New Issues in International Crisis Management

Gilbert R. Winham

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429721830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A comprehensive overview of the state of crisis management in international affairs, this book focuses primarily on the U.S.-USSR relationship. For most of the postwar period, the U.S. superiority in nuclear weapons shaped the political structure within which international crises occurred. This edge began to deteriorate by the late 1970s, leading to a new and potentially more dangerous structure within which the superpower rivalry is now conducted. Arguing that the shifting nuclear balance has created a new dimension for crisis management, the contributors analyze such issues as the informal norms of diplomatic behavior that have evolved during the extended superpower rivalry, the tendency of both superpowers to engage in activities that progressively reduce crisis stability, and various concrete measures such as risk reduction centers that might enhance the current system for crisis management. The book also includes case studies of crisis management among non-superpowers. Taken together, these papers address the important question of how human control can be maximized in situations of international crisis.

1
Introduction

Gilbert R. Winham

In 435 B.C. the Greek city of Epidamnus, a colony of Corcyra suffering internal unrest and external hostilities, appealed for military assistance from its mother country. It was rebuffed. It took its case to Corinth; and the Corinthians, motivated in part by hatred of Corcyra, which was in turn a colony of Corinth, agreed to come to the assistance of Epidamnus. The Corcyreans reacted violently to this action, and hostilities commenced between Corinth and Corcyra.

In the ensuing brief struggle, Corcyra appealed to Athens for assistance. The Athenians, recognizing Corcyra's strategic position and not wanting the Corcyrean navy to pass into Corinthian hands, forcibly prevented Corinth from defeating Corcyra. The Corinthians regarded the Athenian action as a cause for war, and a breach of the treaty between Athens and the Peloponnesians.

Anticipating Corinthian hostility, the Athenians took the defensive action of insisting that Potidae—a Corinthian colony subject to Athenian rule—dismantle its naval fortification. The Corinthians attempted to thwart this action, and hostilities again resulted. The Corinthians carried their grievances to Sparta, and together with other allies who feared Athens, tried to convince Sparta that the Athenians had broken the thirty year truce between them. The Spartans deliberated, and then voted the treaty had been broken and declared war on Athens: " . . . not so much because they were influenced by the speeches of their allies as because they were afraid of the further growth of Athenian power" (Thucydides, 1954: 87). So began the Peloponnesian War, an event which Toynbee described as the "breakdown" of the Hellenic Civilization.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated with his wife in Sarajevo, Serbia. This action inflamed public opinion in Austria-Hungary. Austrian leaders, who had long felt Serbia's presence exacerbated the internal threat to the Austrian Empire from Slavic nationalism, seized on the incident as a pretext to suppress Serbia. After nearly a month of internal deliberations and diplomacy, on July 23, 1914, Austria delivered an exceptionally strong-worded ultimatum to Serbia.

Austria-Hungary acted on the strong encouragement of Germany. Its actions, however, were opposed by Russia, which saw itself as the defender of Slavic interests in Southeast Europe. This pattern of antagonism was not new. Five years earlier, with German support, Austria had annexed Bosnia-Herzogovina over the strong opposition of both Serbia and Russia. The Bosnian crisis had humiliated Russia, and left the Russians with the resolve to increase their military preparedness and to decrease their diplomatic isolation. At the opposite extreme, the earlier crisis motivated Germany to recommend a belligerent policy to Austria-Hungary in 1914.

Serbia responded to the Austrian ultimatum on July 25,1914, accepting most conditions. Meanwhile Germany, having miscalculated Russian resolve and the support Russia would have from its allies France and Britain, vacillated in its support of Austria-Hungary. However, control over events was quickly lost. Military leaders in all capitals—sensing war was imminent—began urging their political leaders to mobilize forces, which in the technology of the day was tantamount to a declaration of war. Russia commenced military preparations against Austria-Hungary.

On July 31, believing Russia to be mobilizing, Germany activated its own mobilization plans and dispatched an ultimatum to Russia. The ultimatum was rejected the following day, and Germany declared war on Russia. In response, France commenced mobilization. On August 2, pursuant to an inflexible military strategy (Schlieffen Plan), the German army invaded Luxembourg and one day later, invaded Belgium. France and Britain quickly declared war, and commenced hostilities. The resulting war killed over eight million soliders, wounded about twenty million more, and devastated Europe.

A more recent case of crisis produced an entirely different outcome. On October 15, 1962, the President of the United States was presented with photographic evidence that the Soviet Union was placing intermediate range nuclear missiles in Cuba. American intelligence sources estimated the missiles would be operative in seven to ten days, after which they could strike most locations in the United States. The Soviet action represented an unexpected and dramatic bid to shift the strategic balance of power. This was unacceptable to the U.S. Government.

The motivation for the Soviet action lay in the perception that the balance of power had turned sharply against them. Despite widely publicized claims in the United States of a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union, U.S. satellite reconnaissance in 1961 confirmed that the Soviets lacked sufficient ICBMs to provide a credible retaliatory capability against the United States. After pondering the implications of this information, the U.S. Government informed the Soviet Union that it knew of the latter's weakness, in an effort to restrain Soviet Cold War diplomacy. This ended over a half-decade of highly-successful strategic deception by the Soviet Union. The Soviet action in Cuba was an attempt to reverse a deteriorating strategic situation brought about by the collapse of the missile gap myth, and by the increased military expenditures of the U.S. Government after 1960.

Despite the obvious danger of precipitating a war between the superpowers, the United States quickly determined it would take military action to effect an early withdrawal of the missiles. In a now-celebrated example of crisis management, the American Government carefully deliberated the alternatives of a naval quarantine or an air strike. On October 24 the United States initiated a quarantine. Soviet ships carrying missiles declined to challenge the quarantine and turned back, but not before several tense encounters between Soviet submarines and American patrol vessels.

U.S. attention then turned to the missiles already in Cuba, which would be operational shortly. On October 27, a Soviet ground-to-air missile destroyed a U.S. reconnaissance plane over Cuba. Amid sharply escalating tension, the United States announced it would take military measures to safeguard reconnaissance flights, and it recalled 24 troop carrier squadrons to active duty. On October 28, just as the U.S. Government was preparing to consider new measures, an agreement was reached: the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw all offensive missiles from Cuba, in return for the United States' pledge not to invade Cuba. The crisis was over.

The previous three cases are examples of international crises. Crises are not uncommon in the international system, but few result in full-blown war. Many do not involve hostilities at all. Thus the Cuban missile crisis is more representative than either the 1914 case or the Peloponnesian War. However, when war does occur the results can be devastating. Moreover, the knowledge that few crises result in war provides little reassurance when contemplating the prospects for crisis between superpowers armed with nuclear weapons. Clearly, any hostilities today that involved nuclear weapons would produce calamitous results for the parties involved, and possibly for the entire human race. The incomprehensible cost of nuclear war has enormously escalated the need to manage international crises below the threshold of war. In this sense crisis management is an unavoidable subject.

Crisis and crisis management have been defined in academic literature, and are reviewed in this volume (Richardson, 1987). The requirements for successful crisis management are also well analyzed (George, 1984) and the literature may have gone as far as it can go in prescribing rules and mechanisms for avoiding violent conflict in crisis situations. The problem, however, is that national leaders often do not want to avoid crises and they are willing to manipulate the risk inherent in a crisis to promote political interests. Crises can create change, and change is sometimes seen as necessary. The incentive for policy-makers to pursue crisis diplomacy is the need to preserve the interests of the nation, and these interests occasionally come into sharp conflict with the interests of other nations.

Crisis management involves difficult decision-making. The basic dilemma is that there would be no crisis if parties were willing to forego their objectives, but this can involve unacceptable costs to nations and/ or their leaders. The central problem of crisis management has been well summarized by Snyder and Diesing (1977: 10), namely, "... to achieve an optimum blend of coercion and accommodation in one's strategy, a blend that will both avoid war and maximize one's gains or minimize one's losses." Put in these terms, crisis management is nothing more than an extreme form of diplomatic behavior, for all diplomacy necessarily involves judgments about how much one should contest, or accommodate, the interests of other states.

There is enormous variety in the crises which have occurred in the international system, which limits the capacity of analysts to establish generalized rules for crisis management. Fortunately, scholars have responded to this empirical challenge. Since the early 1970s, several major studies have examined international crises on a comparative case study basis. These works include George and Smoke (1974), Snyder and Diesing (1977), Lebow (1981), various articles by Brecher (esp., Brecher and Winfield, 1982), and a government analysis published by Hazlewood et al. (1977). Findings from these studies provide a context for any current examination of crisis management.

As one might expect, there was substantial variation in the cases included in these studies. For example, using a "low threshold" definition of crisis, Hazlewood et al. examined 289 cases involving the U.S. Government over the period 1946-76; while Lebow, using a higher threshold, selected 26 cases of international crisis from the 20th century. Despite the differences in sampling techniques, it is apparent that most of the incidents that these scholars described as crisis did not end in war. This reinforces the point that crisis is a common and inescapable part of international politics, and that crisis management is a necessary tool of diplomatic statecraft.

The case study literature provides useful advice on three important questions about international crises: (i) why they arise; (ii) how they are resolved (short of war); and (iii) what main problems are associated with their resolution. On the first point, the variety in types of crises makes it difficult to pinpoint any one set of variables as being a general cause of crisis. Crisis can arise in situations ranging from a fundamental military challenge to the balance of power, to an insignificant border dispute that escalates into a major confrontation. Common factors in such different circumstances are not easy to find. However, Lebow's analysis of the aggressive policy behavior that usually accompanies international crises suggests this behavior arises more out of the domestic needs of the parties than the opportunities that might be presented in the external arena. As Lebow (1981: 276) puts it: "we discovered a good opportunity for aggression (i.e., a vulnerable commitment) in only about one third of our cases but found strong needs to pursue an aggressive foreign policy in every instance. This suggests that policymakers . . . are more responsive to internal imperatives than they are to external cues."

Lebow's findings go some distance to explain why compromise may be difficult to achieve in crisis situations. Parties in crisis usually focus on the external actions taken by their adversaries; they are rarely in a position to appreciate, let alone to accommodate, the internal needs of their opponents. The main policy pursued in crises is deterrence, especially crises involving superpowers, but deterrence is more directed to limiting the external options of an adversary than to understanding the constraints or pressures that might make those options necessary in the first place. There have been some examples of parties in crisis taking account of the other side's political position, such as the effort by the U.S. Government to avoid humiliating the Soviets in the Cuban missile crisis. However, these examples stand essentially as exceptions, and the more general rule may be that of an imbalance between the largely internal motivations that lead to crisis, and the largely external means by which they are handled in the international system.

The second question is how crises are resolved. In a study of sixteen crises, Snyder and Diesing (1977: 248) found that backing down was a more common means of resolving crisis than compromise. As they put it: "In 9 or 10 of our fourteen crisis cases that did not lead to war, the accommodative process was mostly one way—i.e., one party did virtually all the accommodating, after realizing it was the weaker in bargaining power. Most settlements, in other words, were a clear win for the stronger party, with sometimes a face saving concession being awarded to the loser to make it possible for him to accept defeat." These findings are also consistent with those of Lebow and with Wilkenfeld and Brecher (1982), The latter authors note that in crises in which the United States or the USSR are involved, decisive outcomes (victory or defeat) occur more than twice as often as ambigious outcomes (compromise or stalemate). The relative absence of compromise in such cases makes even more stark the pressures faced in crisis situations.

The mechanisms of accommodation in cases that ended decisively was usually an "imbalance of bargaining power" (Snyder and Diesing, 1977: 248) that emerged during the crisis. As crisis clarifies the situations for the parties, the weaker party comes to recognize its weakness, and it backs off rather than pursue war. As elaborated by Snyder and Diesing, bargaining power is a function of resolve, which in turn is determined by relative military strengths and the interests engaged in the confrontation. With regard to military strength as being a determinant of bargaining power, the question arises whether nuclear weapons, which are unusable in any conventional sense, might nevertheless confer an advantage in bargaining power. On this point, Snyder and Diesing (1977: 462) state: "... there are theoretical and some empirical grounds for believing that absolute quantitative superiority in nuclear power can be a bargaining asset in crises, although how valuable an asset is unclear."¹ The authors further note that although some national decision-makers might be indifferent toward nuclear weaponry, whether this would cancel out the benefits that nuclear superiority might confer in a crisis is "problematical."

The third question deals with the problems associated with crisis resolution. Many analysts note that perception and information processing are often faulty in crisis decision-making, and that parties are subjected to a great number of "ambiguous signals" (Bell, 1979: 166). This results in an unrealistic view of the adversary's position and interests, and can also lead to an unrealistic view of the costs of war. It takes time to establish an accurate assessment of the adversary, which is usually done through analysis of behavior during the crisis. A further problem is that of the threat of loss of control. Lebow has noted (1981: 264): "In crisis, nations may have to demonstrate willingness to go to war in order to prevent war." This is a behavior Schelling (1966: 92-125) has identified as a competition in risk taking. This kind of crisis diplomacy always entails two kinds of risks: one is that the parties will at some point decide war is inevitable, and then, like Tsar and Kaiser in 1914, commence preemptive actions to put themselves in the best possible position in the impeding conflict; the other is that the parties will lose control of the situation and inadvertently stumble into war. How much difference actually exists between these two processes may be conjectual. With regard to loss of control, Snyder and Diesing report that although decision-makers usually feared (sometimes quite intensely) that a crisis they were involved in might go out of control, in fact these fears were highly exaggerated. This assertion does not seem to enjoy wide support in the literature. Instead, most analyses have viewed loss of control as a serious problem of crisis management, and they feel this problem has grown more severe with the increasing complexity of modern military machines.

There are indications that crisis management between the superpowers may have become more problematic in the 1980s, which which calls for increased attention to this subject. Over the period of the Cold War a fundamental shift has occurred in the military balance of power between the United States and the USSR. For the first two decades of the Cold War, the United States had an overwhelming strategic superiority over the Soviet Union. Although the U.S. nuclear monopoly was broken as early as 1949, it was not until the mid-1960s that the Soviets were able to threaten the U.S. homeland with a significant nuclear strike.

For most of the 1960s real military expenditures rose in the United States. However, in response to the public reaction to the Vietnam War, U.S. real military expenditure declined substantially over the period 1968-76. Meanwhile military expenditures of the USSR continued to grow by about two to four percent per year, and the Soviets embarked on an ambitious program to build a navy and increase their ICBM forces. The result was that by the early 1970s, it was assumed the forces of both sides possessed essentially equivalent capabilities, and by the late 1970s public opinion in the United States was inflamed over an alleged "window of vulnerability" posed by Soviet heavy ICBMs. What had occurred over this period was a fundamental change in the military balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union. The reason this change was not more evident is that the international system had been bipolar in political terms, resulting in part from the U.S. policy of exaggerating the Soviet threat and from the Soviet policy early in the Cold War of concealing Soviet strategic weakness.

What is the effect of this shift in the prospects for crisis management? The answer depends somewhat on how one views history and the operation of the balance of power. In the theory of balance of power, it is often assumed that roughly equivalent power between individual nations (or alliances of nations) produces stability and preserves the independence of nations from each other (e.g., Morgenthau, 1961: 174). Because a balance of power system was coterminus with long periods of international peace since 1648, and especially in the 19th century in Europe, it was assumed that the system produced peace as well. Organski (1961) has disputed this interpretation of history. He claims that longer periods of peace in the international system were due not to a balance of power among contending nations, but by a preponderance of power exercised by a leading nation and its compliant allies. This argument led Organski to posit a theory of war that was dependent on power shifts in the international system. War occurred when a disatisfied nation (the "challenger") grew strong enough to challenge the status quo established by a preponderant power. As Organski (1958: 297) put it: "A balance of power does not bring peace. On the contrary, the greatest wars of modern history have occurred at times when one of these challengers most nearly balanced the power of the preponderant nations or when through miscalculation a challenger thought that its power was as great as that of its rivals."

Organski's analysis has worrisome implications for the current superpower relationship. What creates even greater concern is the apparent support given to the theory from sources as disparate as public officials and behavioral scientists. In a widely quoted speech in 1980, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger (1981: 279) stated that "... it can no longer be seriously denied that the overall military balance is shifting sharply against us." Kissinger argued this circumstance created an unprecedented vulnerability, and it created a period of maximum danger for the country in the modern period. Kissinger's fear was not of an imminent nuclear attack, but rather of "... an increased Soviet willingness to run risks in local conflicts." As he put it: "Rarely in history has a nation so passively accepted such a radical change in the military balan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• PART ONE THEORY AND PRACTICE
• PART TWO SUPERPOWER RELATIONS
• PART THREE NUCLEAR CRISIS MANAGEMENT
• PART FOUR CRISIS MANAGEMENT IN REGIONAL CONTEXT
• About the Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index