{"title":"战略姿态的国内方面:中东核制度的过去与未来","authors":"Etel Solingen","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3277650","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines domestic aspects of the debate over the establishment of a regional nuclear regime in the Middle East. It does so in order to offset the marginal attention paid to the impact of domestic processes and institutions in the definition of strategic outcomes.<br><br>The call for incorporating domestic politics into the study of international regimes is not new but, with few exceptions, has been rarely followed by actual applications. That failure has not been the subject of great controversy in the analysis of nuclear options in the Middle East, because neorealist assumptions about the primacy of state survival considerations have gained unparalleled analytical supremacy. The potential for physical annihilation compelled a neorealist point of departure, even when neorealist assumptions led to no particular saddlepoint, or solution (in logical terms, the search for survival could have led to a range of means and outcomes).<br><br>That different domestic actors are likely to define strategic options with different considerations in mind seems self-evident. Domestic groups weigh different international outcomes according to the latter's potential effect on their own political and institutional pay-offs. The pay-offs associated with different outcomes can be affected by different mixes of side-payments. For instance, no military establishment entrusted with maintaining conventional deterrence would endanger its access to conventional weapons, the means with which it maintains its mission.<br><br>In general terms, domestic actors rank their preferences according to the rate at which they discount the future, their degree of receptivity to transparency, their sensitivity coefficients to gaps in gains, and/or their definition of a 'balanced exchange'. These four, of course, are influenced by the extent to which actors are concerned with short-term political/electoral gains or with longer-term institutional and bureaucratic survival. Thus, the conventional military establishment may be open to absolute (mutual) gains and transparency at the nuclear level while resisting anything other than relative gains in conventional weaponry. A certain political party may be reluctant to ratify an agreement that does not make its own positional gains clear. Strategic postures are nested in a multidimentional space where foreign aid and investment, technological change, electoral cycles (or their equivalent), and conventional military balances intersect in often unpredictable ways.<br><br>If one construes the past evolution of Middle East nuclear postures with these considerations in mind, where does one look in trying to understand the emergence of nuclear opaqueness on the one hand, and a stillborn regional regime on the other?<br><br> Were these outcomes compatible with the ability of relevant domestic groups to pursue their own political agendas? Were they perhaps even optimal in terms of increasing their internal political latitude? A positive answer to these questions might render domestic considerations a powerful contender in the arena where alternative ways of conceptualizing strategic behaviour claim relative superiority. This study begins with an overview of the historical evolution of nuclear postures in the region, and ends with an assessment of changes in recent years that may affect present and future postures.","PeriodicalId":381297,"journal":{"name":"PSN: Arms Races & Arms Control (Topic)","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"1995-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"3","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Domestic Aspects of Strategic Postures: Past and Future in a Middle East Nuclear Regime\",\"authors\":\"Etel Solingen\",\"doi\":\"10.2139/ssrn.3277650\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"This paper examines domestic aspects of the debate over the establishment of a regional nuclear regime in the Middle East. It does so in order to offset the marginal attention paid to the impact of domestic processes and institutions in the definition of strategic outcomes.<br><br>The call for incorporating domestic politics into the study of international regimes is not new but, with few exceptions, has been rarely followed by actual applications. That failure has not been the subject of great controversy in the analysis of nuclear options in the Middle East, because neorealist assumptions about the primacy of state survival considerations have gained unparalleled analytical supremacy. The potential for physical annihilation compelled a neorealist point of departure, even when neorealist assumptions led to no particular saddlepoint, or solution (in logical terms, the search for survival could have led to a range of means and outcomes).<br><br>That different domestic actors are likely to define strategic options with different considerations in mind seems self-evident. Domestic groups weigh different international outcomes according to the latter's potential effect on their own political and institutional pay-offs. The pay-offs associated with different outcomes can be affected by different mixes of side-payments. For instance, no military establishment entrusted with maintaining conventional deterrence would endanger its access to conventional weapons, the means with which it maintains its mission.<br><br>In general terms, domestic actors rank their preferences according to the rate at which they discount the future, their degree of receptivity to transparency, their sensitivity coefficients to gaps in gains, and/or their definition of a 'balanced exchange'. These four, of course, are influenced by the extent to which actors are concerned with short-term political/electoral gains or with longer-term institutional and bureaucratic survival. Thus, the conventional military establishment may be open to absolute (mutual) gains and transparency at the nuclear level while resisting anything other than relative gains in conventional weaponry. A certain political party may be reluctant to ratify an agreement that does not make its own positional gains clear. Strategic postures are nested in a multidimentional space where foreign aid and investment, technological change, electoral cycles (or their equivalent), and conventional military balances intersect in often unpredictable ways.<br><br>If one construes the past evolution of Middle East nuclear postures with these considerations in mind, where does one look in trying to understand the emergence of nuclear opaqueness on the one hand, and a stillborn regional regime on the other?<br><br> Were these outcomes compatible with the ability of relevant domestic groups to pursue their own political agendas? Were they perhaps even optimal in terms of increasing their internal political latitude? A positive answer to these questions might render domestic considerations a powerful contender in the arena where alternative ways of conceptualizing strategic behaviour claim relative superiority. This study begins with an overview of the historical evolution of nuclear postures in the region, and ends with an assessment of changes in recent years that may affect present and future postures.\",\"PeriodicalId\":381297,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"PSN: Arms Races & Arms Control (Topic)\",\"volume\":\"36 1\",\"pages\":\"0\"},\"PeriodicalIF\":0.0000,\"publicationDate\":\"1995-03-01\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"3\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"PSN: Arms Races & Arms Control (Topic)\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3277650\",\"RegionNum\":0,\"RegionCategory\":null,\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"\",\"JCRName\":\"\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"PSN: Arms Races & Arms Control (Topic)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3277650","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
Domestic Aspects of Strategic Postures: Past and Future in a Middle East Nuclear Regime
This paper examines domestic aspects of the debate over the establishment of a regional nuclear regime in the Middle East. It does so in order to offset the marginal attention paid to the impact of domestic processes and institutions in the definition of strategic outcomes.
The call for incorporating domestic politics into the study of international regimes is not new but, with few exceptions, has been rarely followed by actual applications. That failure has not been the subject of great controversy in the analysis of nuclear options in the Middle East, because neorealist assumptions about the primacy of state survival considerations have gained unparalleled analytical supremacy. The potential for physical annihilation compelled a neorealist point of departure, even when neorealist assumptions led to no particular saddlepoint, or solution (in logical terms, the search for survival could have led to a range of means and outcomes).
That different domestic actors are likely to define strategic options with different considerations in mind seems self-evident. Domestic groups weigh different international outcomes according to the latter's potential effect on their own political and institutional pay-offs. The pay-offs associated with different outcomes can be affected by different mixes of side-payments. For instance, no military establishment entrusted with maintaining conventional deterrence would endanger its access to conventional weapons, the means with which it maintains its mission.
In general terms, domestic actors rank their preferences according to the rate at which they discount the future, their degree of receptivity to transparency, their sensitivity coefficients to gaps in gains, and/or their definition of a 'balanced exchange'. These four, of course, are influenced by the extent to which actors are concerned with short-term political/electoral gains or with longer-term institutional and bureaucratic survival. Thus, the conventional military establishment may be open to absolute (mutual) gains and transparency at the nuclear level while resisting anything other than relative gains in conventional weaponry. A certain political party may be reluctant to ratify an agreement that does not make its own positional gains clear. Strategic postures are nested in a multidimentional space where foreign aid and investment, technological change, electoral cycles (or their equivalent), and conventional military balances intersect in often unpredictable ways.
If one construes the past evolution of Middle East nuclear postures with these considerations in mind, where does one look in trying to understand the emergence of nuclear opaqueness on the one hand, and a stillborn regional regime on the other?
Were these outcomes compatible with the ability of relevant domestic groups to pursue their own political agendas? Were they perhaps even optimal in terms of increasing their internal political latitude? A positive answer to these questions might render domestic considerations a powerful contender in the arena where alternative ways of conceptualizing strategic behaviour claim relative superiority. This study begins with an overview of the historical evolution of nuclear postures in the region, and ends with an assessment of changes in recent years that may affect present and future postures.