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When Do Power Shifts Lead to War?

24September2012

My article “Known Unknowns: Power Shifts, Uncertainty, and War,” (co-authored with Alexandre Debs) is now officially forthcoming in International Organization. Here is the abstract:

Large and rapid power shifts resulting from exogenous economic growth are considered sufficient to cause preventive wars. Such power shifts are rare, however. Most large and rapid shifts result from endogenous military investments. In this case, preventive war requires uncertainty about a state’s investment decision. When this decision is perfectly transparent, peace always prevails. A state’s investment that would produce a large and rapid power shift would prompt its adversaries to launch a preventive war. Internalizing this, the state is deterred from investing. When investments may remain undetected, however, states may be tempted to introduce large and rapid shifts in military power as a fait accompli. Knowing this, their adversaries may strike preventively even without unambiguous evidence about militarization. In fact, the more effective preventive wars are, the more likely they will be launched against states that are not militarizing. Our argument restricts the role of commitment problems and emphasizes the role of imperfect information as causes of war. It also provides an account of why powerful states may attack weaker targets suspected of military investments even in the absence of conclusive information. We illustrate our theory through an account of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

categories: IR theory, publications, research, war. | tags: , .

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New Course: U.S. Strategy after the Cold War

24April2012

I am teaching a seminar on “U.S. Strategy after the Cold War” during the Yale 2012 summer session. Here’s a short description of the course:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has enjoyed a preponderance of power in the international system. With a quarter of the world’s GDP; a military one order of magnitude greater than any other; a defense budget close to half of global defense expenditures; a blue-water navy superior to all others combined; a chance at nuclear superiority over its erstwhile foe, Russia; and a defense R&D budget that is almost twice the total defense expenditures of its most obvious future competitor, China; the United States has unprecedented relative power. Although several other states would likely be able to avoid defeat in case of a U.S. attack, none comes anywhere near its surplus of usable, globally-deployable power. The United States thus has incomparable freedom projecting its power around the world. It has no peer competitors, and none are likely to emerge in the near future.

What are the main threats facing the United States in this new environment? How should the United States behave in these different circumstances? What should U.S. grand strategy be? What, if any, are the constraints on American power? What are the challenges to American power? Are peer competitors rising?

The purpose of this course is to address each of these questions, encouraging students to form their own views on contemporary international politics and U.S. grand strategy. Readings encompass the theoretical and historical aspects of the post-Cold War world, including U.S. grand strategy and foreign policy, the evolution of power trends, and the recent history of armed conflicts.

If you want to know more, you can find the syllabus here.

categories: IR theory, national security, nuclear weapons, teaching, war. | tags: , .

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The Lonely Superpower

21January2012

Tomorrow’s “Internationalist” section of the Boston Globe features an essay by Thanassis Cambanis on my recent International Security article. Here’s the lead:

After decades of nuclear brinkmanship, Americans felt profound relief when the Cold War ended. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989 transformed the world almost overnight from a battleground between two global giants — a bipolar world, in scholarly parlance — to a unipolar world, in which the United States outstripped all other powers.

In foreign policy circles, it was taken for granted that this dominance was good for America. Experts merely differed over how long the “unipolar moment” could last, or how big a peace dividend America could expect. Some even argued that the end of the arms race between Moscow and Washington had eliminated the threat of world war.

Now, however, with a few decades of experience to study, a young international relations theorist at Yale University has proposed a provocative new view: American dominance has destabilized the world in new ways, and the United States is no better off in the wake of the Cold War. In fact, he says, a world with a single superpower and a crowded second tier of distant competitors encourages, rather than discourages, violent conflict–not just among the also-rans, but even involving the single great power itself.

In a paper that appeared in the most recent issue of the influential journal International Security, political scientist Nuno P. Monteiro lays out his case. America, he points out, has been at war for 13 of the 22 years since the end of the Cold War, about double the proportion of time it spent at war during the previous two centuries. “I’m trying to debunk the idea that a world with one great power is better,” he said in an interview. “If you don’t have one problem, you have another.”

Read the whole thing here.

categories: IR theory, national security, public-affairs commentary, research, war. | tags: , , .

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The Flawed Logic of Attacking Iran

17January2012

I have a piece today with Alexandre Debs in Foreign Affairs titled “The Flawed Logic of Attacking Iran,” in which we reply to Matthew Kroenig’s essay in the January/February issue, where he argued it is “Time to Attack Iran.” Here is what we wrote:

Matthew Kroenig’s argument for preventive military action to combat Tehran’s nuclear program — “Time to Attack Iran” (January/February 2012) — suffers from three problems. First, its view of Iranian leaders’ risk calculations is self-contradictory. Second, it misreads nuclear history. And third, it underestimates the United States’ ability to contain a nuclear Iran. When these problems are addressed, it is clear that, contrary to what Kroenig contends, attacking Iran is not “the least bad option.”

Kroenig’s view of the way Iranian leaders are willing to take on risks is deeply incongruous. In his view, a nuclear bomb will push Tehran to block U.S. initiatives in the Middle East, unleash conventional and terrorist aggression on U.S. forces and allies, and possibly engage in a nuclear exchange with Israel. This would mean Iranian leaders are reckless: given the United States’ conventional and nuclear superiority, any of these actions would provoke considerable retaliation from Washington. And, of course, a nuclear exchange with Israel would invite annihilation. At the same time, Kroenig suggests that Tehran would remain remarkably timid after a preventive strike from the United States. Presented with clear redlines, Iran would not retaliate against U.S. troops and allies or attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz. Kroenig’s inconsistency is clear: If Iranian leaders are as reckless as he seems to believe, a preventive strike would likely escalate to a full-blown war. If they are not, then there is no reason to think that a nuclear Iran would be uncontainable. In short, a preventive attack on Iran can hardly be both limited and necessary.

Kroenig’s argument misreads nuclear history at least three times. First, he writes that a targeted preventive strike would likely wipe out the nuclear program in Iran, as strikes against Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 did in those countries. These comparisons are misleading. Recent research based on captured Iraqi documents demonstrates that the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osirak reactor, near Baghdad, actually spurred a covert nuclear weapons program at other sites. Indeed, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein remained determined to revive his nuclear program until he was removed from power in 2003. What prevented him from achieving that goal was the decade-long U.S.-led containment regime put in place after the 1991 Gulf War. The Iraqi case suggests that any attacks that do not depose the Iranian regime, too, would cause it to accelerate its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Kroenig’s prescription might therefore precipitate the very outcome he is trying to avoid.

As for Syria, Damascus’ nuclear program was just budding. The country boasted only one exploratory facility, which was shattered easily by a single aerial bombing carried out by Israel in September 2007 under the cloak of night. But Iran’s nuclear program is much more advanced and is already of industrial proportions. Any attack on Tehran would involve destroying numerous nuclear-program and air-defense targets, making it far more costly and less likely to succeed than the Israeli raid against Syria’s Deir ez-Zor reactor. More, Iran’s advanced program reflects Tehran’s greater resolve to develop nuclear capabilities, so, post-attack, Tehran would be ever more likely to double down on developing a weapon. Furthermore, although Kroenig hopes that a targeted strike would destabilize the Iranian regime, there is no basis for such optimism. Being a civilian, parliamentary, oil-rich theocracy, Iran is relatively stable. Put simply, a preventive strike against Iran can hardly be both limited and effective.

Kroenig misreads history again when he considers a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel. In his view, they “lack nearly all the safeguards that helped the United States and the Soviet Union avoid a nuclear exchange during the Cold War.” Yet the United States and the Soviet Union avoided a nuclear exchange even during the hottest crisis of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, at a moment in which Soviet retaliatory capability was still uncertain, there were no clear direct communication channels between the two leaderships, and Soviet experience managing their nuclear arsenal was no longer than five years. Moreover, the historical record shows that even young and unstable nuclear powers have avoided nuclear escalation despite acute crises. Pakistan and India avoided nuclear war in Kargil in 1999, as well as after the terrorist attacks targeting the Indian parliament in 2001 and Mumbai in 2008. When national survival is at stake, even opaque and supposedly “irrational” regimes with nuclear weapons have historically behaved in prudent ways.

Kroenig’s final abuse of history comes when he posits a cascade of nuclear proliferation across the Middle East in response to an Iranian bomb. He mentions Saudi Arabia, and implies that Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey might all follow suit. Yet none of these states, which can count on U.S. support against Iran, nuclearized in response to Israel’s nuclearization (against which they cannot count on U.S. backing, mind you). And more generally, the United States has a successful record of preventing clients from acquiring nuclear weapons in response to a regional enemy, such as South Korea and Japan in response to North Korean nuclear acquisition. (Washington agreed with Pakistani nuclearization in response to India.)

Taking the long view, Kroenig’s argument reveals an unwarranted skepticism about Washington’s ability to contain a nuclear Iran. This skepticism is all the more surprising considering Kroenig’s work on the benefits of U.S. nuclear superiority. Existing U.S. security guarantees, based on current capabilities, give allies little incentive to nuclearize. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are among the largest recipients of U.S. military support, and Turkey is a member of NATO. Reinforcing U.S. ties with friends in the region would be easier, cheaper, and less risky than attacking the Iranian nuclear program.

Instead, the United States should heed the lessons of the North Korean nuclearization. Not so long ago, Washington had to face an aggressive regime in Pyongyang intent on developing nuclear weapons. The United States rejected a preventive strike in 1994 for fear that the outcome would be worse than its target’s nuclear acquisition. This was the right decision. After North Korea acquired nuclear weapons, none of the consequences that Kroenig’s argument would predict materialized. U.S. security guarantees contained Pyongyang and persuaded South Korea and Japan not to acquire nuclear weapons. Nobody believes that the world is better off with a bomb in North Korea — but the record shows that it hasn’t brought the end of the world, either.

Military action against Iran would be a profound strategic miscalculation. For all the talk of retrenchment, the U.S. military might remains the most powerful in the world, and it can successfully minimize consequences of an Iranian bomb, should one come to pass, by containing Tehran’s ambitions, dissuading regional proliferation, and providing security assurances to its allies.

categories: national security, nuclear weapons, public-affairs commentary, war. | tags: .

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Courses Spring 2012

9January2012

Syllabi for my courses this semester are up in the current courses page. I am teaching a seminar on military power and a lecture course on the balance of power (links to syllabi in PDF).

categories: education, teaching, uncategorized. | tags: , .

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A Reply to Josh Busby

4January2012

Josh Busby engages my recent article “Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity Is Not Peaceful” in a thoughtful post over at Duck of Minerva. He raises a number of interesting questions, which I hope will help clarify some of the points I made in the article. Specifically, I’d like to address three criticisms he offers:

First, Busby takes issue with my “premise” that unipolarity is not peaceful.

It’s not so much a premise of the argument as an empirical observation about the past two decades, which, as I point out in the piece, represent a disproportionate amount of the time the United States has been at war: “the first two decades of unipolarity, which make up less than 10 percent of U.S. history, account for more than 25 percent of the nation’s total time at war” (UA, 11).

In fact, Busby sees in my argument a claim “that unipolarity is not at all peaceful and much less peaceful than other periods” (my emphasis). But this is explicitly not what I argue. As I wrote: “Rather than assess the relative peacefulness of unipolarity vis-à-vis bipolar or multipolar systems, I identify causal pathways to war that are characteristic of a unipolar system and that have not been developed in the extant literature” (UA, 12). It should be clear that my piece makes no comparisons between unipolarity and other types of systems in terms of the level of conflict in each of them. Instead, it shows how the conventional view (largely based on Wohlforth’s work) that unipolarity is peaceful misses some important conflict-producing mechanisms particular to a unipolar world.

Still, Busby asks:

“How do we square this account by Monteiro of a unipolar world that is not peaceful (with the U.S. at war during this period in Iraq twice, Afghanistan, Kosovo) and Pinker’s account which suggests declining violence in the contemporary period?”

This question, according to Busby, leads to another: is my measure of peacefulness — the number of years great powers spend at war — the most adequate to conduct an “adequate test of the peacefulness or not of unipolarity”?

For Busby, a more adequate measure would be “whether the system as a whole is becoming more peaceful under unipolarity compared to previous eras, including wars between major and minor powers or wars between minor powers and whether the wars that do happen are as violent as the ones that came before.” This would indeed by a more complete test of the view that unipolarity is not peaceful. It is, alas, beyond the scope of my article, in which I wanted to achieve a much more modest goal: to show that unipolarity is far less peaceful than the conventional wisdom has it.

(Let me bracket the question of whether a conclusive test such as the one Busby proposes is at all feasible. It would certainly pose some major problems, given the need to disentangle the effects of polarity from those of other trends, such as democratization, the capitalization of the U.S. military, etc., as well as the need to separate those wars that occur within one type of polarity — e.g., Vietnam during bipolarity — from those systemic wars that themselves change the polarity of the system — e.g., World War II, from multipolarity to bipolarity. In any case, the important point is that such a comparison is well beyond the goals of my article.)

My argument that unipolarity makes room for particular conflict-producing mechanisms — involving the unipole in case it does not disengage from the world — is indeed compatible with different assessments of the overall level of conflict in the system, as well as of the lethality of those wars.

As Busby points out, it may well be that the deadliness of wars is declining. But this does not necessarily stem from polarity. I think it doesn’t. As I wrote in the article: “Some scholars might argue that wars in the post–Cold War world have been less lethal than those of the past. … It is difficult, however, to parse the role of polarity in a decrease in lethality. … Furthermore, part of the explanation for this decrease in lethality may lie in the U.S. decision to develop a highly capitalized military aimed at minimizing casualties” (UA, 19 fn. 48). In fact, other developments in the world make the recent incidence of war involving the United States particularly puzzling: “This sharp increase in both the percentage of great power years spent at war and the incidence of conflict is particularly puzzling given that the current unipole — the United States — is a democracy in a world populated by more democracies than ever before. In light of arguments about how democracies are (1) better able to solve disputes peacefully, (2) select only into those wars they can win, and (3) tend to fight shorter wars, this should mean that the United States would spend fewer years at war than previous nondemocratic great powers” (UA, 19 fn. 47).

In sum, in “Unrest Assured,” I am not making comparisons among different types of polarity, merely highlighting that unipolarity is not an unmitigated boon in terms of producing peaceful outcomes, rather it encourages particular types of conflict, namely those present in the mechanisms I lay out in the paper. I also make no points about the lethality of recent wars, which may well have been decreasing for factors unrelated to polarity.

One last clarification point before moving on, Busby notes that “In Monteiro’s world, disengagement would inexorably lead to instability and draw in the U.S. again (though I’m not sure this necessarily follows).” Nowhere in the paper do I argue that the instability created by disengagement would draw the unipole in again. Rather, I argue that dominance is not the only strategy of the unipole, which may also opt for disengagement, and lay out the conditions why, after a likely initial period of dominance, the unipole may decide to disengage from the world (UA, 21-22). After it does, it may subsequently decide to return to a strategy of dominance, but I do not make any arguments on the likelihood, much less the inexorability, of a return to dominance.

Second, Busby disagrees with my core argument that unipolarity is behind whatever level of conflict we have experienced during the post-Cold War era.

Busby writes:

“[I]n Monteiro’s view, the U.S. power position alone, even where the U.S. seeks to defend the status quo, is enough to generate conflict with “recalcitrant” minor powers. Here, “recalcitrance” seems to be cover for some domestic-level variables, either quixotic or idiosyncratic leadership characteristics by the likes of Saddam and Milosevic or attributes of authoritarian regimes. I’m not sure that U.S. power is doing the work for Monteiro. … Rather, I suspect that aspects of U.S. domestic politics … intersecting with domestic attributes of “recalcitrant” regimes are doing much of the heavy lifting. If we were or [sic] become different (practice restraint, focus on the home economic front for a bit) and if the regimes we face become less recalcitrant (post Arab-spring if we’re lucky, post-Kim Jong Il if we’re really lucky and something different in Iran if we’re really, really lucky), then unipolarity is not structurally determined to be violent.”

The main issue at work in this criticism is the role of domestic variables in my theory. If Busby is right, conflict is not being driven by unipolarity, but by domestic variables. Change their values and you’d have a peaceful unipolar world a la Wohlforth. Here’s the relevant section in my piece:

“The structure of the international system does not entirely determine whether or not a minor power accommodates the unipole. Still, structure conditions the likelihood of accommodation in two ways. To begin, a necessary part of a strategy of dominance is the creation of alliances or informal security commitments with regional powers. Such regional powers, however, are likely to have experienced conflict with, or a grievance toward, at least some of its neighboring minor powers. The latter are more likely to adopt a recalcitrant posture. Additionally, by narrowing their opportunities for regional integration and security maximization, the unipole’s interference with the regional balance of power is likely to lower the value of the status quo for these minor powers. As the literature on the ‘value of peace’ shows, countries that attribute a low value to the status quo are more risk acceptant. This argument helps explain, for example, Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 and Syria’s and Egypt’s decision to attack Israel in 1973. In both cases, aggressor states knew that their capabilities were significantly weaker than those of their targets. They were nonetheless willing to run the risk of launching attacks because they found the prewar status quo unacceptable. Thus, for these states, the costs of balancing were lower relative to those of bandwagoning.”

As is clear from this excerpt, both systemic and domestic values play a role in determining which minor powers become recalcitrant. Systemic variables matter because the presence of a unipole — directly or indirectly, as a security sponsor — in any given region will have an impact on the prospects of states with which it is not aligned. The United States, by siding with some regional powers — e.g., Saudi Arabia and South Korea — hinders the prospects of others — e.g., Iran and North Korea — making peace less valuable for them. At the same time, to the extent these states have a history of grievance towards, or conflict with, the clients of the United states, they will have a hard time integrating and therefore will feel the predicament of extreme self-help in particularly acute ways.

Does this mean that domestic variables play no role in these relationships? Of course not. Domestic variables, such as Busby’s “quixotic or idiosyncratic leadership characteristics by the likes of Saddam and Milosevic or attributes of authoritarian regimes,” or whatever, may play a role. Since they are not determined by the distribution of power in the system, I left them out, however. The important part from where I look at it is that the configuration of unipolar alliances in the regions in which it engages reinforces these tensions that end up leading to the emergence of recalcitrant minor powers.

Perhaps the story would be more complete if I would also have addressed domestic variables, but I don’t think we need those to get the mechanism up and running. Frankly, I think this (i.e., determining which states will become recalcitrant minor powers) is an area where structural- and domestic-level theories are likely to reach similar conclusions. The more variables we throw in, the more complete our explanations will be. Of course Milosevic’s temperament, Saddam Hussein’s leadership style, or Kim Jong-il’s well-documented foodie habits may have played a role in driving conflict. But the fact is that the United States refrained from attacking any of the states they led while they had a great-power sponsor. As Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s foreign minister, lamented immediately after the war, “We don’t have a patron anymore. … If we still had the Soviets as our patron, none of this would have happened” (quoted in UA, 28) I think he was right. Polarity was the operative transformation in placing them within the reach of U.S. military power.

Third, Busby sees more of a connection between my theory and Walt’s balance of threat theory than I acknowledge in the piece.

So, what about balance of threat theory? How does my theory relate to Walt’s? For Walt, a state is a threat when it fares highly on an composite index of: strength/power, geographical proximity, offensive capabilities, and intentions. My point is that the strength/power and offensive capabilities of the unipole are such that, when combined with the limited capability other states have to devise its intentions, they make the United States a grave threat for any state in a region in which U.S. forces (or security guarantees) are present.

So the variation you would expect from Walt’s theory in terms of who is a threat and who is not is wiped out when it comes to relations between non-aligned minor powers and a unipole present in their region. Does this mean that Walt is wrong? No. It means that unipolarity is a situation in which Walt’s theory is not particularly useful because the unipole’s power, as it were, trumps the other dimensions that would produce variation in Walt’s world. (Colin Elman has posited this before, as I note in UA, 24, fn. 63.)

I hope to have addressed Busby’s excellent criticisms.

categories: IR theory, national security, publications, research, war. | tags: , .

Posted at 8:15 pm

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Why We Keep Fighting

29December2011

I have a guest post today on Steve Walt’s blog marking the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union this week. I’m copying it here:

Twenty years ago today, the Soviet Union was dissolved. Two years before, Moscow had dropped its geopolitical ambitions, allowing the Berlin Wall to fall peacefully. The United States had won the Cold War.

Since then, U.S. military power is unmatched. Because enemy airplanes rarely come close to U.S. jets, no active American pilot has achieved the five kills necessary for the honorific title of “ace”. Likewise, the U.S. Navy is larger than all the other seventeen high-seas fleets combined. The two most effective non-U.S. land forces (the British and French armies) are roughly the size of the smallest branch of the U.S. military machine, its Marine Corps.

Has this unparalleled power allowed the United States to enjoy the much-touted peace dividend it earned by winning the Cold War? Is the United States better able to impose its will peacefully today than when Stalin blocked Berlin or Khrushchev placed nuclear missiles in Cuba?

Many seem to think so. Writing in the New York Times a week ago, Joshua Goldstein and Steven Pinker argued that “war really is going out of style.” In what concerns the United States, however, nothing could be further from the truth. The last two decades, less than ten percent of U.S. history, account for more than 25 percent of the nation’s total wartime. Between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the Soviet demise, great powers were involved in wars on average one every six years. Since it became the sole superpower, the United States has been at war for more than half the time, or twelve out of twenty two years.

These wars in Kuwait (1991), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001-present), and Iraq (2003-11) all resulted from other states not complying with U.S. demands. When threatened with U.S. military action, Slobodan Milosevic did not fold, the Taliban did not give in, nor did Saddam Hussein roll over. In contrast, the Soviet Union always took U.S. threats seriously. Despite its tremendous might, it refrained from taking West Berlin and withdrew its missiles from Cuba.

Why were U.S. threats heeded by the Soviet bear but now disregarded by secondary powers? Two explanations are commonly offered. The first is that the United States is militarily overextended. The second is that while the Soviets were evil but rational, today’s enemies are irrational.

Both these views are wrong. The war in Afghanistan does not prevent the United States from badly damaging any non-nuclear state that defies it while suffering relatively little itself. And the U.S.’s new enemies are no less rational than its old ones. If U.S. threats were able to deter shoe-slamming “we will bury you” Khrushchev and his hundreds of intercontinental nuclear missiles, why is the United States unable to stop North Korea and its handful of rudimentary warheads — not to mention Iran, which has none?

Because threats are not the problem. Backed by the mightiest military in history, U.S. threats are eminently credible. In fact, the absence of another great power capable of deterring Washington gives the U.S. a free hand abroad. As Saddam’s foreign minister Tariq Aziz lamented after Iraq’s humiliating defeat in the Gulf War, “We don’t have a patron anymore. If we still had the Soviets as our patron,none of this would have happened.”

The problem lies elsewhere. During the Cold War, mutually assured destruction kept the peace. The prospect of an unprovoked U.S. attack, which would ultimately lead to the U.S.’s own destruction, was unthinkable. But now that the Soviet Union is gone, America’s enemies feel vulnerable even if they comply with Washington’s demands. They know that the United States has the wherewithal to take them down if it so decides, so they are unlikely to accept any U.S. demands (to abandon a nuclear program, for example) that would leave them in a position of even greater weakness. This is what explains U.S. involvement in so many “hot” wars since the Cold War ended.

As the world’s sole superpower, the United States is often seen as an aggressive behemoth. To make its threats effective, we are told, it must restrain itself through a less aggressive military posture, a commitment to multilateral action, or even a pledge to eschew regime change. But even if it does all this, as long as U.S. power remains unmatched, Washington will continue to face difficulties having its way without resorting to war. This should come as no surprise. It follows from the unparalleled power of the United States.

[UPDATED: I have corrected a typo pointed out by reader Finn below, to whom I thank.]

categories: IR theory, national security, public-affairs commentary, war. | tags: , , .

Posted at 12:43 pm

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Why Unipolarity Is Not Peaceful

29December2011

I have a new article titled “Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity Is Not Peaceful” in the latest issue of International Security. Here is the abstract.

The United States has been at war for thirteen of the twenty-two years since the Cold War ended and the world became unipolar. Still, the consensual view among international relations theorists is that unipolarity is peaceful. They base this view on two assumptions: first, the unipole will guarantee the global status quo and, second, no state will balance against it. Both assumptions are problematic. First, the unipole may disengage from a particular region, thus removing constraints on regional conflicts. Second, if the unipole remains engaged in the world, those minor powers that decide not to accommodate it will be unable to find a great power sponsor. Placed in this situation of extreme self-help, they will try to revise the status quo in their favor, a dynamic that is likely to trigger conflict with the unipole. Therefore, neither the structure of a unipolar world nor U.S. strategic choices clearly benefit the overall prospects for peace. For the world as a whole, unipolarity makes conflict likely. For the unipole, it presents a difficult choice between disengagement and frequent conflict. In neither case will the unipole be able to easily convert its power into favorable outcomes peacefully.

To read the whole thing, you can download the PDF (ungated) here.

categories: IR theory, national security, publications, research, war. | tags: , .

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Job Talk Questions

10November2011

It’s job talk season again and so I’ve been going to a few. Overall, there seem to be four types of questions being asked of candidates. Since their degree of preparation varies across types, I thought it might be useful to discuss them.

1. Poking holes. These are the questions most candidates prepare for. How does the theory work? How do the methods stand to scrutiny? How strong is the inference drawn? What about this alternative explanation? And this endogeneity problem? These are all common questions, which all candidates seem somewhat prepared to address. They come mostly from people in the same subfield in which the candidate works — people who know the ins and outs of the question and literature the candidate is addressing.

2. Pushing boundaries. These are questions about how well the story travels. How does your story about X apply to Y? How does a story about one country, or region, or timeframe, or outcome, or whatever apply to another? You’ll get a bunch of these from people in your field, and most candidates prepare for these. But you’ll also get a few of these from people outside your field — people you may think know nothing about your area of expertise but still have to vote for your appointment. These latter questions are often harder because they stem from parallels you wouldn’t necessarily establish. So it’s harder to prepare for these — unless you can persuade your friends across subfields to attend your practice talks.

3. Going deeper. These are questions aimed at finding out how much you really know (and care) about the topic you study. These are the best questions at separating the geek from the intellectual. So you have a theory about some phenomenon out there in the world that you test using your cutting-edge methodology. Well, someone will ask you to elaborate on how your theory explains case A, which they find particularly important. You better know your cases well. Answers about how your theory is probabilistic, not deterministic, how there are always outliers, how a game is a stylized abstraction of the strategic interaction at work, etc., usually don’t reveal deep knowledge and, therefore, do not bode well.

4. What’s in it for me? Often someone who knows little about your expertise area will ask you some version of the same taxing question your grandmother has been asking you: What’s in it for me? Why should we care? What have we learned? What is the broad meaning of your work? What, in sum, can people who don’t care particularly about your neck of the woods learn from your work? You may get this from one person only, but this is the question in the minds of many in the room — many who, again, do not have a particular interest in your area and want to know why your work is relevant.

categories: academia, advising, education. | tags: , .

Posted at 2:36 pm

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The Twelve Rules of Policy-Relevant Scholarship

20July2011

This is a copy of my guest-post on Dan Drezner’s blog. Back in June, I spent a week in DC participating in the IPSI workshop ran by the Bridging the Gap Project. Here are twelve most important things I learned about how scholars can bridge the gap with policymaking, distilled as rules:

1. There are many ways of influencing policy, both direct and indirect. You can exert direct influence by working for the government or for a think-tank. You can also exert indirect influence by publishing blog posts (either as a guest or regular blogger), opeds, policy articles, and doing media. Create a strategy that includes both types of influence.

2. The dichotomy between scholarship and policy is largely false. Most political science topics have policy implications, so think through a topic in scholarly and policy terms. These often cross-polinize. The key is to choose research topics that allow for double-dipping: topics that have both scholarly import and policy relevance. Then produce scholarly and also policy-oriented products.

3. There are four types of products academics can provide to policymakers. Framework: what’s the appropriate theory or historical analogy to understand recent events? Data: what are the patterns and what should the ground truths be? Forecast: what are the possible scenarios? Advice: what should we do?

4. Be willing to be wrong. Even if it is a probabilistic judgment, accept the risk of taking a position.

5. Don’t be shy, but don’t be a pain. Put your stuff out, send feelers to think-tanks and journals, but make it short. Any pitch — for a piece, an oped, a research project — that takes more than two minutes to read is too long. Be persistent but not insistent (i.e., don’t pitch the same idea twice to the same place).

6. Keep a twin-track curriculum. Think-tanks offer opportunities for non-resident fellows, in which you are asked to join a few events every year, write a report, or join a taskforce. This enables you to have a twin-track curriculum in which you always have an academic and a policy affiliation.

7. There are six qualities policymakers appreciate. Be engaging, constructive, future-oriented, discreet, concise, and have pity on those who have to make decisions. And remember, you’re an expert, not a pundit.

8. Don’t think of a policy piece as a lesser version of a research piece. Policy pieces are not dumbed-down research pieces. They must have specific policy recommendations. Seek to understand what policymakers need before you seek to be understood.

9. Maximize different networks. Don’t just network in academia. Try to build networks in media, think-tanks, and government. Attend events and follow up.

10. Get institutional cover and buy in. Give your bosses a sense of why it is that you want to engage in policy debates, and of how this is a plus for your institution. If there’s a chance that something you wrote or said is controversial and will make a splash, give your boss a heads-up in advance.

11. Look for moments in which your specialty is in high demand. There will come a moment when everyone will want to know about your specialty. You should be prepared for when that opportunity arrives. If possible, take the obituary-writer approach: write drafts of possible blog posts, opeds, or policy pieces addressing a problem you see brewing. Then send them out fast.

12. Pick your battles and mix vanilla with habanero topics. If you only do vanilla topics you’ll get bored, but if you only do habanero topics you’ll get tired and also potentially lose your credibility. Aim for the sweet spot between being an organic intellectual and becoming seen as a wacko.

categories: academia, advising, public-affairs commentary, writing. | tags: , , .

Posted at 7:15 am

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