{"title":"Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order","authors":"J. Mearsheimer","doi":"10.1162/isec_a_00342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00342","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The liberal international order, erected after the Cold War, was crumbling by 2019. It was flawed from the start and thus destined to fail. The spread of liberal democracy around the globe—essential for building that order—faced strong resistance because of nationalism, which emphasizes self-determination. Some targeted states also resisted U.S. efforts to promote liberal democracy for security-related reasons. Additionally, problems arose because a liberal order calls for states to delegate substantial decisionmaking authority to international institutions and to allow refugees and immigrants to move easily across borders. Modern nation-states privilege sovereignty and national identity, however, which guarantees trouble when institutions become powerful and borders porous. Furthermore, the hyperglobalization that is integral to the liberal order creates economic problems among the lower and middle classes within the liberal democracies, fueling a backlash against that order. Finally, the liberal order accelerated China's rise, which helped transform the system from unipolar to multipolar. A liberal international order is possible only in unipolarity. The new multipolar world will feature three realist orders: a thin international order that facilitates cooperation, and two bounded orders—one dominated by China, the other by the United States—poised for waging security competition between them.","PeriodicalId":48667,"journal":{"name":"International Security","volume":"20 1","pages":"7-50"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81977753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Flawed Framework: Why the Liberal International Order Concept Is Misguided","authors":"Charles L. Glaser","doi":"10.1162/isec_a_00343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00343","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Well before President Donald Trump began rhetorically attacking U.S. allies and the open international trading system, policy analysts worried about challenges to the liberal international order (LIO). A more fundamental issue, however, has received little attention: the analytic value of framing U.S. security in terms of the LIO. Systematic examination shows that this framing creates far more confusion than insight. Even worse, the LIO framing could lead the United States to adopt overly competitive policies and unnecessarily resist change in the face of China's growing power. The “LIO concept”—the logics that proponents identify as underpinning the LIO—is focused inward, leaving it ill equipped to address interactions between members of the LIO and states that lie outside the LIO. In addition, the LIO concept suffers theoretical flaws that further undermine its explanatory value. The behavior that the LIO concept claims to explain—including cooperation under anarchy, effective Western balancing against the Soviet Union, the Cold War peace, and the lack of balancing against the United States following the Cold War—is better explained by other theories, most importantly, defensive realism. Analysis of U.S. international policy would be improved by dropping the LIO terminology entirely and reframing analysis in terms of grand strategy.","PeriodicalId":48667,"journal":{"name":"International Security","volume":"16 1","pages":"51-87"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72692676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Correspondence: The Establishment and U.S. Grand Strategy","authors":"P. Feaver, H. Brands, R. Lissner, P. Porter","doi":"10.1162/isec_c_00347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_c_00347","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48667,"journal":{"name":"International Security","volume":"27 1","pages":"197-204"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82988858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Buying Allies: Payment Practices in Multilateral Military Coalition-Building","authors":"Marina E. Henke","doi":"10.1162/isec_a_00345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00345","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Many countries serving in multilateral military coalitions are “paid” to do so, either in cash or in concessions relating to other international issues. An examination of hundreds of declassified archival sources as well as elite interviews relating to the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Iraq War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization operation in Afghanistan, the United Nations–African Union operation in Darfur, and the African Union operation in Somalia reveals that these payment practices follow a systematic pattern: pivotal states provide the means to cover such payments. These states reason that rewarding third parties to serve in multilateral coalitions holds important political benefits. Moreover, two distinct types of payment schemes exist: deployment subsidies and political side deals. Three types of states are most likely to receive such payments: (1) states that are inadequately resourced to deploy; (2) states that are perceived by the pivotal states as critical contributors to the coalition endeavor; and (3) opportunistic states that perceive a coalition deployment as an opportunity to negotiate a quid pro quo. These findings provide a novel perspective on what international burden sharing looks like in practice. Moreover, they raise important questions about the efficiency and effectiveness of such payment practices in multilateral military deployments.","PeriodicalId":48667,"journal":{"name":"International Security","volume":"31 1","pages":"128-162"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89970208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Proliferation and the Logic of the Nuclear Market","authors":"E. Gheorghe","doi":"10.1162/isec_a_00344","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00344","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The evolution of the nuclear market explains why there are only nine members of the nuclear club, not twenty-five or more, as some analysts predicted. In the absence of a supplier cartel that can regulate nuclear transfers, the more suppliers there are, the more intense their competition will be, as they vie for market share. This commercial rivalry makes it easier for nuclear technology to spread, because buyers can play suppliers off against each other. The ensuing transfers help countries either acquire nuclear weapons or become hedgers. The great powers (China, Russia, and the United States) seek to thwart proliferation by limiting transfers and putting safeguards on potentially dangerous nuclear technologies. Their success depends on two structural factors: the global distribution of power and the intensity of the security rivalry among them. Thwarters are most likely to stem proliferation when the system is unipolar and least likely when it is multipolar. In bipolarity, their prospects fall somewhere in between. In addition, the more intense the rivalry among the great powers in bipolarity and multipolarity, the less effective they will be at curbing proliferation. Given the potential for intense security rivalry among today's great powers, the shift from unipolarity to multipolarity does not portend well for checking proliferation.","PeriodicalId":48667,"journal":{"name":"International Security","volume":"1 1","pages":"88-127"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91152543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why China Has Not Caught Up Yet: Military-Technological Superiority and the Limits of Imitation, Reverse Engineering, and Cyber Espionage","authors":"A. Gilli, Mauro Gilli","doi":"10.1162/isec_a_00337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00337","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Can countries easily imitate the United States' advanced weapon systems and thus erode its military-technological superiority? Scholarship in international relations theory generally assumes that rising states benefit from the “advantage of backwardness.” That is, by free riding on the research and technology of the most advanced countries, less developed states can allegedly close the military-technological gap with their rivals relatively easily and quickly. More recent works maintain that globalization, the emergence of dual-use components, and advances in communications have facilitated this process. This literature is built on shaky theoretical foundations, however, and its claims lack empirical support. In particular, it largely ignores one of the most important changes to have occurred in the realm of weapons development since the second industrial revolution: the exponential increase in the complexity of military technology. This increase in complexity has promoted a change in the system of production that has made the imitation and replication of the performance of state-of-the-art weapon systems harder—so much so as to offset the diffusing effects of globalization and advances in communications. An examination of the British-German naval rivalry (1890–1915) and China's efforts to imitate U.S. stealth fighters supports these findings.","PeriodicalId":48667,"journal":{"name":"International Security","volume":"85 1","pages":"141-189"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73921717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bad World: The Negativity Bias in International Politics","authors":"Dominic D. P. Johnson, Dominic Tierney","doi":"10.1162/isec_a_00336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00336","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A major puzzle in international relations is why states privilege negative over positive information. States tend to inflate threats, exhibit loss aversion, and learn more from failures than from successes. Rationalist accounts fail to explain this phenomenon, because systematically overweighting bad over good may in fact undermine state interests. New research in psychology, however, offers an explanation. The “negativity bias” has emerged as a fundamental principle of the human mind, in which people's response to positive and negative information is asymmetric. Negative factors have greater effects than positive factors across a wide range of psychological phenomena, including cognition, motivation, emotion, information processing, decision-making, learning, and memory. Put simply, bad is stronger than good. Scholars have long pointed to the role of positive biases, such as overconfidence, in causing war, but negative biases are actually more pervasive and may represent a core explanation for patterns of conflict. Positive and negative dispositions apply in different contexts. People privilege negative information about the external environment and other actors, but positive information about themselves. The coexistence of biases can increase the potential for conflict. Decisionmakers simultaneously exaggerate the severity of threats and exhibit overconfidence about their capacity to deal with them. Overall, the negativity bias is a potent force in human judgment and decisionmaking, with important implications for international relations theory and practice.","PeriodicalId":48667,"journal":{"name":"International Security","volume":"33 1","pages":"96-140"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75018658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"India's Counterforce Temptations: Strategic Dilemmas, Doctrine, and Capabilities","authors":"Christopher Clary, V. Narang","doi":"10.1162/isec_a_00340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00340","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Is India shifting to a nuclear counterforce strategy? Continued aggression by Pakistan against India, enabled by Islamabad's nuclear strategy and India's inability to counter it, has prompted the leadership in Delhi to explore more flexible preemptive counterforce options in an attempt to reestablish deterrence. Increasingly, Indian officials are advancing the logic of counterforce targeting, and they have begun to lay out exceptions to India's long-standing no-first-use policy to potentially allow for the preemptive use of nuclear weapons. Simultaneously, India has been acquiring the components that its military would need to launch counterforce strikes. These include a growing number of accurate and responsive nuclear delivery systems, an array of surveillance platforms, and sophisticated missile defenses. Executing a counterforce strike against Pakistan, however, would be exceptionally difficult. Moreover, Pakistan's response to the mere fear that India might be pursuing a counterforce option could generate a dangerous regional arms race and crisis instability. A cycle of escalation would have significant implications not only for South Asia, but also for the broader nuclear landscape if other regional powers were similarly seduced by the temptations of nuclear counterforce.","PeriodicalId":48667,"journal":{"name":"International Security","volume":"27 1","pages":"7-52"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85048401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editors' Note","authors":"Dane Alivarius, Cristine Pedersen","doi":"10.1162/016228899560103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/016228899560103","url":null,"abstract":"The lead article in this issue argues that realist scholars of international relations no longer embrace realism’s core principles. Realism, according to Jeffrey Legro of the University of Virginia and Andrew Moravcsik of Harvard University, “is in trouble.” They base this observation on their analysis of recent scholarship by neoclassical and defensive realists who, in an effort to address anomalies found in realist theory, have instead undermined the theoretical core of realism itself. The next ave articles offer a spirited defense of rational choice theory, which Stephen Walt in his Spring 1999 article “Rigor or Rigor Mortis?” criticized for failing to provide new and policy-relevant insights in the aeld of security studies. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and James Morrow of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution argue that logical consistency is the most important criterion in testing any theory. Without logical consistency, they contend, the other two criteria for judging a theory’s usefulness—degree of originality and empirical validity—cannot be determined. Formal methods, they contend, ensure that scholars construct theories that are logically consistent. A declared “consumer rather than producer” of rational choice theory, Lisa Martin of Harvard University praises the ability of formal work to develop sets of propositions and insights that are both linked and coherent and its ability to bring speciacity to the propositions of nonformal strategic analysis. In addition, Martin analyzes the types of methods used in articles published in six leading journals of security studies between 1994 and 1998. She concludes that Walt’s concern that formal theory may eventually dominate the aeld of security studies is unfounded. Emerson M.S. Niou of Duke University and Peter Ordeshook of the California Institute of Technology take Walt to task for obscuring the differences between paradigms, game theory, and formal methods. Robert Powell of the University of California, Berkeley, elucidates the usefulness of formal models in helping scholars comprehend empirical phenomena. According to Powell, formal models can assist scholars in disciplining their thinking. They can also increase transparency and thus understanding of real-world events. The University of Buffalo’s Frank Zagare contends that, ironically, Walt’s analysis of rational choice theory underscores the value of formal models, because “they provide","PeriodicalId":48667,"journal":{"name":"International Security","volume":"62 1","pages":"3-4"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74123495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}