Resolve in International Politics

Joshua Kertzer, Joshua D. Kertzer

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780691181080, 9780691171609
• eBook ISBN: 9781400883646
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why do some leaders and segments of the public display remarkable persistence in confrontations in international politics, while others cut and run? The answer given by policymakers, pundits, and political scientists usually relates to issues of resolve. Yet, though we rely on resolve to explain almost every phenomenon in international politics—from prevailing at the bargaining table to winning on the battlefield—we don't understand what it is, how it works, or where it comes from. Resolve in International Politics draws on a growing body of research in psychology and behavioral economics to explore the foundations of this important idea.

Joshua Kertzer argues that political will is more than just a metaphor or figure of speech: the same traits social scientists and decision-making scholars use to comprehend willpower in our daily lives also shape how we respond to the costs of war and conflict. Combining laboratory and survey experiments with studies of great power military interventions in the postwar era from 1946 to 2003, Kertzer shows how time and risk preferences, honor orientation, and self-control help explain the ways leaders and members of the public define the situations they face and weigh the trade-offs between the costs of fighting and the costs of backing down.

Offering a novel in-depth look at how willpower functions in international relations, Resolve in International Politics has critical implications for understanding political psychology, public opinion about foreign policy, leaders in military interventions, and international security.

CHAPTER 1.

Resolve in International Politics

Desire, wish, will, are states of mind which everyone knows, and which no definition can make plainer.

—William James (1950 [1890], p. 486)

On January 12, 2010, an earthquake struck the island nation of Haiti, reducing much of the capital city of Port-au-Prince to rubble. In the days afterward, as the casualty estimates grew by the hundreds of thousands and the international community turned its attention toward rebuilding the ravaged country, pundits pontificated on the uphill battle faced by a country that had suffered as many man-made disasters as natural ones. Bob Herbert, writing in the New York Times, struck an optimistic note: the Haitians would succeed, he argued, because they had shown “resolve among the ruins.”¹

Herbert is not alone in positing resolve and its synonyms—willpower, self-control, dedication, tenacity, determination, drive, and so on—as a solution to political problems. The collapse of the Mubarak regime in Egypt has frequently been attributed to the resolve of the protesters in Tahrir Square (“their determination is unshakeable,” noted the editor of the Egyptian Daily News), while the same attribute has been used to account for the opposite event in neighboring Libya, where Moammar Qadaffi clung to power despite months of NATO airstrikes and armed insurrection (“War is largely about willpower,” wrote an analyst for the DC-based Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “and Qadaffi currently holds the upper hand on this front”).² When militants from the Islamic State regained control of Ramadi in May 2015 despite being outnumbered by Iraqi Security Forces, American Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter blamed the Iraqis’ defeat on their lack of a “will to fight.”³ Writing several years prior in The Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer dismissed prophecies of American decline by arguing that “decline is a choice” rather than “a condition,” and that the slide toward multipolarity can therefore be reversed through “moral self-confidence and will.”⁴ Similarly, when the Canadian government was deliberating over whether to renew its deployment in Afghanistan in 2008, the independent panel it convened to issue recommendations released a report arguing that Canadians must exhibit “sustained resolve” in order to allow the mission to succeed.⁵

This is a book about resolve in international politics. Sometimes, scholars of world politics write books to draw attention to a crucial concept or phenomenon that has been problematically ignored by policymakers, or prematurely neglected by political scientists, showing us how we gain a much more vivid understanding of the world once we bring this concept “back in” to our models of world affairs. This is not one of those books, and resolve is not one of those concepts.

After all, resolve is already a ubiquitous ingredient in the study of international relations, used to explain everything from why states win wars to how they prevail at the bargaining table during foreign policy crises, thereby preventing conflict from breaking out.⁶ Rationalist approaches to the study of international conflict revolve around resolve: in a dispute between two actors, if both sides can be made aware of each others’ levels of motivation to fight, the less resolute side backs down before a crisis can even take place.⁷ Likewise, it is motivation, not muscle, that is used to explain why great powers fare so poorly in asymmetric conflict, and why the United States was never able to push the North Vietnamese to their “breaking point” during the Vietnam War.⁸

These types of arguments about resolve are made not just by those who study war, but also by those who wage it. Napoleon Bonaparte famously declared that “in war, the moral is to the physical as three to one,” while Marshall Foch, the commander of the French Ninth Army at the Battle of the Marne in 1914, went even further, proclaiming in his lectures at the École de Guerre that “in a material sense no battle can be lost.”⁹ This belief in the power of resolve formed a major part of the “cult of the offensive” that reigned supreme in military academies across Europe by the time of the First World War: prewar British training manuals pronounced that “moral force in modern war preponderates over physical force,” while in Germany in 1916, Paul von Hindenburg, then Chief of the German General Staff, declared that “victory will go to him who has the best nerves.”¹⁰

Given that exhortations of resolve routinely punctuate politicians’ press conferences, and invocations of resolve drive many of our theories of world politics, the aim of the book is not to “bring resolve back in,” but rather, to lend it microfoundations, to help us understand what resolve is, and how—and whether—it works. At its broadest level, the book is motivated by three puzzles: one conceptual, one methodological, and one theoretical.

First, what is resolve, conceptually? Is it related to an actor’s capabilities, as it was for the classic international relations theorists who wrote about the “national will” as a source of power?¹¹ Is it equivalent to an actor’s intentions or preferences, as in rational choice approaches that equate resolve with utility?¹² And if resolve is the same as capabilities or intentions, why should we go to the trouble of using the term in the first place? Building on a diverse array of literature across the social sciences, I sweep the conceptual minefield and suggest that resolve is something different altogether: a state of firmness or steadfastness of purpose, a “second-order volition” that is neither reducible to an actor’s intentions, nor isomorphic with its capabilities.¹³ Akin to the idea of willpower, resolve is not what an actor wants, but rather, the extent to which she maintains this intention despite contrary inclinations or temptations to back down.

Second, how should we study resolve? How do we know resolve when we see it? Precisely because resolve is not directly observable, I suggest that IR scholars have ended up in a paradoxical position, where although many of us would agree that resolve matters, we have had less success marshaling empirical evidence to test whether this assumption is true. As a result, although resolve is perhaps one of our favorite explanatory variables in our theoretical models, we tend to either explicitly avoid measuring it, or implicitly risk tautology by inferring it from the same outcomes we use it to explain: we assume, for example, that because the United States lost in Vietnam, it must have been less resolved than the North Vietnamese, and attribute the Iraqi Security Forces’ defeats at the hands of militants from the Islamic State to the absence of a “will to fight.” Studying resolve in this manner problematically turns the concept into a catchall residual category used ex post to explain outcomes we were unable able to explain ex ante, making it difficult to subject our theories about resolve’s effects to rigorous empirical testing. The problem is not that resolve has no explanatory power in these cases, but that we would not be able to tell either way.

In an era when politicians and pundits routinely posit a kind of “Green Lantern” theory of foreign policy in which every geopolitical challenge can be overcome with a sufficient application of willpower, this methodological challenge bears real political consequences. If we merely infer resolve from victory and irresolution from defeat, it becomes difficult to argue against the axiom that to win wars, one needs to be more resolved, or to push back against the claim suggested at General Mark Milley’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services committee in July 2015, that “one of the most central tasks that the new army has” is the question of how the United States can “teach the will to fight” to the foreign troops it supports.¹⁴

Third, where does resolve come from? In the context of military interventions, why do some leaders and publics display remarkable persistence—the British in the Malayan emergency, for example—while others cut and run, like the United States in Somalia in 1993? Although we often explain behavior and outcomes in international politics by pointing to variation in actors’ levels of resolve, we have trouble explaining this variation itself. In short, we lack microfoundations, and with them, a theory of resolve. The task I take up in this book is how to address these three lacunae, which are, course, interconnected: as long as we disagree on what resolve is, we will not be able to agree on how to measure it, and by gaining leverage on the determinants of resolve, we are better able to explore its consequences.

In this book, I address these challenges by offering a behavioral theory of resolve, suggesting that variation in time and risk preferences, honor orientation, and self-control shape how actors respond to the situations they face. In this sense, I argue we should think about resolve as an interaction. Contrary to its usual portrayal in IR, resolve is neither a simple cost-benefit calculation nor an invariant “type” of actor, but a contingent state, a function of both dispositional and situational causes, both traits and stakes, both mind and matter. Importantly, the dispositional characteristics I focus on here are among the traits that social scientists turn to when trying to explain willpower in our daily lives. Building on a growing body of research on willpower and self-control from elsewhere in the social sciences, I suggest that “political will” is more than just a metaphor or figure of speech, in that the characteristics that behavioral decision-making scholars turn to when modeling our tendencies to choose carrots over cheesecake, take gambles, and pick fights with people who bump into us, also spill over into the political domain, and can tell us something about why certain types of actors are more or less sensitive to different types of costs of war. In fact, it turns out that dispositions matter so much that it is difficult to understand how we respond to conflict without them: how we think about time and risk, how we feel about honor, and how much perseverance we display in our daily lives all shape how much resolve we display in political contexts.

In this sense, this is a book about the political psychology of international politics, showing how we gain a richer understanding of global affairs when we focus not just on the macro-structural forces “shaping and shoving,”¹⁵ but also on the properties and characteristics of actors themselves. In positing that characteristics or attributes from our daily lives spill into the political domain and can tell us something about international affairs, the book is also part of a broader movement in IR scholarship pushing back against the notion of international politics as an autonomous sphere of inquiry.¹⁶ Perhaps paradoxically, much of the progress in IR theory over the past 40 years has come from the discipline chipping away at its own distinctiveness: just as earlier work showed that politics does not stop at the water’s edge and that domestic politics bleeds into the international realm, my aim here is to go a step further, and illustrate some of the ways in which the personal spills over into the political.

Like the structural realists they sought to supplant, the rationalist approaches that have been prominent in mainstream IR over the past several decades have tended to privilege structure over agency, based on a “methodological bet” that greater theoretical progress can be made in International Relations by focusing on environmental features rather than actor-level characteristics.¹⁷ Although this tendency has fostered many rich and remarkable contributions, it has also stymied our attempts to understand phenomena like resolve, frequently reducing it to an actor’s costs of war, and leading to a number of both empirical and conceptual conundrums. Looking at how dispositional features moderate the effects of situational factors is critical in explaining how two actors can face the exact same situation, but respond in strikingly different ways. As the British historian James Joll put it when reflecting on the causes of the First World War, “it is only by studying ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Resolve in International Politics
• Chapter 2: An Interactionist Theory of Resolve
• Chapter 3: Experimental Microfoundations for Resolve: I
• Chapter 4: Experimental Microfoundations for Resolve: II
• Chapter 5: Resolve in Great Power Military Interventions, 1946–2003
• Chapter 6: Conclusion: Taking Resolve Seriously
• Appendix A: Supplementary Theoretical Materials
• Appendix B: Supplementary Empirical Materials
• Bibliography
• Index