Cheap Threats
eBook - ePub

Cheap Threats

Why the United States Struggles to Coerce Weak States

  1. 288 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Cheap Threats

Why the United States Struggles to Coerce Weak States

About this book

Why do weak states resist threats of force from the United States, especially when history shows that this superpower carries out its ultimatums? Cheap Threats upends conventional notions of power politics and challenges assumptions about the use of compellent military threats in international politics.

Drawing on an original dataset of US compellence from 1945 to 2007 and four in-depth case studies—the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 2011 confrontation with Libya, and the 1991 and 2003 showdowns with Iraq—Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain finds that US compellent threats often fail because threatening and using force became comparatively “cheap” for the United States after the Cold War. Becoming the world’s only superpower and adopting a new light-footprint model of war, which relied heavily on airpower and now drones, have reduced the political, economic, and human costs that US policymakers face when they go to war. Paradoxically, this lower-cost model of war has cheapened US threats and fails to signal to opponents that the United States is resolved to bear the high costs of a protracted conflict. The result: small states gamble, often unwisely, that the United States will move on to a new target before achieving its goals.

Cheap Threats resets the bar for scholars and planners grappling with questions of state resolve, hegemonic stability, effective coercion, and other issues pertinent in this new era of US warfighting and diplomacy.

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Yes, you can access Cheap Threats by Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Military & Maritime History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. List of Illustrations
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Introduction: Too Cheap to Compel
  8. 1 The Logic of Costly Compellence
  9. 2 US Compellent Threats, 1945–2007
  10. 3 The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
  11. 4 The 2011 Libya Crisis
  12. 5 The 1991 Threat against Iraq
  13. 6 The 2003 Threat against Iraq
  14. Conclusion: The Implications of Costly Compellence for Theory and Policy
  15. Appendix: How the Data Set Was Constructed
  16. Bibliography
  17. Index