Military Coercion and US Foreign Policy

The Use of Force Short of War

Melanie W. Sisson, James A. Siebens, Barry M. Blechman, Melanie W. Sisson, James A. Siebens, Barry M. Blechman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000056877
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Sécurité nationale

This book examines the use of military force as a coercive tool by the United States, using lessons drawn from the post-Cold War era (1991–2018).

The volume reveals that despite its status as sole superpower during the post-Cold War period, US efforts to coerce other states failed as often as they succeeded. In the coming decades, the United States will face states that are more capable and creative, willing to challenge its interests and able to take advantage of missteps and vulnerabilities. By using lessons derived from in-depth case studies and statistical analysis of an original dataset of more than 100 coercive incidents in the post-Cold War era, this book generates insight into how the US military can be used to achieve policy goals. Specifically, it provides guidance about the ways in which, and the conditions under which, the US armed forces can work in concert with economic and diplomatic elements of US power to create effective coercive strategies.

This book will be of interest to students of US national security, US foreign policy, strategic studies and International Relations in general.

1

Coercion in a competitive world

Melanie W. Sisson, James A. Siebens and Barry M. Blechman

Between 1991 and 2018, the United States was the world’s dominant power. With a productive economy and a federal government willing to spend generously on a military already well-advantaged relative to other countries, the United States “enjoyed uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain.… The US could generally deploy forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, and operate how we wanted.”¹ Indeed, the US armed forces during this period undertook a breadth, depth, tempo, and duration of overseas activities that was historically unprecedented. These activities were component parts of national security strategies designed by a sequence of presidential administrations to protect the US homeland, to defend US strategic interests overseas, and to promote abroad the liberal values of individual rights and democracy.

In 2018, the US Government asserted that this post-Cold War era of primacy was over. What had in preceding years been diffuse prognosticating about an ascending China and an aggrieved and risk-acceptant Russia coalesced in the codification of these states as near-peer rivals in the 2018 National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. This energized preparation for a new era of long-term competition, in which the United States is anticipated to contend increasingly, and more directly, with the interests of other states also in possession of considerable military and economic might.

National security leaders thus are preparing the United States to succeed at two related but not identical tasks: war, and competition. The requirements of war generally are well understood – even as they become increasingly technologically sophisticated – and preparing for it demands that the United States has, and knows how to use, the military assets needed to defeat all adversaries. Competition, however, demands that the United States find ways to discourage and therefore to minimize the frequency with which other actors choose to challenge US national security interests, and to find ways to resolve those challenges favorably without needing to resort to war when they do arise.

The idea of competition has captured the attention, imagination, and anxieties of national security practitioners. For historians and scholars of international politics, however, it is old hat. Indeed, a foundational premise of almost all theories seeking to explain why countries behave toward each other as they do is that the international environment is inherently competitive – that is, states perpetually are in contest with one another for advantage.² Sometimes these contests manifest in ways that are direct, obvious, and violent, as happens in war, and sometimes they emerge as short-of-war tussles over, for example, diplomatic norms and standards, human rights, environmental conservation, trade, information exchange, and international law.

A state that competes successfully sets the terms of international life to suit its interests, as it understands them at any given time, more rather than less. It gets other actors to do more of what it wants, at the times of its choosing, in the ways that it likes, and it does so without first having to invade, occupy, or destroy. Exercising international leadership thus is both the work and the reward of competition. It is the work of establishing rules, of convincing as many actors to follow them as much of the time as is possible, and of incentivizing compliance and penalizing defiance such that the rules remain intact. The return is in the system’s structural privileging of that state’s interests over those of others. This prioritization can be instantiated in the nature, type, and activities of multinational regimes and institutions, but need not be. So too can it be evident in norms backed by no legal or organizational entity, in loosely-formed but common patterns of behavior, and in the simple requirement of considering how an action will be perceived and, possibly, addressed by the dominant state.

States, of course, are unlikely to tolerate this prioritization and follow rules set by another in the absence of a good reason to do so. Some may find that they agree with the rules because those rules suit their own material and instrumental interests, or because they comport with their values. For all other states, however, to be compelling and durable, the rules structure must promise and deliver either adequate benefit for good behavior, or adequate pain for bad. This means that the rule-setter must have the capability and the will to give and to take away, as required to assert and enforce standards and expectations.

Military, economic, and socio-political power therefore are the tools of the trade in competition. Socio-political power has been argued to be a means through which a state’s international leadership can be made more palatable. Indeed, strong arguments have been made that the appeal of individual rights, representative democracy, and market capitalism endowed the United States in the post-Cold War era with the power to attract. This so-called “soft power” is understood by some to lead other actors to view US dominance more favorably than they otherwise would, and so to conform more readily with its rule-based order.³ Although there currently are no compelling empirical indicators to support this claim, there is a prima facie case to be made that having a domestic social and political culture with global appeal is more likely to be a net positive than negative.

The eruption of violent, radical Islamist backlash in the early 2000s, however, and its continuation today demonstrates that socio-political diffusion cuts both ways. So, too, does China’s international rise call into question the extent to which values, ideology, and identity will drive national strategies in the coming decades. China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region, after all, has been won not with a galvanizing socio-political message, but rather through the creation of financial structures and trade regimes with, and direct investments in, the economies of growth-hungry neighbors, both regionally and those more far-flung.

The United States, too, uses the integration of its economy with those of others through trade, finance, and investment for political purposes. Opportunity to export to the large US market, to import its goods, and to access its services are sizable inducements, while exclusion and, especially, expulsion from them can impose considerable pain. Economic sanctions in particular have increasingly become a tool of influence – while not new, their use has grown steadily since World War II, and accelerated markedly after the end of the Cold War (Figure 1.1).⁴ Indeed, in the 44 years between 1946 and 1990 the United States initiated at least 191 sanctions on 74 states; in the 27 years between 1991 and 2018, those numbers increased to 252 sanctions on 101 states.

Figure 1.1 Sanctions initiated 1946–2018

Source: T. Clifton Morgan, Navin Bapat, and Yoshi Kobayashi, “The Threat and Imposition of Sanctions: Updating the TIES Dataset,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 31, no. 5 (2014): 541–58.

Economic power, of course, also is the foundation of conventional and nuclear military capabilities, the development, maintenance, and application of which are dependent upon a robust industrial base and healthily stocked government coffers. Although it is possible that technological advancements may change the nature of weapons such that this relationship is attenuated over time, for now, expensive, sophisticated and integrated systems, powerful platforms, large quantities of planes and ships and servicemembers, and the skills and abilities needed to use them effectively are essential for states seeking to compete successfully.

All of these tools are necessary, and none alone will be sufficient, for the United States to succeed in structuring international political life to prioritize its interests over the coming century. It will be the ability to use socio-political, economic, and military instruments in concert with one another, as integrated components of wise foreign policy managed deftly and with discipline, that will differentiate the rule-setter from the rule-follower, and that will separate peace from war.

This book is written to aid decisionmakers in this task, and to do so specifically as they consider whether and under what conditions the US armed forces should be called into use. Lessons are drawn from the 27 years of US preponderance between 1991 and 2018. Focus is on how and to what effect the United States used its armed forces, either independently or in conjunction with other instruments of foreign policy, to influence the behavior of other actors – to reinforce acceptable behaviors or to prevent or encourage the reversal of behaviors that ran counter to US interests. It is an examination, in other words, of how the United States went about coercing its global neighbors in the past to derive insights into how best to coerce them in the future.

War, not war, and coercion

By all objective measures, of course, the United States did not during these years have to try to coerce other states. Coercion was a choice, not an asymmetric strategy demanded by limited capabilities. As the most powerful country in the world, the United States had the option of simply imposing its will, of throwing the full weight of its considerable military might at any given problem, confident that, although perhaps costly, battles would not be fought at home and that the far superior US military would prevail. Yet, this was not often the course chosen by US leaders. Instead, the US armed forces frequently were used not to achieve the desired outcome directly, but rather to do so indirectly by persuading other actors to behave in ways the United States wanted them to.

That the United States used the military to achieve its desired ends through means short of war is not to say that the United States refrained entirely from the use of force. To the contrary, the US military deployed troops, dropped bombs, and launched missiles in pursuit of foreign policy aims on multiple occasions between 1991 and 2018. What, then, classifies these as violent acts of coercion and not as violent acts of war?

There is no definition of war that has been established and accepted by the community of US foreign policy professionals, or that is of standard use in the academic literature. Some of the institutions, organizations, and scholars that study war do not so much define war as delimit it based upon the characteristics of military violence. “Sustained combat,” for example, attaches thresholds to the duration and intensity of violence that enable cut-points between war and not-war. Others focus on the effects of violence. One of the most-known and most-used conflict datasets, for example, relies on counts of participants killed in combat (battle deaths), as a means of distinguishing between armed disputes and wars, ostensibly because battle deaths are a reasonable proxy for the size and scale of military effort.⁵

Within the practitioner community, the most authoritative source on terminology is silent on the issue. Although the word “war” appears in the DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms more than 40 times, in none of those instances is it as an entry with its own definition. In all cases, rather, “war” is embedded in definitions of other terms, for example, “mobilization,” “neutrality,” “prisoner of war,” and “voluntary tanker agreement.”⁶

Among those who write on coercion, the tendency is to define what coercion is and to describe at length what it looks like, to be less specific and descriptive about what it is not, and to revert to dimensional characteristics when pressed to place events on one side of the line or the other. Comparisons are drawn between coercion, described as “an exemplary use of quite limited force,” or as “demonstrative uses of force,” and war, described as “full-scale military operations,” or “a full-scale use of force,” or “the use of force that is massive, at least to the target.”⁷ Discerning the boundary between limited and full-scale uses of force, demonstrative or massive, is left open for interpretation.

In some cases, being definitive about the threshold between coercion and war isn’t necessary – as in the work of Thomas Schelling, for example, who produced an almost-literary exploration of the relationships between and among behavior, incentives, and communication in international politics.⁸ His endeavor was to undertake rigorous theorizing, not systematic tests of his ideas against an empirical record. This latter clause is important because it is that task – the scrutiny of evidence done for purposes of explaining what has worked in the past and why, and what therefore may be more likely to work in the future, and why – that requires clear differentiation between the phenomenon one wants to study from all other phenomena. If one wants to be able to choose wine based on the likelihood that it will be delicious and not distasteful, one first must be able to recognize the difference between a bottle of wine and a jar of grape juice.

The work of which this book is a legacy established just such a means of operationalizing the distance between coercive uses of force and uses of force as war. In doing so, it advanced considerably the literature on coercion in international politics, although the authors did not describe its purpose in those terms. Rather, in the introduction to Force Without War, published in 1978, Barry Blechman and Stephen Kaplan state simply that they understand military force to be one among many instruments available for use in pursuit of political objectives.⁹ The US military, in other words, is not a tool only of war, but rather also can be used as a tool of statecraft, independently or with diplomatic, economic, cultural, and other instruments of influence.

Because all military actions carry costs and risk – dispatching portions of the US armed forces is expensive and makes possible unintended escalations that can result in unwanted violence – Blechman and Kaplan’s intent in writing the book was to provide information that might increase the likelihood that future choices to use the armed forces to coerce would be made selectively and wisely. Information was to be derived from the historical record of instances in which the United States had used its military in the conduct of statecraft, as a means not of imposing an outcome but rather of communicating to other actors about the nature of US preferences and about behaviors that were desired, prescribed, or prohibited.

Because their exercise was empirical, they needed a means of differentiating use of the military as a tool of coercion f...