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How A Big State Can Be Trusted
Via Stephen Walt an interesting theory on big state/small state negotiations:
A […] highlight was Todd Sechsers’s paper “Goliath’s Curse: Asymmetric Power and Effectiveness of Coercive Threats.” Using a simple bargaining model, Sechser (from the University of Virginia) argues that great powers often fail to get their way when they issue coercive threats (which is surprising at first glance), and that this problem may in fact get worse the more powerful they are. The basic logic here concerns reputation: weak states will worry about giving in to a great power’s demands (even when the demands are fairly minor), because they will fear that the great power will just demand more later. So they resist now, to enhance their reputation for being stubborn and to convince the great power to leave them alone in the future. The core of the problem is that a very powerful state can’t make a credible commitment of restraint; it can’t reassure the weak state that it really, truly, wants just a modest concession, one that the weak state might be willing to grant if it were confident that this would be the only demand. And the bigger and stronger the coercing state is, the harder it is for that state to reassure the weak power that its aims are actually limited.
I do not agree with the proposed automatism: big states vs. small, thereby "stubbornness" from the small one. There is of course a way to "reassure the weak power that its aims are actually limited" and that it can be trusted. That would be a consistent adherence to international law and agreements by the big state.
But the U.S. has the bad habit of constantly trying to slip out of these. Bush I promised Russia not to expand NATO. Then the U.S. pressed to expand NATO into east Europe. The U.S. signed the UN Convention Against Torture. Then it tortured. The SOFA agreement with Iraq clearly demands the U.S. forces to leave Iraq by the end of 2011. Next a public campaign is started to stay longer.
So this is not just a theoretical construct and it is not at all inevitable that small states have huge mistrust against any big state demand. They do have such mistrust because the U.S. – at least after the fall of the Soviet Union – made it a habit to break agreements and to demand more and more and more with disregard to law and its own word.
It is not alone in doing such.
We can currently see something similar in Israel's changing position on a truce in Gaza as mediated by Egypt. Israel started out by demanding a 18 month truce when Hamas offered 12 month. When Hamas accepted, the Israeli demand changed. Suddenly the exchange of prisoners, the Israeli soldier Shalit against some Palestinian prisoners held by Israel was put down as a condition for a truce. Then the Israelis again changed their position and now the prisoner exchange seems to be the only issue it wants to negotiate about at all.
To get there it keeps up the blockade of food and other necessary means for 1.5 million people in Gaza: collective punishment in disregard of international law and its own former promises.
In the Algier accords the U.S. agreed not to intervene politically or militarily in Iranian internal affairs. But it kept up and still has a huge secret program to do just that. No wonder then that Iran does not trust any U.S. offer.
But it is not simply the size of the negotiation partners that creates mistrust and lets smaller states resist against demands from bigger ones like the U.S. It is the very real experience of distrustful behavior by the U.S. that creates such resistance in the first place. If there would be experience that the U.S. can be trusted, the situation would likely be much different.
For a big country that seems to still have the trust of smaller states, and thereby is able to get concessions from these, look at China. It is very concerened to stick to the letter of international law and to keep a non-interventionist stand. That gives it a creadibility the U.S. has lost.
The US has always played hardball — after all, it is the national sport.
CluelessJoe is right, and the evidentiary record is clear. Hardball — combined with “Divide et Impera” — won it the entire hemisphere via the string of broken Indian treaties, the Louisiana purchase and the Monroe Doctrine, as I have detailed elsewhere. Control of the Pacific came even easier, as there was nothing but water separating the US from Japan and China once Hawaii and the Philippines were “negotiated.”
But the US Empire did not arise spontaneously from the phlogiston of the new Nation-state; it was based upon the British model, which, at its apex held sway over 1/4 of humanity (“The sun never sets…”). The model dictates setting competitor against competitor, and the de-industrialization of potential threats — as Britain did to the Indian textile industry, centralizing higher value-added activity in the core.
Modern versions of the model include the methods detailed by John Perkins in “Confessions of an Economic Hitman:” economic subversion followed by the threat of assassination and military destruction. In Europe, the “Strategy of Tension,” Operation Gladio, false flags, infiltration, and assassination were similarly employed.
Let us recall that both Hitler and Mussolini were lauded by significant sections of the US elite, and — as well detailed — supported by US finance capital and industry. The playing of potential competitors against each other, leading to their mutual destruction — which was the real import of WWII (as with 9/11, three theories compete: accidental, LIHOP, MIHOP) — left the US in the enviable position famously described by George Kennan:
“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. … To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. … We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
In other words, Hardball worked very well to scale the mountain, but the peak is ever hard to hold on to.
In actuality, it is not Walt, but Todd Sechsers’s paper “Goliath’s Curse: Asymmetric Power and Effectiveness of Coercive Threats” that is being quoted here. Nevertheless, the perspective — as is to be expected of a mainstream conservative academic like Walt — offers no critique of the successful performance of previous coercive models of behavior; rather he is playing the role of technician/tactician for the ills of Empire:
What would work, and what wouldn’t. And one might note, Walt’s laughable assertion earlier in the review that, “academic scholars don’t have pick a side in this fight; their comparative advantage lies in providing as even-handed and fair-minded an assessment as they can.” (Anyone who laid his career on the line to dissect the Israel Lobby most assuredly knows better than that!) Similarly, the limited critique of great power politics offered here is often laughably deceptive: “… that state to reassure the weak power that its aims are actually limited …” Such a comment would be less ridiculous if Walt managed to convincingly enumerate the “limited” aims that, for instance, the US had viz. Iraq: Control of oil supply and dollar-denominated trading, control of the agricultural system, institution of a flat-tax, free trade environment conducive to MNCs buying up all productive assets, destruction of unions and collective labor bargaining, alliance with Israel, etc.
Perhaps the issue truly is as Walt states: ” …they will fear that the great power will just demand more later.” In the end, there is little difference for the weak state whether maximal demands are put forth as a “package” like “free-trade” agreements, or as a gradualist program like EU membership.
In any event, Walt does not account for the former effectiveness of coercion, or the true forces at work in mitigating the success of coercion.
Getting back to a grounding in real, and not wishful, history, to my mind, five principle obstacles — or contradictions — confronted the Kennanists with insurmountable challenges in maintaining Hegemony: Ideological, Military, Physical, Structural and Fundamental. These challenges often vitiate the effect of coercion, or mitigate against its effective use.
First, Maintenance of the disparities of Empire always depends upon an ideology of “Exceptionalism” used to quell the populace into accepting and rationalizing the brutality necessary for such control. The extraordinary ideological potency of “The Good War,” along with the Holocaust, and the original “Pearl Harbor” (documented to be a LIHOP event), allowed the public to accept the firebombing of Dresden and the complete devastation of Japan (“take two, and call me in the morning to surrender — again”). Even 9/11, an event which was heralded by the corporate media to “change everything,” has not proved potent enough to overcome the population’s inhibitions over employing the “nuclear option” – an option, we should note, which illegally and in true gangster fashion, is never “taken off the table,” even by Obama. In other words, coercion is dependant upon the general acceptance of an exceptionalist ideology which the weaker state cannot easily resist. We can clearly see the limitations of this effect after Israel’s recent massacre of Gaza: Israel’s stock, and its coercive power, is at an all-time low. US stock is similarly discredited, and it is Obama’s task to re-inflate the image bubble so that soft power methods of coercion can again be employed by the Empire.
Second, the risk of “gangster politics” always lies in escalation betraying the limitations of the threat. Britain met its comeuppance in the Suez Affair; France exposed its weakness in Algeria. Similarly, Vietnam exposed the limitations of US military might. Small States posed little problem, as Reagan’s romp devastated Latin America, but mid-sized States found that they could at least achieve a partial stalemate by employing guerilla tactics and so-called “fourth generation warfare.” Bzezinski’s success in Afghanistan should have made the US more circumspect. Thes first two levels are primarily the region Walt is arguing on.
Third, innate physical constraints have proved intractable. Europe is composed of small Nations, and so could be set against itself: industrial vs. agricultural, “old” vs. “new,” etc. But Japan was larger than the European States, and could not be broken up, as China was larger still – by orders of magnitude. Efforts to fracture China – Manchuko, Taiwan, Tibet – have been only partially successful. To a great extent, China – also devastated by WWII and related events – could be neutralized by the Soviet Union. But once the Iron Curtain fell, the Empire has been unable to fashion a successful neutralizing strategy: China is just too large. Setting the Asian Tigers up as a bulwark backfired and only accelerated the movement of industry and capital to that side of the globe. (Frank’s “Re-Orient” draws the big picture by arguing that this movement was only a return to a previous state.) But, converse to Walt’s theory, the sheer size and population of China has mitigated the effectiveness of gangster coercion.
Fourth, there are the structural reasons put forth by the World Systems Theorists and others. Joshua Goldstein advanced the theory that the capitalist World System tends continuously towards war cycles. The international system is characterized according to him by: global war -> world hegemony of the dominant power -> de-legitimization of the international order -> de-concentration of the global system -> global war, et cetera. It is the Hegemon in this scenario which must employ the most coercive methods. Economically, this is graphed by Volker Bornschier in this manner: Upswing -> Prosperity -> Prosperity-recession -> Crisis -> Temporary recovery -> Depression. But, as detailed by Richard Moore — but earlier by Braudel and others of the Annales School — at the peak of the cycle, or rather, just past the peak, in an attempt to maintain hegemony the elite develop a split between the interests of the industrialists and the financiers. This leads to mixed aims for the Empire, and mixed messages put to the weaker states. This confusion between isolation and “engagement” is always resolved in favor of engagement/domination, with the financial sector winning. Financial demands and methods are always maximalist: Control of the currency, and hence, social conditions of the weaker nation. Structural Adjustment is a prime example of a demand upon a weaker state which could hardly be described as “fairly minor.”
Finally, and perhaps the greatest challenge to Kennanism is, what Wallerstein refers to as “the structural crisis of the world capitalist system.” He describes it this way in “The End of the Beginning,” a six year old commentary which admirably still addresses all of Walt’s pedestrian concerns (and well worth reading):
Because the system we have known for 500 years is no longer able to guarantee long-term prospects of capital accumulation, we have entered a period of world chaos—wild (and largely uncontrollable) swings in the economic, political, and military situations—which are leading to a systemic bifurcation—that is, essentially a world collective choice about the kind of new system the world will construct over the next fifty years. The new system will not be a capitalist system, but it could be one of two kinds: a different system that would be equally or more hierarchical and inegalitarian; or one that will be substantially democratic and egalitarian.
Others, like Bookchin, might put more emphasis on the environmental aspects of the crisis, but the ramifications are essentially the same: Nations find themselves riven by internal contradictions, and simple suasion no longer works as it once did. One World System is dying, and a new one, governed by different rules and considerations, has not yet been born.
Walt concludes, “But what if Iran is still worried that we really do have more ambitious goals (such as regime change) and that we will take advantage of any concessions they might make and up our demands later? If that is their view, then making relatively modest demands and offering generous incentives may not work. Paradoxically, his paper implies that we might have a better chance of cutting a deal with Iran if our position in the region were somewhat weaker, because Tehran would be less worried about the long-term implications of giving up its nuclear program.”
Talk about putting lipstick on the proverbial pig.
Yet, I couldn’t agree more: One must see the bright side of the disintegration of Empire – even if it truly means for the crumbling Empire, “that its aims are actually limited.” But let us be under no illusions” this is not some Utopian quest for a “Just World” coming into play, but a Realpolitic assessment of what is possible for the pathologically violent, but terminally ill, Empire.
Posted by: Malooga | Feb 17 2009 17:04 utc | 8
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