Power in Uncertain Times

Strategy in the Fog of Peace

Emily Goldman

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804777353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Seguridad nacional

The United States faces a complex and rapidly shifting international security landscape. Forces of ethnic and religious extremism, diffusion of information technologies, proliferation of mass destruction weapons, and newly empowered non-state actors are just some of the trends whose complex interplay will produce unanticipated threats. Yet, while the future is more uncertain today than during the Cold War, we currently have a window of opportunity for shaping a more favorable future. The challenge for the United States, and for all states, is not just to manage uncertainty but also to prevail in spite of it.

To help address that challenge, this book examines strategic choices in uncertain times and analyzes how different strategies position states to compete, manage risk, and prevail despite uncertainty. It investigates how past and current political and military leaders have responded to uncertain strategic and technological environments, and assesses the consequences of those strategies for their state's power and influence.

1 THE FOG OF PEACE

THE UNITED STATES faces a bewildering array of strategic challenges today. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dominated headlines in recent years, but the problems posed by North Korea, nuclear Iran, rising China, resurgent Russia, and spreading violent extremism vie for attention and resources. The perceptual reference points and decision frameworks that guided national security decision making since the mid-twentieth century are no longer meaningful in today’s world. The strategic environment has been characterized in national security documents and debates over the past decade as uncertain and chaotic. A more accurate descriptor is “complex.” There is no dominant threat, no single strategic challenger, no clear enemy. Relative to the Cold War context that forged and honed our strategic constructs, we now confront a greater number of threats, greater diversity in the types of security actors that can threaten our interests, and a more interdependent world in which rapidly emerging technologies quickly diffuse and are exploited by others in unanticipated ways.¹

Geopolitical developments had already overturned Cold War givens before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Ethnic and religious extremists threatened peace. Nonstate actors, newly empowered by globalization and the information revolution, threatened to disrupt the information systems and critical infrastructure that undergird modern society. Proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons technologies and expertise were diffusing the capability to cause massive damage and eroding prevailing international norms constraining the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Technological advances associated with an information technology revolution were, beginning to transform military competition and warfare. Strategic planners always confront uncertainty as they prepare for conflict “(1) that will occur at some indeterminate point in the future, (2) against an opponent who may not yet be identified, (3) in political conditions which one cannot accurately predict, and (4) in an arena of brutality and violence which one cannot replicate.”² Complexity exacerbates these normal difficulties because resources must be allocated, personnel must be trained, and plans must be forged in the absence of a strategic rival.

This book examines how leaders respond in a complex and uncertain world. The overwhelming power of the United States is in many ways unprecedented; but the challenges America faces are not so different from those faced by others when long-standing rivals collapsed, alignment patterns shifted, and new types of threats emerged. Some opted to react to present challenges at the expense of preparing for future unforeseen contingencies; others reversed these priorities. Some tried to shape the structure of the international system; others reactively adapted. Some crafted strategies to be robust across a range of contingencies; others adopted focused strategies. During times of rapid technological change, some acted to capture the opportunities of first-mover advantages; others postponed major investments in new and emerging technologies. These same choices confront the United States today.

QUESTIONS ADDRESSED, WHY THEY ARISE

How do states respond when they face no strategic rival and have no overarching threat? What strategies do they pursue, and what explains their strategic choices? What are the risks and consequences of different strategies for power, influence, and preparedness for war?

These questions lie at the heart of this book. They arise because they have not received adequate attention by scholars. The focus of inquiry has been on critical turning points in world history leading up to the outbreak of war or after wars end. There is a robust literature on the causes of war and sources of instability when threats are high or escalating.³ Realist scholarship and balance-of-power theory explain why states balance, buck-pass, or bandwagon when threats are rising. The literature on deterrence, crisis management, escalation, alliance formation, and postwar institutional arrangements is also broad and deep.

In between the run-ups to major wars are longer periods when the threat is not clear or well understood. Threat uncertainty is not uncommon. It follows after the disappearance of a traditional or familiar threat. This usually occurs after a major war, but rivals may implode, as the Soviet Union did, or become partners through peaceful reconciliation. Absent a clear enemy, a state may face a number of potential threats over the horizon, no threats even at a distance, or novel, diffuse, unfamiliar threats in the near term and long term. In each case, no “burning house” exists to focus on.⁴

The field has focused disproportionately on a narrow slice of world history—periods of high threat—giving short shrift to the rest of the time, when states operate in the fog of peace. The extant literature tells us far less about the strategies adopted under these conditions and the consequences that follow.⁵ Yet the problems facing strategic planners when the threat is low differ from those they confront when the threat is high. The logic of strategic choice also differs. In uncertain times, the problem is not how to respond to a specific threat. The challenges are to identify and understand a range of threats, anticipate the types of wars that may arise in the future, balance responses to present challenges with preparations for future contingencies, and ensure the state is well positioned to compete effectively when new unanticipated challenges arise.

States always plan under uncertainty. The issue here is planning in uncertain times. The timeliness of this study stems from the uncertain conditions that characterize the present security environment of the United States, that have done so for nearly two decades, and that most likely will continue to do so in the future. The United States is no longer burdened by the threat of massive nuclear exchange and possesses overwhelming conventional military superiority. It faces no peer; nor is a potential rival chasing closely behind. The European Union is an economic rival but not a military one.⁶ Economic and military transformations underway in China could propel it to superpower status in the next half-century. India is also poised to emerge as a global superpower. But neither Asian state is nipping closely at the heels of the United States. History shows that strategic choices made in uncertain times have important consequences for future power and position. Surviving and thriving in the international system depend on choices made before threats coalesce, during the “fog of peace.”

This study also engages the debate on unipolarity. The dominant paradigm in international relations, realism, assumes that rising contenders innovate and invest more wisely than overburdened leaders, causing a shift in the balance of power and hastening the leader’s decline. Most security studies scholars, even those who argue that the United States can sustain unipolarity for some unspecified period of time, believe that hegemonic decline is eventually inevitable. Balance-of-power theory and hegemonic stability theory both assume that U.S. military power and preponderance will erode with shifts in relative power or that the pace of erosion will be accelerated by self-defeating behavior. On the other hand, those who think unipolarity is sustainable believe the United States should show restraint in promoting its values, act multilaterally, strengthen international institutions, and provide public goods that reassure others of America’s benign intent. The United States should leverage its soft power, judiciously use military force, and bolster domestic support for internationalism, all in the service of a defensive grand strategy that gradually accommodates inevitable decline.

A consistent pattern in business is the failure of leading companies to stay at the top of their industries when technologies or markets change. In a similar fashion, leading states likewise cling to the technologies and practices that are historically valued and that underwrite their current strength. Shifts in the balance of power often come from rising challengers that launch innovations that leverage the challengers’ strengths and exploit the leaders’ weaknesses. But research on corporate responses to uncertainty in the marketplace shows that there are options firms have in uncertain times that are not available when competition is intense. In other words, periods of pause in great power strategic rivalry present windows of opportunity that states can exploit to shape the dynamics of competition and perpetuate their power. The logic of “shaping” has not been examined systematically. With the uncertainty from more threats, greater diversity in security actors, and a rapidly evolving technological environment that can be exploited by different actors in unanticipated ways, a proactive strategy of shaping the future has advantages over waiting for others to impose their futures. A hiatus in great power rivalry provides a rare opportunity to capitalize on competitive advantages and cement a lead. On the cautionary side, shaping is not viewed as a benign strategy. It can encourage challengers to rise and exacerbate prospects for peace.

This book puts U.S. efforts to shape its strategic environment into historical perspective. By so doing, it identifies the pitfalls of planning in peacetime. It also clarifies the conditions under which different strategies preserve, augment, or undermine state power. These choices are equally important for rising powers, like China and India, and significantly weakened states, like Russia. All have to allocate resources and make strategic choices in an uncertain world.

In this book I introduce three types of strategic responses states may make: “shaping,” “adapting,” and “reforming and reconstituting.” I argue that environmental factors (power distribution) and complexity provide the best predictors of when states will undertake one of these strategic responses. I demonstrate how choices made during periods of strategic pause have a significant effect on what states can do once threats emerge.

ARGUMENTS ADVANCED, ANSWERS OFFERED

The focus of this book is on military strategy and grand strategy. Military strategy encompasses decisions about doctrine, force structure, and mission requirements to support grand strategy. Grand strategy brings together the economic, diplomatic, and military lines of effort to manage present challenges and prepare for future contingencies. Structural and environmental conditions and concerns about relative international standing shape strategic choices, even when a state has no strategic competitor or clear threat—in other words, during the fog of peace.

Realism is the starting point for this analysis because the theory provides the most convincing explanation for how states react to their strategic environment. It is the approach best suited to understanding the constraints and opportunities facing leaders as they strive to preserve and extend their state’s power. Its starting premise is that states live in an anarchic world with no sovereign to enforce rules of behavior, and so states must look to themselves to survive. War is always a possibility, and the key to survival in war is military power. States try to increase their power when they can without excessive cost or risk, and they try especially hard to preserve the power they have. Power is relative, so states are vigilant about the attempts of others to increase their capacities. Not all states behave according to the tenets of realism, but those that do not decline in power and suffer accordingly.

Realists acknowledge that states have choices about the strategies they pursue to preserve and increase their relative power. But they have focused on conditions of rising and high threat and said less on how concerns about relative international standing influence strategic choice in uncertain times. Employing an exploratory research strategy,⁷ this study builds on theories of corporate responses to uncertainty in the marketplace on the premise that the strategies modern business firms adopt can help us to understand state choices. States and firms both can be viewed as unitary rational actors in an uncertain environment. They face common problems when confronted with uncertainty, and this plays an important role in the decision-making calculus of entrepreneurs and political leaders. Research shows that the risks of uncertainty can be reduced for firms that increase their size, much as states strive to augment their power to hedge against unanticipated futures. Shaping consumer preferences, expectations, and behavior through advertising is another way for firms to deal with uncertainty, much as states use strategic communication and soft power to influence attitudes and behavior of critical audiences.⁸ Both states and firms innovate to remain competitive, and their position affects the propensity to innovate. The state–firm analogy is not the only way to characterize strategic choice in uncertain times, but it highlights a number of important dimensions of the problem that are overlooked by traditional approaches to the study of international politics.⁹

By drawing on managerial theory, I do not claim that a modern state is in every respect analogous to the “ideal” of a modern business firm driven by the overriding goal of profit maximization. But both exist within competitive environments; both seek to survive, to remain competitive, and to maximize relative power, whether understood as influence or market share. In the real world, as opposed to the hypothetical world of perfect competition, the similarities increase further. Both are organizations with relatively independent action in a system, defined group boundaries, control of their internal structure and resource allocation, varying levels of domain consensus, and a good deal of organizational complexity across various competencies. Nor do the profit motive or stockholders present stark differences. Corporations do not manage up and down for profit; if they did, all losing corporations would disappear. Stockholders are usually, at best, distant from the operation of the firm, voting with as much knowledge as citizens have when they vote.¹⁰

From the management literature, we can derive three main strategies available to states to maintain and improve their relative standing in an uncertain world: shaping, adapting, or reforming and reconstituting. Shaping is a proactive strategy of altering the external strategic environment to channel world events down favorable paths so that serious new challengers do not emerge. Adapting is a reactive strategy that takes the current system structure as given and strives to preserve the state’s position in the system and gradually improve it over time. Reforming and reconstituting make up a long-term strategy of deep and fundamental internal reform undertaken to leapfrog to a more privileged position and compete more effectively in the future. Each strategy has distinct pitfalls and risks.

The strategy a state pursues is a product of its relative power. The weakest states, those in the trough of the power curve, have little choice but to reform and reconstitute to strategically rebuild in response to defeat in war or gradual relative decline. Rising powers have an incentive to shape to overturn the current order. Declining powers have one of two options if they want to arrest their decline. They can adapt in the hopes that a fast follower strategy will forestall decline, or they can opt for a more radical strategy of reforming and reconstituting, as did the Soviet Union under perestroika.

Conventional wisdom suggests that preeminent powers, particularly hegemons, should act as conservative status quo states and adapt to maintain and preserve the prevailing order they dominate.¹¹ Yet preeminent states, like market leaders, also have an incentive to exploit the opportunity that their preponderant power presents to organize international politics to suit their interests, consolidate and improve their dominant power advantage, and perpetuate their lead. Shaping is an important yet understudied response to uncertainty. This may be why it was so surprising to most international relations theorists that the United States has acted like a revolutionary power by trying to shape the world with its “transformational” program of democracy promotion, regime change, and military transformation.¹² Shaping is risky because it seeks to overturn the very system the hegemon sits atop. Yet the absence of a strategic competitor presents unique opportunities for the market leader.¹³ What is paradoxical from the perspective of traditional international relations theory becomes less puzzling from a management theory perspective.

Structural realism is a theory about how constraints and incentives of the geopolitical environment affect state behavior. Relative power is the logical place to start to understand strategic choices. For example, great powers, by virtue of having more power, more expansive interests that have to be promoted, and more commitments that have to be protected should face different strategic dilemmas than do lesser powers that exert power only locally or regionally. The great power must plan against a larger number of threats and probably a more diverse set of threats. However, the opportunities and constraints that derive from relative power position can be modified or reinforced in relatively predictable ways by unit-specific environmental conditions. For example, geography and proximity to potential adversaries can alter the opportunities and constraints of states that are otherwise comparable in terms of relative power. The strategic options available to insular, defensively advantaged states should diverge from those available to continental, defensively disadvantaged states.

States that face a greater number of threats, a more diverse set of consequential security actors, and a more highly interdependent or networked environment, one in which rapid change is likely to spill over and spread, confront a more “complex” external environment. The greater the complexity of one’s environment, the more things one will be uncertain about. One of the biggest challenges of living in uncertain times is to balance the ability to respond to both present problems and future unforeseen contingencies. This challenge is particularly great for the most powerful states in the system because they are likely to have broader interests, more commitments, and greater ambitions. What this means for the United States today is that, despite a commitment to shape the international system and transform its military to perpetuate its power, operational demands associated with a complex strategic environment demand responsiveness to a wide variety of near-term contin...