Naval Diplomacy in 21st Century

A Model for the Post-Cold War Global Order

Kevin Rowlands

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138624245
• eBook ISBN: 9780429865251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book offers a detailed investigation of naval diplomacy, past and present, and challenges the widely accepted Anglo-American school of sea power thought.

Despite the acknowledgement of the importance of the threat or use of force in the pursuit of policy since the dawn of strategic thought, the utility of seapower in operations other than war is poorly understood and articulated. Theorists have invariably viewed seapower in peacetime through the lens of hard power effects such as coercion and deterrence. Commentaries on engagement, interoperability and the forging of friendships are largely conspicuous by their absence. This book considers how all these strands of international politics can be better understood for use in the 21st century.

The book explains and defines naval diplomacy, with existing theoretical frameworks being critically analysed. It reviews over 500 incidents from the post-Cold War era, drawing on this empirical evidence to determine that naval diplomacy remains a potent means of 21st century statecraft. It finds that existing understanding of naval diplomacy is insufficient and offers an alternative model, drawing on basic communication and stakeholder theories. The implications of the book relate directly to national security: naval deployments could be more effectively targeted; foreign activity at sea could be better understood and, if necessary, countered; finally, the ability of non-state actors to support national interests from the sea could, potentially, be better harnessed.

This book will be of much interest to students of naval power, maritime security, strategic studies and International Relations.

1
Defining naval diplomacy

What is diplomacy?

If contemporary naval diplomacy is little understood, it is perhaps because it is a subset of a broader topic which despite a long history and great study remains remarkably ill-defined. The common perception of diplomacy is one of formal state-to-state communication. That is certainly the meaning given in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.¹ Martin Griffiths and Terry O’Callaghan echo many in the field of international relations when they state that diplomacy is ‘the entire process through which states conduct their foreign relations’;² but if that is the case, what exactly is meant by foreign relations? The same authors talk of diplomacy as ‘the means for allies to co-operate and for adversaries to resolve conflicts without force’, which does go some way to answering the question, but such an explanation rather limits the scope of what diplomacy is and what it has to offer. It is not simply codified discourse.

A broader view situates diplomacy at the very heart of international relations, and the theorists John Baylis, Steve Smith and Patricia Owens offer what at first reading appears to be a reasonable contemporary definition:

In foreign policy it refers to the use of diplomacy as a policy instrument possibly in association with other instruments such as economic or military force to enable an international actor to achieve its policy objectives. Diplomacy in world politics refers to a communications process between international actors that seeks through negotiation to resolve conflict short of war. This process has been refined, institutionalized and professionalized over time.³

These writers are careful not to limit diplomacy to recognized states and they place it alongside ‘other instruments’ of policy though, interestingly, they still see it as separate and discrete. Yet, like Griffiths and O’Callaghan, they narrow the field again by connecting it directly to conflict resolution. International actors may indeed rely on diplomatic means to resolve conflict but that is just one part of the story. Similarly, the assertion that diplomacy operates ‘short of war’ surely needs to be challenged. Paul Sharp, a leading figure in the study of diplomatic theory, neatly counters this:

When force is resorted to, diplomacy need not necessarily come to an end.… In the age of total war diplomacy continued, with even the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki having their communicative components spelled out by unofficial and third party contacts.⁴

Relating diplomacy to the exercise of power is one way to potentially clarify its role and purpose. If Joseph Nye’s description of power as ‘the ability to influence the behaviour of others to get the outcomes one wants’⁵ is accepted, then perhaps a more accurate assessment would be to refer to diplomacy not in terms of conflict resolution but as a communications process that seeks to further the interests of an international actor, whatever those interests or whoever that actor might be.

Of course, many observers acknowledge that diplomacy has grown to become a ‘profession’; perhaps it always was. By extrapolation, a profession requires professionals, and these we call diplomats. Paul Sharp states that ‘we can find an uneasy consensus around the idea that diplomacy is whatever diplomats do, but it quickly falls apart again around the question of who are the diplomats’.⁶ He investigates the notion of diplomacy and diplomats in the formal sense – that is, as international actors on the world stage – and concludes that quite what diplomacy is remains a mystery. However, he does acknowledge that at a practical level diplomacy consists merely of people doing the normal things of human interaction such as bargaining, representing, lobbying and, of course, communicating that we find in all walks of life.⁷ In this informal sense we are all diplomats, though some of us may be better at it than others.

Niche diplomacy

Viewed this way, diplomacy can be exercised in a near-infinite number of ways, adapted as required to best suit the circumstances of the case. Some actors, be they individuals, organizations or states, by virtue of their particular strengths, weaknesses, interests and culture may favour one or more methods over another and they can develop a methodology to serve their particular purpose.

Andrew Cooper coined the term ‘niche diplomacy’ in the mid-1990s and, at state level, he discussed a range of ‘middle powers’ and how they differ in their diplomatic approach to international relations. For example, he explained how Canada tends to apply low-key institution-building policies while Argentina forges economic ties with its neighbours to gain influence and Turkey emphasizes its strategic geographical position. Of non-state actors Cooper has more to say:

a wide range of NGOs, especially those with an interest in issues such as human rights and the environment, such as Amnesty International and Green-peace, have worked to secure their own niches in international relations…. Greenpeace has a greater influence on world policy than, say, the government of Austria.⁸

Cooper’s thesis is compelling. Diplomacy need not be limited to recognized states; international bodies such as the European Union and United Nations certainly participate in diplomacy, as do de facto administrations such as Hezbollah or Hamas or even the Taliban and ISIL/Daesh which, while not universally recognized as legitimate governments, have or do control territory and play a role on the world stage. Whether Greenpeace and Amnesty International fall into a similar category is debatable, but the fact that they have global strategies, operate across state boundaries and influence events is not.

For the purposes of this book, a simple definition is adopted. Diplomacy is assumed to be a communications instrument used in power relationships to further the interests of the international actors involved. Actors with particular relative strengths will seek to use them; it would be counter-intuitive to think otherwise. It is a logical deduction, therefore, that military force may be a niche which some actors will seek to exploit for diplomatic purposes.

The diplomatic use of military force

The supposed raison d’être of military forces, war fighting, is just one extreme manifestation of their utility. Joseph Nye describes a ‘spectrum of behaviour’ in international relations along which sit different types of power. Under ‘hard power’, within which he tends to place military action, comes coercion and inducement, while under ‘soft power’, which he defines as ‘getting others to want the outcomes you want’,⁹ comes agenda setting and attraction. Initially a reader may assume that military forces are absent in the exercise of soft power. However, Nye is sufficiently astute to note that there is overlap.¹⁰ Addressing the role military forces in particular, he states:

The military can also play an important role in the creation of soft power. In addition to the aura of power that is generated by its hard power capabilities, the military has a broad range of officer exchanges, joint training and assistance programs with other countries in peacetime.¹¹

Alongside Nye’s ‘spectrum of behaviour’, and closely associated with the widely accepted concept of the ‘spectrum of conflict’,¹² there is a corresponding spectrum along which military force can be used to support political objectives. In operations other than war this spectrum includes such activities as coercion, deterrence, reassurance, humanitarian relief, stabilization and peace support. In the absence of war fighting, whether in total or more limited conflicts, it is the activities along this spectrum which generally provide effective day-to-day employment for the world’s armed forces. The American scholar Robert Art captures the essence of this situation, particularly the ‘hard’ end, well:

Military power can be wielded not only forcefully but also ‘peacefully’. […] To use military power forcefully is to wage war; to use it peacefully is to threaten war. Only when diplomacy has failed is war generally waged. Mainly in the hope that war can be avoided are threats usually made. For any given state, war is the exception, not the rule, in its relations with other countries, because most of the time a given state is at peace, not war. Consequently, states use their military power more frequently in the peaceful than the forceful mode.¹³

Coercive diplomacy: deterrence, coercion and compellence

Notwithstanding Nye’s soft power thesis, Art directly links the peaceful role of military power with the use of threat. From Sun Tzu through Machiavelli to the present day, much has been written on the utility of threatened force and it is important to distinguish between the positive and negative variants of this: coercion and deterrence. The difference is perhaps summed up best by Gordon Craig and Alexander George:

Whereas deterrence represents an effort to dissuade an opponent from undertaking an action that he has not yet initiated, coercive diplomacy attempts to reverse actions which have already been undertaken by the adversary.¹⁴

Both coercion and deterrence are methods by which interests may be pursued without resort to all-out conflict. British Defence Doctrine has adopted very similar definitions for the terms and emphasizes their positive and negative connotations by connecting coercion with the word persuade and deterrence with the word dissuade.¹⁵ However, some commentators use coercion as an umbrella term to cover both deterrence (the negative) and compellence (the positive) variants, and thus coercion and compellence can sometimes be read to mean the same thing.¹⁶ Whether coercion is the opposite of deterrence or whether it describes both deterrence and compellence is debatable, but the academic pursuit of any difference between them inevitably results in a concentration on the ends rather than the ways and means of conflict resolution in an international relationship. At the military level, the threat or use of force may be enacted in exactly the same way, for example by the forward positioning of troops, whether it is meant to coerce/ compel or deter.

The main body of contemporary academic literature on coercion, deterrence and compellence stems from the bipolar world of the last century. Deterrence, particularly nuclear deterrence, most often comes to the fore. An influential work of the period is Deterrence and Strategy by the French soldier-scholar Andre Beaufre. Beaufre discusses the ‘laws of deterrence’ and defines the concept quite simply: ‘The object of deterrence is to prevent an enemy power taking the decision to use armed force’.¹⁷ The effect Beaufre describes must be psychological, requiring the recipient of the ‘threat’ to calculate risk, determine that the likelihood of escalation is so high and the impact so unacceptable that the decision to use armed force is never taken. Given the nuclear backdrop at the time of his writing, it is unsurprising that Beaufre talks of ‘fear’ being engendered through deterrence.¹⁸ Deterrence theory dominated politico-military strategy and major p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Defining naval diplomacy
• 2 Theory through time
• 3 Surveying the historical record
• 4 The post-Cold War context
• 5 Pax Americana and US hegemony at sea
• 6 The return of great power rivalry
• 7 Towards a new model for 21st-century naval diplomacy
• 8 Applying naval diplomacy in today’s world
• Conclusion
• Appendix: chronological index of incidents of naval diplomacy
• Index