that the United States would be willing and able to bear the costs of a long war. In other words, the threat to start a war was credible, but the threat to remove Taliban leaders from power was, in their eyes, not.
Note that the credibility of the threat refers to the target’s beliefs, not the actual intentions of the state issuing the threat. A state may fully intend to carry through on a threat, but it may have a hard time convincing its adversaries. Saddam Hussein genuinely intended to invade Kuwait if his demands were not met; observers in the United States and Kuwait, however, did not see the threat conveyed by his mobilization as credible. Similarly, a state may have no intention of carrying out its threat, but the target may mistakenly believe otherwise. In such cases, the bluff can succeed.
Why is credibility hard to achieve? There are two interrelated reasons. First, carrying through on threats is costly. A state may say that it will wage war if its demands are not met, but the costs of war might be such that it would not make sense to fulfill this threat if called on to do so. This concern about credibility was particularly pronounced during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. With both sides in possession of large arsenals of nuclear weapons, it was well understood that war could quickly escalate into total annihilation. Given this situation, officials in the United States worried about how they could deter the Soviet Union from attacking Western Europe. Would the United States really risk New York to save London or Paris? If the Soviets believed the answer to
credibility Believability. A credible threat is a threat that the recipient believes will be carried out. A credible commitment is a commitment or promise that the recipient believes will be honored.
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this question was no, then the U.S. commitment to defend Western Europe would lack credibility. It was precisely these kinds of concerns that led Great Britain and France to develop their own nuclear capabilities in order to deter the Soviets; after all, it was much more credible that France would risk Paris to save Paris.
Even without the prospect of nuclear annihilation, threats may lack credibil- ity because their targets appreciate the costs of carrying them out. In the midst of the crisis between Iraq and Kuwait in 1990, the United States announced joint naval exercises with the United Arab Emirates. On the same day, the State Department spokesperson issued an extended deterrent threat by reaffirming the U.S. commit- ment to protect its friends in the Persian Gulf. Iraq’s response was contemptuous. Hussein called the U.S. ambassador to his office the next day and told her that he was not scared by American threats. After all, he reportedly said, “Yours is a society which cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle.”18 Thus, the U.S. deterrent threat had little credibility in Hussein’s eyes because he believed that the United States would be unwilling to bear the costs of war.
The second reason that credibility is hard to achieve stems from the conflict- ing interests at the heart of the bargaining interaction. Even though states have a common interest in avoiding war, each also wants the best possible deal for itself, so they have incentives to hide or misrepresent their information.
In some cases, this incentive means that states will conceal information about their true strength. After Iraq invaded Kuwait, the United States massed a large force in Saudi Arabia and threatened war unless Iraq retreated. It was widely assumed that if war came, U.S. forces would attack Iraqi positions in Kuwait head-on. Such a strategy would have provided the most direct route to the objec- tive, but there were clear costs involved: the Iraqi forces in Kuwait were dug in behind strong defenses, including trenches filled with oil that could be lit on fire as soon as U.S. troops tried to cross.
Saddam Hussein’s resistance to U.S. pressure stemmed in part from his belief that his defenses would make the liberation of Kuwait very costly. In fact, war plan- ners in the United States decided early on that they would not attack directly at the strength of the Iraqi positions. Instead, they secretly shifted the bulk of the U.S. force into the desert west of the Kuwaiti border. The military plan called for a “left hook”: U.S. tanks would enter Iraq on the western flank of Iraqi forces in Kuwait and then swoop around behind them, thereby outflanking the enemy’s fortifica- tions. This tactical decision meant that the United States expected to incur lower casualties than Iraq expected to be able to inflict.19
Theoretically, if the United States could have communicated these expectations to Iraq, its threat would have been more credible and perhaps Hussein would have decided to back down. But it is easy to see why the United States could not say to
18. A transcript of this meeting was published in the New York Times, on September 22, 1990. Hussein may also have been encouraged to ignore U.S. threats because American ambassador April Glaspie seemed to indicate that the United States had no strong interest in the outcome of the Iraq-Kuwait dispute.
19. For a discussion of Persian Gulf War strategy, see Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, “How Kuwait Was Won: Strategy in the Gulf War,” International Security 16 (Autumn 1991): 5–41.
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Hussein: “You think that war will be too costly for us, but you are mistaken. Rather than attack your forces head-on, we will go around them on the western flank.” Had the United States sent such a message, Iraq could have taken measures to counter the tactic, such as by repositioning its forces to the west. Hence, any bargaining advantage that the United States might have reaped by revealing its strength would have been nullified. In the strategic context of the crisis, it made sense for the United States to hide its strongest cards.
In other cases, states misrepresent in order to hide their weakest cards. Any- one who has played poker knows that it sometimes makes sense to bluff—that is, to act as if one has a strong hand in the hopes that others will fold. A similar incentive exists in international crises. In this context, a bluff is a threat to use force that the sender does not intend to carry out. In a crisis, a successful bluff could reap large rewards. In 1936, Germany marched its military forces into a region on its border with France known as the Rhineland—a region that, by the 1919 treaty that ended World War I, Germany was required to keep demilitarized. Hitler sent his forces in anyway, daring the Western powers to stop him. Though alarmed by this move, both France and Great Britain chose not to risk a full-scale war over the issue, and the remilitarization of the Rhineland took place unopposed. Interestingly, there is good reason to believe that Hitler’s move was a bluff. Although this point is somewhat controversial, there is evidence that German troops were under orders to retreat if confronted.20 If so, then one of the key moments in the lead-up to World War II was a well-executed bluff.
This observation raises a dilemma: How can states credibly convey their infor- mation in order to diminish the risk of war due to uncertainty? Given a strategic environment that sometimes rewards misrepresentation, how can a genuine threat be made believable?
Communicating Resolve: The Language of Coercion To help us answer these questions, another example will be helpful. On June 25, 1950, without any warning, North Korea invaded South Korea. The Korean peninsula had been split in two after World War II, divided at the 38th parallel between the communist North and the non-communist and pro-Western South. North Korea’s attack was a bold attempt to reunify the country under communist rule, and the United States quickly joined the South in repelling the attack. After three months, the U.S. efforts were largely successful, and North Korean forces began to retreat to their side of the 38th parallel. At this point, the United States decided to press the attack, cross into North Korea, and topple the communist regime there.
This possibility raised grave concerns in neighboring China, which had only the previous year been taken over by a communist government. On October 3,
20. James Thomas Emmerson, The Rhineland Crisis, 7 March 1936 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1977), 98–100.
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1950, Chinese diplomats conveyed a message through the Indian ambassador that a move across the 38th parallel would trigger Chinese intervention.21 Nonetheless, the threat went unheeded. The U.S. operation had been planned and authorized under the assumption that the Chinese would not intervene, and the October 3 warning did nothing to change any minds.22 U.S. forces crossed into North Korea on October 7 and advanced rapidly. In response, 600,000 Chinese troops poured into the Korean peninsula, leading to three more years of fighting and a costly stalemate.
Why was the Chinese threat dismissed, in the words of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, as “a Chinese Communist bluff ”? An October 4 memorandum describes Acheson’s rationale:
The Secretary pointed out that the Chinese Communists were themselves taking no risk
in as much as their private talks to the Indian Ambassador could be disavowed. . . . if they
wanted to take part in the “poker game” they would have to put more on the table than
they had up to the present.23
Acheson’s reasoning for downplaying the Chinese threat is instructive. The Chinese government was making an extended deterrent threat: “Don’t invade North Korea, or we will intervene to defend it.” From the U.S. perspective, it was possible that China would actually make good on this threat, but it was also possi- ble that China was simply trying to bluff the United States into staying out of North Korea. Regardless of which possibility was true, the message conveyed through the Indian ambassador was cheap and easy to send. There was nothing in the mes- sage or the way it was sent that would give American decision makers reasons to think that China was not simply bluffing. Unless the Chinese were willing to pay some costs—“to put more on the table”—there was little reason to take their threat seriously.
This example suggests a more general insight: For threats to be credible, they have to be costly in such a way that the sender would make the threat only if it really intended to carry the threat out. Consider the problem that the United States faced in October 1950 in these, admittedly oversimplified, terms:
It is possible that the Chinese government is resolved to intervene if we attack North Korea, and it is possible that it is not so resolved. How can we know if we are facing a “resolute” China or an “irresolute” China? What would we look for to distinguish these two “types” of adversaries? The answer is this: We would want to look for actions that a resolute China would be willing to take but an irresolute China would be unwilling (or, at least, less likely) to take. If we see such actions, then we are more
21. The United States did not recognize the People’s Republic of China as a legitimate government, so the two countries did not have direct diplomatic contacts.
22. See, for example, William Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 4.
23. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, vol. 7, Korea (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 868–69.
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likely to be facing a resolute China, and we have to take its threat seriously. If we do not see such actions, then there may be reason to doubt China’s resolve.
The message that the Chinese actually sent did not have much credibility because an irresolute China could just as easily have made the same claim.
What kinds of actions can help an opponent distinguish whether its adversary is resolved? In general, the literature has identified three mechanisms that states use to make their threats credible: brinksmanship, tying hands, and paying for power.
Brinksmanship: The “Slippery Slope” Some of the earliest scholarship on the ques- tion of how to make threats credible took place in the 1950s, when policy makers and academics were preoccupied by the credibility of threats in the nuclear age. If everyone understood that nuclear war would bring total annihilation to each side, then under what conditions could threats between nuclear powers ever be credible? Since no state would ever intentionally “pull the trigger” and bring about Armaged- don, the threat to do so was not credible. This observation raised the question of whether nuclear weapons had any utility at all in the emerging Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The most important insight into this issue came from Thomas Schelling, an early theorist of the strategy of crisis bargaining. In Schelling’s view, although it was understood that no state would intentionally bring about its own destruction by starting a total nuclear war, these weapons could nonetheless be wielded for diplomatic effect through a strategy known as brinksmanship. The basic idea was that states could signal their resolve in the crisis by approaching the “brink” of war through provocative actions. Schelling describes this concept:
The brink is not, in this view, the sharp edge of a cliff where one can stand firmly, look
down, and decide whether or not to plunge. The brink is a curved slope that one can stand
on with some risk of slipping, the slope gets steeper and the risk of slipping greater as one
moves toward the chasm.24
The costs of war are such that, if faced with a simple choice of whether to jump or not, no sane decision maker would jump. But rational leaders might decide to step out onto the “slippery slope” and thereby increase the risk that war would start inadvertently. Schelling famously referred to such an act as a “threat that leaves something to chance.”25 The willingness to take such a chance separates resolute from irresolute adversaries. After all, the less the state values the good in dispute, and the more it fears a war over that issue, the less willing it will be to step onto the slope and embrace a risk of war.
In a brinksmanship crisis, each side bids up the risk of war—moving further and further down the slippery slope—until either one side decides to give in or they fall together into the precipice (as in the game of Chicken discussed in the
24. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 199.
25. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, 187.
brinksmanship A strategy in which adversaries take actions that increase the risk of accidental war, with the hope that the other will “blink” (lose its nerve) first and make concessions.
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“Special Topic” appendix to Chapter 2, on pp. 84–85). Exactly how a war might start “inadvertently” is not always clear; fortunately, in the case of nuclear war, we do not know the answer to that question. Absent a computer glitch, it still takes a human hand to pull the trigger.
The general idea was that as tensions rose in an international crisis, the risk of accidents would increase. A limited skirmish between forces could inadvertently escalate if a nervous local commander thought his position was about to be overrun and decided to launch his tactical nuclear weapons in order not to lose them to the enemy. Or, in the midst of a tense crisis, a flock of geese might be mistaken on the radar for incoming bombers (as actually happened in the 1950s), leading to a deci- sion to launch rather than risk being disarmed by a first strike (which, fortunately, did not happen in this incident). Alternatively, the tension of a nerve-wracking cri- sis might cause leaders to give in to passion and fury and lose their cool, rational heads. In any event, it was precisely the willingness to court this risk that would credibly separate the genuinely resolved opponents from the bluffers.
Tying Hands A second way in which states can send credible signals of their will- ingness to fight is by making threats in ways that would make backing down dif- ficult. For example, after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, President Bush repeatedly and publicly stated that the conquest “will not stand.” He made this commitment first on August 5, 1990, and reiterated it throughout the crisis, includ- ing during his State of the Union address on January 29, 1991. These words were also matched by deeds, particularly the deployment of over 500,000 U.S. troops to the region and an extensive diplomatic effort to build international consensus for an attack. Unlike the case with the Chinese threat, which Acheson felt could be
Leaders may use brinksmanship to make the threat of nuclear war credible. In the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, American president John F. Kennedy took steps toward nuclear war—for example, putting missile crews on alert—in order to pressure the Soviets to dismantle nuclear missile sites in Cuba.
115Do Wars Happen by Mistake? War from Incomplete Information
disavowed, Bush was clearly on record as asserting that the policy of his administra- tion was to reverse the Iraqi invasion.
By taking such clear, public statements and actions, Bush put his reputation, and that of the country, on the line. It was not unreasonable to expect that in doing so, he had made it quite costly to retreat from this position—to decide, in the face of Iraqi resistance, that the invasion would be allowed to stand after all. Doing so would have been embarrassing for him as a leader and for the country as a whole. It would have called into question the credibility of future U.S. threats, and Bush could expect his political opponents to use such a retreat against him at the next election.
The general insight here is that under some conditions, threats can generate what are known as audience costs—that is, negative repercussions that arise if the leader does not follow through on the threat.26 Two audiences might impose these costs. The first is the international audience—other states that might doubt future threats made by the president or by the country. Such international audience costs could be felt through an inability to convince future adversaries of one’s resolve. For example, one of the reasons that U.S. decision makers were skeptical of the Chinese threat to intervene in the Korean War was that it came in the wake of a series of unfulfilled threats over a different issue: Taiwan. As early as March 1949, the Chinese communist government began issuing threats to “liberate” Taiwan from the Nationalist Chinese forces that had fled there. These threats, repeated several times over the course of the next year and a half, combined with China’s failure to carry them out, led some analysts in the United States to discount the threats over Korea as similarly empty bluster.27 International-audience costs might also arise if allies come to doubt the trustworthiness of the country’s threats, which may lead them to seek other protectors (see Chapter 5).
A second audience that might punish a leader for backing down from a threat is in the leader’s own country: voters and political opponents who might seek to repri- mand a president who has tarnished the country’s honor and reputation by mak- ing empty threats. For example, in 2012 U.S. president Barack Obama declared that any use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime against its people would cross a “red line” and compel a forceful response. His subsequent decision not to strike Syria after it used the banned weapons the following year was widely criticized by domestic opponents and used to foster the perception that Obama was weak on foreign policy.
In either event, if threats expose state leaders to audience costs, they can have the effect of “tying their hands.” This phrase comes from a famous scene in Homer’s Odyssey in which the main character, Odysseus, asks to have his hands tied to the mast of his ship as they sailed past the sirens. The call of the sirens was so beauti- ful that sailors who heard it were bewitched into steering their ship into the rocks.
26. James D. Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,” American Political Science Review 88 (September 1994): 577–92. For recent arguments that audience costs do not play a major role in crises, see Marc Trachtenberg, “Audience Costs: An Historical Analysis,” Security Studies 21 (2012): 3–42; and Jack Snyder and Erica D. Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound,” American Political Science Review 105 (August 2011): 437–56.
27. Anne Sartori, Deterrence by Diplomacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 33–39.
audience costs Negative repercussions for failing to follow through on a threat or to honor a commitment.
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By tying his hands to the mast, Odysseus hoped to experience the sirens’ call with- out succumbing to this enchantment. State leaders in a crisis tie their hands for similar reasons: because threats are costly to carry out, they know that they might choose not to follow through if faced with that decision. By exposing themselves to audience costs, they blunt the temptation to back down from their threats and thereby tie their own hands.
In the process of tying their hands, of course, state leaders also send a powerful message to their opponents: “I cannot back down; hence, my threat is completely credible.” As with acts of brinksmanship, engaging in actions that incur audience costs separates the resolute from the irresolute. Those most likely to back down from a threat are less willing to take steps that will make backing down costly.
Paying for Power A final mechanism that states use to signal their resolve in a crisis involves taking costly steps to increase their capabilities, such as by mobilizing and deploying a large military force, increasing military manpower, and/or spending large sums of money. For example, during a 1961 crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union over Berlin, President Kennedy asked Congress to increase the army’s strength by 350,000 troops, with much of the growth coming from an increase in the number of people drafted and a call-up of reserve forces. This last step was particularly costly, in a political sense, because reservists are people who have finished their mili- tary service and have families and regular jobs. As a result, calling up 150,000 reservists led to political resistance. There was also a concrete monetary cost to these actions.
As already noted, military mobilizations play an important role in crises because they give the states the material capabilities needed to back up their threats. The most credible threat is not going to be effective unless the action threatened is very costly to the adversary. Thus, one purpose of military mobilization is to put force behind diplomatic maneuvers. At the same time, costly actions of this sort can also affect the opponent’s estimate of the state’s resolve, through several mechanisms.28 First, by increasing the state’s military capabilities, these actions may decrease the costs associated with carrying out the threat. Since the costs of carrying out a threat are what call credibility into question in the first place, visible steps taken to reduce those costs can make it more believable that the threatener will do what it says. Second, the willingness to pay the costs associated with these actions can signal that this issue is one that the threatening state cares a great deal about. By calling up the reserves, Kennedy was trying to send the message that he cared so much about the fate of Berlin that he was willing to pay the political costs associated with this action.
We started this section by noting that a condition of incomplete information is dangerous because states might miscalculate in bargaining, such as by mistakenly resisting threats that turn out to be genuine. Such mistakes played a role in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and in the onset of war between the United States and China in 1950. Brinksmanship, tying hands, and paying for power are strategies for
28. Branislav Slantchev, Military Threats: The Costs of Coercion and the Price of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
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communicating a willingness to fight; they are mechanisms that help states figure out which threats are genuine and which are not. Interestingly, though, these cures for incomplete information entail risks that can be just as dangerous as the underlying problem they address.
This danger is clearest in the case of brinksmanship strategies, through which states bid up the risk of accidental war in order to prove their resolve. The hope in doing so is that the adversary will blink, and thus war will be averted. But there is no guarantee that the states will not lose control and fall into the precipice. Ironi- cally, then, to avoid a war driven by uncertainty, states have to embrace some risk of accidental war. Hand-tying strategies can have similar risks. Although actions that raise the costs of backing down can convince the other side to give in, there is also a risk that both sides will tie their hands in a contest of threats and counterthreats. Both sides can then become locked into intransigent and incompatible bargaining positions from which it is too costly to retreat. Once each side has eliminated its ability to compromise, war may be inevitable—even if the initial uncertainty that led to the crisis has been removed. Finally, while military mobilizations might per- suade the adversary to yield, they can also provoke the other side to strike first—a possibility that we will revisit shortly.
In the case of the Persian Gulf War, it is quite possible that President Bush’s hand-tying actions between August 1990 and January 1991 eventually convinced Saddam Hussein that the United States was willing to fight, in spite of his original belief to the contrary. He may have resisted nonetheless because his own pattern of defiance and counterthreats in those months had served to tie his own hands as well. Hussein may have feared domestic repercussions for a retreat in the face of American threats, or he may have been concerned that such a retreat would embolden Iraq’s neighbor and long-standing enemy, Iran. By January 15, 1991, neither side was willing to compromise, and the U.S.-led war to liberate Kuwait began. We thus see that incomplete information can cause war both directly, through miscalculation, and indirectly, by forcing states to communicate their resolve in ways that can foreclose successful bargaining.
This discussion generates several predictions about the conditions that make war more or less likely. In general, the harder it is for states to learn about each other’s capabilities and resolve, the more severe the problem of incomplete infor- mation will be. When states are relatively opaque, in the sense that it is hard for outsiders to observe their military capabilities or their political decision-making processes, there is likely to be greater scope for uncertainties of this kind to arise and bedevil the quest for negotiated settlements. The strategic situation might also influence the degree of uncertainty that states face. For example, as the number of states that might potentially get involved in a particular crisis increases, the number and importance of the “hidden cards” grows dramatically: in the event of a war, who will join and who will not? Finally, this discussion sensitizes us to the question of whether states can find ways to signal their intentions in a credible manner. Prob- lems of incomplete information are more likely to be overcome when states can find costly ways to signal their intentions and thereby convince their adversaries to make concessions.
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Can an Adversary Be Trusted to Honor a Deal? War from Commitment Problems Incomplete information provides one compelling answer to the puzzle of war: uncertainty about capabilities or resolve can make it difficult for states to agree on a settlement that all sides prefer over war. The ability to identify such a settlement, however, does not always guarantee that war will be avoided. What happens if the states do not trust one another to abide by that settlement in the future?
In this section we develop a second set of explanations for why bargaining may fail. The causes of war considered here all arise from a common underlying chal- lenge: the difficulty that states can have making credible promises not to use force to revise the settlement at a later date. In this context, credibility has the same meaning as before, but we use it here to describe not a threat to use force but rather a promise not to. A credible commitment to abide by a deal is a commitment by one state assuring the other side that it will not threaten force to revise the terms of the deal. A commitment problem arises when a state cannot make such a promise in a credible manner.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma introduced in Chapter 2 is a quintessential exam- ple of such a problem. Although the prisoners in this game would like to commit to cooperating with each other, their incentives are such that a commitment to do so is not credible: when given the choice, they will prefer to defect. Commitment problems are particularly common in the absence of any enforcement mechanism, such as a court, that can hold people to their commitments. In the international sys- tem, external enforcement of commitments can be difficult to arrange (though not impossible, as we will see in the concluding section of this chapter). Next we con- sider three ways in which an inability to make credible commitments to a bargain might undermine the search for a peaceful settlement of international disputes.29
Bargaining over Goods That Are a Source of Future Bargaining Power The clearest place to see the role of commitment problems is in disputes over goods that can serve as a source of future bargaining power. The best examples of such goods are strategically important pieces of territory and weapons programs. States bargain over territory all the time, but in some cases the piece of territory in question has military significance, perhaps because it contains high ground from which one could launch an effective attack or islands that sit astride strategically
29. The ideas are introduced in Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” and are further elaborated in Robert Powell, “War as a Commitment Problem,” International Organization 60 (2006): 169–203.
119Can an Adversar y Be Trusted to Honor a Deal? War from Commitment Problems
important sea routes. For example, China and Japan have in recent years been locked in dispute over eight uninhabited islands in the East China Sea, known as the Senkaku to Japan and the Diaoyu to China. Not only are the surrounding waters rich in fish and in oil and gas deposits, but the islands are also close to stra- tegically important sea routes that are vital for naval movements in the region. As a result, control over the islands potentially impacts the countries’ relative military power.
Bargaining over weapons programs has a similar quality. In recent years, the United States has sought to pressure several states—including Iraq (prior to 2003), Libya, Iran, and North Korea—into abandon- ing the development of WMD. These efforts have met with varying levels of success. Libya agreed to dismantle its weapons programs in December 2003. North Korea agreed several times to freeze its nuclear program, but these deals unraveled, and North Korea effectively entered the nuclear club in 2006. In 2015, the United States and its partners reached a deal with Iran to freeze its nuclear program for at least a decade. As with strategically important territory, a deal on this matter does not simply resolve a dispute; it also directly affects the military capabil- ities of the participants. A country that agrees to give up a weapons program makes itself weaker by doing so.
The difficulty in bargaining over such objects is that a state will be reluctant to render itself more vulnerable to attack without credible promises that the other side will not exploit that vulnerability in the future. The state may be able to avoid war now by making concessions, but doing so entails a risk that its adversary, made stronger by the deal, will then press new claims. Unless there is some way for the other side to credibly commit not to use its newfound power, a threatened state may decide that it would rather fight today than face a future in which it is considerably weaker. Thus, even if there is some deal that is preferable to war now, if this deal will lead to a change in capabilities that can be exploited later, the state that would be rendered weaker may decide to forgo that deal and gamble on a war.
This strategic dilemma has presented an important obstacle in U.S. efforts to convince countries like North Korea and Iran to give up their nuclear programs peacefully. It is important to remember that the United States had hostile relations with these countries prior to their seeking nuclear weapons. As we already saw, the United States fought a war against North Korea from 1950 to 1953. That war ended with a cease-fire but not a peace treaty, and ever since, more than 30,000 U.S. troops have been stationed in South Korea. U.S. hostility toward the North is driven not only by the lingering issue of Korea’s division but also by the nature of its regime, which is one of the most repressive systems in the world. Similarly,
Territory with military-strategic value can be hard to bargain over because control over the good affects the states’ relative military power. The uninhabited Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands have been a source of conflict between Japan and China partly because they sit astride strategically important sea routes.
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hostility between the United States and Iran dates back to the 1979 revolution, which toppled Iran’s pro-American leader and installed an Islamic fundamentalist government.
To the extent that these states see their nuclear programs as a counterweight against American (and, in the case of Iran, also Israeli) power, they would be reluc- tant to give up those programs if by doing so, they rendered themselves more vulnerable to U.S. demands on other issues. The experience of Libya is instructive in this respect. As noted earlier, Libya agreed in December 2003 to end its chem- ical and nuclear weapons programs and to submit to international inspections. In return, the United States and Britain promised to normalize relations with the country and not to press for fundamental changes in the regime of Libyan leader Mu’ammar Qaddafi—even though he ran a brutal dictatorship. In March 2011, how- ever, Qaddafi faced a rebellion against his rule, and his attacks on civilians triggered military action by the United States, Britain, and other European countries. Qaddafi was ousted and then killed by rebel forces seven months later.
Whether or not this intervention would have been deterred if Libya had con- tinued its weapons programs, the lesson was clear: a promise by the United States to forswear regime change is not necessarily a credible or lasting guarantee. The success of any effort to end these programs peacefully requires the United States to find a way to commit credibly not to exploit the power shift brought about by disarmament.
Prevention: War in Response to Changing Power A second, related problem arises if the balance of military capabilities is antici- pated to change because of factors external to the bargaining process. A common source of this kind of power shift is different rates of economic growth. As noted in Chapter 1, uneven economic development has led to the relative rise and decline of states over time. The growth of Germany’s power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a dramatic impact on that country’s ability to challenge its neighbors. Similarly, as we will discuss in Chapter 14, China’s impressive economic growth since 1980 has greatly increased its influence in international politics. If a state is growing much more rapidly than its adversary, then the military capabilities that it can bring to bear in future disputes will be greater than those it can bring to bear today. A second important source of large shifts in military capabilities is the development and acquisition of new technologies, such as nuclear weapons. The acquisition of nuclear weapons can cause an abrupt and profound shift in a state’s capacity to impose costs on its adversaries.
Regardless of their exact source, anticipated changes in military capabilities can present an insurmountable dilemma in crisis bargaining. To see this, we revisit the bargaining model introduced earlier. Figure 3.3 illustrates what happens to the bargaining interaction when the power of one state, in this case State A, is expected to increase. In the top panel, the expected outcome of the war is initially close to State B’s ideal point (or the far left of the bar, where State B would get all of the
121Can an Adversar y Be Trusted to Honor a Deal? War from Commitment Problems
good). Let’s assume, however, that State A’s power is expected to grow, so that, at some time in the future, the new war outcome will be closer to State A’s ideal point (or the far right of the bar), as in the lower panel.
In the initial period, the states can agree to some distribution inside the bargaining range. But both sides can anticipate that, in the future, State A will no longer be satisfied with this deal and will demand a new deal in the new bargaining range. As this example is constructed, State B prefers the war outcome it could obtain under the initial power distribution (labeled in blue in the top panel of Figure 3.3) over any outcome that falls in the future bargaining range. Even the best deal that State B can hope to get in the future (the red dotted line in the lower panel), gives State B less than it expects to get from war today. Hence, State B would rather fight a war now than face worse terms in the future.
WAR OUTCOME TOMORROW
COSTS TO A
COSTS TO B
VALUE OF WAR TO B
VALUE OF WAR TO A
A BBARGAINING RANGE
WAR OUTCOME TODAY
COSTS TO A
COSTS TO B
VALUE OF WAR TO B
VALUE OF WAR TO A
A BBARGAINING RANGE
FIGURE 3.3 Bargaining and Shifting Power Initial power distribution: Today, State B is more powerful than State A, so fighting a war favors State B, as indicated by the fact that the war outcome is close to State B’s ideal point.
Future power distribution: Tomorrow, after State A’s power increases, fighting a war will favor State A, as indicated by the fact that the war outcome is now close to State A’s ideal point. The best possible deal that State B can get after the power shift is indicated by the red dotted line. Because this deal gives State B less than it can expect to get from war today (the blue dotted line in the top panel), State B has an incentive to wage war now in order to prevent the power shift.
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Thus, even if the states can locate a deal that they prefer over war today, the state that is getting stronger will face a strong temptation to use its future power to try to revise the deal later. Unless there is some way for the growing state to make a credible commitment not to do that, then its adversary may decide that it is bet- ter to gamble on war today in order to stop or slow the anticipated shift. A war that is fought with the intention of preventing an adversary from becoming relatively stronger in the future is a preventive war.
Notice that this logic is compelling only if it is believed that war will halt, or significantly delay, the anticipated change in power, as might happen if war could successfully disarm the other state or cripple its economic growth. If the shift in power will happen anyway, then there is nothing to be gained by fighting now, only to have the outcome revised later in the rising state’s favor. The need to destroy the source of the adversary’s rise means that wars fought in the context of shifting power tend to be especially long and costly (see “How Do We Know?” on p. 124).
The U.S. war against Iraq in 2003 had a preventive logic, even if much of the motivating intelligence turned out to be flawed. Saddam Hussein’s regime was believed to have some minimal capability—and a demonstrated intention—to develop WMD. The preventive argument for attacking was that it would be easier to oust Hussein before he had fully developed these capabilities than to do so after he had succeeded in deploying them in his arsenal. Of course, the uncertainties sur- rounding Iraq’s weapons program illustrate a major risk of engaging in preventive war, since the rationale for doing so is only as strong as the evidence that a disad- vantageous shift in relative capabilities is coming.
Preemption: War in Response to Fear of Attack A final commitment problem that can prevent states from reaching negotiated settlements of their disputes arises from fear of attack by an opponent with a first- strike advantage. A first-strike advantage exists when there is a considerable benefit to being the first to launch an attack. It arises when military technology, strategies, and/or geography give an advantage to offensive actions over defensive ones. When defense is relatively effective, a state can afford to wait to see whether its opponent is going to attack because a first strike can be defeated or absorbed. When offense is relatively effective, a first strike is potentially devastating, and fear of attack creates incentives to abandon the bargaining table and rush to the battlefield.30
For example, if one state could launch its nuclear missiles and destroy all of its adversary’s missiles on the ground before they could be launched, then that state would enjoy a first-strike advantage. A state that can land a disarming blow may be tempted to do so, and a state that is vulnerable to such a blow may feel a “use it or lose it” imperative to strike first rather than be disarmed.
30. There is a considerable literature on the “offense-defense balance” and its effect on the likelihood of war; see, for example, Keir Lieber, “Grasping the Technological Peace: The Offense-Defense Balance and International Security,” International Security 25 (Summer 2000): 71–104. A related literature emphasizes that what matters is not the actual offense-defense balance but rather the balance that is perceived by military and political leaders; see Van Evera, “Cult of the Offensive.”
preventive war A war fought with the intention of preventing an adversary from becoming stronger in the future. Preventive wars arise because a state whose power is increasing cannot commit not to exploit that power in future bargaining interactions.
first-strike advantage The situation that arises when military technology, military strategies, and/or geography give a significant advantage to whichever state attacks first in a war.
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First-strike advantages can create a potentially insurmountable commitment problem: unless each state can credibly promise the other not to attack first, there is a danger that bargaining will break down as each side hurries to get in the first blow. Each side may be confident that if it manages to strike first, it can do better in war than if it accepts the deal currently on offer. Indeed, there may be no deal that both sides prefer over a war that they start.
An example of this situation is depicted in Figure 3.4. Here, we assume that there are two different war outcomes, depending on which state lands the first blow. The expected outcome of a war started by State A is depicted in the top panel, and the expected outcome of a war started by State B is depicted in the lower panel. The first-strike advantage is captured by the assumption that each side expects to do better in a war that it starts than in a war started by the adversary (that is, the war outcome in the top panel is closer to State A’s ideal point than the war outcome
WAR OUTCOME
COSTS TO A
COSTS TO B
VALUE OF WAR TO B
VALUE OF WAR TO A
A B
SET OF BARGAINS PREFERRED TO WAR STARTED BY STATE A
COSTS TO A
COSTS TO B
VALUE OF WAR TO B
VALUE OF WAR TO A
A B
WAR OUTCOME
SET OF BARGAINS PREFERRED TO WAR STARTED BY STATE B
FIGURE 3.4 Bargaining and First-Strike Advantages State A attacks first: State A enjoys a significant advantage in war if it attacks first, and the war outcome will be close to its ideal point.
State B attacks first: Here, the war outcome heavily favors State B. Because the bargaining ranges in the top and lower panels do not overlap, there is no deal that both sides prefer over a war that they initiate.
The duration of interstate wars varies a good deal. Figure A shows the distribution of war durations for 125 interstate wars over the last two centuries. About 10 wars have lasted three years or more, and they account for most of the com- bat deaths from wars in this period. However, most wars are relatively brief.
What determines how long a war will last? A number of factors might explain why some wars are longer than others, including the power of the adversaries and what they are fighting over. But, at a more general level, how long a war lasts is related to the strategic problem that caused the war in the first place. Once the adversaries go to war, the incentive to reach a deal that spares each side the costs of fighting does not disappear. Indeed, relatively few wars are fought until one of the states is completely occupied or unable to mount further operations; most end with some kind of bargain. This observation raises a puz- zle: How does war make it possible for states to reach a settlement when they could not do so beforehand?
In a recent book, Alex Weisiger argues that if bargain- ing fails because of incomplete information about relative capabilities and resolve, then war can bring about a deal by revealing the hidden information.a As states compete on the battlefield, features that were hard to observe before- hand—the power of each state, the effectiveness of mil- itary technologies and strategies, the willingness of the populace to bear the burdens of war—become observable. In this case, war lasts as long as is necessary for uncer- tainties to be resolved.
Alternatively, if the war came about because of a commitment problem, then the war can end only when the source of that problem is removed. A preventive war fought in response to the rising power of an opponent can end when either the declining power is unable to keep fighting or the rising power is crippled to the point that its rise has been forestalled.
To test these propositions, Weisiger collected data on 103 cases of interstate war since 1816 and estimated the effect of different factors on how long each war lasted. He found that one of the strongest predictors of long and severe wars was whether the war was preceded by a large shift in the adversaries’ relative military capabilities, as measured not only by the size of their militaries, but also by their population size and level of economic develop- ment. In particular, the typical duration of a war preceded by a large power shift is three times that of war preceded by little or no such shift. Thus, as expected, the longest wars tend to be those fought between declining and rising states, when preventive motivations loom largest. On the other hand, among wars that were not preceded by a shift in power—and were therefore more likely to be rooted in an information problem—those that experienced rel- atively frequent and intense battles tended to end more quickly. This finding is consistent with the idea that bat- tles serve to resolve uncertainty, permitting the adversar- ies to find a settlement that both prefer over continued bloodshed.
Bargaining and the Duration of War HOW DO W E K NOW ?
FIGURE A The Duration of Interstate Wars, 1816–2014
Number of Wars
Du ra
tio n
(M on
th s)
0 0 6
12 18 24 30 36 42 48 54 60 66 72 78 84 90 96
102 108 114 120
3 6 9 12 15
Source: Meredith Reid Sarkees and Frank Wayman, Resort to War: 1816–2007 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2010).
a. Alex Weisiger, Logics of War: Explanations for Limited and Unlimited Conflicts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). For another important study along these lines, see Branislav Slantchev, “How Initiators End Their Wars: The Duration of Warfare and the Terms of Peace,” American Political Science Review 48 (September 2004): 813–29.
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in the lower panel, and the opposite is true for State B). As a result, although there is a set of deals that both states prefer over a war started by either State A or State B, no deal is preferable to both of these possible wars. A deal within the lower bargain- ing range would satisfy State B but give State A less than it expects to get by attack- ing first (the area labeled in red in the top panel). Similarly, a deal within the upper bargaining range would satisfy State A but give State B less than it expects to get by striking first (the area labeled in blue in the lower panel).
Under these conditions, neither state will make concessions to the other at the bargaining table; instead, both will likely rush to the exits, each trying to beat the other to the punch. Negotiations in this context may be seen as nothing more than a ploy to delay the other side from mobilizing. A war that arises in this way is a preemptive war.31
The 1967 Six Day War between Israel and four Arab states (Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq) is a classic case of a war that started this way. In May 1967, Egypt responded to border skirmishes between Israel and Syria by massing troops on the Israeli border and imposing a partial blockade. On June 5, fearing that war was likely, Israel launched a surprise, preemptive attack on the Egyptian air force, destroying 300 aircraft while they were still on the ground. With Egypt’s main offensive threat crippled, the ensuing war lasted six days and left Israel in control of large swaths of formerly Arab-held territory.
This dynamic forms an important component of what we referred to earlier as the security dilemma. When military technology favors offensive action, a state that builds arms, even out of purely defensive motives, inevitably makes other states worry about a possible attack. If threatened states arm in response, the original state will, in turn, feel less secure, feeding a self-reinforcing cycle of fear. In addition to causing arms races and hampering international cooperation, the commitment problem created by this fear fuels a risk of war.
Both preemption and prevention arise from the difficulty states can have in mak- ing credible commitments not to use their military power. The difference between the two concepts revolves around timing. Preemption is a response to an imminent threat when there is an existing first-strike advantage. Prevention is a response to antici- pated changes in the distribution of power that might result in an increased threat sometime in the future. (For a discussion of how such considerations contributed to the outbreak of World War I, see “What Shaped Our World?” on p. 126.)
We have seen, then, that even if states can locate a deal that both prefer over war at the moment, concerns about their willingness to abide by the deal in the future can cause bargaining failure and war. Although these concerns can arise for different reasons, all the paths to war discussed in this section have at their root a common commitment problem: the difficulty of committing not to use one’s power to one’s advantage in the future.
31. It should be emphasized that this example assumes a very large first-strike advantage relative to the costs of war, so it is possible that this kind of situation arises only rarely. For a historical overview of preemptive war, which finds that very few wars start this way, see Dan Reiter, “Exploding the Powder Keg Myth: Preemptive Wars Almost Never Happen,” International Security 20, no. 2 (Autumn 1995): 5–34.
preemptive war A war fought with the anticipation that an attack by the other side is imminent.
126
World War I redrew the maps of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. It decimated a generation of young people, and the postwar settlement contributed to World War II 20 years later, as well as to more recent conflicts.
For all its far-reaching consequences, the First World War had relatively modest origins. On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, was assassinated during a visit to neigh- boring Serbia. How could this event lead to a war that would ultimately involve 32 states fighting on three continents?
Interests Europe in 1914 was rife with conflicting inter- ests. Germany’s growing power brought it into compe- tition with Britain and provoked fear in its neighbors. France hoped to reclaim territory from Germany, which in turn had designs on territory in Russia and overseas. Austria-Hungary and Russia were competing for influence in the Balkan region. The Ottoman Empire was in decline, and outsiders sought to expand at its expense.
Institutions States with compatible interests often form alliances, institutions that help them to cooperate militar- ily (see Chapter 5). By 1914, the major powers were divided into two hostile camps: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy formed the Triple Alliance against Great Britain, France, and Russia in the Triple Entente. This alliance sys- tem meant that any conflict had the potential to expand throughout Europe. It also posed a problem for German military planners, who knew that, in the event of a war, they would face foes to the east and west.
Interactions In this combustible atmosphere, the assas- sination of the archduke by Serb terrorists created a dan- gerous spark. Austria-Hungary had a substantial Serb minority, and agitation by Serb nationalists threatened to tear the multiethnic empire apart. Austria-Hungary sought to compel Serbia to end its support for these mili- tants and threatened war. This threat brought a deterrent response from the Russians. Germany then promised to protect the Austrians. Though, in principle, the conflict could have been defused by a negotiated bargain, preven- tive and preemptive considerations loomed large.
Although German leaders did not relish a war with Russia, they feared Russia’s growing power. In the
decades prior to the war, Russia had made great economic strides, building its heavy industries and railroad network. Germany’s leaders watched these developments with con- cern and came to believe that they had a short “window of opportunity” in which to prevent future Russian domination.
In contemplating war with Russia, however, there was a significant obstacle: France. To deal with the pos- sibility of a two-front war, the Germans came up with an audacious solution. The Schlieffen Plan took advantage of the fact that Russia’s vast size made its military machine very slow. After the Russians started mobilizing, it would take six weeks before their forces could join the fight. The Germans hoped to exploit this delay to invade and quickly defeat France. German troops could then be shifted to the east, in time to meet the Russian advance.
Planners believed that the strategic situation gave an advantage to whoever struck first. By acting quickly, Germany could seize key bridges and tunnels in Belgium, roll onward into Paris, and then turn their attention to Russia. If they waited, the Belgians could fortify or destroy the bridges, causing the German army to bog down in the west, while the Russian “steamroller” bore down from the east. Under these conditions, negotiations threatened an intolerable delay. Preemptive incentives also meant that military mobilizations were not a useful instrument of cri- sis diplomacy. When the Russians mobilized on July 30, they hoped that signaling their resolve would lead the Austrians to reduce their demands. Instead, Russia’s mobilization spurred the adversaries to the battlefield.
By August 3, Europe was at war. When the Russian army mobilized, Germany invaded Belgium and France. Great Britain joined the fray. Other states were tempted by one side or the other to pile on, and the battlefield expanded across and beyond Europe.
Prevention and Preemption in World War I W H AT SH A PE D OUR WOR L D ?
127Is Compromise Always Possible? War from Indivisibilit y
In addition to shedding light on the general problem of war, this discussion generates a number of predictions about the conditions under which war is more or less likely to occur. First, war is more likely to occur when the good in dispute is a source of power to those who possess it. For example, it is harder to strike bargains over strategically important territory than over territory that is valuable for eco- nomic reasons.32 Second, preventive incentives arise when there are relatively rapid and dramatic changes in the military balance between two countries. Hence, war is more likely when such changes are anticipated or under way. Finally, bargaining failures are more common when the military-strategic situation creates substantial advantages for striking first. These advantages generally arise from the nature of military technology, which sometimes imparts large advantages to the actor who goes on the offensive first—although, as we saw in the case of World War I, particular military strategies can also create pressure to act preemptively.
Is Compromise Always Possible? War from Indivisibility Finally, we consider a third kind of problem that can prevent states from reaching mutually beneficial settlements of their disputes because the disputed good can- not be divided. A good is divisible if there are ways to split it into smaller shares; an indivisible good cannot be divided without destroying its value. Imagine, for exam- ple, the difference between having 100 pennies and having one dollar bill. Although the amount of money available is the same in both cases, the pennies can be divided up between two people in many different ways, while the dollar bill cannot be split without ruining it. When the good in question is indivisible, compromise solutions are impossible to reach, and the bargaining becomes “all or nothing.”
It is easy to see how indivisible goods could create an insurmountable obstacle in crisis bargaining. Consider a situation in which each state would prefer to fight a war rather than get none of the good. Even though there might be deals that both sides prefer over war—such as, say, a 50-50 split—an inability to divide the good into the necessary shares renders such a deal unattainable. In an all-or-nothing bargain- ing situation, one state must get nothing. And if both states prefer war over getting nothing, then war becomes inevitable.
Although the logic of indivisibility is quite clear, what is less clear is whether or how often indivisibility is actually a problem in international politics. What goods are truly indivisible? A key point is that indivisibility is not a physical property of a good, but rather the way in which that good is valued. This point is made most dra- matically by the biblical story in which King Solomon, confronted by two women claiming to be the mother of the same baby, decides that the only fair solution in
32. Paul K. Huth, Standing Your Ground (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
indivisible good A good that cannot be divided without diminishing its value.
128 Chapter 3 Why Are There Wars?
the face of these incompatible claims is to cut the baby in half. This solution seems odd not because it cannot be physically implemented, but because the process of doing so would kill the baby. (Fortunately, in King Solomon’s case, the decision did not have to be carried out, since one woman insisted that she would rather let the other woman have her child than see it killed— whereupon Solomon decided that this woman must be the true mother.) Similarly, in a dispute over a valuable painting, one could slice the painting in two, but doing so would destroy the object’s value.
Hence, when we say that a good cannot be divided, we generally do not mean this literally. Rather, we mean that the good loses much, if not all, of its value when it is divided.33 This can be the case with core values that cannot be compromised or with divisible goods that are closely linked to such core values.
A commonly cited example of an indivisible good in international relations is the city of Jerusalem.34 It is a city that contains some of the holiest sites of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism and has historical, cultural, and reli- gious significance unlike any other piece of territory in the world. As a result, the status of Jerusalem is a major stumbling block in efforts to bring about peace in the Middle East.
For many Jews, Jerusalem is the focal point of the desire—sometimes symbolic, sometimes literal—to return to the promised land of Zion. Every year at Passover, Jews all over the world utter the words “Next year in Jerusalem,” underscoring the role of that city in forging a connection between the land of Israel and the Jewish identity. The centrality of this city has been given political expression as well: a Basic Law passed by Israel in 1980 declares that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.”
For Muslims, East Jerusalem, or Al-Quds, is the third-holiest city (after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia) and the site of the Dome of the Rock, where the prophet Mohammed is believed to have ascended to Paradise.
Palestinians claim East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after the 1967 Six Day War, as the capital of an eventual Palestinian state. This claim clearly clashes with the Israeli position that the city is indivisible and the capital of the Jewish state. Moreover, the holiest sites for both faiths sit literally on top of one another. The Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque were built (1,300 years ago) directly on the Temple Mount—the site of the original Jewish temple—whose Western Wall is an
33. H. Peyton Young, “Dividing the Indivisible,” American Behavioral Scientist 38, no. 6 (1995): 904–20.
34. See, for example, Cecilia Albin, “Negotiating Indivisible Goods: The Case of Jerusalem,” Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 13, no. 1 (1991): 45–76.
In Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s holiest shrines, sits on top of the Temple Mount, the site of the Jewish temple until 70 C.E. The concentration of holy sites in Jerusalem complicates negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians over whether and how to divide or share the city, which both sides claim as their capital.
129Is Compromise Always Possible? War from Indivisibilit y
important place of worship for Jews. The question of whether or how to divide the city, and how to ensure that people of all faiths have access to their holy sites, is one that has so far defied resolution.
It is important, however, not to place undue emphasis on indivisibility as a source of bargaining failures. First, some of the difficulty of dealing with indivisi- ble goods arises not from indivisibility per se, but from weak enforcement mecha- nisms. King Solomon’s quandary is one that divorcing parents routinely face when each wants custody of their children. These disputes are settled not by dividing the children physically, but by dividing the time they spend with each parent. This kind of alternating possession would generally fail in international politics, how- ever, because a state would not trust its adversary to hand over the good when the time came to do so. In child-custody cases, the deal is enforced by courts and police, which are generally lacking in the international context. Thus, the main obstacle to striking such a deal lies not in the nature of the good, but in the difficulty of making a credible commitment to share that good over time.35
A second reason to be skeptical of claims of indivisibility is that states may have strategic incentives to claim that they cannot compromise on a particu- lar issue, even if they actually could. Recall that one of the strategies that states employ in crisis bargaining is to tie their hands through public pronouncements from which it would be costly to back down. It is quite possible that claims of indivisibility—such as the Israeli Basic Law pronouncing Jerusalem the capital of Israel—have a strategic quality: they represent an effort to tie the government’s hands so that it will find compromise difficult, if not impossible. The hope in making such claims is that the other side will realize that it has no choice but to give in entirely. In this sense, objects may take on the appearance of indivis- ibility in the course of the bargaining process through the public positions that states take.36
The point of this discussion is not to suggest that indivisible goods do not exist in international politics. Rather, it is to suggest that we be appropriately skeptical when the participants in a dispute claim that the good in question is indivisible and hence no compromise is possible. Such a claim may reflect a bargaining position adopted for strategic reasons rather than a true description of the fundamental nature of the good in question.
In any event, there may be ways to allocate apparently indivisible goods that do not involve physical division. One possible mechanism is shared control. It has been proposed, for example, that Israelis and Palestinians jointly control certain portions of Jerusalem to ensure that all people have access to the sacred sites. Indeed, this already happens to some degree at the Temple Mount: though the site falls under Israeli sovereignty, the area on top, including the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, is administered by Islamic authorities.
35. See Powell, “War as a Commitment Problem,” for a discussion of how indivisibility leads to commitment problems.
36. See Stacie E. Goddard, “Uncommon Ground: Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy,” International Organization 60 (2006): 35–68.
130 Chapter 3 Why Are There Wars?
A second mechanism for dealing with indivisible goods is compensation on another issue. Although a rare painting cannot be physically divided, a dispute over it can be resolved by having one party compensate the other in exchange for the good. In this case, the object is made divisible by adding a new dimension to the deal: rather than arguing about who gets the painting, the issue becomes how much money one is willing to pay the other to get it. Since money is generally divisible, adding this new dimension creates the possibility for compromise where none previously existed. Hence, disputants may be able to find a second issue dimension on which the loser in the main issue can be compensated. The strategy of making one dispute easier to solve by bringing in a second issue is known as linkage, as we saw in Chapter 2.
Has War Become Obsolete? War arises from a variety of factors that can prevent states from reaching peace- ful settlements of their disputes. Of course, the reason we study war is not just to understand why it happens, but also to identify factors that might reduce or elim- inate its occurrence. On this front, there is some room for optimism. One striking observation from Figure 3.1 is that the incidence of interstate war seems to have dropped since 1950. Moreover, there has not been a war between two great powers since the Korean War ended in 1953—the longest such streak in modern history.37
The apparent decline in interstate war over the last six decades has been the sub- ject of considerable attention among political scientists.38 However, we must approach this trend carefully. As Figure 3.1 shows, earlier periods in history experienced dips in the frequency of war that turned out to be temporary. And as this book was going to press in 2018, numerous crises involving the United States, Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran were threatening to escalate. Depending on what happens in the world, a section on the obsolescence of war might not be appropriate for the next edi- tion of this book, a few years from now. Still, the observation that the past six decades have seen a decline in interstate war is striking and important enough to motivate the following questions: Have there been changes in world politics that could explain a decline in the incidence of interstate war since World War II? To what extent can the framework offered in this chapter guide our thinking about this development?
The logic developed in this chapter has three main components: (1) war becomes possible when states have conflicting interests over a contentious issue, (2) the costs of war ensure that there exists a peaceful deal that both states prefer
37. Scholars typically identify the following states as great powers in the post–World War II period: the United States, the Soviet Union/Russia, Great Britain, France, China (after 1950), Germany (after 1991), and Japan (after 1991).
38. See, for example, John E. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (New York: Dutton, 2011); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). For a skeptical view, see Tanisha M. Fazal, “Dead Wrong? Battle Deaths, Military Medicine, and Exaggerated Reports of War’s Demise,” International Security 39 (Summer 2014): 95–125; and Bear F. Braumoeller, “Systemic Trends in War and Peace.” In The Causes of Peace: What We Now Know–Nobel Symposium 161, edited by Olav Njølstad. (Oslo, Norway: The Norwegian Nobel Institute, 2017.)
131Has War Become Obsolete?
over fighting, but (3) bargaining may fail because of information or commitment problems or because of an inability to divide the good at stake. It follows that a decline in war could arise from (1) changing interests that lead to a decrease in the value of goods that have historically driven conflict, (2) an increase in the costs of war that leads to changing interactions, or (3) the growth of institutions that help states solve the information or commitment problems associated with uncertainty and changing power, or the problem of the indivisibility of a good. There is reason to think that all three of these factors have changed in ways that have made war less likely overall.
Changing Interests: Declining Conflict over Territory A striking feature of world politics since 1945 is the declining role of territory in driving interstate conflicts. Not only has there been a drop in the frequency of interstate wars over territory, but there have also been fewer instances of success- ful conquest or annexation of territory since World War II.39 Explanations for this observation abound, but any understanding has to start with changes in the value of possessing territory in the modern era. Whereas control of territory and popu- lation was historically an important source of state power, technological changes have weakened this link. In an age of nuclear weapons, precision-guided missiles, and increasing reliance on unmanned aerial vehicles (popularly known as drones), military power no longer depends on how large an army a state can field. Moreover, the growth of international trade and investment (see Chapters 7 and 8) means that it is generally easier to acquire resources through markets than through conquest.40 At the same time, the spread of nationalism has made it harder for foreign states to control conquered populations, thereby raising the costs of taking territory. Thus, some of the interests that drove states to contest territory have become less potent.
The interests of key states also changed after World War II. Whereas previ- ously the rival territorial ambitions of the European great powers had cast that continent into frequent warfare, leadership of the international system after 1945 passed to two states—the United States and the Soviet Union—with little interest in further territorial expansion. The United States had satisfied all of its ambitions by the early twentieth century, with the end of westward expansion against the Native American tribes and the final settlement of the Canadian boundary in 1902. The Soviet Union used its military success in World War II to restore its dominance over lands that it had historically controlled. Thus, the most powerful states in the system had an interest in stabilizing the territorial order rather than changing it. The United States, in particular, played a role in advancing and defending a norm of “territorial integrity”—the idea that borders should not be changed through
39. See, for example, Mark W. Zacher, “The Territorial Integrity Norm: International Boundaries and the Use of Force,” International Organization 55, no. 2 (2001): 215–50; Tanisha M. Fazal, State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Gary Goertz, Paul F. Diehl, and Alexandru Balas, The Puzzle of Peace: The Evolution of Peace in the International System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
40. Stephen G. Brooks, Producing Security: Multinational Corporations, Globalization, and the Changing Calculus of Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
132 Chapter 3 Why Are There Wars?
force—a norm that became enshrined in international institutions like the United Nations (for more on the role of norms, see Chapter 11).41
Many newly decolonized countries also embraced this norm, even though their borders often made little sense, having been drawn in European capitals by imperial powers with scant knowledge of local conditions. Leaders in these new states decided that it was generally in their interests to respect the inherited borders and consolidate power within them, rather than open up a Pandora’s box by calling all of the colonial borders into question.42 In sum, changes in the international system after 1945 reduced states’ interest in fighting over territory— reducing the value of territory as a good—which has historically been a major cause of interstate war.
Changing Interactions: The Rising Costs of War One of the main disincentives for engaging in war is the human, economic, material, and psychological costs it imposes. Indeed, the costs of war generally ensure that states can do better by finding a negotiated settlement of their disputes. As war becomes less attractive, states are more willing to make compromises in order to avoid it. In addition, increasing the costs of war increases the range of status quo distributions that neither state has an incentive to challenge (see Figure 3.2).
At least two major developments since 1945 have increased the expected costs of war. One is the advent of nuclear weapons, which gave states the abil- ity to completely obliterate each other. As a result, the expected costs of a war that involve nuclear exchange are so large that they swamp the value of what- ever good is at stake. The threat of “mutually assured destruction” in the event of war engenders caution among nuclear-armed states, reducing the attractive- ness of taking risks in a crisis. Indeed, it is striking that despite five decades of intense hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the two superpowers never waged war directly against one another. Although there are many theories about the cause of this so-called long peace, both states’ possession of nuclear weapons certainly played a stabilizing role.43 We will return to this topic in Chapter 14, when we consider the implications of the spread of nuclear weapons.
The second major development since 1945 is the explosive growth of interna- tional trade and financial transactions (see Figure 14.2 on p. 589). Scholars have long thought that, as countries became more economically interdependent, the costs of war between them would grow. The more two countries value one another as trad- ing partners, the more incentive they have to avoid conflicts that could disrupt those
41. Zacher, “Territorial Integrity Norm”; Fazal, State Death, 47–52.
42. Jeffrey Ira Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
43. See, for example, John Lewis Gaddis, “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System,” International Security 10 (Spring 1986): 99–142.
133Has War Become Obsolete?
profitable exchanges.44 Whether this theory is right has been a subject of vigorous academic debate.45
Part of the challenge is that while it is plausi- ble that increased trade makes countries less likely to fight one another, the reverse could also be true: peaceful relations create the conditions for greater interdependence through trade. So, although coun- tries that trade more do fight less, figuring out how much of that relationship is due to trade causing peace—rather than peace causing trade—is difficult. On balance, though, most scholars consider grow- ing commercial and financial interdependence since 1945 as a contributor to peaceful relations, particu- larly among the advanced industrial countries.46
Changing Institutions: Democracy and International Organizations Finally, the decline in interstate conflict may be due to the growth of institutions that have helped states overcome information and commitment problems that can cause bargaining to fail. Two kinds of institutions could play a role in this regard: domestic and international.
On the domestic front, the major trend since World War II has been the expan- sion in the number of countries that have democratic political systems (see Figure 4.6 on p. 170). This development is striking when paired with the observation that there are few, if any, clear cases of war between democratic states. This means that the spread of democratic institutions might account for some of the overall decline in interstate war in the past six decades. Why democracy might have this effect is the subject of a larger discussion in the next chapter, but prominent explanations center on three factors that are relevant to the discussion here. First, democracy may make the leaders of states more sensitive to the costs of war. Second, democracy may make states more transparent to outsiders, thereby reducing uncertainty about their capa- bilities and resolve. Third, democratic states may bargain with one another differ- ently than they do with other states, avoiding threats and emphasizing compromise.
The post-1945 world has also seen a dramatic expansion in the number and activity of international organizations (see Figure 14.1 on p. 587). This period wit- nessed the emergence and growing assertiveness of the United Nations, as well as the
44. For a good discussion of some of the intellectual origins of this view, see Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York: Norton, 1997), chap. 7.
45. For a recent review, see Erik Gartzke and Jiakun Jack Zhang, “Trade and War,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Political Economy of International Trade, ed. Lisa L. Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199981755.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199981755-e-27.
46. See, for example, Håvard Hegre, John R. Oneal, and Bruce Russett, “Trade Does Promote Peace: New Simultaneous Estimates of the Reciprocal Effects of Trade and Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 47 (November 2010): 763–74.
Although recent decades have been relatively free of interstate war, disputes among nuclear- armed states, such as China, persist. The high expected costs of nuclear war have contributed to peace among these states, since the threat of “mutually assured destruction” makes them cautious to escalate conflicts.
134 Chapter 3 Why Are There Wars?
development of numerous regional organizations devoted to promoting peace and security.47 A fuller examination of the role and track record of these organizations will come in Chapter 5, but we can anticipate some of the ways these institutions may have improved states’ abilities to solve informational and commitment problems.
First, international organizations may enhance transparency by providing neutral observers of a state’s military activities. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), for example, conducts inspections of members’ nuclear energy programs in order to determine whether nuclear fuel has been diverted to produce weapons. Similarly, the United Nations often provides monitors to help observe whether parties to a conflict are fulfilling pledges to withdraw troops or disarm, thereby reducing uncertainty among adversaries about what the other side is up to.48
International organizations may also make it easier to resolve commitment problems. As discussed earlier, a promise not to use one’s power to one’s advantage is a very difficult commitment to make in a credible fashion, largely because states cannot generally rely on repeated interaction to hold one another to such a prom- ise. Repeated interaction can help make promises credible if the prospect of future dealings leads a state to forgo the temptation to break a promise today because it fears retaliation by the other state tomorrow. Under conditions of shifting power, however, the state that is becoming more powerful has less to fear from the other side’s retaliation. Furthermore, if a state can use its increased power to destroy the other state, then there may be no “shadow of the future” to stay the growing state’s hand. The same holds in situations involving first-strike advantages: the temptation to deliver a crippling blow is hard to blunt if the other side’s retaliatory capability will be rendered ineffective in the process.
Because adversaries generally cannot solve this commitment problem on their own, any solutions are most likely to come from third parties—that is, a state or group of states, including international organizations, that are not directly involved in the bargaining game between the opponents. In some cases, such outsiders may be able to help build credibility for the opposing states’ commit- ments not to exploit power or first-strike advantages. Third parties can play this role by monitoring and enforcing agreements, by providing security guarantees to one or both sides, and sometimes by interposing their forces directly between two potential combatants—all roles that the United Nations performs, as we will see in Chapter 5.
In sum, changes in interests, interactions, and institutions since 1945 have contributed to conditions that make peace more likely in international disputes. It is too strong to declare war obsolete or a thing of the past. But even incremental reductions in the risk of war are reason for optimism and opportunities for greater understanding of this phenomenon.
47. Goldstein, Winning the War on War.
48. See, for example, Virginia Page Fortna, Peace Time: Cease-Fire Agreements and the Durability of Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
135Conclusion: Why War?
Conclusion: Why War? We started this chapter with a puzzle: Why do states fight wars in spite of the enor- mous costs associated with fighting? The answer involves two ingredients: a con- flict in states’ interests, and some factor or factors that prevent states from reaching a peaceful solution to that conflict. States’ underlying interests in power, security, wealth, and/or national identities can give rise to disputes over territories, policies, and the composition of one another’s governments. In the absence of authoritative institutions that resolve interstate disputes, states engage in a bargaining interac- tion over these issues, sometimes invoking the threat of military force to enhance their leverage. War occurs when features of this strategic interaction prevent states from reaching a settlement that both prefer over war, with all its uncertainties and costs.
Three kinds of problems can prevent states from settling their disputes in ways that enable them to avoid the costs of war: incomplete information, difficulty in committing to honor a deal, and goods that are hard to divide. Since these obstacles occur in different degrees and in different combinations from one crisis to the next, there is no single answer to the puzzle at the heart of this chapter. Instead, the dis- cussion has sought to identify and explore a set of mechanisms that can stymie the effort to resolve disputes peacefully. Having done so, we are in a better position to understand and interpret behavior and outcomes in international crises. The con- cepts introduced here highlight some of the key factors that determine whether a dispute can be settled without resorting to war.
In particular, we need to pay attention to (1) what the adversaries in a dispute believe about one another’s willingness and ability to wage war and how uncer- tain those beliefs are; (2) how each side seeks to communicate its resolve, whether those efforts are credible, and to what extent they either entail a danger of acci- dental war or “lock in” incompatible bargaining positions; (3) whether the good in the dispute is a source of future bargaining power; (4) whether the distribution of power between the adversaries is expected to change as a result of different eco- nomic growth rates or technological progress; (5) whether the military technolo- gies and strategies of the adversaries generate sizable first-strike advantages; and (6) whether the good in question is indivisible because of its close connection to core values, such as religious identity.
In spite of the many things that can go wrong and prevent a peaceful solution, it is important to remember this point: Wars are rare and appear to have become rarer over time. Even though information is often incomplete, credible commitments are difficult to make, and core values are hard to compromise, most states most of the time are at peace with one another. The costs of war mean that not every disagree- ment is worth fighting over or even threatening to fight over. Hence, the very costs that make war hell also ensure that war is not the most common way that states settle their disputes.
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Chapter Title: Assertion and Division: Oregon and the Northern Boundary
Book Title: The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History Book Subtitle: Volume 2: Continental America, 18001867 Book Author(s): D. W. MEINIG Published by: . (1993) Yale University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hk0p1.12
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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 103
Rush that actually broke down the barrier. Squatters swarmed into the area, and before any further negotiations with the Indians had been undertaken, before any land was legally open to Whites, Congress took all of the land north of 37°N between the Missouri and the Continental Divide and created Kansas and Ne^ braska territories. The immediate result was anarchy: a lawless scramble for lands, bloody competition between organized groups (that between pro-slavery and free- soil settlers being the only part commonly featured in American histories), and relentless despoliation of Indians and their properties. Amid this disaster, treaties of removal, drastic reduction, or individual allotment were forced upon every tribe north of the Neosho. By the time federally surveyed land was actually put on the market in late 1856 there were tens of thousands of White residents, a dozen substantial towns, and a major settlement district extending as far west as the new army post of Fort Riley at the head of navigation on the Kaw.
And so the basic concept of the West as a designated geopolitical territory for the "Preservation and Civilization of the Indians" was shattered. The Indian titles to these lands in the West were even less substantial than they had been in the East because they "had no foundation in antiquity. The Government gave them and, when it so pleased, defied them. As a consequence, before the primary removals had all taken place, the secondary had begun, and the land that was to belong to the Indian in perpetuity was in the white man's market." This Indian Territory was a formal official protectorate (or, more accurately, a set of protectorates), but the United States refused to uphold its part of the treaty obligations. It was a deliberate dereliction. When the Indian commissioner and his agents pleaded for help in stemming the turmoil, the secretary of the Interior (to whose department the Indian Office had been transferred in 1849) advised President Franklin Pierce that it was not appropriate to use the military forces at Fort Leavenworth to expel squatters and trespassers because such action would be "discordant to the feelings of the people of the United States."
6. Assertion and Division: Oregon and the Northern Boundary
In 1830 an eighty-page booklet entitled A Geographical Sketch of that Part of North America Catted Oregon appeared in Boston bookshops. As the title might suggest, it dealt with an area uncertain in name or nature to Americans. The booklet was a propaganda tract by Hall Jackson Kelley, a Massachusetts schoolman who had become obsessed with the topic of Oregon. Its descriptions were crafted for use in fervent discussions and agitations, and it helped confirm that name as well as assert American claims to the Northwest Coast.
The word Oregon was of obscure, apparently Indian, origin. Although it had
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104 EXTENSION: A CONTINENTAL EMPIRE
appeared occasionally in some form, it had remained unfamiliar to the general public until it resounded in William Cullen Bryant's poem Thanatopsis in 1817 (the very year Hall Kelley first read Lewis and Clark and underwent a change of life). Thereafter it began to emerge as the preferred American term for this large, ambiguous area. Congressman John Floyd's bill in 1822 had proposed the creation of a "Territory of Origon." A few years later William Darby included notice of the "Basin of Columbia, or Territory of Oregon" in his View of the United States, Historical Geographical, and Statistical (1828)—but gave it only 4 of his 634 pages because "that imperfectly explored territory. . . appears at present as if on another planet." The name continued to be applied to the river (as in Thanatopsis) as well as the region, but the American designation "Columbia" was more generally accepted in Europe and America for the famous River of the'West. However, the main settlement of that territory asserted, quite by design (and to Kelley's alarm), another presence: Fort Vancouver—so named, as the governor of the Hudson's Bay Company put it, "to identify our Claim to the Soil and Trade with Lt. Broughton's [of Captain George Vancouver's expedition] discovery and Survey." In the 1830s this expanding cluster of facilities and fields overlooking the Columbia (and over- looked from either side by the towering snow-capped peaks bearing other pres- tigious British names: St. Helens [after the ambassador to Madrid] and Hood [Lord of the Admiralty]—Kelley tried to get these renamed for American presidents) would become a major focus of the geopolitical competition implicit in this regional toponymy.
The founding of Fort Vancouver marked a change in regional strategies. The initial focus had been upon the obvious: the mouth of*the Columbia River. That seemed the key point for competitive continental programs, as Astoria—Fort George and repeated calls in Congress for a military post there attested. But experience in that locale and expanding knowledge of the Pacific Slope brought a shift to a site upriver. The important difference was not in the river itself but in climate and countryside. It was a change from the beclouded, rain-soaked, densely forested, coastal region (Lewis and Clark had reported at length on their miserable winter there) to the great lowland in the lee of that rugged margin, a region with half the rainfall and considerably more sunshine, yet still shielded by the even greater mountain wall to the east from the drier, hotter, and colder conditions of the continental interior. This lowland area was part of the remarkably mild mar- itime zone blessed with "that surprising difference between the climates on the western and eastern sides of the continent"; this northwest coast, it soon became common to observe, had "a climate much like England" (two centuries earlier, Western Europeans had been surprised—shocked—at the harshness of climate they had found on the eastern side of North America). This moderation of climate was accompanied by a more attractive landscape, intermediate in kind between the
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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 105
almost impenetrable rain forests of the coastal margins and the extensive deserts and grasslands east of the Cascade Range, and best exhibited in the Willamette Valley (Kelley's Multnomah valley: the two names, both Indian in origin, were used interchangeably for several decades), a broad lowland extending 100 miles south from Fort Vancouver. The mountains bounding the valley were luxuriantly covered in fir, spruce, and cedar, but its floodplain and valley floor, isolated buttes, and gentle foothills carried a mixture of oak woodlands and open prairies, laced with many streams and offering a variety of soils. The Willamette Valley was the southern section of a great structural trough between the Coast Range and the Cascade Range. To the north the wetter, more forested and gravelly Cowlitz Plains led to the deepened and largely drowned glaciated lowlands of Puget Sound, which was itself the southerly compartment of the spectacular landscapes of deep water, towering forests, and mountain walls extending northward to Alaska
(%. ID. Fort Vancouver was located, therefore, at the intersection of the two great
natural axes of the Oregon country: where the mighty Columbia flowing westward through the mountains to the sea crossed the north-south lowland trough—and, more exactly, a location almost opposite the junction of the Willamette and Columbia rivers. By the mid-1830s, a decade after its founding, many of the virtues of this district were apparent in the considerable complex spread along the north bank of the Columbia. The main post was a large stockaded rectangle enclosing offices, stores, workshops, and residences of company officers. Nearby were the workers* cabins aligned on broad streets ("the whole looks like a very neat and beautiful village"), more workshops, bams, and a boathouse, and farther out a busy sawmill (with mainly Hawaiian laborers). About 1,000 acres were under cultiva- tion, yielding grain, peas, potatoes, garden and orchard produce; 2,000 more were enclosed for livestock. Twenty miles to the south, at the Falls of the Willamette, a gristmill and sawmill had been set up, and farther on, where the valley suddenly broadens, was an informal settlement of French Canadians—retired employees of the Hudson's Bay Company. In total nearly 1,000 people resided in and around this primary focus of the Northwest Coast, the center of a geographic system gathering produce from much of the Pacific Slope, trading with Alaska, California, and Hawaii, and maintaining annual contact with London, York Factory, and Montreal (Governor Simpson's winter residence).
Fort Vancouver was an impressive, thriving nucleus, the capital of an immense region, but it is important to understand that it was also something else: it was a company town, not a rooted colony (fig. 12). It was the creation of private enter- prise, its purpose was profit, its people were intended to be sojourners not settlers, personnel on assignment who were subject to recall and reassignment to other stations. The thriving farms and mills were a branch of the fur business, designed to
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11. Oregon Borderlands.
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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 107
reduce the costs of the main enterprise. The settlement up the Willamette was a reluctant answer to a social problem: what to do with retired employees and their Indian wives and mixed-blood children. Setting them up on farms in the valley was not calculated to initiate a colony in a strategic area; it was designed to remove them far enough away so as not to be a nuisance around the main base of opera- tions. That Fort Vancouver and its Willamette outliers might be transformed into something more permanent, that indeed it was becoming more and more like a commercial town and colonial nucleus, that, given the quasi-governmental role of the Hudson's Bay Company, there was a good deal of the symbol and substance of
12. Fort Vancouver. About 1845 an unknown artist painted this portrait of the headquarters of the Columbia Department at the peak of its development. The view is from the higher terrace on the north (where the U.S. Army would later establish Vancouver Barracks) overlooking the majestic Columbia. The Willamette, running along the foot of the low mountains in the background, converges with the main river about four miles downstream to the right. In the foreground are two common sights of this British North American system: a high-wheeled Red River cart, and an Indian or metis man on horseback with his woman following on foot. (Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
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108 EXTENSION: A CONTINENTAL EMPIRE
empire about it, that such a British nucleus must have some bearing upon an eventual partition of Oregon were matters of which the Hudson's Bay Company leaders were well aware and increasingly concerned. In 1838 the governor and committee summoned George Simpson, governor of American operations, and John McLoughlin, chief factor at Fort Vancouver, to London for consultation on geopolitical strategies to cope with impending problems in their Columbia Depart- ment.
At that time there were probably fewer than forty Americans—men, women, and children—in all of Oregon, none of whom had been there for more than three or four years. Out of such a meager presence was an American pressure generated. Indeed, one might say that American success in the competition for Oregon came very directly out of apparent American failures—even an interrelated set of fail- ures.
One of these notable and pertinent failures was Hall Jackson Kelley, the man who worked so relentlessly for an American Oregon. He had prospered enough from the writing of school textbooks to devote his attention to the cause. He lobbied in Washington for government aid in establishing a colony, organized the American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of the Oregon Territory, and shortly after publication of his Geographical Sketch issued "A General Circular to all Persons of good character who wish to Emigrate. . . ," inviting them to join him in forming a settlement uto be commenced in the Spring of 1832, on the delightful and fertile banks of the Columbia River." But no government aid was forthcoming, and his attempts to form an expedition were unsuccessful; Kelley himself got there after a dispiriting journey of two years by way of New Orleans, Mexico, and California, yet he was considered by those in charge at Fort Vancouver to be as sick in mind as he obviously was in body, and after four strained months they shipped him back to Boston.
But Kelley had a direct influence upon a fellow Yankee of different talents and temperament: Nathaniel Wyeth, a prosperous young Cambridge entrepreneur (his ingenuity had helped "create an extensive export ice business). Wyeth became interested in Oregon through Kelley but soon gave up on him as an expedition leader, organized his own company, raised capital, and set out in 1832 to engage in the fur business. He joined the annual caravan to the Rocky Mountain rendezvous, and with the help of some experienced trappers, he and a few companions even- tually arrived at Fort Vancouver, only to find that the supply ship he had sent out from Boston had been lost. Wyeth spent several months in Oregon and saw enough to induce him to return to Boston, reorganize, and set out again in 1834 with a larger company that included two eminent scientists (a botanist and an ornitholo- gist) and five Methodist missionaries. Unable to sell a load of trade goods to the American company at the rendezvous, as he had expected, Wyeth built his own
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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 109
post, Fort Hall, on the upper Snake River, Moving on to the Columbia, he constructed Fort William on an island at the mouth of the Willamette (six miles from Fort Vancouver) and set about developing a salmon fishery and a sawmill. Wyeth soon found that although he was hospitably received and given some assistance by the chief factor, he was dogged with difficulties (seventeen of his men died from disease or accidents) and quite unable to compete in the fur trade or sustain his other enterprises, and in 1836 he gave up, sold out to the British company, and returned home. As a commercial challenge, Wyeth's adventure had been no more effective than other occasional American interlopers1 forays into Hudson's Bay Company territories.
The Rev. Jason Lee and his Methodist brethren who attached themselves to the Wyeth expedition were intending to establish a mission in the upper Columbia country. They were responding to what had been interpreted and widely publicized as a call from some Flathead Indians for Christian teachers, but after a stay at Fort Vancouver they decided for various reasons to begin their work in the Willamette Valley near a small Calapooya Indian village on the edge of French Prairie, the Canadian retiree settlement. There were in fact few Indians left in the valley or lower Columbia following devastating epidemics in 1829-32 (McLoughlin esti- mated that nine out of ten had died); and in terms of Christianizing the native population, this Methodist effort, as well as that of several other Protestant mis- sions soon initiated east of the Cascades, was a failure. But these mission stations were intended to support the missionaries as well as to teach the arts of Christian civilization to the Indians, and as agricultural settlements those in the Willamette Valley were not only successful, they were soon famous as such.
Despite its failures, the second Wyeth expedition may be seen as a telling display of the range of American interests in Oregon: fur trade, salmon fishery, lumbering, Pacific commerce, farming, science, Christian philanthropy, and all of this in some degree suffused with an American national purpose so shrilly proclaimed by Hall Keliey and other expansionists. Because of the national attention they attracted, these unsuccessful private initiatives helped mightily to impel the kind of Ameri- can reach for Oregon that Congress had so far failed to undertake. Wyeth's testi- mony as to the character of Oregon was drawn upon by various congressional committees, and it was more reliable than most. He offered a reasonable appraisal of its regional qualities, emphasized the power of the Hudson's Bay Company, and stated bluntly that insofar as relations with the Indians were concerned, "the Americans are unknown as a nation, and, as individuals, their power is despised by the natives of the land." In late 1835 President Jackson, responding in part to the returned Keliey's cries about British tyrannical domination, commissioned William Slacum as his personal agent to inquire about the settlements on the "Oregon or Columbia river." Slacum arrived there by ship in December 1836 and
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110 EXTENSION: A CONTINENTAL EMPIRE
stayed just three weeks, but he was thereby able to testify about the "extraordinary mildness of the climate" and richness of the pastures even in winter, as well as the thriving activities in and around Fort Vancouver. The missionaries wrote many letters and reports that were widely reprinted in eastern papers and thereby greatly magnified public interest in, and information about, Oregon. In 1838 Jason Lee returned East for an extensive lecture tour and lured reinforcements for the Meth- odist program as well as a small party of settlers from Illinois. By then it was becoming clear that the Oregon mission had evolved into an American agri- cultural colony. The settlers themselves had no doubt about what they were creating; as their petition to Congress seeking the extension of American laws and courts phrased it: "We flatter ourselves that we are the germe of a great State." Senator Lewis Linn of Missouri had already begun a major push in Congress to assure them of that, with a bill calling for the formal establishment of Oregon Territory, a port of entry, and military occupation.
The Hudson's Bay Company thus had good reason to reassess its position on th Northwest Coast. The fur resources of the Columbia country were no longer of great value (and changes in fashion were depressing the market for beaver), but the Columbia River remained the trunk line of operations on the Pacific Slope, Fort Vancouver the key location (and a major investment), and the sustained British presence a powerful claim to territory. If there was no way the company could stem the influx of emigrants from the United States who were responding to "the overcharged pictures of [Oregon's] fertility and commercial importance," there was a reasonable hope of holding the Americans south of the Columbia. To do so the British position north of the river would need to be substantially augmented. Accordingly, the Puget Sound Agricultural Company was organized as a subsidiary to develop a large livestock operation at Nisqually (an earlier outpost near the southern end of the sound) and a colony of farmer-settlers in the lowland corridor at Cowlitz. There was a new economic rationale for this program, for the Hudson's Bay Company had signed a contract with the Russian American Company to provide subsistence for the latter's Alaskan operations. But the main concern was geopolitical, as the directors reaffirmed in a letter to McLoughlin: "We consider it of the utmost importance for various reasons, but especially in a political point of view to form a large settlement at the Cowlitz portage as early as possible, as the fact of a numerous British agricultural population being actually in possession there would operate strongly in favor of our claims to the territory on the Northern bank of the Columbia River." Their first thought was to bring in colonists from Scotland and England, but they soon turned to a more ready source of experienced North American farmers: the Red River Settlement. The first contingent (21 families, 116 persons) arrived overland from Assiniboia in 1841 and was apportioned be- tween Nisqually and Cowlitz. At the same time, two Roman Catholic priests sent
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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 111
out earlier from Red River were called upon to help induce the retired employees in the Willamette Valley to move north to the Cowlitz colony.
Thus, thirty years after the brief encounter between the Astorians and Nor'westers a new confrontation in the Columbia country was apparent. The ventures of a miscellany of Americans in the British company's monopoly territory had turned into competitive colonizations—and Christianizations, for the Protes- tant and Roman Catholic missionaries had a keen competitive, national, geo- strategic view of their tasks. Rather suddenly, momentarily, there seemed to be a balance of forces and an obvious basis for geographical partition (fig. 13). Two notable visitors to Oregon in that year, 1841, were important representatives of these contending powers. Sir George Simpson arrived overland from Montreal and paused to assess the state of affairs in the Columbia Department en route to inspect new company trading posts in Alaska and California (San Francisco Bay). At Fort Vancouver he encountered Lieutenant Charles Wilkes and various members of the United States Exploring Expedition. Wiikes was the naval commander of this American undertaking modeled on the great geographic expeditions of James Cook and the comte de La Perouse. Carrying an impressive array of natural scien- tists, topographers, and artists, it was a conscious assertion of national power and pride. Authorized by President Jackson in 1836, the fleet of six ships had sailed from Norfolk in 1838, made extensive surveys of Antarctica, the South Pacific, and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and was now carrying out its orders "to direct your course to the Northwest Coast of America" and make a careful examination of "the territory of the United States on the seaboard, and of the Columbia River." Simpson and Wilkes were both strong, assertive personalities, and they had little time for each other, but they exchanged some views, and the very presence of such an official American party making an extensive reconnaissance of Oregon (several detachments ranged into the interior east of the mountains), together with the growing American presence in the Willamette, had an effect upon Simpson. He was not ready to yield on the Columbia as the appropriate boundary between the two sovereignties, but he was now less confident, and as a precautionary measure, he urged that an alternative base be set up on Vancouver Island. That idea had been proposed as early as 1839 when it became apparent that "the influx of strangers to the Columbia" might endanger the company's operations even if the river did become the boundary. Wilkes, on the other hand, while not a forceful advocate for the American colonists (having received the hospitality and as- sistance of the British company at every post, he thought the settlers' complaints were petty or unfounded), was outspoken in his view that the United States must never give up Puget Sound, an opinion based on the expedition's confirmation of its magnificent harbors and the experience of losing a ship trying to enter the Columbia ("mere description can give little idea of the terrors of the bar of the
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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 113
Columbia"). Thus the British expert turned to a strategy of retreat from positions long held, while the American Official asserted the national necessity of lands never occupied by its citizens.
From this point, developments in Oregon, in national politics, and in diplo- matic relations between the two powers rapidly brought the issue to a decision. The trickle of American farmer-emigrants became a flood. A party of a hundred or so arrived in 1842, getting wagons as far as Fort Hall. Some were dissatisfied with what they found and left for California, but that fall the St. Louis newspapers reported that much larger emigrations "to that celebrated region" were being organized, and throughout the western states "the Oregon fever" was raging. In 1843 the first "great migration"—nearly 1,000 people—took place (getting their wagons, for the first time, as far as The Dalles, from where they were floated downriver), in the following year 1,000 more arrived, and in the next, perhaps 3,000 (by several routes, and getting at least some of their wagons across the Cascades). By 1845 American settlers occupied attractive sites for sixty miles above the Falls of the Willamette. The original Methodist mission had been relocated and redirected entirely to serve the American settlement: "there was no mission in Oregon at all; there was only a replica of frontier Methodism complete with itinerants and a church"—and, it may be added, with a gristmill, sawmill, school, and plans for a town. Furthermore, the attractions of the Willamette Valley lured more than Americans; they completely subverted the Hudson's Bay Company's "countering migration" north of the Columbia, for the Red River emigrants, dissatisfied with their lands and chafing under the company's restrictions (leaseholds and rents), soon packed up and moved south to join their compatriots in and around French Prairie (none of whom had been induced by the company to resettle in the Cowlitz).
The Americans had also taken the lead in forming a government. When the
13. The Lower Columbia River. Those "beautifully conspicuous" volcanic cones towering over the lower Columbia are car- tographically conspicuous on this map of the great artery downriver from Walla Walla (at the top of the map—the view is straight east) that was included as an inset on the "Map of Oregon Territory," in volume 4 of Lieutenant Wilkes's Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition. What is curiously missing is the name Fort Vancouver, even though it is prominent on the main map and its location is clearly shown here in the set of squares just above the mouth of the Willamette. By this time a number of other settlements have appeared, including three Method- ist missions, a Catholic mission (at French Prairie), and the HBC Cowlitz Farm. Note the absence of Indian villages below the Cascades ("Head of Navigation") and the cluster of them around prime salmon fishing sites upriver, especially at The Dalles. (Courtesy of the George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University)
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Linn bill to establish an Oregon Territory failed in Congress, the settlers, con- cerned about law and order and especially about titles to their lands, held a mass meeting at Champoeg ("Champooing" on the Wilkes map), the river landing at French Prairie, which led to the drawing up of a constitution and legal code, and to the delimitation of a set of counties for "Oregon Territory" to be in force until the U.S. government extended jurisdiction. The French metis and Hudson's Bay Company officials were wary but did not dare ignore completely or resist directly for fear of endangering their rights and properties. In response to these obvious differ- ences in allegiance, the agreement was carefully worded so that participation would be construed as being consistent with the duties of a citizen of the United States or of a subject of Great Britain. In 1845 this compact was further elaborated with the creation of the office of governor and designation of Oregon City (at the falls) as the capital.
By 1844 Oregon had become a major issue in American national politics. Extreme expansionists called for the annexation of all of Oregon and Texas. President James Polk, in his inaugural address, declared that the American title to "the country [he didn't say the 'whole'] of the Oregon is clear and unquestionable." Such, of course, was not at all the case. The British were adamant that the United States had no claim at all on a large part of Oregon. Actually each country had strong claims only to part of the region, and the expectation of a division of the whole had been present from the earliest discussions of the matter. The issue, therefore, was where to draw the line: the United States insisted on an extension of the Forty-ninth parallel boundary from the Rocky Mountains to the sea; Great Britain insisted on the lower Columbia River as the appropriate division. The territorial dispute therefore was centered on the 200-mile strip between those lines, which included the whole of Puget Sound.
The United States advanced the idea of the Forty-ninth parallel without any extensive rationale. Some Americans evidently believed that such a boundary was implicit in early spheres of influence; it had actually appeared on some United States maps as early as 1806; John Melish imprinted it on his first map of 1816 as the presumed ultimate arrangement even though "towards the Pacific Ocean, we have no very correct data for forming an opinion as to the boundaries." But there was no historical precedent nor American activity on which to base a strong claim, and the American case rested on simple concepts of "extension," "contiguity," or the old colonial precedent of latitudinal sea-to-sea charters. In the 1820s some Ameri- cans began to specify the hazards of the Columbia Bar as a reason why that river was unacceptable as a boundary. But that was a controversial topic even among Ameri- cans who knew something about it. The Columbia entrance could be dangerous, but it could also be managed at other times without problem, and the possibilities for improvement through lighthouses, dredging, and breakwaters were argued.
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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 115
Those who emphasized the inadequacies pointed to the need for harbors on the Strait of Juan de Fuca (and thus the Forty-ninth parallel boundary). In an extensive series of articles, a knowledgeable Bostonian strongly recommended Port Discov- ery as the best place for a naval station. This concern for American harbors was argued not on the need for an alternative entrance into, nor colonization of, the Oregon country, but on the need to provide a haven for American whaling and shipping in the Pacific and, in some accounts, to keep the Russians and the British from closing the Americans out of the Northwest Coast. At the time such views were not incongruent with the conviction of many persons (and especially New Englanders) that this remote Pacific seaboard could never become an integral part of the American nation.
In 1826 the British offered the United States just what such American spokes- men had called for: Port Discovery with a five-mile radius of territory. When that was summarily rejected, they offered the whole of the Olympic Peninsula, giving the Americans the southern shore of Juan de Fuca and the western harbors of Puget Sound. But the United States refused to consider any such enclave and became increasingly insistent on the entire contiguous block of territory. In 1837 Slacum declared Puget Sound to be "of the highest importance to the United States" from "a military point of view," and Wilkes obviously concurred, declaring that "the entrance to the Columbia is impracticable for two-thirds of the year."
Great Britain never pressed for any territory south of the lower Columbia. In 1823-24 it explicitly offered a boundary along 49°N from the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia and down that river to the sea. In the next year George Simpson was in London, following his first assessment of the Columbia Department as part of the company's strategic system, and British diplomats were urged to reopen negotia- tions in order to obtain a boundary drawn from the Continental Divide at the point of Lewis and Clark's crossing (thought to be 46°20'N) west to the Snake River (at the junction with the Clearwater River) and downriver to the sea. Such a line would preserve the Flathead and Spokane countries (where the British had out- posts before the Astorians) and, more important, would preserve (with slight adjustment) the overland trail between Fort Nez Perces (which could be shifted to the north bank) and Fort Colvile on the upper Columbia. Inbound brigades used that trail, and the procurement of hundreds of horses annually from the Cayuse and Nez Perces Indians in the Walla Walla and lower Snake areas was fundamental to the operation of the whole interior system. In the very last stages of boundary negotiations, when the company was asked for a list of alternatives, Simpson again nominated this line as the first choice. But having already offered the 49°N- Columbia line, British negotiators were in no position to insist on a boundary less favorable to the Americans, and so an argument based on routine British occupa- tion and use of this large block of territory was foreclosed.
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During these recurrent deadlocked negotiations the United States offered two modest concessions: freedom of navigation on the Columbia, and the termination of the Forty-ninth parallel line at the Strait of Georgia and extension of the boundary through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The original American insistence on 49°N to "the sea" could be interpreted to mean extending that line across Van- couver Island to the open ocean. This modification would leave that island entirely to the British and Juan de Fuca open to both parties. Other alternatives were discussed privately. In 1842 Daniel Webster, then the principal American negotia- tor, was of the opinion that a boundary drawn east through Juan de Fuca, south through Puget Sound, and on to the lower Columbia would adequately serve American interests (close to the British proposal of 1826), but he made no such official offer (turning instead toward trying to gain British help in securing San Francisco Bay from Mexico) and it is unlikely he could have gained approval to do so (he was in disfavor with expansionists for having "given away" part of Maine).
By 1844 the British government, for a variety of reasons having little to do with Oregon directly, was ready to settle this festering dispute. The great domestic issue was free trade (repeal of the Com Laws); new economic theories were being intensely debated, and an important faction of leaders was persuaded that Britain would be better served by a widening of trade and a contraction of empire; over the ensuing months there were fears of rebellion in famished Ireland and memories of rebellions in the troublesome Canadas; the Americans would go to war with Mexico and become alarmingly bellicose over Oregon (loud cries of "Fifty-four forty or fight!"); war with France was a chronic concern. The British public had slight interest in this distant affair, and the particular British diplomats then in charge of the matter had no great sympathy for the monopolistic privileges of the Hudson's Bay Company; at the same time, the company's directors, while clearly preferring a Columbia boundary, no longer argued that the Forty-ninth parallel would be disastrous to its operations or its profits. Thus, a partition along 49°N to the Strait of Georgia and the mid-channel of the Strait of Juan de Fuca (a dispute over the connecting line through the maze of islands separating these points would flare up later), together with specification of navigation privileges on the Columbia for the Hudson's Bay Company (but not British subjects in general) and protection of its "possessory rights" within the territory awarded to the United States, was offered by the British, quickly accepted by the American administration, and ratified by a generous margin in the Senate in June 1846.
As a large body of historical studies makes clear, settlement of the Oregon dispute was more the result of particular persons and parties working within the context of other national and international issues than of the actual historical geography of exploration, exploitation, and occupation of that vast territory by the contending nations. It is true that the basic geographic character of Oregon was
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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 117
much better known in the 1840s than when the agitations began in the 1820s, and such knowledge was drawn upon in every debate, discussion, and oration. The particular natural features most pertinent to the boundary question were the Co- lumbia River, the bar at its mouth, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound, together with various harbors therein. As for the human geography, Fort Van- couver and Astoria were central, but other British posts and the overall system were rarely brought into focus, and references to them were usually incomplete and inaccurate. The Willamette Valley and its settlements were usually mentioned, often at length, but since these did not He within the primary disputed territory, they were directly pertinent only in terms of a perceived threat to Fort Vancouver and British use of the Columbia. As for more general regional qualities, extensive accounts were often given, but opinions differed sharply, and most of the descrip- tions and assessments in the American literature were polemical. One must con- clude that momentous geopolitical decisions on Oregon, as with so many other parts of North America, were made with limited understanding of, and even limited concern about, its geography.
It is common—and surely appropriate—to commend the peaceful resolution of this dispute during a very bellicose time; it is also common for American historians to suggest, sometimes explicitly, that in the end it was an almost matter-of-fact, obvious, and equitable compromise in which each side got approximately half of the whole. Frederick Merk, one of the most distinguished American specialists on the matter, concluded that the Forty-ninth parallel was the most reasonable basis of settlement; indeed, that line, he said forthrightly, "was the boundary that the finger of nature and the finger of history pointed out for the partition of the Oregon area." As for the first, it is difficult for a geographer to discern "the finger of nature" (Merk took the term from John Quincy Adams) in a geometric line drawn straight across great mountains and rivers and across the human systems adapted to those gross lineaments of nature. As for "the finger of history," it is true that the United States kept its "finger" pointed firmly along the Forty-ninth parallel, but it must also be concluded that it thereby achieved a geopolitical victory that its historical geographical position could hardly justify; this "compromise" resulted in Great Britain losing the entire area in serious dispute. Perhaps we should interpret "the finger of history" as pointing to the basic difference in character of the British and American positions in the human geography of Oregon: the one created and maintained by a commercial company, the other by a spontaneous folk movement; the one a network of widely dispersed stations staffed by assigned agents, the other an organic colony of settlers. That is a telling difference in kind but has little to do with the line of partition, for there were not two dozen Americans north of the Columbia River in 1845-46. We should recognize that the Hudson's Bay Company regarded colonization within its own territories as being a costly complication and
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118 EXTENSION: A CONTINENTAL EMPIRE
infringement upon the fur business, and only reluctantly undertook it as an implied obligation to win renewal of its charter from politicians with larger British interests in Oregon. In retrospect, the 1841 counterimmigration appears to have been fatally handicapped from its inception. But lest we slip into the easy assumption that there could have been no hope that British colonization could have competed with American colonization in Oregon, it might be interesting to reflect on the fact that at the very time Hall Jackson Kelley was whipping up attention with his Geographical Sketch and schemes for the colonization of Oregon, Edward Gibbon Wakefield (a man at least as obsessed, capricious, vain, and difficult as Kelley) was avidly promoting his National Colonization Society in London. Suppose that in his search for a distant place to try out his theories Wakefield had fixed his eye on the northwest coast of North America instead of the southern coasts of Australasia—and suppose the Evangelicals in England had done the same. The idea is not wildly implausible. While Kelley was trying to organize his Oregon expedition, Wakefield and associates had formed the South Australian Associa- tion; and just as Nathaniel Wyeth was reluctantly allowing Jason Lee and his fellow Methodists to tag along, George Fife Angas was paving the way for Wesleyans and other dissenters to stamp their imprint on the only nonpenal colony in Australia. The pertinent point is that overseas emigration, the results of recent colonizations, and how to improve on them were lively topics in England all through the 1830s. Wakefield's theories were controversial and, insofar as they were tested, not wholly practical; nevertheless he had a major influence on several successful undertakings. If we are going to refer to "the finger of history" we might think about the one that pointed him first to Australia and New Zealand rather than to North America (to which he in fact did come, to the Canadas as an associate of Lord Durham, for whom he composed the appendix on Crown Lands and Emigration for the famous report).
The purpose of this digression from what did happen is to help us guard against simple assumptions that colonization had become a peculiarly American talent and American expansion inevitable and irresistible. Ultimately it seems most reasonable, perhaps, simply to conclude that the United States gained a major geopolitical victory because Oregon became a more important issue in its national politics and it gave the impression that it was willing to risk more in support of its demands than was the case with Great Britain.
The boundary settlement produced no immediate American expansion or Brit- ish withdrawal. The Hudson's Bay Company's properties and operations were ostensibly protected by the treaty, and American emigrants continued to choose the Willamette Valley. Two dramatic events, however, one within the region and one nearby, impelled important changes. The first was the massacre at the Whit- man mission in the Walla Walla Valley in late 1847. An explosion from long-
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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 119
smoldering grievances, it was not an uncommon type of event in American history. The Oregon Trail led directly across the territory of the Cayuse Indians; tensions grew with the annually increasing traffic and erupted in the aftermath of scarlet fever and measles epidemics that devastated the Cayuse; the retaliation was di- rected at the missionary who had ministered as a physician to Indians and Whites alike for many years. There were important repercussions: Indian-White relations were endangered throughout the interior country, the Protestant mission system was dissolved, American army units were sent to Fort Vancouver and The Dalles, and the Hudson's Bay Company diverted its interior brigades away from the Co- lumbia Plain to the lower Eraser.
The California Gold Rush reverberated around the world, and its impact upon adjacent Oregon was immediate. Large numbers left the Willamette for the gold- fields, and most of the overland emigrants from the East now diverged toward the Sacramento Valley. But the impact was not all negative. More than fifty vessels came up the Columbia in 1849 seeking Oregon produce for this sudden new market. The Donation Land Act of 1850 provided unusually liberal allotments (640 acres to a husband and wife), and a good many among the now much larger numbers of American emigrants decided that an Oregon farm was a better way to wealth than the frenzied scramble in Sierra Nevada streambeds. The census of 1850 recorded nearly 12,000 persons (excluding Indians) in the Territory of Ore- gon (created in 1849). Oregon City, the capital and milling center at the falls, and Portland, the largest among several rival ports, had become thriving intermediaries between the Willamette Valley and Pacific commerce.
North of the Columbia, activity was less intense and less focused. Fort Van- couver was included within a U.S. military reserve; squatters encroached on the Hudson's Bay Company's various lands; American customs stations, Indian agents, and territorial officials impinged on the company's operations; and the company held on south of the border only in the hope of some reasonable liquidation of its assets (a process that took more than twenty years). A sprinkling of land claims were filed along the road leading north to Puget Sound, but it was not very attractive country to farmer-colonists. The main lure of this newly acquired area was the towering forests rising above deepwater anchorages on Puget Sound. California provided a market, Yankee ships a link with New England lumbermen, and in the early 1850s a scattering of sawmill hamlets—Port Townsend, Port Gamble, Port Madison, Seattle, Bellingham Bay—began to appear. In 1853 the Territory of Washington was created, with its capital at Olympia, the customs station at the head of Puget Sound and terminus of the Cowlitz corridor road from the Columbia River. The original petition from local settlers had called for a Territory of Columbia, embracing all the area north and west of that river. Con- gress, playing its own geopolitical games, decided to extend the lower Columbia
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120 EXTENSION: A CONTINENTAL EMPIRE
line eastward along the Forty-sixth parallel to provide an approximate halving of Oregon and, to avoid confusion with the District of Columbia, decided to call it Washington instead. The territorial census of 1853 recorded just under 4,000 residents.
North of the new international boundary, the British government decided that a colony of British subjects should be established on Vancouver Island to help deter "the encroaching spirit of the U.S.," but the political climate of the day warned that it must be done without cost to the taxpayer, and so the Hudson's Bay Company was again pressured to undertake the task. Accordingly, the colony of Vancouver Island was formalized with a governor seated at Fort Victoria, but after the first year the governor and the chief factor were the same man; and because the company wished to forestall any really substantial colonization, the results were meager. A considerable portion of the people shipped in, and especially the miners sent to work the Nanaimo coalfield, deserted to California. By 1855 a semblance of a settlement in a small block of surveyed lands, with roads, mills, schools, and a church, was apparent, but there were only a few hundred settlers. As a colony the formal undertaking anchored on Fort Victoria was as yet less substantial than the informal developments it had been designed to replace in and around Fort Van- couver.
ASSINIBOIA
Tensions among the Hudson's Bay Company, the British government, and settlers arising from uneasiness over American pressures along the international boundary were not confined to the Northwest Coast. In the Red River Basin, American traders became much more aggressive in luring trade from Assiniboia to markets south of the border. By the early 1840s rival American and Hudson's Bay Company posts were spaced along the boundary from Grand Portage to Turtle Mountain. Pembina, the old metis cluster on Red River just south of the line, was the main focus of tensions (fig. 14). The Hudson's Bay Company attempted to enforce its monopoly over all fur trade within its territories, but American traders paid two to four times the price for furs and robes and the metis had no strong allegiance to the company. As hunters, traders, and settlers, they were indifferent to invisible boundaries drawn across the uniformities of nature, and they were very difficult to police. In 1843 the first in what soon became a rapidly expanding line of Red River carts carried a load of furs and robes from Pembina to Mendota, a hamlet in the shadow of Fort Snelling, the American military post on the upper Mississippi. A loose cluster of settlements had grown up here around the mouth of the Minnesota River and the Falls of St. Anthony in the Big Woods (mixed hardwood forest) just beyond the edge of the prairies. The first settlers here were in fact Selkirk Colony refugees: metis, and Swiss and other soldier-colonists who had left during various
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TERRITORY
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Thi s book seeks to explain why Mexico went to war with the Uni ted States in 1846, and why that war went so badly for Mexico. Enthusiasts -for military history should be fore- warned: even though the book ostensibly is about "war," it spends relatively little time detailing military maneuvering, focusing instead on political and diplomatic maneuvering. Tu s is not to suggest that the mechanics of warfare were ir- relevant; it is, rather, to suggest that an examination of how and why Mexico and the United States went to war sheds light on the conflict's real significance. It explains, for exam- ple, how both sides used specious arguments to justify the war , why the outcome was so lopsided, and why the war had such far-reaching consequences.
Most of what little literature is available <on the U.S.- M exican War in English deals primarily with military matters and tells the tale almost exclusively from the U .S. point of ~ - This book, ~ contrast, pl'ivtleges the other side. While most readers are likely aware that the United States went to war with Mexico to gai territory and fulfill its "Manifest
xvii j PREFACE
Destiny," they will be far less certain why Mexico went to war with the United States.
· One explanation holds that the Mexicans went to war be- cause they were proud to the point of delusion, arrogantly overestimating their own strength. In fact, however, most of the Mexican politicians who led their country to war had a sober sense of their country's strengths and weaknesses and few imagined that Mexico would prevail in a war with the United States. They led their country to war just the same, largely because of the gaping divisions in race, class, and ide- ology that prevented Mexico from being truly a "nation," and because they seethed in the daunting shadow of a powerful, wealthy, and aggressive neighbor.
I make no effort to resolve the question of which side-tl1e United States or Mexico-was to "blame" for the war. There were cynical, shortsighted, unethical, reckless, and bigoted leaders on both sides, and there was plenty of blame to go around. Mexico's weakness with respect to the United States which lay at the root of the conflict, was no one's fault but wa~ rather the result of a long and complex history.
While according to nearly every economic and social indi- cator, M_exico was weaker than the United States, merely to assert this fact would be unenlightening. To paraphrase Tol- stoy, every weak country is weak in its own way. Understand- ing the root causes of Mexico's weakness is crucial. Mexico began its independent life with a host of formidable obstacles to achieving coherent nationhood--obstacles that the United States simply did not have to face. At first glance Mexico se~~s to h~ve begun its independent life as a proud and opti- ffilst:lc empire but descended within a decade into complete anarchy. As historian Timothy Anna points out, however, it is probably more accurate to see the process going on in those decades no_t as an unraveling but rather as a kind of groping toward nationhood-a series of halting attempts to overcome the obstacles created by the many disparate regions, races, cultures, and classes that made up Mexico and to forge a com-
PREFACE X iX
mon identity. This book, then, rather than trying to assign blame, seeks to understand Mexico's weakness and how that weakness helped to land it in a war with the United States.
That such a book is needed has been brought home to me by some of the frenzied rhetoric iliat swirls around U.S.- 1exican relations in our own day. The disparity in wealth
and power between ilie United States and Mexico-which, of course, remains very much intact-has given rise to many problems, including massive immigration from Mexico into ilie United States, much of it illegal. The immigration issue periodically flares into heated debate, as it did while I was completing this book. On ilie American far right some hys- terically characterize Mexican immigration as an "invasion." One fringe group even conjures ilie specter of a "Conquest of Aztlan," charging iliat ilie Mexican government is actively abetting a conspiracy to retake ilie lands it lost to ilie United
tates in 1848. And while some imagine an insidious takeover of ilie U.S. Souiliwest, oiliers look with equal virulence in ilie oilier direction. A letter to ilie editor of ilie Greensboro
f"'<JJs & Record, written in ilie immediate aftermaili of ilie U .S. invasion of Iraq, proposed, wiiliout a hint of drollery, that ilie United States follow up on ilie Iraq venture by invad- ing Mexico. "Since we have no way to stop [Mexican immi- gration]," iliis citizen wrote, "why not invade Mexico and ma ke it our 51st state?" 1
What such views have in common is a profound indiffer- en ce toward Mexico's realities and a iliorough lack of respect fur its people. If Mexicans desperate for work enter the United States, they are derided as a horde and a contagion. If Americans, on the other hand, should enter Mexico with hos- tile intent, it is assumed their cause must be righteous and chat the Mexicans would be too pusillanimous to resist. It is
·te possible that the U.S.-Mexican War had the pernicious effect of helping to instill in Americans the notion that the
rld's peoples are a perfectly pliant mass and that invading d incorporating foreign lands is an easy and painless under-
xx PREFACE
taking. Subsequent U.S. experiences in the Philippines, Cuba, Vietnam, and Iraq have abundantly belied this notion, but the lesson, it seems, never quite gets learned. Historians second- guess the past at their peril, but it seems safe enough to sug- gest that had the United States chosen to remain in Mexico after the war, the results would have been catastrophic. Most of the Mexicans who fought ifl' the war against the United States had little incentive to defend a government that did not represent them and that, in fact, despised them. That does not mean they would have welcomed U.S . domination.
_The war between the United States and Mexico ended up bemg costly for both countries. Apart from the obvious costs in blood and treasure, the war accelerated social and political processes that eventually plunged both countries into bitter civil wars. It also left a legacy of mistrust and resentment be- tween the United States and Mexico, as well as between the United States and the rest of its hemispheric neighbors. A re- cent minor diplomatic flare-up helps to illustrate the point . Marine Lance Corporal Juan Lopez Rangel, the son of Mexi- can p~ren~ who had migrated to a small town in Georgia, was killed m the Iraq war on June 21, 2004. His parents de- cided to have his remains buried in his hometown, San Luis de la Paz, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. The ceremony, which took place over the July 4 weekend, was supposed to feature a Marine Corps Honor Guard carrying ceremonial weapons. But just short of the gravesite, a dozen Mexican sol- diers stopped the honor guard and demanded that they sur- render their "weapons." When the Marines refused , they were escorted to their cars and held under armed guard until the funeral ceremony was concluded. The presence of armed American soldiers on Mexican soil, it would seem, still arouses strong feelings, even when their weapons are fake and their intent is respectful.
The tempest that followed the incident is also telling. The U.S. ambassador to Mexico called Lance Corporal Lopez a "h " d d ero an expresse outrage over the scene at the gravesite.
PREFACE xx i
That outrage was rejoined in letters to Mexico's left-leaning 'Spapers by those who saw Corporal Lopez as at best a vie-
. of U.S. aggression and at worst an agent of U.S. imperial- ism. "Our heroes," read one letter to a national newspaper,
2re not the traitors who join the American army but those M exicans who fought the Americans when they invaded our coun try in 1846."2
Ulysses S. Grant, who served as a young second lieutenant durin g the U.S.-Mexican War, late in his life famously de- scribed that war as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a suo nger against a weaker nation.'' 3 The sentiment might well
ve been sincere, but at roughly the same time he wrote th ose words, Grant was in the forefront of plotting a com- mercial assault on Mexico . In an interview he assured poten- rial U.S. investors that the Mexican people were "industrious, frugal, and willing to work for even a pittance, if afforded an opportunity." 4 That Grant considered the Mexicans' most re- markable characteristic to be their capacity to work hard for 2 pittance suggests that he exemplified a peculiar strain of American hubris. Throughout history, it seems, American in- terest in Mexico has been conditioned by Mexico's ability to benefit or menace the United States. A true collaboration based on mutual respect and an understanding of our com- mon history would be a welcome change, one that would surely help to resolve vexing problems on both sides of the border. I hope this book, in some small way, will contribute to such a change.
A NOTE ON PLACE NAMES
I have chosen to refer to places by the names that are most fa- miliar to American readers . Thus San Antonio de Bexar, com- monly known as Bexar when Texas was a Mexican state, I call San Antonio . Likewise, the river that Mexicans call the Rfo Bravo de! Norte is herein referred to as the Rio Grande.
6
THB ANNEXATION CRISIS
The idea that the United States should annex Texas was cer tainly not .new in 1844, but in that year it seemed suddenly to gain a ferocious momentum that affected several nations and many compe�·g· interests. Texas annexation would likely have proved _d1V1s1ve no matter how it was accomplished, but the fact that it was accomplished by ethically and legally dubi ous means ensured that it would provoke crises and that those crises w_ould be severe. The political crisis it provoked within the Uruted States became an important cause of the Civil War of the 1860s. Annexation also provoked yet another round of severe political crises in Mexico, as well as a series of attempted interventions by European powers anxious to halt the territorial expansion of the United States.
THE ANNEXATION DEBATE
IN THE UNITED STATES
In .the . U°!ted States sentiment was badly split on the issue
of temtonal expansion in general and on the acquisition of
134 A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
Texas in particular. Critics of expansion held that the wealth and cares brought by expansion would doom democracy, just as it had done in ancient Athens and republican Rome. Oth- ers suspected that expansion was a scheme by southern slave owners to add new slave states and thus increase their power. Proponents of expansion worked hard to overcome such ob- jections, coming up at times with ingenious arguments de- signed to appease critics while simultaneously increasing the ardor of their fellow expansionists .
No one was more ingenious in devising ways to batter down objections to annexation than Senator Robert]. Walker of Mississippi. A transplanted Pennsylvania lawyer, Walker was well versed in the arguments for and against annexation, and he set about to find the common ground-or rather, to find and exploit useful prejudices common to nearly all white Americans. Northern opponents of slavery may have de- plored the "peculiar institution" and wished to see its demise, but that did not mean that they were comfortable with the prospect of living side by side with free blacks on terms · of equality. Most, in fact, assumed that the white race would be gravely threatened by emancipation, · particularly i.f it were accomplished precipitately. Walker played cleverly ·on thos<:! racial anxieties.
In 1844 Walker wrote a twenty-six-page letter that was subsequently printed in full in some of the country's leading newspapers and circulated by the millions of copies in pam- phlet form . The real threat, Walker explained, was not slavery but the presence of blacks throughout the country . Walker made much use of data from the 1840 census, which were re- markable indeed. The census appeared to give resounding support to the slave owners' long-held contention that slavery was good for blacks, saving them from their own bestial na- tures and forcing upon them at least the bare rudiments of civilization. Free blacks, the census seemed to show, were eleven times more likely to be physically deformed or mentally
,J
THE ANNEXATION CRISIS 135
deranged than slaves. Some pointed out that the census data were implausible, to say the least. In Worcester, Massachu- setts, for instance, a whopping 13 3 out of 151 black residents were classed as insane, and some towns that had no black res- idents at all appeared in the census as home to shocking numbers of black beggars, cripples, and lunatics. The patent inaccuracy of the data, however, mattered little, for white Americans of the 1840s w.ere generally predisposed to believe the worst about blacks.
They were also generally inclined to think the worst about England, another favorite bugbear . Perhaps Walker's most impressive gambit was to wed anglophobia to negrophobia to advance the annexationist cause. England, according to his reasoning, was intent on mediating the dispute between Mex- ico and Texas in the hope of persuading Mexico to recognize Texas's independence . That independence would be guaran- teed by England on the condition that the Texans agreed nei- ther to seek nor accept annexation to the United States. England would then pressure Texas to abolish slavery, and horrifying consequences would soon follow. Walker and other apologists for slavery were cynical about England's mo- tives, for England had freed the slaves in its West Indian colonies in 183 3 and as a result had taken a beating in the colonial sugar trade. Accordingly, Walker charged , the British hoped to push abolition elsewhere, not for altruistic reasons but so that its West Indian products would become more competitive. Moreover, England would set up preferential trade with Texas, importjng Texas cotton duty free and selling manufactured goods unburdened by the discriminatory tariff charged by the United States. Other states in the U.S. South and Southwest might be tempted to leave the Union and join with Texas so as to gain preferential access to the British mar- ket; or the United States might be pressured to end its own protective tariffs, which would damage the U.S . economy and destroy its revenues. In addition to economic concerns, the
A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
United States had to consider a pro-British Texas a threat to its national security, for in the event of hostilities the United States would find itself bordered by Britain or its allies to both north and south. With Texas a British ally, the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi River would be imperiled. Walker's allies, such as President Tyler's secretary of state, Abel Up- shur, embellished this nightmarish picture by pointing out that England might be tempted to goad American blacks to
revolt, subverting U.S. security from within. In short, the consequences of not annexing Texas, as out-
lined by Walker, would be alarming : Americans of every sec- tion of the country would soon find themselves surrounded by weak-minded, physically deformed, and morally depraved black people; the country would face economic depression, civil war, and dismemberment; and America's most powerful enemy would be handed a potent weapon with which to men- ace the nation's security. On the other hand, should annexa- tion be accomplished, it would bring untold blessings to all Americans. Those who assumed that a1mexation would be a boon to the forces of slavery erred, for ultimately the out- come would be precisely the opposite. Surprisingly, Walker argued, annexation would be a first step toward ridding the United States of the baneful institution of slavery. Slaves and their owners would be attracted to the warm climate and other enticements that Texas offered, and more and more of them would migrate southward. Texas would be a gateway to the still more agreeable climes of Mexico and Central and South America. Blacks in those countries would mix with 1 In- dians, affording them a step up in the racial hierarchy. In
ti. me all blacks both enslaved and free, would be drained ' ' away from the United States, leaving it an all-white repub-
lic-for many whites in 1840s America, a highly desirable outcome. Walker, hoping to allay the widespread suspicion that annexation was part of a conspiracy by southern slave owners, was at pains to point out that southern slave owners
THE ANNEXATION CRISIS 137
were not the only ones who stood to benefit from the acquisi- tion of Texas; nor would they be the biggest losers should an- nexation fail.
Arguments such as Walker's certainly did not persuade the most adamant opponents of annexation, some of whom glee- fully ridiculed the ·particulars. But the prospect of ending slavery and racial strife so painlessly gave the arguments widespread appeal. According to the Richmond Enquirer, they continued for months to be "the theme the talk the
' ' fashion, the very rage." 1 The specific arguments regarding race and commerce blended nicely with the imperious pro- nouncements of writers like John L. O'Sullivan, coiner of the phrase "Manifest Destiny," that dismissed such niceties as "rights of discovery, exploration, settlement, contiguity, etc .," as mere quibbling. Providence had simply and unambigu- ously intended the United States to spread its "great experi- ment of liberty and federative self government" across the North American continent, and the nation's right to extra ter- ritory was as na_tural and unquestionable "as that of the tree to the space of air and earth suitable for the full expansion of its principle and destiny of growth." Any who complained proved, by the very act of complaining, that they were unwor- thy of the possession of valuable real estate. "Public sentiment with us," editorialized the New York Morning News in 1845, "repudiates possession without use ... This national policy, necessity or destiny, we know to be just and beneficent, and we can, therefore, afford to scorn the invective and imputa- tions of rival nations." 2 Such arguments made for a heady brew of artless optimism and hubris and they were, for the moment at least, intoxicating enough to overcome divisions over slavery and section.
With the aid of such visionary polemics, sentiment in favor of annexing Texas had been gaining grow1d steadily since 1841, and by 1844 a large segment of the American public was ready to be persuaded. The arguments had persuaded
138 A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
President John Tyler, a lanky Virginia planter and slave owner, who had succeeded to the presidency in 1841 upon the death of William Henry Harrison. Earlier in his career Tyler had bolted the Democratic Party for the Whig Party, and his subsequent disputes with the Whigs had led to his ex- pulsion from that party as well. He was thus an unelected president without a party and only a slender base of support. He hoped to ride the issue of Texas annexatio n to popularity and possibly reelection. But the Whigs, led by Henry Clay, eloquently objected that the addition of Texas would upset the delicate balance of power between North and South and lead inevitably to war with Mexico. The Senate rejected Tyler's treaty of annexation in June 1844, only six months be- fore the end of his term. Tyler dropped out of the presidential race, leaving the struggle to the anti-annexation Whig candi- date Henry Clay and his yet-to-be-chosen Democratic Party
rival. There was tension among Democrats on the expansion
issue. The early front-runner for the nomination was Mar- tin Van Buren, who shared with Clay the conviction that Tyler's rush to annexation was reckless. Determined pro- annexationists, including Robert J. Walker, maneuvering deftly at the Democratic convention, managed to persuade their party to repudiate Vari Buren and opt instead for a dark horse candidate known to favor annexation, former Tennessee
congressman and governor James K. Polk. The Democratic Party platform under Polk came to advo-
cate the "reannexation" of Texas, claiming that Texas had in fact been part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, which had been bargained away in the 1819 Adams-Onfs treaty with Spain. That tactic had two advantages: it used semantics to make Texas annexation seem a matter of elementary justice, while also taking a swipe at the negotiator of the 1819 treaty, John Quincy Adams, who was currently the most vocal critic of Texas annexation. Adams and his coreligionaries took the
THE ANNEXATION CRISIS 13 9
view that annexation would be unconstitutional, would risk an unnecessary and dishonorable war, and would worsen the slavery problem. By contrast, Democratic candidate Polk-a small, intense, uncharismatic, and humorless man-refused to acknowledge any connecti?n between territorial expansion and slavery and had no doubts about the moral superiority and special destiny of Anglo-Saxon Americans. After a bitter campaign Polle won the presidency by a scant thirty-eight thousand votes. He and his supporters interpreted this slen- der victory as nothing less than a "mandate" for Texas annex- ation.
President Tyler,,still hopeful of pushing through Texas an- nexation on his watch, proposed that Texas be invited into the Union through a joint resolution rather than a treaty. The resolution would be easier to get passed, needing only a sim- ple majority vote in both houses of Congress. According to the resolution, Texas would be immediately offered admission to the Union as a state-presumably one in which slavery would be .legal. The amendment passed the House but stalled in the Senate. Senator Walker proposed a solution to the Senate impasse: incoming President Polk would have the op- tion of accepting the resolution as passed by the House or ne- gotiating a new treaty with the Texans. Polk, eager to see the resolution passed as quickly as po ssible, apparently allowed opponents of the original resolution to believe he preferred negotiating a new treaty with Texas in which slavery might be excluded and the boundary dispute resolved. With that un- derstanding, enough sehators switched their votes to allow the amended joint resolution to pass 27-25.
The two-option compromise was evidently nothing but a political ploy. On March 3, his last day in office, President Tyler sent a courier to Texas with an offer of immediate an- nexation. Polk endorsed Tyler's actions upon entering office. He also pointedly declared that the Rio Grande was to be the nonnegotiable boundary of the U.S. state of Texas. The re-
A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
fusal to negotiate on the disputed territory was clearly a provocation, one that Polk was prepared to exploit should
diplomacy with Mexico fail.
TEXAS, MEXICO, AND THE
GREAT POWERS OF EUROPE
The American expansionists may have exaggerated in their denunciations of British intrigues, but those intrigues were not entirely a matter of paranoid fantasy. England paid close attention to Texas issues, having good reasons for wanting to see that republic remain independent and prosperous. En- gland was apprehensive about the growing size and power of the United States and hoped Texas might prove useful in stemming that tide. And just as Walker and his allies asserted, England assumed that an independent cotton-growing Texas would provide a cheap and reliable source of raw materials for British factories, as well as a healthy market for the output of those factories. Also, British merchants and bondholders hoped that a strong, independent Texas would increase the chances that Mexico might one day repay its debts, for it would remove Mexico's pretext for lavishing its scant re- sources on its bloated army. Finally, the British feared that Texas annexation to the United States would perpetuate slav- ery there. An independent Texas beholden to England might be induced to abolish that evil institution.
Lord Aberdeen, the British foreign secretary, appeared dis- posed to take strong measures in defense of Texas. Four ob- stacles, however, stood in the way of success. First, the Texans themselves seemed eager to join the United States and would have to be persuaded that independence was a more desirable option. Second, the Mexicans continued obstinately to refuse to acknowledge Texas's independence. They would have to be persuaded that recognition of Texas would bring tangible benefits without damaging their national dignity. Third, En-
THE ANNEXATION CRISIS
gland would have to proceed somewhat delicately, since it was even then embroiled in an acrimonious dispute with the United States over the Oregon Territory, which both coun- tries claimed. England was not eager for war with the United States. And finally, in order to achieve a happy outcome, En- gland would likely have to enlist the support of France. Fran~ois Guizot, who wielded executive power in France, was interested in cooperating, but here again there were obsta- cles. France had blockaded and attacked Mexico as recently as 1838, and her relations with Mexico remained poor. Nor were Anglo-French relations entirely harmonious, despite the personal rapport between Guizot and Aberdeen. The major- ity of the French people rather liked the idea of Texas annex- ation to the United States, for no better reason than that the prospect was displeasing to the British. Keeping Texas inde- pendent would not be an easy task.
In late May 1844, as the U .S. Senate was close to rejecting President Tyler's annexation treaty, Aberdeen spoke with the diplomatic representatives of both Texas and Mexico, outlin- ing his plan for what he called a "diplomatic act" respecting Texas. According to this plan, if Mexico agreed to recognize Texas's independence, England and France would jointly guarantee that independence, and they would also ensure that Mexico would retain possession of New Mexico and Califor- nia. If the United States should go ahead with its annexation plans, England and France would "assist Mexico in the con- test which may be thereby brought on." 3
This plan had little chance of success. The French, faced (
with the possibility. of war with the United States, responded tepidly to Aberdeen's suggestions. Meanwhile the British and French ministers at Washington warned that any suggestion of British and French meddling in Texas might doom the can- didacy of anti-annexationist Henry Clay, thus playing into the hands of the annexationists. The Texans, for their part, wished to keep their options open . Anson Jones, who won the
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., I II
A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
Texas presidency in September 1844, openly complained that Texas had been "shabbily used" by the United States, and he generally viewed the Europeans warmly. Out~oin~ _presi- dent Sam Houston-who according to one of his .cnttcs fa- vored annexation when sober and violently opposed it when drunk-apparently urged acceptance of the British plan. Even so, Jones was skeptical of the idea: the diplomatic act would give England the right to arbitrate American disputes, doom any prospect of annexation, and possibly lead to war between Europe and America. Jones instructed Texas diplomats to cease discussing the plan, and the diplomatic act came to
naught. The Mexicans, for their part, did little to help advance any
sort of diplomatic settlement. At the very moment when the British and French were exploring a negotiated settlement of the Mexico-Texas dispute, Santa Anna was escalating his bombast, vowing that the invasion of Texas would begin any day and that all Texas prisoners would be summarily shot as traitors. The British explicitly assured Santa Anna that, should he invade Texas and find himself in difficulties, "he must not look for the support of Great Britain in aiding him to extricate himself from those difficulties." French king Louis Philippe personally harangued the Mexican minister to France on the topic, accusing the Mexicans of "infatuation" with Texas. "This infatuation," he said, · "prevents you from recognizing what everybody ,else sees; that is, that you have
lost Texas irrevocably."4
The Mexican 'stance toward recognizing Texas was not en- tirely unreasonable . T.he Mexicans argued that it would be folly to trust in the good faith of Texans, who had repeate~ly proved themselves unreliable. If Mexico were to recogruz_e Texas as an independent ·country, what assurance would 1t have that the Texans would not subsequently seek annexation to the United States? Or that they would refrain from attack- ing Mexico? Indeed, Mexican recognition would increase
THE ANNE X ATION CRISIS 1 43
· these possibilities, since by granting recognition Mexico , would be acknowledging that the Texans were free to do whatever they pleased. The Mexicans maintained that the Texans, like all savage peoples, respected only the threat of physical force. If the British and French wanted Mexico to recognize Texas independence, they must agree unequivocally to supply that force. Despite these arguments, Santa Anna eventually softened on the issue. He agreed to recognize Texas in late November 1844 in exchange for a generous in- demnity from the United States and a British and French commitment to defend a favorable boundary. But the British and French once again backed away from granting hard and fast guarantees, and Santa Anna's government was over- thrown a week later.
The Mexican attitude toward Texas softened even more af- ter Santa Anna's ouster. The dictator's successor, General]ose Joaquin de Herrera, was a dedicated moderate. He was, like Santa Anna, a na.tive of Veracruz state, and like Santa Anna he had joined the Spanish royal army while still a teenager. Ex- cept for a brief stint as a druggist , he had spent his entire ca- reer in the army. But unlike Santa Anna, Herrera sought sincerely to reconcile Mexico's irreconcilable factions while scrupulously avoiding rash acts. Although of modest financial means himself, he was comfortable in the company of the hombres de bien, and he shared their uneasiness toward the commoners. In a refreshing contrast to so many others, he was known for his honesty and integrity, common sense and sound judgment, though in some ways his modesty and mod- eration made him poorly suited to times of crisis: when so 'many demanded heroics, Herrera offered only sober, unglam- orous reason. Nor did he possess the kind of dynamic person- ality that might have helped him sell his policies effectively.
Herrera, of course, confronted the same problems · that had already undone so many previous regimes. Mexico's total rev- enues amounted to less than half of expenses. The single
144 A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
largest expense remained the army, which continued_ to cl_aim budget priority by conjuring the ;J'exas menace. Factionalism, too, remained a volatile problem. The constitution Herrera inherited from the Santa Anna dictatorship, the so-called Or- ganic,Bases, was wildly unpopular, and it provided ~e.radi~al liberals-who began styling themselves puros, to d1st1ngrush themselves from the moderados, or moderate federalists-with a potent issue. The constitution restricted citizenship to peo- ple of means, concentrated power in Mexico Ci~, _re~uced the states to "departments," and allowed for no civil nghts. But while puros demanded an immediate resurrection of the federalist Constitution of 1824, Herrera merely appointed a committee to consider constitutional reform. Such dallying cost him a great deal of political support .
By far the most heated rhetoric, however, swirled around the perennial hot-button issue of Texas. Herrera was well aware that Mexico was in no condition to risk war with the United States. Moreover, he had seen how Santa Anna's ef- forts to rally the nation for an invasion of Texas had fizzled. Herrera, in fact, was strongly inclined to avert war by recog- nizing Texas independence, with Mexico availing itself of whatever . good offices Britain and France tnight be willing to provide. He managed to get authorization ·from congress to open negotiations with Texas, and he had strong support in his quest for an "honorable treaty" from moderates. The more radical puros, however, lost no opportunity to make po- litical hay out of Herrera's alleged weakness and cowardice.
While much of what the politicians and journalists wrote and said was simply irresponsible demagoguery, they did make some points that were not easily gainsaid. Mexicans who followed the debates on annexation that raged in U.S. newspapers were alarmed by the blatantly racist rhetoric they found there. Anglo-Saxon Americans clearly considered Mexicans their racial inferiors, lumping them into the same category as blacks and Indians. Given that the Americans had
THE ANNEXATION CRISIS 145
enslaved blacks and exterminated or relocated Indians, Mexi- cans could not be sanguine about what fate might befall them should the Americans conquer their country. Mexicans were also well aware of the inflammatory rhetoric of racial destiny that was reaching a crescendo in the 1840s. While some U.S. writers claimed that the destiny of Anglo-Saxons was to uplift and civilize benighted peoples, others argued that it was sim- ply to overwhelm and displace those peoples who held valu- able resources undeservingly. "When the white races of this country multiply as they will multiply to a certain extent," wrote James Gordon Bennett of the influential New York Her- ald in 1844, "all the colored races will : disappear. We have seen that problem already solved and detertnined in the case of the Indian races." 5 The Americans appeared to have noth- ing but disdain for the way the Mexicans had been utilizing their lands. Were they, too, destined to "disappear"? And who could say when the Americans would be satisfied with the ex- tent oL their territory? Resistance might indeed be futile, some maintained, but the question was one of national sur- vival. Mexicans simply had no choice but to fight.
While these concerns may have had merit, puro politicians flogged them to the point of hysteria. To judge from the tone of some liberal newspapers and broadsides, one would have thought that war fever was sweeping Mexico. "Federation and war on Texas," declared La Voz de! Pueblo, "that is the cry of the people."6 Former vice president Valentin Gomez Farias, who had spent much time · ·in exile, returned to Mexico in March 1845 and assumed leadership of the radical faction, becoming the most strident advocate of war against Texas. Gomez Farias maintained that the reconquest of Texas was absolutely indispensable to Mexico's prosperity, and he even suggested that it would be a fairly easy undertaking: the Tex- ans, he claimed, were badly divided, and the largely Mexican population of San Antonio would support Mexico against the Texans. The campaign should begin at once.
146 A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
Such was the situation in Mexico when James K. Polle was elected president of the United States-an event that British newspapers denounced as "the triumph of everything that is worst" in America-and the annexation resolution was passed. The Mexican minister to Washington Juan N. Al- monte in accordance with his instructions, immediately re- quested his passports, severed diplomatic relations between the United States and Mexico, and returned home to help
Mexico prepare for war. Despite Almonte's precipitous action, all was not necessar-
ily lost. The annexation resolution still needed the approval of the Texans, and that they would grant it was not an entirely foregone conclusion. Both Sam Houston and his successor, Anson Jones, had well-known doubts about the matter. They, like many Texans, had assumed that Texas would be wel- comed into the Union immediately after winning its inde- pendence, and they were offended by the long delay. Their most cherished hope was that the United States might offer annexation at the same time Mexico offered recognition, so that Texans could make a reasoned decision between inde- pendence and statehood. Jones pointedly avoided the annexa- tion issue during his campaign, made no mention of it in his inaugural address, and continued his silence even after the resolution was approved in the U.S. Congress . The British and French representatives urged him to delay action for ninety days, simultaneously lending their good offices to help Texas obtain recognition from Mexico. By this time Britain and France had abandoned any notion of giving Mexico any solid guarantees, especially ones involving the use of force. They were resolved only to use their "moral influence" to
bring the Mexicans around. Diplomacy finally bore fruit. On May 19, 1845, Mexico
agreed to formally recognize the independence of Texas on the condition that Texas agree not be annexed to the United States. Boundary issues were to be resolved later through ne-
THE ANNEXATION CRISIS 147
gotiation and arbitration. Anson Jones got his wish and was now able to present his fellow Texans with a choice between annexation and independence.
As it turned out, the reservation~ that Houston and Jones had toward annexation were not widely shared by their fellow Texans. The U .S. charge d'affaires to Texas, Andrew Jackson Donelson, nephew of 10ld Hickory and a skilled diplomat in his own right, had spent months in Texas ardently promot- ing annexation. The Texas congress had already come out strongly for annexation. The vast majority of Texans favored annexation and zealously resented Jones's tepidness on the matter, to the point of burning him in effigy and threatening him with ouster. Upon receiving the news of Mexican will- ingness to recognize Texas's independence, Jones called a convention to consider the two offers. Meeting at Austin on July 4, the convention wasted little time before rejecting Mexico's offer of recognition and accepting annexation by a lopsided vote of fifty-five to one. After taking care of the re- maining details, Jones wastable to declare on February 1.9, 1846, that "the final act in this great drama is now performed; the Republic of Texas is no more."
THE FAILURE OF DIPLOMACY
The news that Texas had accepted annexation to the United States was a tremendous blow to Herrera and his µioderate allies. Stung by the failure of his conciliatory policy and a barrage of abuse from his domestic critics, Herrera was vir- tually forced to rattle some sabers, declaring that · Mexico
· would fight to defend her honor. After all, Mexico had declared publicly that it would view annexation as an act of war.
The Polle administration missed few chances to fan the flames of Mexico's war hysteria. It clung fiercely to its con- tention that Texas was bounded to the south by the Rio
•· ..
148 A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
Grande, not the Nueces as it had been when it was a Mexican state. Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor, the commander at Fort Jesup in western Louisiana, to move his troops toward the Rio Grande . By mid-July Taylor's forces were encamped at Corpus Christi, just inside the disputed territory. Mean- while, papers allied to the Polk administration were denounc- ing the "insolence, stupidity and folly" of the Mexicans, ridiculing their threats of war. Apparently Polk and his sup- porters believed that bellicosity was the best way to bring the Mexicans to the bargaining table. In fact, bellicosity had pre- cisely the opposite effect: it inspired fear, humiliation, and rage, playing squarely into the hands of Mexico's war party. Herrera, with few options, sent Mexican troops to the Rio Grande with orders to remain south of the river and to avoid
hostilities. The Mexican army was in no sense prepared for war with
the United States. "Strictly speaking," lamented one moder- ate Mexican politician, "the army does not exist. What today bears that name is only a mass of men without training and without weapons." 7 Mexican officers might create an impres- sive spectacle with their fine mounts and gaudy uniforms, but many were political hacks whose loyalty was questionable and who lacked the most basic military competence. According to one estimate, there were eighteen officers for every five regu- lar soldiers, and those officers' bloated salaries were ruinous to the budget. Service in the Mexican army was infamously unattractive, so recruits had to be coerced. Prisoners, va- grants, and drunkards were pressed into service. Indians were often captured, quite literally, with lassos as they tried to flee from recruiters, and brought to the barracks chained to- gether. Discipline was notoriously derelict. Brantz Mayer, secretary of the U.S. legation during the 1840s, recounted seeing a sergeant at Veracruz drilling a few recruits "to the tap of the drum. The music seemed to be a dead march, and the step of the soldiers was slow and solemn. Nothing could
THE ANNEXATION CRISIS 1 49
be more dreary-more heart-sickening." 8 Armaments were scarce and of low quality. Mexico had no firearms factories, so most of the army's weapons were antiquated muskets pur- chased at bargain prices in Europe, which were useless except at short range. U.S. minister to Mexico Waddy Thompson guessed that no more than one in ten recruits had ever seen a gun prior to doing service, and fewer than one in a hun - dred had actually fired one. Food and clothing were likewise scarce. Under such circumstances desertion was an entirely sensible option and was often employed. In 1845 General Mariano Arista, who commanded the Mexican forces at the northern frontier, complained that of the four thousand troops who had been sent to the border since 1841, all had deserted, and he was left with only a small corps of veterans on the very eve of hostilities with the United States.
To his credit, Herrera did try to reform the military . He simplified the command structure, changed the system of promotions to reward merit rather than partisan allegiance, and clearly delineated the powers of state governors and mil- itary officers in hopes of eliminating the problem of regional caudillos . Most controversially, he tried to revive the idea of a civic militia-an idea that had fallen on hard times during the era of centralized government. He authorized the creation of a new force to be known as the Volunteers in Defense of In- dependence and the Law, which was suppos.ed to serve as a counterweight to the regular army and, to some extent, give Mexicans a greater stake in their own defense. Unfortunately, Herrera handled the matter clumsily. Many who might have served in such a force were incensed that Herrera had dis- banded the volunteer militias that had formed spontaneously to defeat Santa Anna in January 1845. lt was presumed that Herrera feared that those militias might turn against his own government, lending considerable credence to the charge that Herrera simply did not trust the common folk. The charge was further borne out by the details of Herrera's proposal:
"I\ '" Ill 11,, Ill\
"'i Iii\ :111 ,~ ' I ~
1''1
[i i\l\ ...
A GLORIOUS DEFEAT 1 50
service in the new militia was to be voluntary and unpaid, and the prerequisites for service-militiamen had to have incom~s of at least two hundred pesos per year and could not be aru- sans or public servants-excluded all but wealthy Mexicans . Recruitment was disappointing, to say the least. The largest unit was in Morelia, Michoacan, where a mere thirty-seven volunteers turned out. · In many cities, no one volunteered at all. Herrera's failed effort to create a militia turned out to be one ofthe great disasters of his presidency. It alienated reac- tionary officers of the regular army and failed to provide for a force that might have risen to defend Herrera's government when it came under attack. Moreover, it did nothing to en- hance Mexico's preparedness for war. The Mexican military continued to be manned by unwilling conscripts rather than
by patriotic citizens . . . Knowing full well that Mexico was in no condinon to fight
the United States, Herrera sought to explore all options for avoiding war. Unfortunately, peace was an entirely se_ns_ible but politically ruinous proposition. Politicians were sph~ mto four factions: moderate federalists, who wanted some liberal reforms but shared the elite's horror of the lower classes; rad - ical federalists, who relied on lower-class support and wished to weaken the power of the church and army; traditional conservatives, who were increasingly convinced that only a legitimate European monarch could save the country; and santanistas, who believed that only Santa Anna could save the country. Of these factions, only moderate federalists like Her - rera consistently advocated a negotiated settlement of the dis- pute with the United States . Politicians of the three other factions mercilessly attacked Herrera with charges of cow-
ardice. Herrera did get congress to authorize the raising of a
15-million-peso loan, and there was some discussion of just how to tap into the church's wealth to support a war effort. But Herrera still seemed resolved to continue to work
THE ANNEXATION CRISIS 15 1
through diplomatic channels as far as possible. He let it be ~ow~ that he ~ould be willing to discus,s the Texas boundary issue_ 1f the Uruted States were willing to pay an indemnity. Wilham Parrott, a confidential agent sent by the Polk admin- istration to explore diplomatic options in Mexico, reported that although calls for war were shrill and insistent, the Mex- icans' awareness of their own weakness probably meant that an amicable arrangement could be reached. He suggested ~at_ the United States send a suitably qualified envoy, pre- d1ctmg that such a person could likely settle all issues "over a breakfast." Taking that advice to heart, Polk selected John Slidell, a generally well-regarded Louisiana politician who spoke Spanish fluently.
For a brief while, prospects for a settlement seemed favor- able. U.S. diplomats reported optimistically that Herrera's government might even be persuaded to sell New Mexico and California in addition to Texas. Slidell, accordingly, was au- thorized to treat for as much territory as he could talk the Mexicans out of. His instructions mentioned the over $3 mil- lion in American claims against Mexico, proposing that those cla_ims be liquidated if Mexico agreed to a general boundary adjustment. The instructions forcefully asserted that the Rio Grande was the nonnegotiable southern border of Texas, and that the United States was prepared to pay $5 million in ex- change for Texas and New Mexico. The payment would rise to as ·much as $2 5 million if Mexico would toss in California including San Francisco and Monterey with their valuabl~ harbors. Privately, Polk assured Slidell that if the Mexicans p,roved recalcitrant, he was prepared to make an issue of U.S. claims against Mexico, taking "redress for the wrongs and in- juries we have suffered."
Slidell arrived in Mexico City on December 6, 1845, and was greeted by a tempest of angry diatribes in die Mexican press denouncing the Americans and accusing Herrera of plotting to sell Mexico's northern territories. Some editorials
u' r U'
152 A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
openly advocated overthrowing the Herrera government "be- fore it is too late." Herrera, shocked by the vehemence of the denunciations, quickly determined that it would be a mistake to receive Slidell. The U.S. government had in fact provided the Mexicans with a convenient pretext for refusing to receive him: Slidell carried the title "minister plenipotentiary" to Mexico. Mexico had agreed to receive only a "commissioner." To receive a minister would imply that Mexico had resumed full diplomatic relations with the United States, something Herrera insisted only congress was empowered to do and that in any case would likely be done only if the United States expressed sufficient contrition to permit Mexico to resume relations in a face-saving way.
Herrera's last-minute change of heart made little differ- ence. By the time Slidell arrived in Mexico, the plotting of Herrera's overthrow was already well advanced. The key fig- ure in the plot was the archconservative General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, the army commander at San Luis Potosi who had helped bring Herrera to power the year before. Paredes had for some time been corresponding with Her- rera's opponents, including many liberals. Paredes's own sympathies were revealed in his correspondence with the con- servative intellectual Lucas Alaman and with the Spanish minister to Mexico Salvador Bermudez de Castro, who as- sured Paredes that they could come up with funding to bring a European prince to assume the throne of Mexico. Paredes's loathing of the common folk was extreme even by the stan- dards of the Mexican elite, and like most conservatives he be~ lieved that the two pillars of the old colonial order-king and church-were the best means of keeping the poor in their place.
Early in December, when Herrera ordered Paredes to re- inforce Mariano Arista's forces in the north, Paredes refused, instead demanding that Herrera resign the presidency. The formal rebellion began on December 14 with the Plan of San
THE ANNEXATION CRISIS 153
Luis Potosi, which charged Herrera with trying to bargain away precious national territory, creating a militia of the rab- ble, trying to abolish the army, and generally causing chaos and anarchy. Most army garrisons seconded the revolt. Her- rera's government made a show of defiance: speakers in con- gress called Paredes a scoundrel, a traitor, and a drunkard, and at the last possible moment the government hastily dis- tributed some seven thousand muskets. But Herrera's im- promptu militia 'was easily disarmed, and by the end of December, when the capital garrison joined the revolt, the Herrera government collapsed so unceremoniously that, ac- cording to one observer, "any foreigner coming into Mexico would not have the slightest idea that the country had gone through an upheaval. "9
The hombres de bien were delighted by the Paredes revolt, but most Mexicans were less pleased. Monarchy was not a popular option in Mexico, and Paredes was attacked for his monarchist sympathies and his authoritarian bent. Easily the most ironic of the many charges leveled against Paredes, however, was that he was insufficiently jingoist. He had justi- fied his overthrow of Herrera partly on the grounds that Mer- rera had no stomach for war, but once in office Paredes proved to be just as anxious to avoid conflict with the United States. John Slidell was guardedly optimistic tq~t the Paredes government would receive him eventually. ··late January Slidell left Mexico City for Jalapa, Veracruz, but not before dropping a few hints that he held the answer to Mexico's ex- treme financial distress.
A patient policy might have borne fruit, but the Americans opted instead to force the issue. President Polk and his secre- tary of state, James Buchanan, instructed Slidell to continue trying to meet with the government, but at the same time they hinted that if the Mexicans continued to refuse, dire consequences would follow. To reinforce that threat, the ad- ministration sent orders to General Taylor, who had been
I
154 A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
biding his time at Corpus Christi, to move his forces to the Rio Grande and occupy positions at Laredo and Point Isabel, at the river's mouth. At the same time naval squadrons took up stations off Veracruz and Mazatlan. Upon learning of these maneuvers, Slidell grew emboldened: on March 1 he sent an ultimatum to the Mexican foreign minister. Mexico, it said, had two weeks to choose between peace and war.
Once again the apparent assumption that the Mexicans would back down in the face of threats revealed appalling ig- norance of the political dynamics within Mexico. Threats and attempts at intimidation were practically guaranteed to offend the Mexicans' sense of honor and incline them toward greater obstinacy. That, in fact, is precisely what Slidell's note accom- plished. Paredes's foreign minister, Joaquin Castillo y Lanzas, answered Slidell's brusque note with an equally brusque one. Castillo y Lanzas insisted that the recent military maneuvers in Texas and the Gulf were proof of American bad faith. He accused the United States of having masterminded an elabo- rate plot to seize Texas and charged that the designation of Slidell as "minister plenipotentiary" was not an oversight but a calculated insult. Slidell, the note made clear, would not be received, and if hostilities should erupt, they would be the fault of the United States. Slidell downplayed the American military presence, refuted the account of the Texas issue, and accused the Mexicans of answering good faith offers of peace with bullheadedness and insults. He prepared to abandon his mission and return home.
Even as Slidell was packing his bags, General Zachary Tay- lor and his troops were arriving at the banks of the Rio Grande, deep within the disputed territory. General Pedro Ampudia demanded that Taylor move his forces back across the Nueces River within twenty-four hours. Taylor refused; his primary intention was clearly to provoke an incident that would serve as a pretext for war. President Polk made no se-
THE ANNEXATION CRISIS 155
cret of his conviction that diplomacy had been exhausted and that he was now resolved to declare war: he needed only some plausible pretext. He pondered basing a war declaration on the supposed insult to Slidell, or perhaps on Mexico's failure to pay its debts, but neither option would be ideal. He fer- vently hoped the Mexicans would attack Taylor's forces in the disputed territory.
On May 8 he got his wish. On that date Zachary Taylor's dispatch arrived at the White House bearing the news that a force ·of several hundred Mexicans had attacked a small re- connaissance party on April 25 at a place on the Rio Grande about fifteen miles upstream from the present-day site of Brownsville, Texas. Sixteen Americans had been killed or wounded in the melee, the rest taken prisoner. Polk immedi- ately set to work on his war message, which unequivocally ,branded the Mexicans as the aggressors and the Americans as long-suffering victims:
The cup of forbearance had been exhausted even before
the recent information from the frontier of the Del Norte
[Rio Grande]. But now, after reiterated menaces, Mexico
has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded
our territory and shed America11 .. blood -on-Amer.ican-soil.-
She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nation s-:lfenow iit\var: ---··-· .. ··-· .. - - ··- -- --
The declaration was;·of~~~se, founded upon a deliberate de- ception. The Mexicans had not invaded American territory. The Americans, rather, had provoked an attack in territory they claimed on dubious grounds. Polk's maneuvering leaves little room to doubt that he was resolved to relieve Mexico of its northern lands by fair means or foul.
Two battles-Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, both vic- tories for the United States-were fought even before the of-
. .. . - ----
A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
ficial U.S. declaration of war was signed on May 13, and the call went out for volunteers to help deliver to Mexico her just punishment. The long-anticipated war between the United
States and Mexico was finally under way. "Ho," said the most famous recruiting poster, "for the halls
of the Montezumas!"
7
THB WAR Of 1847
As war began, most realistic Mexicans realized that their country had little hope of victory. They thought, however, that they might manage to avoid a crushing defeat. If they could hold the line at the frontier, it would force the United States to launch a risky amphibious invasion. Perhaps the Mexicans could then ottle up e nv-a · ers at e coast, where tropical diseases would take a fearsome toll. If all else failed, they hoped they might be able to wear down the en-
. emy with ga:rerrtl a arlare. All of these strategies, however, presumed the existence of
a motivated fighting force. Commodore Matthew Perry, who commanded U.S. naval forces during the war, commented in- sightfully on the problem. "The Mexicans are not deficient in personal courage," he wrote; "nothing is wanting to make them good soldiers, other than military discipline and na- tional ardor which cannot be expected of men impressed as they are into service, in the most cruel and ruthless manner." 1
The elites who managed the war tried mightily to convince
A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
themselves that the Mexican people clamored for a vinaica - · ~ w r, but in fact very few of those people were passionate aoou fight. Nonelite Mexicans-the ones who were ex- pected to do most of the fighting-realized that, in the eyes of their leaders, they were useful only as drudges or cannon fodder. During the war and its aftermath, when impoverished Mexicans fought enthusiastically, it was not against the for- eign invaders but against th · ',oQ - verlevds.
"National ardor" was also lacking among the elites them- selves, making a unified response to the invasion practically impossible. Civil strife had become such an ingrained habit among Mexican politicos that not even a -f01~eign · vasion could keep them from figh-1:ingo:on ano er. "A sensible, pa- triotic people unites and offers a solid front at the first hint of the common peril," moaned one Mexican politician, even as U .S. forces closed in on Mexico City. "A people that is nei- ther ensi e nor patriotic gr0w eak, thus smoothing out difficulties for the invader, who wins without opposition." 2
POLITICS AND WAR
During 1846, even as war with the United States loomed, Mexican politics remained tumultuous. Mariano Paredes had come to power in late 1845 as part of a conspiracy to convert Me ·eo to monarchy . He backed off of his monarchist preten- sions upon becoming aware of how genuine! unpopular the
lr!J!-;was n ~ xico. Still, the very threat of a to sucli a esp1sea system was enough to fire up the
pure who believed that a return to the feoeralrS' @onstitu- tion of 1824 was the ticket to victory in the war with the United States . Confident of this prescription, the puros be- came by far the most strident advocates of war. Indeed, they have the distinction of being virtually the only group that seemed actually o belieY.e.-Mexico co Id win-but victory, in their view, woukl e .ssible on y unaer the proper political
THE WAR OF 1847 159
system. PwJ eader Va . tin~@6me E rias was the most ar- ~ ent champion of war and--fecleralis · . So intent was he on dumping Paredes that he was willing to deal with the devil. In 1846 he began a regular correspondence with his old nemesis Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who had been exiled fro~ ~exico "for life" in 1845. Santa Anna was presently devoting himself to banquets and cockfights in Cuba. Gomez Farias believed that he and Santa Anna would make an unbeatable governing team: Gomez Farias claimed to have influence over tl1e ass_es, while Santa Anna held sway with rm .
Gomez Farias was not Santa Anna's i nly potential route back to power. At the same time he was parleying with the Mexican puros, Santa Anna was also putting out feelers to tl1eir archenemies, the Americans. In February 1846 a U.S. citizen named Alejandro Jose Atocha visited President Polk claiming that Santa Anna had expressed a willingness, upon being restored to power, to make remarkable concessions: the Rio Grande boundary and all of modern-day New Mexico and northern California, in exchange for a $30 million in- demnity. It was an attractive offer, but Atocha was a shady character. Polk was skeptical but was nevertheless persuaded that Santa Anna wo_µld be more conciliatory than Paredes. If some subtle way could be found to help Santa Anna make his political comeback, Polk was on board.
Meanwhile, Santa Anna assured Gomez Farias that during . his Cuban sojourn he had become a liberal of conviction . Cu- riously, Gomez Farias seems to have found this plausible. A key feature of Santa Anna's genius was his impressive ability to per:su.acle people that he was h~rres and sin'tere despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Some Mexicans were themselves fairly mystified at their. co . tinued willingness to trust the wily general. Moderate politician Jose Fernando Ramirez, who was normally of a very skeptical turn of mind, wrote to a friend, "There is no doubt whatsoever that [Santa Anna] is returning as a real democrat, and I can conceive of
160 A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
his being one." Ramirez, perhaps realizing how absurd that sounded, added laconically, "I cannot tell you on what I base
my conviction ."3
The lib-erals launched their rebellion in late July, even :as l:h-S, ~es ere occupymg a-lifomia, preparing to occupy New Mexico, and plotting strategy in northern Mexico. When General Jose Mariano Salas joined the revolt in Mex- ico City, Paredes was finished. Paredes had been head- ing north to take charge of the army but was arrested en route . Salas became provisional president, but pending Santa Anna's return, Gomez Farias exercised the real power. In Au- gust 1846 the ~ ·s onstitutio _ o '1.-S:21 once again was declared to be the lai · f.J,LYJ;~!M.!,
Santa Anna landed at Veracruz in August, apparently with the acquiescence of the American fleet that was blockading the Mexican coast. On Mexico's independence day, Septem- ber 16, Gomez Farias and Santa Anna entered the capital to- gether in an open carriage. The entry was deliberately low key, for the nation was in grave peril and the two leaders were resolved to appear as sobe ml inee e em crats . An enor- mous banner of the recently resurrected federalist constitu- tion fluttered to the side of the carriage, but apart from that there were few decorations, and the two men were dressed in subtle civilian attire-no medals, no frock coats, nothing that might smack of aristocracy. According to Ramirez, they "seemed more like · e -· s than conqu._erors. "
4
Ever the man of action, Santa Anna spent only two weeks in the capital before sallying northward at the head of three thousand ragged troops . In his absence he was elected presi- dent, and after some ugly politicking Gomez Farias became vice president , with power to govern while Santa Anna
fought. General Juan Alvarez, a caudillo of southern Mexico who
was among the few bold enough to openly oppose the war with the United States, sized up the new regime's chief prob-
THE WAR OF 1847
!em nicely. "M-0.ney, oney, mi--n'i<')re::money;:" he wrote, ' re th e tlu,e~ thin_gs:-whmh are ee e in or e to ecover [Texas],
- alifo a , nd resewe om . ·0nalieyi"5 Mexico's treasury, as usual, was bare, its normally meager revenues made more meager still by the U.S. blockade . The govern- ment decreed a barrage of emergency taxes and demanded contribu~ons from the states and from urban property own- ers, but 1t lacked the means to collect such exactions or to deal with th e fierce resistance they engendered.
The atholi € nurch, with its apparent opulence, was as always a tempting place to lo le £o , ds. As a liberal ,of conviction, Gomez Farias was famously hostile toward tl1e church, not merely for its wealth but because of the formida- ble obstacle it presented to the creation of a modern, liberal, secular nation-state. As he had done during his 1832-33 gov- <;:rnment, Gomez Farias artacked the church frontally. On January 11, 184 7, he persuaded congress to authorize the goverru~ent to raise ·"-Ilion~ -esos for the war effort by Illf)Jc.tgagm selling ohur.e p..1:_opei:ty; he made exceptions for cnurc sc oo s, osp1ta s, and chatj · e . The clergy loudly protested the measure, and they had plenty of support. Demonstrators .. threw stones at the National Palace, leaflets advocated death to congress and Gomez Farfas, the churches of Mexico City suspended services in protest, and pulpits thundered with antigovernment jeremiads. Several states in the center of the country denounced the measure as ruinous not only to the church but to all those businesses, ranches, and farms that had borrowed money from church coffers. Za- catecas went so far as to advocate overthrowing the federal
· authorities and negotiating a quick end to the war with the United States, while the governor of San Luis Potosi asked the legislature to declare his state's independence from Mex- i~o. There were even rumors that Zacatecas, Durango, Smaloa, and Tabasco discussed declaring their independence from Mexico and asking for U.S. protection.
A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
The crisis worsened when the p.w: goye or of Mexico City, boldly declaring himself an i!heis,t, sought to ignore some of the tax exemptions for &harl® s1f ls that had been mentioned in the Ja uarf' l 1 aw. In late February, when Gomez Farfas ordered a conservative militia battal- ion-known as /os polkos because of their fondness for dancing the polka-to prepare for the defense of Veracruz against an anticipated American invasion, the polkas efused to go. In- stead, with moral and financial support from the church, they began a rebellion that plunged Mexico City into a condition just short of civil war. They denounced Gomez Farfas fo_r sur- rounding himself with the "most wretched and despicable [men] from among the dregs of all factions." They first de- manded the repeal of the offensive tax laws and the dissolu- tion of the executive and legislative branches of government but eventually said they would settle for the dismissal of Gomez Farfas.
The polkas had little popular support. Many residents of the city did not fail to notice the appalling cynicism involved in sparking such an upheaval at the very moment when Mex- ican troops were battling the Americans in the north and when American forces were preparing to land at Veracruz for a march on the capital. The c ch seems to have lo..s.t...io ' e g es"tige because of its role in the _eolk-0s a ai : few people turned out for the Holy Week celebrations later that year, and most did not even doff their hats out of respect as the re- ligious processions passed by.
As had often happened previously in such situations, many looked to Santa Anna for salvation. At a critical moment Santa Anna abandoned the fight in the north and returned to Mexico City. People cheered and threw garlands of flowers in his path as he approached the city in late March. Just as he had done in 1833, Santa Anna now took the side of Gomez
anass ene ·es: he persuad ed the church to lend the govern- an a;h millia pesos in exchange for the nullifi-
THE WAR OF 18 47
cation of the offen ing tax law, while at the same time he withdrew his support from Gomez Farfas. He pressured con- gress to simply abolish the office of vice president, and the stubborn Gomez Farias had no recourse but to step down. A S~nta Anna crony, General Pedro Marfa Anaya, became sub- stitute president while Santa Anna prepared to continue fighting the war.
While the politicians wrf~ gled, the war continued along its disastrous course . In June _ul 6, onl~ men th, after the U.S . declaration of ,war against Mexico, the Mexicans received the unwelcome news that the Uni e S:tates @tell ritain a~er some moments f high tension, had patched up ,t.hei; differences over the regon errcitory. M'llfl M·exican hacf. hoped that that dispute might lead to war betwee reat
ritain ~ d th Un-rte State , which could conceivably have ~esulted _m an Al;!glo- exica alliance. Instead, Britain rap- idly lost mterest in Mexico's plight, and the United States was free to pursue its war with Mexico with one ess disrraet:icm.
Z eh~ :Jay . .for's army won victories at two battles just north of the Rio Grande-Palo Alto and Resaca de 1a Palma- in early May 1846, and his troops took Matamoros without resistance . The Mexican forces withdrew to the city of Mon- terrey, about two hundred miles west of Matamoros. At that point, ha?1pered by the departure of volunteers serving short- term enlistments and by lack of supplies, Taylor bided his time until fresh troops and supplies arrived . On September 20 Taylor's forces laid siege to Monterrey, forcing the Mexicans to capitulate after four days of fierce street fighting. A new force under General John E. Wool linked up with those of Taylor in February 1847, even as General Santa Anna was taking over the Mexican war effort.
Santa Anna, upon returning to Mexico, had hastily as-
A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
sembled an armyapraetically without funding. He mortgaged his own property, cobbled together his own resources, and pressed the peons from his own haciendas into service. In San _ Luis Potosi he seized bars of silver from the local mint, most ~ of which belonged to Spaniards. None of this was sufficient to form a credible fighting force. Santa Anna's army had @ wuforms -H e rood,-in:fe:riQF wea , ons, and little training. The lack of artillery and long-range rifles meant they could fight only at close range, but the formidable U.S. artillery was capable of slaughtering them ruthlessly at a comfortable dis.; tance, making it nearly impossible for the Mexicans to mouth an effective charge-a disadvantage that would cripple Mexi- can military efforts throughout the war. Statesmen in Mexico City might make much of Mexican "honor," but for the rank- and-file soldier national honor was a hopeless abstraction that provided scant incentive for wanton self-sacrifice. And if death on the field of battle seemed less than glorious, for many such a death would have been a luxury: of the 20,eoo or so troops Santa Anna assembled at San Luis Potosi, nearly five thousan perished of ~ er rs , exhaustion, an ex ,eo ,c; during the grueling 240-mile march north to Saltillo. Thousand mQr- wou a1e on e mareh-b:tc:
· ve~ despite the appalling losses, Santa Anna's forces still numbered some 15,000 upon reaching the environs of Saltillo, where Taylor's men were encamped at a good defen-_ sible position near a hacienda called Buena Vista. The Mexi- cans-hungry, exhausted, and demoralized as they were-still had a decided ' numerical advantage, for Taylor had only around 5,000 mostly green troops. Santa Anna was by this time aware that the Americans were preparing an amphibious invasion at Veracruz, and strategically it would have made sense for him to refocus his efforts toward repelling that as- sault. But Santa Anna coula no resist the temptation of en- hancing his heroic stature by handing his enemy a 0 · o s
ouncing: His army attacked on February 22 and again on
THE WAR OF 1847
February 23, 1847. The fighting was intense and bloody. The Mexicans lost around 2J .00 men, the Americans 6f/-3 plus some ~ desertions. Even with their terrible losses, the Mexicans retained a comfortable numerical advantage. Had Santa Anna chosen to renew the attack on February 24, the Mexicans might well have prevailed. But Santa Anna, per- suaded that his army did not have enough food to hold out for another day, decided to withdraw his forces back to San Luis Potosi. The march back was probably as costly as a con- tinuation of the battle would have been . By the time Santa Anna's army reached San Luis Potosi on March 12, he had lost more than half his original army of twenty thousand. The battle was reckoned an American victory, since it was the Mexicans who withdrew. Santa Anna suffered vicious criti- cism, including numerous charges of incompetence and trea- son, for his conduct of the campaign.
While the fighting raged in northern Mexico and political fa~tions clashed in Mexico City, President Polk put into oper- ation the next part of his plan-a move that had been under discussion for some time . ~ olk was persuaded that diplomacy and reason would not work witl1 the Mexicans and that only a solid and indisputable rout would com el them to negotiate. He therefore appointed Ge er-al Wmfield Scott-a man he held in low esteem but whose military talents he appreci- ated-to head up an invasion of Mexico from the east. Scott's force of 12,0QP landed south of Veracruz city on March 5, 1847, and invited the lightly defended city to surrender. Upon receiving a defiant reply, Scott ordered a bombardment that visited hellish destruction until the city surrendered on March 29. Anxious to move his forces inland before the heat of summer brought the scourge of yellow fever, Scott and his army set out almost immediately for the highlands.
The Americans, in their march from the coast, followed essentially the same route that the Spanish conquistador Heman Cortes had followed more than three hundred years
A GLORIOUS DEFEAT 166
earlier. Both ortes and ScGtt landed at Veracruz during Holy Week, making the historical ~ara~lel a bit ee~ie. The symbolism was not lost on either side m the confli~t. The American soldiers were voracious readers of William H. Prescott's volume History of the Conquest of Mexico, published in 1843. They 'seem to have gained from that w~rk a se~se of historical and, perhaps; ntci?il aestmy, even while learnm~ a bit about the Mexican landscape and archaeological remams. The Spanish conquest was again invoked when, after the war, General William J. Worth ptesented President Polk with a fine copy of a famous painting of Cortes. Alth~ugh P~lk fre- quently and vehemently denied that his war with MeXlCO was a war of conquest, he does not seem to have o?jected to ~e obvious symbolism of the gift: it first hung m the _White House and currently hangs in Polk's ancestral home m Co-
lumbia, Tennessee. On the Mexican side, some drew a dispiriting lesson from
the conquest analogy. Five hundred years earlier a small crew of Spanish adventurers had been able to l~y· wa~te to an enor - mous empire because the people of MeXI«O failed to pull to - gether against their common enemy. History seemed to be repeating itself. Other Mexicans sought to us~ the parallel more constrUctively: puros did their best to mvoke Aztec imagery in hopes tof ,instilling in the Me~can ~eople some sense of racial pride and solidarity and to 1dent1fy the hated
Spaniards with the new conquerors. . Efforts to instill pride and patriotism in exhausted MeX1can
soldiers were fairly futile given the wretched and onerous conditions under which they were made to operate. Many of the troops who had fought at Buena Vista were now forcibly marched hundreds of miles southward, where, under the command of the indefatigable Santa Anna, they dug in to re- ceive Scott's forces at a jagged mountain pass near the small town of Cerro Gordo . The position seemed well-nigh im- pregnable, surrounded as it was by a river,_ hills, and steep
IJ
T H E WAR OF 1847
. After the Battle of Cerro Gordo, comparisons to the con- (!Uest grew starker and more disheartening. " e troops h:rtre co11;e back very much depressed," wrote m derate politician Jose Fernando Ramirez . "The leaders ana officers declare that . th_e Yankees are invincible, and e soldiers are telling temble tales that bring to mind the <t:onquest. Some say that the enemy soldiers are such hu e, strong men that they can ~ut an o~ponent in two with single sweep of their swords. It 1s a!so said that their horses e gigantic and very fast and that ~e~r ~uskets dis~harge s o which, once they leave the gun, d1V1de mto fifty pieces, ach one fatal and well-aimed. Let us say nothing about the artillery, which has inspired fear and terror in all our tro ps and is undeniable proof of our back- wardness in milita art ."6
In fact, however, Scott's army had its own problems. Some three thousand of his volunteers had enlisted for a year and were now free to go. On May 6, seven U .S. regiments marched off toward the coast to board ship for home. Another two ~ousand or so U .S. troops were wounded or gravely ill. Mak- mg matters still worse, on April 28, ten days after the Battle
168 A GLOR I OUS OEFEAT
of Cerro Gordo, substitute president Pedro Maria ~ aya is- sued a call for well-heeled patriots to form guerrilla units to disrupt the American supply lines along the Mexico City- Veracruz corridor. Other guerrilla units formed spontane- ously and without government sanction. The guerrillas were quite successful in making life perilous for the Americans. Scott's army now consisted of fewer than five thousand healthy men, with no reinforcements expected and no reliable
source of supplies. General Scott-who, like Cortes, was gifted in both the
military arts and those of diplomacy-was well aware of the dangers of widespread guerrilla warfare. He was also aware that the surest way to spawn guerrilla warfare was to mistreat ordinary Mexicans. He therefore carefully cultivated the goodwill of the common people by sternly disciplining any misbehavior on the part of his troops. He also wisely sought to appease the Roman Catholic clergy, ordering his soldiers to salute priests on the streets, requesting that priests cele- brate mass with his troops, and personally attending mass in the opulent cathedrals of the cities. This strategy paid divi- dends: many top clergymen eagerly betrayed Santa Anna and made common cause with the invaders. Scott's forces were welcomed into the city of Puebla-a city some sixty miles southeast of Mexico City, known for its conservatism and piety-almost cordially, "more like travelers than enemies," in the words of the Spanish minister.
Scott spent a full three months at Puebla, plotting his as- sault on Mexico City. While he was there, a new character entered into the drama: upon learning of the seizure of Ve- racruz, Polk had dispatched a Spanish-speaking diplomat, Nicholas P. Trist, with authority to negotiate peace-presum- ing, of course, large territorial concessions-with the Mexi- cans. Trist had impeccable credentials, having studied law under Thomas Jefferson, married Jefferson's granddaughter, served as Andrew Jackson's private secretary, and been U.S.
THE WAR O f 1847 169
consul to Cuba. Even so, Scott resented what he saw as Polk's effort to undercut his authority . He treated Trist coldly at first, though soon enough the two men became friendly. Trist was intrigued when the British minister informed him that Santa had hinted that he would be susceptible to ,bu: ery-his price was ten thousand dollars down and an- other "Ilion once a treaty was ratified. Bribery was not only ethically dubious and sure to anger the administration in Washington; it was also an unreliable method .of doing busi- ness, especialll 'given Santa Anna's penchant for duplicity. With many reservations, General Scott approved the plan and provided the en~thousand clolla:Fs from his own funds for "secret expenses."
Nothing came of the bribe~ scheme. The Mexican con- gress had gree.ted news of the Mexican loss at the Battle of Cerro Gordo 'with a fresh round of defiance: two days after the battle they passed a law declaring it treasonous to so much as discuss treating with the enemy. Santa A.Jvia claimed that this law obliged him to abandon negotiations with the U.S. agents-but not before he pocketed the ten thousand dollars. Santa Anna then told Trist that a U.S. attack on Mex- ico City would have the beneficial effect of frightening the opponents of peace into submission, enabling • him to seize power and make peace. This interesting proposition clearly opened the way for a U.S. assault on the capital; the problem was, neither side was quite sure if the att ck would be in earnest or for show.
. The siege began August 20, 184 7, with a pair of battles on the black craggy lava beds to the city's south. Once again the Mexican forces, though swelled by militiamen and even some Irish deserters from Scott's army, gave way before the supe- rior U.S. firepower. The battles were costly to both sides, the Mexicans losing some four thousand men and the Americans more than a thousand. Sentiment among Mexican leaders in favor of surrender was by now considerable, but Santa Anna
.. 17 0 A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
instead proposed a truce. Scott and Trist agre~d and waited to see what sorts of concessions Santa Anna might make. The terms Santa Anna spelled out in a memo of August 26 were surprising: Mexico would recognize the independence of Texas but with the Nueces as its southern border; the Amer- icans ~ust evacuate all occupied territory and raise the block- ade of Mexico's ports; Mexico would consider granting the Americans some trading privileges in California; and the United States must pay all the costs of war, cancel all Mexican debts, and recognize all Mexican land grants in Te~as made prior to 1836. With Mexican military fortunes at their lowest ebb, Santa Anna now proposed to end the war as though the Mexicans had won it.
Santa a's oifer was rejected, of course, but negotiations still proceeded desultori y. All the while Santa Anna was al- lowing himself to be persuaded by those who a~vocated co_n- tinued stubborn resistance. Perhaps the crowrung absurdity of the matter was the ultimate sticking point: neither side was willing to barter away its preferred boundary for Texas. T~e virtually worthless territory between the Nueces and Rio Grande Rivers-a swath of land so arid it could not even sup- port a cotton crop until the 1920s-":as nonnegotiable f~r both sides. The Americans were determmed to own the tern- tory so as to maintain the fiction that the Mexicans had sparked the war by invading U.S. territory. Santa_ Anna be- lieved the territory was essential as a buffer agamst future U.S. aggression. When the Mexican negotiators made it clear that they would not relinquish their demand for the_ Nue~es boundary, and also that they had no intention of partmg with New Mexico or southern California, the truce collapsed. Santa Anna had used the time to improve the city's defenses, in violation of the terms of the truce.
The fighting resumed on September 8 when th_e U.S. forces attacked an old flour mill known as the Molmo del Rey, ~hich they erroneously suspected of housing a cannon
THE WAR OF 1847
foundary. The Mexicans put up fierce resistance, engulfing I the U.S. troops in a sustained hail of artillery fire, but after a
two-hour fight the Mexican resistance collapsed. Before dawn on September 12 the Americans began shelling Chapultepec
1Castle, an imposing edifice that had once served as a resi- dence [ or viceroys but that now served as Mexico's military academy. The castle, which rested on a hilltop some two hun- dred feet above the plain, guarded the western entrance to Mexico City. After a full day's bombardment the castle was badly damaged. On the morning of September 13 the bom- bardment resumed, followed by an assault. Specially selected U .S. troops used scaling ladders to climb the slopes, breach the castle walls, and engage the castle's defenders in brutal hand-to-hand combat. By nine-thirty in the morning, the cas- tle had fallen to the Americans. The Battle of Chapultepec provided the ultimate symbol of Mexico's doomed resistance: six teenaged cadets, ordered to fall back, instead chose to fight to the de.a th. One of the boys, according to patriotic leg- end, wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and leaped from the castle to his death rather than allow the flag to fall into Amer- ican hands.
Late on the night after the Battle of Chapultepec, Santa Anna resigneq the presidency of Mexico, gathered what was left of his army, and withdrew from the cfty. Shortly there- after he besieged the tiny and ailing contingent that Scott had left at Puebla, but his army disintegrated as soon as U.S. reinforcements arrived. Santa Anna's midnight evacuation of Me~co City made him the object of much scorn and scape- goatmg. When he was summoned to a military court of in- ~ui1y, he resigned his military command and made his way mto yet another exile.
On the morning of September 14 the American forces musr_ered in_ Mexico City's main square while a band played martial music and the Stars and Stripes were raised over the National Palace. Around midday General Scott rode into the
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:11
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17 2 A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
square, resplendent in full-dress uniform, to accept the for-
mal surrender of the city.
THE TREATY OF GUADALUPE HIDALGO
The surrender of Mexico City did not stop the fighting. The conflict simply devolved into something resembling class warfare, as the city's leperos-the urban poor so feared by the comfortable classes-joined by prisoners Santa Anna had or- dered released from the city's jails, ransacked the National Palace and other public buildings. Even after the city seemed pacified, both the U.S. soldiers and city residents co~mitted excesses and atrocities. Soldiers who ventured out mto the streets, especially if they wandered from the city's center, were often shot from rooftops. On one occasion the corpses of several U.S. soldiers were found in a tavern where they had apparently been served poisoned pulque, the ferme~ted maguey juice that was the favorite intoxicant of the MeXIcan poor. Many also fell victim to dysentery.
With the surrender of the city and the resignation of Santa Anna from the presidency, ad interim executive power fell to the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Manuel de la Pefia Y Pena. Pena y Pena relocated his government to the city of Queretaro, about one hundred miles to the north of Mexico City. There the politicians deliberated over whether to ~eat with the Americans or continue the war. They were as nven by faction as ever. Some felt the country's only hope of sa.lva- tion lay in locating a European prince to assume the MeXIcan throne. Others maintained their loathing of monarchical gov- ernment but had nevertheless come to the conclusion that Mexicans were incapable of governing themselves and would require outside assistance lest they succumb to the lawless passions of the "rabble." Some liberals favored making Mex- ico a protectorate of the United States, which would presum- ably restrain the power of the clergy, the monarchists, and
THE WAR OF 18 47 17 3
the army while enhancing trade and bringing stability and i progress to the country. Some puros went still further, favor-
ing continuing the war until the United States agreed to out- right annexation of the entire country.
A minority believed that Mexico might eventually prevail ,, against the United States through guerrilla warfare. Most,
however, were terrified by that prospect, for it would mean placing weapons and power in the hands of the unwashed masses and could morph into racial or class warfare. That, in turn, could end up consuming Mexico's privileged groups in the sort of hideous conflagration they had so long dreaded .
~ In the end, the Mexican elite's fear of the people proved decisive to the outcome of the war with the United States. The occupation of their country by a foreign power was, in the end, less unsettling than the specter of race war, which,
, they noted with great alarm, appeared already to be taking shape. The profound injustices of rural Mexico-a place where enormous haciendas monopolized the land, depriving or mercilessly exploiting Indian and mestizo peasants-meant that anger simmered and the threat of violent rebellion con- tinually smoldered . In "normal" times suppressing rural dis- content was a large part of the Mexican army's job. With the wa~ ~e ~exi~an .army was momentarily ~estroyed and the polincal el1te m disarray. That created an opening that peas- ants in several regions of Mexico seized ferv~ntly.
In the far-off, perennially separatist state of Yucatan, Mayan Indians who had been mobilized by the white elite to fight on behalf of state autonomy charged that promises made to them in exchange for their military services were unful- filled. They rose up against the peninsula's whites in what Yucatan's governor described as a "savage and exterminat- ing war." "Everything is ravaged and destroyed," Governor Santiago Mendez wrote to U.S. secretary of state James Buchanan. "(T]he towns are delivered to flames and all without consideration of sex or age, who fall into the blood;
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174 A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
hands of these barbarians, are murdered without pity, and with the most cruel tortures." The terrified whites knew they could expect no succor from Mexico: there was too m~ch bad blood between Yucatan and central Mexico, and MeXIco was in no condition to help in any case. In their desperation the Yucatecans implored the United States to intervene, offering in return nothing less than "dominion and sovereignty of the Country ."7 The United ·States declined the offer. This "C aste War of Yucatan" would come to rank among the most violent episodes in the history of the western hemisphere, costing the lives of some two-hundred thousand people in 1848 alone. By the time it wound down, the populati?n of ~e Yucatan Peninsula had been reduced by half. Fmally, m Decem- ber 1848 Mexico was able to send some sixteen thousand troops to pacify the peninsula, a larger force than had ever been deployed during the war with the United Srntes. .
Meanwhile in the Sierra Gorda, a mountamous reg10n comprised of parts of the states of Queretaro, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosf, peasants using arms they had bought cheaply from U.S. troops at Tampico had been rebelling vio- lently against war taxes since 1846 . In 1847 they _iomed thelf tax and agrarian demands to a demand for war w1tl1out quar- ter against the Americans. By the end of 1847 the movement was growing more violent still under the leadership of a Mex- ican army deserter named Eleuterio Quiroz . Peasant revolts were also ongoing in Puebla, San Luis Potosf, the Huasteca region of Veracruz, and Tarnaulipas, where local a~chives and haciendas were torched, judges and landowners killed. Even more than usual Mexico appeared to be spinning wildly out of control. Ending the war with the United States was essential to containing race and class violence-that, at least, was something most Mexican politicians could agree on. Toward the end of 1847 the Mexican congress managed to elect Gen- eral Pedro Marfa Anaya, a former henchman of Santa Anna's but a man of moderate tendencies, to tl1e presidency. Anaya,
THE WAR OF 1847 175
in turn, commissioned a trio of commissioners to negotiate a peace ~ith the United States. The negotiations began in ear~est m January 1848. The Mexicans thus acknowledged
., the!f loss of the war. It only remained to be seen how much territory they would lose in the bargain.
On the U .S. side, some were encouraged by Mexico's on- going ~sfortunes. U.S. negotiator Nicholas Trist, seeing the desperat10n of the elite Mexicans at the continuing violence and social disintegration of their country, fell prey to the same sort of myopic Anleric an exceptionalism that had made
t, Joel Poinsett such anathema to Mexican nationalists: he be- came convinced that the notion of annexing all of Mexico to the United States had widespread and enthusiastic support a~ong Mexicans, at least among the "best part" of the popu- lat10n, What the United States encountered in the wake of the war was, Trist enthused, a "phenomenon altogether unex- ampled in the history of the world : a nation [the United States], to whose principles & habits & institutions the spirit of conquest is altogether foreign, actually has thrust upon her by its own inhabitants, the acquisition of a country, rich be~ yo~d calculation in numberless sources of commercial pros- penty, & ,~boundi~g in every thing that ca make a country deslfable. For Tnst, even the most passionate statements of defiance seemed to confirm the Mexicans' secret desire to re- linquish their nation .s
·Those Mexicans who favored joining the United States would likely have had second thoughts had they been aware of ~e kind of rhetoric that swirled around this option in the .Uruted States. There was indeed a movement pushing for U.S. acquisition of all of Mexico . For some, news of U.S. mil- ita7 successes was an occasion to indulge in a giddy spree .
0 f
racial self-congratulation. In early 1847 a writer for the Dem- ocratic Review predicted optimistically, "The Mexican race now see, in the fate of the aborigines of the north their own inevitable destiny. They must amalgamate and be iost, in the
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A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
superior vigor of the Anglo-Saxon race, or they must utterly perish." 9 The New York Globe was still more to the point: "There is a spirit abroad which will not long be stayed-a spirit of progress, which will ,compel us, for the good of both nations and the world at large, TO DESTROY THE NATIONAL~ ITY of that besotted people. It would almost seem that they,' like the Israelites of old, had brought upon themselves the vengeance of the Almighty and we ourselves had been raised up to overthrow AND UTTERLY DESTROY THEM as a separate and distinct nation." 10
Some in the United States, of course, decried such senti- ments as immoral and arrogant imperialist fantasies. But the arguments that eventually carried the day against the "All Mexico" movement were essentially racist ones. Ironically, southern slave owners, who before the war had been among the most aggressive expansionists, were at the forefront of the opposition to the movement. Mexico had a long history of hostility to slavery, so its incorporation as a free state would have immensely · strengthened the antislavery forces. Oppo- nents of the All Mexico movement also argued that Mexico contained entirely too many Mexicans-a people they had long denounced as a vicious, ignorant, slothful, uncivilized, "mongrel" race. Making such people citizens of the Union would be offering them a distinction they did not merit; such people, rather than allowing themselves to be uplifted by the Anglo-Saxons, just might end up dragging the Anglos down to their level. John C. Calhoun, ardent expansionist and de- fender of slavery, emerged as perhaps the most vocal oppo- nent of acquiring all of Mexico. The United States, he said, had never incorporated nonwhite people as citizens . "Ours is a government of the white man," he told Congress, and to place nonwhites on an equal plane with whites would be a "fatal error." 11 It would be better, Calhoun and others of his ilk concluded , to take over only the sparsely inhabited regions of Mexico's far north.
• THE WAR OF 1847 177
The All Mexico movement was of little consequence in the end. Nicholas Trist, despite his enthusiasm for taking over the entire country, based his peace negotiations on what Pres-
'1 ident Polk had said he wanted . The negotiations were not without friction. Back in October President Polk, upon learn- ing of the failure of negotiations during the truce preceding the assault on Mexico City, had ordered Trist to abandon his mission and return to the United States. Since communica- tion between Washington and Mexico took from three weeks to a month in transit, Trist did not learn of his recall until
JI Nbvember 16. By that time the Mexican government, con- trolled by moderates, was clearly disposed to negotiate. Trist therefore resolved to disregard the order for his recall and press ahead with negotiations.
From there the negotiations went relatively smoothly and quickly. By the end of January the Mexicans had agreed to nearly all of the demands that Polk had insisted upon in his original instructions to Trist. They were willing to accept the Ri.o Grande as the boundary of Texas, and a border for New Mexico and California running from El Paso to the Pacific at the thirty-second parallel. The United Sta es would assume all of the debts it claimed Mexico owed to U.S. citizens and pay an indemnity of $15 million for New Mexico and Califor- nia-some $10 million less than the United States had been willing to spend before the war. The territory in question comprised over 525,000 square miles, about 55 percent of Mexico's land. It would eventually be divided into the states of Texas, California, and Utah, most of New Mexico and Ari- z~na, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Trist and the Mexican commissioners signed the treaty on February 2 at the town of Guadalupe Hidalgo, very near the shrine of Mex-
. ico's patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe . Polk, though enraged by Trist's act of insubordination and
deeply ensconced in second thoughts about just how much territory the United States should acquire from Mexico,
178 A GLORIOUS DEFEAT
could not find a face-saving way of quashing the treaty, inas much as it granted everything he had claimed to be seeking at the outset of the war. To oppose the treaty now that it was a fait accompli would be rank hypocrisy, especially given his re peated insistence that the war with Mexico had not been a war of conquest. Polk considered Trist to be "destitute of honour or principle ... a very base man," but he nevertheless forwarded the treaty to Congress. After some contentious de bate it was approved on March 10. Mexico's congress ratified the treaty on March 30. In mid-June U.S. troops began their evacuation of Mexico City, and by the end of]uly Mexico was entirely free of foreign occupation.
.. ,
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I f 1
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Last weekend, President Donald Trump reportedly told the U.S. trade representative to scare South Korean negotiators by telling them he was a madman. “You tell [the South Koreans] if they don't give the concessions now, this crazy guy will pull out of the deal,” he said, referring to the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement. That report came at the end of a day in which the president’s tweets about another
The Problem With Trump's Madman Theory
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issue on the Korean peninsula evoked comparisons to the Nixon-era “madman
theory” that you can scare an opponent into concessions by cultivating an image of
recklessness. “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is
wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” the president wrote.
“… Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what needs to be done!”
Although President Trump credits himself with breaking every presidential norm,
in choosing to intimidate foreign opponents through feigned (or real) recklessness,
he is borrowing from the playbook of a predecessor. In April 1971, facing an
impasse in negotiations with the North Vietnamese to end the Vietnam War,
Richard Nixon gave Trump-like advice to his national-security adviser, Henry
Kissinger. Kissinger had just suggested that he might hint to Hanoi, “if you think
you’re going to defeat him [Nixon], if you don’t accept this [latest offer], he will stop
at nothing”—implying the use of nuclear weapons.
Nixon: You can say, “I cannot control him.” Put it that way.
Kissinger: Yeah. And imply that you might use nuclear weapons.
Nixon: Yes, sir. “He will. I just want you to know he is not going to cave.”
Nor did Nixon invent this approach. Nixon’s mentor in foreign policy, Dwight
Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles, was credited by many in
Washington with having ended the Korean War by hinting to the Chinese that the
former Allied commander was tough enough to use nuclear weapons in Korea. Even
some top Democrats believed in this. According to Nixon’s autobiography, Lyndon
B. Johnson, who was minority leader in the Senate when the war ended, later
confessed to Nixon his belief that the Soviets “‘feared Ike’ because of what Dulles
had threatened to do in Korea.” Eisenhower, of course, never allowed anyone to
imply that he was crazy. But, in the expectation that the information would reach
Mao, Dulles did hint to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that the
Eisenhower administration was prepared to widen the war if negotiations did not
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succeed. As Eisenhower biographer William Hitchcock has recently argued, this was a self-serving myth Dulles himself invented after the fact. Not only does post- Cold War evidence suggest that the hint had no effect on Chinese decision-making, there is no reason to believe it ever reached Beijing at all.
Unfortunately, fake history can be irresistible to some leaders, especially when it confirms their preconceptions more than what actually happened. Nixon and Kissinger, who referred respectfully to the “Dulles ploy,” not only seemed to accept the effectiveness of the nuclear ploy but added a very dangerous new twist to it. Nixon didn’t just want to convey Eisenhower toughness, but also that he could be reckless. In a conversation with his chief of staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, which Haldeman revealed in his memoir, Nixon described this new variant as the “Madman Theory.” According to Haldeman, the so-called theory was actually “a threat of egregious military action by an unpredictable U.S. President who hated Communism, coupled with generous offers of financial aid.”
There are very good reasons why, until Trump, Nixon was the only chief executive to have associated himself with such a strategy: It makes no sense for a confident, great power. Since Pearl Harbor, the United States has acted as a leading partner in grand alliances designed to defeat vicious adversaries and then maintain some semblance of international peace. Such alliances—whether the Big Three of World War II or the postwar North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are founded on trust that, to put it bluntly, you would take a bullet for the other guy. These don't work as well if the states at the helm, as personified by their leaders, are erratic or irrational. You cannot be both a reckless madman and a reliable alliance partner. Throughout the Cold War, for example, the U.S. worked hard to encourage non-nuclear allies like West Germany to accept “extended deterrence,” the idea that they did not need their own nukes because the United States could be relied upon to defend them. Nonproliferation, which is difficult in the best of times, becomes impossible if the foreign ally thinks the American president is erratic and untrustworthy. It is inconceivable that John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, or George H. W. Bush, for example, would have believed it useful for any foreign leader to think him “crazy.”
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Back to Nixon. He and Kissinger understood the importance of NATO. Their madman game was narrowly focused on America’s adversaries, not its allies. And it was the product of desperation. Nixon had been elected promising to end the war in Vietnam. It wasn’t just congressional Democrats or anti-war demonstrators in the streets who wanted the United States to start withdrawing troops; Republicans, most notably Nixon’s secretary of defense Melvin Laird, believed that troop withdrawals were needed soon for the sake of domestic tranquility. Kissinger and Nixon worried that the domestic drumbeat for withdrawal would give Hanoi and incentive to stonewall in negotiations. Kissinger used the metaphor of “salted peanuts” to convey the idea that the desire for withdrawals would be uncontrollable once the American people got their first taste. Why would the North Vietnamese deal now, went the argument, when if they just waited the U.S. commitment to the war was bound to wind down and then collapse?
Enter the madman. Kissinger encouraged Nixon to undertake actions while there was still time—while they were still credible—to suggest he would stop at nothing to end the war in what he considered an honorable fashion.
Nixon and Kissinger came into office believing that the Vietnam War could be over by the end of 1969. All that was necessary was guts, toughness, and a thick skin at home, and Hanoi would be forced to make real concessions. “I have great sympathy for President Johnson as a patriot,” Nixon recorded himself saying as he thought retrospectively about the Vietnam War in April 1973, a few months after the U.S. signed a peace agreement with Hanoi. “He was surrounded by people who were soft-headed, worse.” After Vietnam launched an offensive for Tet 1969 (a year after its more famous Tet offensive), Nixon began the secret bombing of Cambodia. It didn’t stop the North Vietnamese from waging their war. In the summer of 1969, Kissinger convinced Nixon to double down, first offering a plan, “Duck Hook,” that in an early draft, according to the historians William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball, involved the use of nuclear weapons. In the end Nixon dropped the plan, but not before agreeing to a pointless fake nuclear alert in October 1969 designed to scare the Soviets into putting pressure on the North Vietnamese. Over the next two years,
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U.S. forces invaded Cambodia, then provided assistance to a South Vietnamese offensive in Laos. Still the North Vietnamese did not cave.
By the summer of 1971, although Nixon did not stop talking privately about sending a signal of toughness, his focus shifted from trying to convince Hanoi that he was mad to finding ways to convince Beijing that he wasn’t, breaking a domestic political taboo to enlist Mao’s help in altering North Vietnamese behavior. The breakthrough with Hanoi finally came in October 1972, when the North Vietnamese for the first time agreed that the regime of Nguyen Van Thieu could remain in power in South Vietnam as part of a peace agreement with Washington. (This occurred after another round of action and reaction—North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive followed by a U.S. air campaign in April and the mining of Haiphong harbor in May.)
Nixon’s madman strategy wasn’t supposed to take three and a half years, over 21,000 U.S. deaths, and untold Vietnamese losses, to work. It was supposed to be a version of “shock and awe.” Until we see Hanoi’s decision-making records to be sure, the more likely explanation is that a combination of other factors led to Hanoi’s concession—namely the likelihood that Nixon would be re-elected (and yet would be more amenable to a negotiated settlement as a candidate for re-election) and the effects of Nixon’s opening to China and détente with the Kremlin.
Why would North Korea react to Trump’s intentional recklessness by disarming?
There can be little debate, however, over what Nixon’s calculated unpredictability abroad achieved at home. It tore this country apart. In a declassified “eyes only” memorandum to Alexander Haig on May 20, 1972, after ordering the mining of Haiphong harbor, Nixon explained who his domestic audience was: “The hawks are our hard core and we must do everything that we can to keep them from jumping ship [in reaction to arms-control talks with Moscow] after getting their enthusiasm restored as a result of our mining operation in the North.” The madman approach
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was not just for Hanoi. Nixon wanted his base to know he was tough, thus
distracting attention from his simultaneous efforts to build bridges to Hanoi’s
communist patrons in the Kremlin and the Forbidden City.
It is not surprising that Trump, who prides himself on being tougher than any
adversary and who apparently has little interest in allies or diplomacy, would latch
on to this theory of applied bullying. What is remarkable is that no one seems to
have successfully gotten through to him that it is unlikely to work.
In the Nixon era, the logic of the madman theory, to the extent it was logical, was
that a nuclear-armed superpower could effectively threaten a non-nuclear
developing country. The U.S. would raise the cost of the war to a level that would be
unacceptable to Hanoi. As it turned out, the U.S. was never really able to do this.
And there is even less reason to assume it would work against North Korea in 2017.
The U.S. is certainly stronger than North Korea, just as it was in comparison to
North Vietnam, but North Vietnam did not itself have nuclear weapons; North
Korea does. What is credible about the idea that the U.S. would risk a nuclear attack
on Guam or Hawaii or, by mistake, Japan to get a chance at wiping out Pyongyang?
Moreover, in the Vietnam War Nixon learned the hard way that if an adversary
believes their existence is at stake, they are likely to fight even harder as you
increase the pressure on them. Why, now, would North Korea react to Trump’s
intentional recklessness by disarming, thus becoming even more vulnerable to U.S.
power? It makes no sense.
The strategy might have a better chance at forcing concessions from non-nuclear
allies, like South Korea. But here the costs would be of a different kind. For
example, savvy U.S. trading partners are finding domestic American groups that
would be hurt by Trumpian protectionism. There is a huge Kia plant in West Point,
Georgia, whose Republican Congressman Drew Ferguson might not want to lose its
800 jobs. Similarly, Canadian companies have been in touch with members of
Congress, such as the powerful head of the Freedom Caucus Mark Meadows, who
represent areas where they employ U.S. citizens.
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There is an aspect to Trump’s toying with the madman fallacy that makes it potentially even more threatening to peace and international tranquility than the Nixon effort. In light of Trump’s tweets, it is fair to assume that some of the president’s unpredictability is unrehearsed. Nixon had an unstable personality, but his risk-taking in Vietnam, however ill-founded, was at least plotted with Henry Kissinger.
Ultimately, Trump might find that he will be the biggest loser. In April 1973 Nixon, who shared the 45th president’s habit of saying unexpectedly revealing things, confessed to a visiting former POW, Lt. General John B. Flynn that there was a limit to how much presidential irrationality the American people could stomach: “We are never going to have a madman as president, in this office. We never have, probably never will have,” he said, according to a declassified recording he made of the conversation. “Ours [system] throws them out … about every four years, if a guy shows that he’s [unclear phrase], out!”
There is the intriguing possibility that Trump or his advisers got their fake history lesson about the madman theory from the venerable Henry Kissinger, who still loves giving presidents advice and appeared as an adviser of sorts to Trump after the election. Whatever the case, Kissinger would certainly be more useful to this president as an eyewitness to how Nixon ultimately got ensnared in his own madman delusion.
�
The Washington Post
PostEverything PerspectiveL
No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons. That's by design.
The whole system is set up so the president — and only the
president — can decide when to launch.
By By Alex WellersteinAlex Wellerstein December 1, 2016December 1, 2016 Follow @wellersteinFollow @wellerstein
Alex Wellerstein is a historian of nuclear weapons at the Alex Wellerstein is a historian of nuclear weapons at the Stevens Institute of TechnologyStevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. He runs in Hoboken, N.J. He runs
the website the website Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy BlogRestricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog..
Sometime in the next few weeks, Donald Trump will be briefed on the procedures for how to activate the U.S. nuclear arsenal, ifSometime in the next few weeks, Donald Trump will be briefed on the procedures for how to activate the U.S. nuclear arsenal, if
he hasn’t already learned about them.he hasn’t already learned about them.
All year, the prospect of giving the real estate and reality TV mogul the power to launch attacks that would kill millions of peopleAll year, the prospect of giving the real estate and reality TV mogul the power to launch attacks that would kill millions of people
was one of the main reasons his opponents argued against electing him. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we canwas one of the main reasons his opponents argued against electing him. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can
trust with nuclear weapons,” Hillary Clinton said in trust with nuclear weapons,” Hillary Clinton said in her speechher speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. She accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. She cut an adcut an ad
along the same lines. Republicans who didn’t support Trump — and even some who did, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) — alsoalong the same lines. Republicans who didn’t support Trump — and even some who did, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) — also
said said they didn’t thinkthey didn’t think he could be trusted with the launch codes. he could be trusted with the launch codes.
Now they’re his. When Trump takes office in January, he will have sole authority over more than 7,000 warheads. There is noNow they’re his. When Trump takes office in January, he will have sole authority over more than 7,000 warheads. There is no
failsafe. The whole point of U.S. nuclear weapons control is to make sure that the president — and only the president — can usefailsafe. The whole point of U.S. nuclear weapons control is to make sure that the president — and only the president — can use
them if and whenever he decides to do so. The one sure way to keep President Trump from launching a nuclear attack, underthem if and whenever he decides to do so. The one sure way to keep President Trump from launching a nuclear attack, under
the system we’ve had in place since the early Cold War, would have been to elect someone else.the system we’ve had in place since the early Cold War, would have been to elect someone else.
* * ** * *
When the legal framework for nuclear weapons was developed, the fear wasn’t about irrational presidents but trigger-happyWhen the legal framework for nuclear weapons was developed, the fear wasn’t about irrational presidents but trigger-happy
generals. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which was passed with President Harry Truman’s signature after nine months ofgenerals. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which was passed with President Harry Truman’s signature after nine months of
acrimonious congressional hearings, firmly put the power of the atomic bomb in the hands of the president and the civilianacrimonious congressional hearings, firmly put the power of the atomic bomb in the hands of the president and the civilian
components of the executive branch. It was a momentous and controversial law, crafted in the months following the atomiccomponents of the executive branch. It was a momentous and controversial law, crafted in the months following the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with an eye toward future standoffs with the Soviet Union.bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with an eye toward future standoffs with the Soviet Union.
The members of Congress who wrote the law, largely with the backing of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project,The members of Congress who wrote the law, largely with the backing of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project,
framed it explicitly as a question of who controls the power to use nuclear weapons: Is dropping an atomic bomb a military actframed it explicitly as a question of who controls the power to use nuclear weapons: Is dropping an atomic bomb a military act
or a political one? If it is inherently political, above and beyond a regular military tactic, then that power could not be entrustedor a political one? If it is inherently political, above and beyond a regular military tactic, then that power could not be entrusted
to the military. Ultimately, the president was supposed to be the check against the Pentagon pushing to use nukes more often.to the military. Ultimately, the president was supposed to be the check against the Pentagon pushing to use nukes more often.
The scientists’ fears were based in their experiences in World War II. Their work under the Army Corps of Engineers and theThe scientists’ fears were based in their experiences in World War II. Their work under the Army Corps of Engineers and the
Army Air Forces left them with a sour taste: Generals, they concluded, cared little about ethics, democracy or internationalArmy Air Forces left them with a sour taste: Generals, they concluded, cared little about ethics, democracy or international
politics. Even during the war, some civilians involved with atomic-bombing work feared that the military had become too eagerpolitics. Even during the war, some civilians involved with atomic-bombing work feared that the military had become too eager
to leave German and Japanese cities in cinders. The secretary of war, Henry Stimson, learned about the ruinous firebombing ofto leave German and Japanese cities in cinders. The secretary of war, Henry Stimson, learned about the ruinous firebombing of
Tokyo from the press. He warned Truman that letting the military run the show might cause the United States to “get theTokyo from the press. He warned Truman that letting the military run the show might cause the United States to “get the
reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.”reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.”
This division between military and civilian control over nuclear weapons has been weaker or stronger at various points. In theThis division between military and civilian control over nuclear weapons has been weaker or stronger at various points. In the
late 1940s, U.S. nuclear weapons could have their nuclear components — the plutonium or uranium “pits” needed to start theirlate 1940s, U.S. nuclear weapons could have their nuclear components — the plutonium or uranium “pits” needed to start their
reactions — removed and inserted as needed. The nuclear parts of the atomic bombs were in the custody of the civilian Atomicreactions — removed and inserted as needed. The nuclear parts of the atomic bombs were in the custody of the civilian Atomic
Energy Commission (the precursor to the present-day Energy Department), while the military controlled the nonnuclear parts.Energy Commission (the precursor to the present-day Energy Department), while the military controlled the nonnuclear parts.
The president had the power to transfer these pits to the military and order their use.The president had the power to transfer these pits to the military and order their use.
During the Eisenhower administration, more compact and complex weapons were developed whose nuclear and nonnuclearDuring the Eisenhower administration, more compact and complex weapons were developed whose nuclear and nonnuclear
parts could not be separated. Fearing a Soviet sneak attack, President Dwight D. Eisenhower put the military in charge of mostparts could not be separated. Fearing a Soviet sneak attack, President Dwight D. Eisenhower put the military in charge of most
of the U.S. nuclear stockpile to streamline a possible response. Eisenhower also “pre-delegated” authority to the military to useof the U.S. nuclear stockpile to streamline a possible response. Eisenhower also “pre-delegated” authority to the military to use
tactical nuclear weapons (aimed at tanks, not cities) without getting specific presidential approval in certain situations, such astactical nuclear weapons (aimed at tanks, not cities) without getting specific presidential approval in certain situations, such as
if Soviet tank columns rolled into Germany’s Fulda Gap.if Soviet tank columns rolled into Germany’s Fulda Gap.
Fears of low-level commanders setting off nuclear conflagrations during the tensions of the early 1960s persuaded PresidentFears of low-level commanders setting off nuclear conflagrations during the tensions of the early 1960s persuaded President
John F. Kennedy to dial some of this back. Miscommunications during the Cuban missile crisis almost led to the use of nuclearJohn F. Kennedy to dial some of this back. Miscommunications during the Cuban missile crisis almost led to the use of nuclear
weapons by both U.S. and Soviet troops, and U.S. weapons stationed abroad, such as the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, could beweapons by both U.S. and Soviet troops, and U.S. weapons stationed abroad, such as the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, could be
used by any army that seized control of them. There were also lingering concerns about “Strangelove”-esque rogue generals. Theused by any army that seized control of them. There were also lingering concerns about “Strangelove”-esque rogue generals. The
head of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Thomas Power, was an enthusiastic proponent of preemptive nuclear war.head of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Thomas Power, was an enthusiastic proponent of preemptive nuclear war.
Similar concerns within the upper reaches of the Kennedy administration led to a push for technologies to “lock” the nuclearSimilar concerns within the upper reaches of the Kennedy administration led to a push for technologies to “lock” the nuclear
weapons and prevent their use without some kind of codes or authorization. Some early versions were as primitive asweapons and prevent their use without some kind of codes or authorization. Some early versions were as primitive as
combination locks, but later versions were complex electro-mechanical systems that could physically disable a weapon if it werecombination locks, but later versions were complex electro-mechanical systems that could physically disable a weapon if it were
tampered with or if the wrong code was entered too many times.tampered with or if the wrong code was entered too many times.
Eventually, the brass adopted the idea that, when it came to nuclear matters, they were at the beck and call of the president. ItEventually, the brass adopted the idea that, when it came to nuclear matters, they were at the beck and call of the president. It
was not generals’ responsibility to make the order; it was their responsibility to carry it out.was not generals’ responsibility to make the order; it was their responsibility to carry it out.
Another GOP Senator hesitates on giving Trump America's nuclear codes M W
That the president would be the only person competent to use nuclear weapons was never challenged. Even asking the questionThat the president would be the only person competent to use nuclear weapons was never challenged. Even asking the question
would throw the entire system into disarray, as Maj. Harold Hering learned in 1973. Hering was a 21-year Air Force veteran whowould throw the entire system into disarray, as Maj. Harold Hering learned in 1973. Hering was a 21-year Air Force veteran who
was decorated for his flying in Vietnam before being sent for training as a nuclear missile squadron commander. He had beenwas decorated for his flying in Vietnam before being sent for training as a nuclear missile squadron commander. He had been
taught that officers had an obligation to disobey illegal orders. So when he was told how to launch a nuclear attack, he askedtaught that officers had an obligation to disobey illegal orders. So when he was told how to launch a nuclear attack, he asked
what seemed like a simple question: How could he be sure that an order to launch his missiles was lawful? How could he bewhat seemed like a simple question: How could he be sure that an order to launch his missiles was lawful? How could he be
sure, for example, that the president wasn’t insane? Instead of an answer, he got the boot: an aborted promotion and ansure, for example, that the president wasn’t insane? Instead of an answer, he got the boot: an aborted promotion and an
administrative discharge for “failure to demonstrate acceptable qualities of leadership” and for indicating “a defective mentaladministrative discharge for “failure to demonstrate acceptable qualities of leadership” and for indicating “a defective mental
attitude towards his duties.”attitude towards his duties.”
The Air Force’s problem, in short, is that once a serviceman starts down the rabbit hole of doubt, he becomes an unreliableThe Air Force’s problem, in short, is that once a serviceman starts down the rabbit hole of doubt, he becomes an unreliable
second-guesser — and suddenly he is one of the few people who can decide whether nuclear weapons are used.second-guesser — and suddenly he is one of the few people who can decide whether nuclear weapons are used.
* * ** * *
The procedure for ordering a nuclear attack involves more than one person: The president cannot literally press a button on hisThe procedure for ordering a nuclear attack involves more than one person: The president cannot literally press a button on his
desk and start World War III. There is no “nuclear button” at all. Instead, the U.S. nuclear command-and-control system isdesk and start World War III. There is no “nuclear button” at all. Instead, the U.S. nuclear command-and-control system is
bureaucratically and technically complex, stretching out to encompass land-based missile silos, submarine-based ballistic andbureaucratically and technically complex, stretching out to encompass land-based missile silos, submarine-based ballistic and
cruise missiles, and weapons capable of being dropped from bombers. The chain of command as widely understood requirescruise missiles, and weapons capable of being dropped from bombers. The chain of command as widely understood requires
that the president order the secretary of defense to carry out a launch; the secretary serves as the conduit for implementation bythat the president order the secretary of defense to carry out a launch; the secretary serves as the conduit for implementation by
the military. There are succession policies in place so that the procedure can be continued in the event of the death orthe military. There are succession policies in place so that the procedure can be continued in the event of the death or
incapacitation of either the president or the secretary of defense — or their designated successors.incapacitation of either the president or the secretary of defense — or their designated successors.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte became the second U.S. senator this month to hesitate when asked whether she'd trust GOP nominee Donald TrumpSen. Kelly Ayotte became the second U.S. senator this month to hesitate when asked whether she'd trust GOP nominee Donald Trump
with the U.S. nuclear codes.with the U.S. nuclear codes. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)(Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
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Most details of how a nuclear war would be started are classified, because an enemy who knew enough about the system couldMost details of how a nuclear war would be started are classified, because an enemy who knew enough about the system could
come up with ways to complicate or defeat it. What is known is that an aide is always following the president, carrying at leastcome up with ways to complicate or defeat it. What is known is that an aide is always following the president, carrying at least
one large satchel (often two) known as the “nuclear football,” reportedly containing information about nuclear attackone large satchel (often two) known as the “nuclear football,” reportedly containing information about nuclear attack
possibilities and how the president could verify his identity, authenticate orders and communicate with the military aboutpossibilities and how the president could verify his identity, authenticate orders and communicate with the military about
implementing them.implementing them.
Could the secretary of defense refuse to carry out a presidential order for a nuclear attack? The legal and constitutional aspectsCould the secretary of defense refuse to carry out a presidential order for a nuclear attack? The legal and constitutional aspects
are not clear. The official doctrine that has been released says nothing about this question, and the cryptic public responses toare not clear. The official doctrine that has been released says nothing about this question, and the cryptic public responses to
official inquiries, even from Congress, indicate that it is not something that can be openly talked about. “Only the president canofficial inquiries, even from Congress, indicate that it is not something that can be openly talked about. “Only the president can
authorize the use of nuclear weapons” is essentially the only reply officials ever give to any questions about nuclear controls.authorize the use of nuclear weapons” is essentially the only reply officials ever give to any questions about nuclear controls.
Could the president simply fire the defense secretary and move on to the deputy secretary, the secretary of the Army and so onCould the president simply fire the defense secretary and move on to the deputy secretary, the secretary of the Army and so on
through the chain of command? Maybe. Such an action would at least slow things down, even if the refusal to carry out thethrough the chain of command? Maybe. Such an action would at least slow things down, even if the refusal to carry out the
order was illegal. But the secretary may not even be formally required to participate — U.S. Air Force doctrine does not indicateorder was illegal. But the secretary may not even be formally required to participate — U.S. Air Force doctrine does not indicate
he is a necessary part of the chain of command, and holds that the president can communicate directly with the military, in thehe is a necessary part of the chain of command, and holds that the president can communicate directly with the military, in the
form of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to order a nuclear strike.form of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to order a nuclear strike.
Commanders further down the pipeline are trained to act quickly on any orders that do come in. The launch officers are trainedCommanders further down the pipeline are trained to act quickly on any orders that do come in. The launch officers are trained
to launch weapons, not to debate the legality or advisability of the action. Hence the problem with Hering’s question in 1973:to launch weapons, not to debate the legality or advisability of the action. Hence the problem with Hering’s question in 1973:
While nuclear launch officers are not meant to be strictly mechanical (and indeed, the United States has always resisted fullyWhile nuclear launch officers are not meant to be strictly mechanical (and indeed, the United States has always resisted fully
automating the process), if they stopped to question whether their authenticated orders were legitimate, they would put theautomating the process), if they stopped to question whether their authenticated orders were legitimate, they would put the
credibility of U.S. nuclear deterrence at risk.credibility of U.S. nuclear deterrence at risk.
Congress held hearings on these issues in the mid-1970s, but nothing came of them. The debate faded away except among aCongress held hearings on these issues in the mid-1970s, but nothing came of them. The debate faded away except among a
small circle of nuclear wonks. In the early 1980s, Jeremy Stone, then the president of the Federation of American Scientists,small circle of nuclear wonks. In the early 1980s, Jeremy Stone, then the president of the Federation of American Scientists,
proposed that proposed that Congress ought to pass a lawCongress ought to pass a law restricting presidential use of nuclear weapons. The idea was fairly simple: So long restricting presidential use of nuclear weapons. The idea was fairly simple: So long
as no nuclear weapons had been used by another power in a conflict, the president should not be able to order a first strike withas no nuclear weapons had been used by another power in a conflict, the president should not be able to order a first strike with
nuclear weapons without getting approval from a fairly large committee of high-ranking members of Congress. It would notnuclear weapons without getting approval from a fairly large committee of high-ranking members of Congress. It would not
eliminate the possibility of an American first strike but would spread the responsibility more democratically.eliminate the possibility of an American first strike but would spread the responsibility more democratically.
The idea was The idea was pooh-poohed by legal scholarspooh-poohed by legal scholars, who noted that Congress has often been far more belligerent than presidents and, who noted that Congress has often been far more belligerent than presidents and
that the logistics could be complicated.that the logistics could be complicated.
The people who set up the current command-and-control system did believe there was a check in place: elections. Don’t want anThe people who set up the current command-and-control system did believe there was a check in place: elections. Don’t want an
insane president to have nuclear weapons? Don’t put one in office. But this isn’t necessarily much of a check — even rationalinsane president to have nuclear weapons? Don’t put one in office. But this isn’t necessarily much of a check — even rational
presidents have bad days; even high-functioning people succumb to mental illness or substance abuse.presidents have bad days; even high-functioning people succumb to mental illness or substance abuse.
It might be worth resurrecting this debate , if we take seriously the idea that presidents — any of them, much less Trump —It might be worth resurrecting this debate , if we take seriously the idea that presidents — any of them, much less Trump —
should not have the legal authority to conduct arbitrary and unilateral nuclear war. Perhaps now, decades after the end of theshould not have the legal authority to conduct arbitrary and unilateral nuclear war. Perhaps now, decades after the end of the
Cold War, we are past the moment when we need to entrust that power in a single person. One can imagine a law that wouldCold War, we are past the moment when we need to entrust that power in a single person. One can imagine a law that would
allow the president to use nuclear weapons in the face of imminent danger, the sort of situation in which a matter of minutes orallow the president to use nuclear weapons in the face of imminent danger, the sort of situation in which a matter of minutes or
even seconds could make a difference, but would enact formal requirements for outside consensus when more options were oneven seconds could make a difference, but would enact formal requirements for outside consensus when more options were on
the table. It would not require a full renunciation of the possibility of a first-strike nuclear attack (something the United Statesthe table. It would not require a full renunciation of the possibility of a first-strike nuclear attack (something the United States
has never been willing to make) but might add some reassurances that such decisions would not be made unilaterally.has never been willing to make) but might add some reassurances that such decisions would not be made unilaterally.
Congress ceded a considerable amount of power to the presidency in 1946. Seventy years later, maybe it is time lawmakers tookCongress ceded a considerable amount of power to the presidency in 1946. Seventy years later, maybe it is time lawmakers took
some of it back.some of it back.
This story was updated after its initial publication to reflect later research by the writer that found that theThis story was updated after its initial publication to reflect later research by the writer that found that the
secretary of defense may not be legally required to be part of the chain of command for launching nuclearsecretary of defense may not be legally required to be part of the chain of command for launching nuclear
missiles.missiles.
* 1181 Comments
Alex Wellerstein is a historian of nuclear weapons at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. He runs
the website Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog. - Follow @wellerstein
I t all starts in 2025, as tensions between India and Pakistan escalate over the con- tested region of Kashmir. When a terror- ist attacks a site in India, that country sends tanks rolling across the border with Pakistan. As a show of force against the invading army, Pakistan decides to detonate several small nuclear bombs.
The next day, India sets off its own atomic explosions and within days, the nations begin bombing dozens of military targets and then hundreds of cities. Tens of millions of people die in the blasts.
That horrifying scenario is just the beginning. Smoke from the incinerated cities rises high into the atmosphere, wrapping the planet in a blanket of soot that blocks the Sun’s rays. The planet plunges into a deep chill. For years, crops wither from California to China. Famine sets in around the globe.
This grim vision of a possible future comes from the latest studies about how nuclear war could alter world climate. They build on long-standing work about a ‘nuclear winter’ — severe global cooling that researchers pre- dict would follow a major nuclear war, such
as thousands of bombs flying between the United States and Russia. But much smaller nuclear conflicts, which are more likely to occur, could also have devastating effects around the world.
On 16 March, researchers reported that an India–Pakistan nuclear war could lead to crops failing in dozens of countries — devas- tating food supplies for more than one billion people1. Other research reveals that a nuclear winter would dramatically alter the chemistry of the oceans, and probably decimate coral reefs and other marine ecosystems2. These
HOW A SMALL NUCLEAR WAR WOULD TRANSFORM THE PLANET As geopolitical tensions rise in nuclear-armed states, scientists are modelling the global impact of nuclear war. By Alexandra Witze
India tests its Agni-5 rocket in 2013, which is capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
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results spring from the most comprehensive effort yet to understand how a nuclear conflict would affect the entire Earth system, from the oceans to the atmosphere, to creatures on land and in the sea.
Scientists want to understand these matters because the nuclear menace is growing. From North Korea to Iran, nations are building up their nuclear capabilities. And some, includ- ing the United States, are withdrawing from arms-control efforts. Knowing the possible environmental consequences of a nuclear conflict can help policymakers to assess the threat, says Seth Baum, executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute in New York City, who has studied the risks of trigger- ing a nuclear winter. “Fleshing out the details of ways in which it can be bad is valuable for helping inform decisions,” he says.
Cold-war forecasts Nuclear-winter studies arose during the cold war, as the United States and the Soviet Union stockpiled tens of thousands of nuclear warheads in preparation for all-out assaults. Alarmed by leaders’ bellicose rhetoric, scien- tists in the 1980s began running simulations on how nuclear war might change the planet after the initial horrific deaths from the blasts3,4. Researchers including the US planetary scien- tist and communicator Carl Sagan described how smoke from incinerated cities would block sunlight and plunge much of the planet into a deep freeze lasting for months, even in summer4. Later studies tempered the forecasts somewhat, finding slightly less-dramatic cool- ing5. Still, Soviet leader Mikail Gorbachev cited nuclear winter as one factor that prompted him to work towards drawing down the coun- try’s nuclear arsenals.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons continued to drop. But with many thousands of warheads still in existence, and with more nations becoming nuclear powers, some researchers have argued that nuclear war — and a nuclear winter — remain a threat. They have shifted to studying the consequences of nuclear wars that would be smaller than an all- out US–Soviet annihilation.
That includes the possibility of an India– Pakistan war, says Brian Toon, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Colorado Boul- der who has worked on nuclear-winter studies since he was a student of Sagan’s. Both coun- tries have around 150 nuclear warheads, and both are heavily invested in the disputed Kash- mir border region, where a suicide bomber last year killed dozens of Indian troops. “It’s a precarious situation,” says Toon.
Both India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998, highlighting growing geo- political tensions. By the mid-2000s, Toon was exploring a scenario in which the countries set off 100 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs, killing
around 21 million people. He also connected with Alan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who studies how volcanic eruptions cool the climate in much the same way that a nuclear winter would. Using an advanced NASA climate model, the scientists calculated how soot rising from the incinerated cities would circle the planet. All around the dark, cold globe, agricultural crops would dwindle.
But after a burst of publications on the topic, Robock, Toon and their colleagues struggled to find funding to continue their research. Finally, in 2017, they landed a grant worth nearly US$3-million from the Open Philanthropy Project, a privately funded group in San Francisco that supports research into global catastrophic risks.
The goal was to analyse every step of nuclear winter — from the initial firestorm and the spread of its smoke, to agricultural and eco- nomic impacts. “We put all those pieces together for the first time,” says Robock.
The group looked at several scenarios. Those range from a US–Russia war involving much of the world’s nuclear arsenal, which would loft 150 million tonnes of soot into the atmosphere, down to the 100-warhead India– Pakistan conflict, which would generate 5 mil- lion tonnes of soot6. The soot turns out to be a key factor in how bad a nuclear winter would get; three years after the bombs explode, global temperatures would have plummeted
by more than 10 °C in the first scenario — more than the cooling during the last ice age — but by a little more than 1 °C in the second.
Toon, Robock and their colleagues have used observations from major wildfires in British Columbia, Canada, in 2017 to estimate how high smoke from burning cities would rise into the atmosphere7. During the wildfires, sunlight heated the smoke and caused it to soar higher, and persist in the atmosphere longer, than scientists might otherwise expect. The same phenomenon might happen after a nuclear war, Robock says.
Raymond Jeanloz, a geophysicist and nuclear-weapons policy expert at the Uni- versity of California, Berkeley, says that incorporating such estimates is a crucial step to understanding what would happen dur- ing a nuclear winter. “This is a great way of cross-checking the models,” he says.
Comparisons with giant wildfires could also help in resolving a controversy about the scale of the potential impacts. A team at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico argues that Robock’s group has overestimated how much soot burning cities would produce and how high the smoke would go8.
The Los Alamos group used its own models to simulate the climate impact of India and Pakistan setting off 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs. The scientists found that much less smoke would get into the upper atmosphere than Toon and Robock reported. With less soot to darken the skies, the Los Alamos team cal- culated a much milder change to the climate — and no nuclear winter.
The difference between the groups boils down to how they simulate the amount of fuel a firestorm consumes and how that fuel is con- verted into smoke. “After a nuclear weapon
US President George Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev celebrate the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty on 31 July 1991.
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After a nuclear weapon goes off, things are extremely complex.”
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goes off, things are extremely complex,” says Jon Reisner, a physicist who leads the Los Alamos team. “We have the ability to model the source and we also understand the combus- tion process. I think we have a better feel about how much soot can potentially get produced.” Reisner is now also studying the Canadian wild- fires, to see how well his models reproduce how much smoke gets into the atmosphere from an incinerating forest.
Robock and his colleagues have fired back in tit-for-tat journal responses9. Among other things, they say the Los Alamos team simu- lated burning of greener spaces rather than a densely populated city.
Dark seas While that debate rages, Robock’s group has published results showing a wide variety of impacts from nuclear blasts.
That includes looking at ocean impacts, the first time this has been done, says team mem- ber Nicole Lovenduski, an oceanographer at the University of Colorado Boulder. When Toon first approached her to work on the pro- ject, she says, “I thought, ‘this sure seems like a bleak topic’.” But she was intrigued by how the research might unfold. She usually studies how oceans change in a gradually warming world, not the rapid cooling in a nuclear winter.
Lovenduski and her colleagues used a leading climate model to test the US–Russia war scenario. “It’s the hammer case, in which you hammer the entire Earth system,” she says. In one to two years after the nuclear war, she found, global cooling would affect the oceans’ ability to absorb carbon, causing their pH to skyrocket. That’s the opposite to what is hap- pening today, as the oceans soak up atmos- pheric carbon dioxide and waters become more acidic.
She also studied what would happen to
aragonite, a mineral in seawater that marine organisms need to build shells around them- selves. In two to five years after the nuclear conflict, the cold dark oceans would start to contain less aragonite, putting the organisms at risk, the team has reported2.
In the simulations, some of the biggest changes in aragonite happened in regions that are home to coral reefs, such as the southwest- ern Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. That suggests that coral-reef ecosystems, which are already under stress from warming and acidifying waters, could be particularly hard- hit during a nuclear winter. “These are changes in the ocean system that nobody really consid- ered before,” says Lovenduski.
And those aren’t the only ocean effects. Within a few years of a nuclear war, a “Nuclear Niño” would roil the Pacific Ocean, says Joshua Coupe, a graduate student at Rutgers. This is a turbo-charged version of the phenomenon known as El Niño. In the case of a US–Russia nuclear war, the dark skies would cause the trade winds to reverse direction and water to pool in the eastern Pacific Ocean. As during an El Niño, droughts and heavy rains could plague many parts of the world for as long as seven years, Coupe reported last December at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Beyond the oceans, the research team has found big impacts on land crops and food supplies. Jonas Jägermeyr, a food-security researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, used six lead- ing crop models to assess how agriculture would respond to nuclear winter. Even the relatively small India–Pakistan war would have catastrophic effects on the rest of the world, he and his colleagues reported on 16 March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Over the course of five years, maize (corn) production would drop by 13%, wheat
production by 11% and soya-bean production by 17% .
The worst impact would come in the mid-latitudes, including breadbasket areas such as the US Midwest and Ukraine. Grain reserves would be gone in a year or two. Most countries would be unable to import food from other regions because they, too, would be experiencing crop failures, Jägermeyr says. It is the most detailed look ever at how the aftermath of a nuclear war would affect food supplies, he says. The researchers did not explicitly calculate how many people would starve, but say that the ensuing famine would be worse than any in documented history.
Farmers might respond by planting maize, wheat and soya beans in parts of the globe likely to be less affected by a nuclear winter, says Deepak Ray, a food-security researcher at the University of Minnesota in St Paul. Such changes might help to buffer the food shock — but only partly. The bottom line remains that a war involving less than 1% of the world’s nuclear arsenal could shatter the planet’s food supplies.
“The surprising finding”, says Jägermeyr, “is that even a small-war scenario has devastating global repercussions”.
Alexandra Witze writes for Nature from Boulder, Colorado.
1. Jägermeyr, J. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA https://doi. org/10.1073/pnas.1919049117 (2020).
2. Lovenduski, N. S. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 47, 3 (2020). 3. Crutzen, P. J. & Birks, J. W. Ambio 11, 114–125 (1982). 4. Turco, R. P., Toon, O. B., Ackerman, T. P., Pollack, J. B. &
Sagan, C. Science 222, 1283–1292 (1983). 5. Schneider, S. H. & Thompson, S. L. Nature 333, 221–227
(1988). 6. Toon, O. B. et al. Sci. Adv. 5, eaay5478 (2019). 7. Yu, P. et al. Science 365, 587–590 (2019). 8. Reisner, J. et al. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos. 123, 2752–2772
(2018). 9. Robock, A., Toon, O. B. & Bardeen, C. G. J. Geophys. Res.
Atmos. 124, 12953–12958 (2019).
At a 2005 parade in Islamabad, Pakistan, a truck carries a Shaheen II long-range missile that can be armed with a nuclear warhead.
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The Washington Post
Monkey Cage AnalysisL
The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize
winner wants to ban nuclear
weapons. Here’s why the U.S.
is opposed.
By By Rebecca Davis GibbonsRebecca Davis Gibbons December 11, 2017December 11, 2017
On Sunday, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (On Sunday, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICANICAN) received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. ICAN) received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. ICAN
won the won the prizeprize “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and
for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.” Beatrice Fihn, the executive director offor its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.” Beatrice Fihn, the executive director of
ICAN, accepted the prize along with anti-nuclear activist ICAN, accepted the prize along with anti-nuclear activist Setsuko ThurlowSetsuko Thurlow, an 85-year-old survivor of the Hiroshima atomic, an 85-year-old survivor of the Hiroshima atomic
bomb.bomb.
But the United States — along the United Kingdom and France — reportedly But the United States — along the United Kingdom and France — reportedly snubbedsnubbed the prize winners by sending the prize winners by sending lower-lower-
ranked diplomatsranked diplomats instead of ambassadors to the ceremony. The United States and its close allies took a strong stance against the instead of ambassadors to the ceremony. The United States and its close allies took a strong stance against the
Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear WeaponsTreaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) that ICAN helped establish. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on (TPNW) that ICAN helped establish. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on
July 7, the TPNW prohibits its signatories from possessing, threatening the use of, transferring, testing or stationing nuclearJuly 7, the TPNW prohibits its signatories from possessing, threatening the use of, transferring, testing or stationing nuclear
weapons.weapons.
Why the strong opposition from the United States? U.S. officials have lobbed a variety of criticisms against the treaty, claimingWhy the strong opposition from the United States? U.S. officials have lobbed a variety of criticisms against the treaty, claiming
variously that it will have variously that it will have little effectlittle effect on disarmament, as no states possessing nuclear weapons plan to join; that it will on disarmament, as no states possessing nuclear weapons plan to join; that it will
undermineundermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; and that nuclear reductions through treaties negotiated among the nuclear the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; and that nuclear reductions through treaties negotiated among the nuclear
possessor states are the possessor states are the only feasibleonly feasible path toward disarmament. path toward disarmament.
But there is a more immediate, although rarely stated, concern: This new treaty could undermine the cohesion of NATO, anBut there is a more immediate, although rarely stated, concern: This new treaty could undermine the cohesion of NATO, an
explicitly explicitly nuclear alliancenuclear alliance..
The United States pressured NATO allies to oppose the treatyThe United States pressured NATO allies to oppose the treaty
In November 2016, before the U.N. General Assembly vote on a resolution to begin negotiations on a nuclear ban treaty, theIn November 2016, before the U.N. General Assembly vote on a resolution to begin negotiations on a nuclear ban treaty, the
United States sent an United States sent an informal diplomatic paperinformal diplomatic paper to its NATO allies outlining the ways in which the proposed treaty would to its NATO allies outlining the ways in which the proposed treaty would
undermine the stability of the international system, delegitimize nuclear deterrence, and complicate NATO planning andundermine the stability of the international system, delegitimize nuclear deterrence, and complicate NATO planning and
nuclear burden-sharing. It states, “We strongly encourage you to vote ‘no’ on any vote at the UN First Committee on startingnuclear burden-sharing. It states, “We strongly encourage you to vote ‘no’ on any vote at the UN First Committee on starting
negotiations for a nuclear ban treaty.”negotiations for a nuclear ban treaty.”
This pressure was successful; no U.S. allies voted in favor of the U.N. resolution, although the Netherlands abstained. In theThis pressure was successful; no U.S. allies voted in favor of the U.N. resolution, although the Netherlands abstained. In the
end, the Netherlands was the only U.S. ally to participate in negotiations, as its legislature end, the Netherlands was the only U.S. ally to participate in negotiations, as its legislature required it to do sorequired it to do so. U.S. pressure on. U.S. pressure on
NATO allies and partners surrounding this treaty continues.NATO allies and partners surrounding this treaty continues.
In September, In September, Defense NewsDefense News reported that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis sent a letter to Sweden — a NATO partner — reported that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis sent a letter to Sweden — a NATO partner —
threatening future U.S. military cooperation if Stockholm joins the TPNW.threatening future U.S. military cooperation if Stockholm joins the TPNW.
Should the United States be worried that NATO allies might join the treaty?Should the United States be worried that NATO allies might join the treaty?
Although the United States might still be concerned that its NATO allies might join the treaty in the future, here are threeAlthough the United States might still be concerned that its NATO allies might join the treaty in the future, here are three
reasons why current trends appear to work in favor of the U.S. position.reasons why current trends appear to work in favor of the U.S. position.
1) Most NATO members are putting the alliance first1) Most NATO members are putting the alliance first. First, most NATO member . First, most NATO member governmentsgovernments have spoken have spoken outout against against
the the treatytreaty, claiming it is at odds with their alliance commitments. One country of particular concern for the United States was, claiming it is at odds with their alliance commitments. One country of particular concern for the United States was
Norway. Under its labor coalition government from 2005 to 2013, Norway provided significant funding to ICAN and, in 2013,Norway. Under its labor coalition government from 2005 to 2013, Norway provided significant funding to ICAN and, in 2013,
held the first of three well-attended international held the first of three well-attended international conferences on the humanitarian effectsconferences on the humanitarian effects of nuclear weapons use. When this of nuclear weapons use. When this
government lost the election in 2013 to a conservative coalition, ICAN lost a major source of support. Many in the disarmamentgovernment lost the election in 2013 to a conservative coalition, ICAN lost a major source of support. Many in the disarmament
community hoped a return of a labor coalition would lead to Oslo’s support of the new treaty. In elections this September,community hoped a return of a labor coalition would lead to Oslo’s support of the new treaty. In elections this September,
however, the conservative coalition retained power. The Netherlands is another government in which there is some domestichowever, the conservative coalition retained power. The Netherlands is another government in which there is some domestic
support for the treaty, but its leaders have also support for the treaty, but its leaders have also declareddeclared they would not support it. they would not support it.
2) Russian aggression makes this a tricky time to talk about disarmament2) Russian aggression makes this a tricky time to talk about disarmament. A second factor dampening NATO. A second factor dampening NATO
enthusiasm for the TPNW is Russian aggression, especially since 2014. Annexing Crimea, destabilizing Ukraine, enthusiasm for the TPNW is Russian aggression, especially since 2014. Annexing Crimea, destabilizing Ukraine, cheatingcheating on an on an
arms control treaty, conducting arms control treaty, conducting provocativeprovocative militarymilitary activitiesactivities near NATO borders and issuing nuclear near NATO borders and issuing nuclear threatsthreats are all behaviors are all behaviors
that have NATO leaders thinking twice about rejecting nuclear weapons.that have NATO leaders thinking twice about rejecting nuclear weapons.
In interviews I conducted with disarmament advocates at the U.N. negotiations this summer for a In interviews I conducted with disarmament advocates at the U.N. negotiations this summer for a forthcoming articleforthcoming article, many, many
indicated that Russia’s resurgence meant the treaty’s timing was less than ideal. Indeed, the change within Europe on this issueindicated that Russia’s resurgence meant the treaty’s timing was less than ideal. Indeed, the change within Europe on this issue
is well illustrated by German behavior. In 2009 and 2010, Germany and a is well illustrated by German behavior. In 2009 and 2010, Germany and a handfulhandful of other NATO states of other NATO states wantedwanted to to discussdiscuss the the
removalremoval of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe. Earlier this year, in contrast, Germany of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe. Earlier this year, in contrast, Germany revealed revealed that it had conducted a study on that it had conducted a study on
whether it would be legal for the state to fund the British or French deterrent in exchange for protection. Talk of removing U.S.whether it would be legal for the state to fund the British or French deterrent in exchange for protection. Talk of removing U.S.
nuclear weapons from Europe has waned significantly, and in 2014 at the nuclear weapons from Europe has waned significantly, and in 2014 at the Wales SummitWales Summit and in 2016 at the and in 2016 at the Warsaw SummitWarsaw Summit,,
NATO reaffirmed its role as a “nuclear alliance.”NATO reaffirmed its role as a “nuclear alliance.”
3) Most people just don’t pay much attention to nuclear weapons policy3) Most people just don’t pay much attention to nuclear weapons policy. A final factor working against adoption of. A final factor working against adoption of
the treaty in NATO states is the continued low salience of nuclear weapons among the general population. The threethe treaty in NATO states is the continued low salience of nuclear weapons among the general population. The three
humanitarian conferences in 2013 and 2014 brought awareness of nuclear weapons effects to a new generation of diplomats andhumanitarian conferences in 2013 and 2014 brought awareness of nuclear weapons effects to a new generation of diplomats and
advocates, but to the average citizen, nuclear weapons probably remain Cold War relics. For example, a poll of Europeansadvocates, but to the average citizen, nuclear weapons probably remain Cold War relics. For example, a poll of Europeans
younger than 30 published in 2017 younger than 30 published in 2017 concludedconcluded that “this generation is not on the verge of mobilization regarding nuclear weapon that “this generation is not on the verge of mobilization regarding nuclear weapon
issues and does not expect to actively engage in it.” Without significant and widespread domestic pressure to join the treaty, it isissues and does not expect to actively engage in it.” Without significant and widespread domestic pressure to join the treaty, it is
unlikely that leaders would risk disrupting relations with their NATO allies.unlikely that leaders would risk disrupting relations with their NATO allies.
PollingPolling conducted on behalf of ICAN suggests that when asked about a conducted on behalf of ICAN suggests that when asked about a nuclear ban treatynuclear ban treaty, many , many European populationsEuropean populations are in are in
favor of it, but polls rarely ask if the participants had heard of the treaty before taking the survey or whether they consider thefavor of it, but polls rarely ask if the participants had heard of the treaty before taking the survey or whether they consider the
risk of nuclear weapons in their daily lives. Without some major change or incident putting nuclear weapons at the forefront ofrisk of nuclear weapons in their daily lives. Without some major change or incident putting nuclear weapons at the forefront of
the population’s attention — current tensions over North Korea’s nuclear program do not seem sufficient thus far — this appearsthe population’s attention — current tensions over North Korea’s nuclear program do not seem sufficient thus far — this appears
unlikely to change.unlikely to change.
ICAN has done important work in bringing global attention to the effects of nuclear weapons. All leaders should have a clearICAN has done important work in bringing global attention to the effects of nuclear weapons. All leaders should have a clear
understanding of the risks involved in maintaining such weapons. It seems doubtful, however, that the new treaty will beunderstanding of the risks involved in maintaining such weapons. It seems doubtful, however, that the new treaty will be
splitting the NATO alliance anytime soon, as geopolitical trends are leading to a greater reliance on nuclear weapons and thesplitting the NATO alliance anytime soon, as geopolitical trends are leading to a greater reliance on nuclear weapons and the
broader public appears to lack interest in this issue.broader public appears to lack interest in this issue.
Rebecca Davis Gibbons is a visiting assistant professor in the Government and Legal Studies Department at Bowdoin College.Rebecca Davis Gibbons is a visiting assistant professor in the Government and Legal Studies Department at Bowdoin College.
* 17 Comments
/
Democracy Dies in Darkness
Donald Trump thinks more countries should have nuclear weapons. Here’s what the research says. By Gene Gerzhoy and Nicholas Miller
April 6, 2016 at 4:00 p.m. EDT
According to Donald Trump, the United States should not try so hard to stop nuclear proliferation. On Sunday night, during a Republican town hall hosted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump declared that proliferation is “going to happen anyway.” And just a week earlier, Trump told the New York Times, “If Japan had that nuclear threat, I’m not sure that would be a bad thing for us.” Nor would it be so bad, he’s said, if South Korea and Saudi Arabia had nuclear weapons, too.
We can break down Trump’s assertions into two ideas: Proliferation is inevitable, and it is good for the United States — at least when its allies are the ones going nuclear. What can political science tell us about each of these beliefs?
It turns out that both propositions fly in the face of a wide range of recent scholarship.
Is nuclear proliferation inevitable?
Trump’s logic for this idea is based on his belief that the United States is weak and that past proliferation ensures future proliferation. Here’s what Trump told the Times about Japan: “If the United States keeps on … its current path of weakness, [Japan is] going to want to have [nuclear weapons] anyway with or without me discussing it.”
Trump also implied that South Korea and Japan would inexorably seek nuclear weapons — regardless of what the United States does — because so many countries have already gone nuclear. As he said to Anderson Cooper: “It’s only a question of time. … You have so many [nuclear] countries already.”
But as we show in a number of research articles, those assumptions don’t match the historical record. For the past 70 years, through mutually reinforcing policies — including security guarantees, troop deployments, arms sales, nuclear umbrellas and sanctions threats — U.S. administrations from both parties have inhibited nuclear proliferation.
When another country built nuclear weapons, the United States limited the repercussions by discouraging that country from conducting nuclear tests.
What about Trump’s belief that U.S. allies will inevitably seek nuclear weapons because the United States is economically and militarily weak? That doesn’t match the facts, either. The United States remains the world’s dominant military power — it spends three to four times as much on its military than China does, and it has the world’s most advanced nuclear arsenal. The United States also has a dynamic and growing economy, while its rivals’ economies are slowing or even declining.
But even when the U.S. economy was flagging, the government successfully prevented other countries from acquiring
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nuclear arms. The 1970s were a period of high inflation and low economic growth in the United States. Yet that’s when Washington launched some of its most determined and successful nonproliferation efforts, including founding the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, a global body that restricts the spread of sensitive nuclear technology, and passing laws that imposed mandatory nonproliferation sanctions, which have successfully deterred other countries from embarking on nuclear weapons programs.
Trump’s foreign policies would make his predictions come true
Although history suggests that proliferation is not inevitable, recent research on nonproliferation suggests that Trump’s proposed foreign policy might make it so.
Trump says he would scale back or entirely end U.S. alliance commitments unless our allies made major financial concessions. In his interview with the Times, Trump said that the United States “take[s] tremendous monetary hits on protecting countries” such as Japan, South Korea, Germany and Saudi Arabia. He also denounced the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty as “one-sided,” said that the United States doesn’t need to maintain forces in South Korea and described the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as “obsolete.”
But if those security institutions and military deployments disappeared, U.S. allies — including Japan and South Korea — might well pursue nuclear weapons of their own. Recent research shows that alliances are a powerful tool for preventing proliferation, both because they reassure states that their security will be protected in case of attack and because they give senior partners the leverage to restrain their allies’ nuclear ambitions. Research also demonstrates that the type of U.S. troop withdrawals Trump envisions have a history of prompting allies to consider developing their own nuclear weapons.
Consider the last time the United States had a president who was skeptical about nonproliferation and who tried to reduce U.S. commitments to its allies in Asia. As part of his Guam Doctrine — a plan to increase Asian allies’ military self-reliance — President Nixon withdrew 20,000 troops from South Korea. Famously, he also traveled to China to improve Sino-American relations. As a result, South Korea launched a covert nuclear weapons program, and Taiwan ramped up its own nuclear ambitions. So why didn’t they end up with nuclear weapons? The administrations that followed Nixon’s redoubled efforts to stop them.
Research does not support the idea that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable. But isolationist “America First” policies could prompt that spread. Defining U.S. strategic interests primarily in terms of monetary gain, and curtailing U.S. global engagement toward that end, would boost the probability that our allies would respond by going nuclear.
Would nuclear proliferation be good for U.S. interests?
What about Trump’s second proposition: that proliferation by our allies would be good for U.S. interests? This argument is based on the idea that nuclear-armed allies could help contain U.S. adversaries and enable the United States to save money. As Trump told Cooper, “I would rather see Japan having some form of defense, and maybe even offense, against North Korea.” And as he suggested, the United States can’t afford to protect Japan and South Korea — and therefore, “they have to pay us or we have to let them protect themselves.”
Reducing military commitments and letting allies build their own nuclear weapons might save money for the United States. But international relations scholarship suggests that allied proliferation would have broader negative repercussions. Among these would be declining U.S. influence. When nations gain their own military capabilities, they rely less on their allies and become less subject to their sway. And that can undermine a senior partner’s ability to hold its junior allies back from risky military actions.
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In other words, allowing or encouraging proliferation would worsen the “American weakness” that Trump decries.
Recent nonproliferation research underscores this proposition. Mark Bell shows that nuclear allies are likely to become more independent of their patrons and in some cases can develop more assertive foreign policies. And Francis Gavin and Matthew Kroenig show that the fear of declining influence was one reason why most American administrations vigorously opposed the spread of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear allies can also become security risks. Vipin Narang demonstrates that when weaker states gain nuclear weapons, they often seek to coerce their senior partners into intervening on their behalf by threatening to use nuclear weapons. That’s what Israel did at the height of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. That’s what South Africa did during its 1988 confrontation with Cuban forces in Angola. And that’s what Pakistan did in the midst of its 1990 military crisis with India.
Instead of relieving the United States of a military burden, as Donald Trump suggests, having more nuclear allies could increase the risk that the United States would get involved in conflicts that might turn nuclear.
Furthermore, were South Korea or Japan to begin developing nuclear weapons, their rivals might be tempted to launch preventive military strikes, which research suggests has been frequently considered in the past. The road to nuclear acquisition is often rocky and increases the likelihood of militarized conflict. For example, Soviet worries that West Germany would acquire nuclear weapons helped trigger the Berlin Crisis.
And if Japan or South Korea actually acquired nuclear weapons, we could possibly see a nuclear arms race in Asia. Japan’s neighbors, including South Korea, would fear resurgent Japanese militarism. North Korea would expand its nuclear capabilities. China would continue to expand its own nuclear arsenal.
Why haven’t we seen nuclear arms races before?
Nuclear “domino effects” have not been common historically. But that’s largely because of determined U.S. efforts to stop them.
Since the dawn of the nuclear age, the United States has pursued nonproliferation as a top policy priority. That includes sponsoring and enforcing the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Research suggests the NPT has been instrumental in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons, in part by coordinating states’ beliefs about one another’s nonproliferation commitments. To develop nuclear weapons, Japan and South Korea would need to violate or withdraw from the NPT. That could prompt U.S. allies and adversaries in other regions — including Saudi Arabia, Germany and Iran — to question the treaty’s viability and consider seeking their own nuclear arsenals.
Would this be so bad? After all, no two nuclear armed states have fought a major war with each other, and nuclear weapons have not been used in conflict since the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
But the conclusion that nuclear weapons produce peace is subject to debate. It’s true that there has been no war between major powers since 1945. But that may be due to other factors. The quantitative evidence linking nuclear weapons to a reduced risk of conflict is limited at best.
Further, theoretical and historical evidence suggests that nuclear accidents and miscalculations are likely. More countries with nuclear weapons would mean more opportunities for catastrophic nuclear mistakes.
So what’s the takeaway?
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A look at history shows us that nuclear proliferation is anything but inevitable. U.S. nonproliferation efforts have been surprisingly successful, even when the United States was weaker than it is today.
Without firm U.S. opposition to the spread of nuclear weapons — a policy implemented through “carrots” like alliances and “sticks” like sanctions — the world would probably have far more than nine countries with nuclear weapons. What’s more, research suggests that nuclear proliferation would reduce U.S. world influence, undermine global stability and increase the risk of nuclear war.
Gene Gerzhoy is a congressional fellow with the American Political Science Association.
Nick Miller is an assistant professor of political science and international and public affairs at Brown University.
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