American foreign policy and the fungibility of force

Security Studies

Volumn 5, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 7-42

  Art, Robert J ^a,b  

^a BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002500554     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636419608429287     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. There are many definitions of grand strategy. The one I use here is this: grand strategy posits the foreign policy goals for a state and prescribes how military power can best be used to attain them. As used in this article, grand strategy is therefore about the proper relation of the military instrument to a nation's external goals.
2. I have developed this distinction more fully in Robert J. Art, "The Role of Military Power in International Relations," in National Security Affairs: Theoretical Perspectives and Contemporary Issues, ed. B. Thomas Trout and James E. Harf (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1982), 18-27.
3. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1979), 114. Waltz quotes E. R. Livernash (p. 114) as follows: "The few strikes that take place are in a sense the cost of the strike option which produces settlements in the large mass of negotiations."
4. For further discussion of the effects of catastrophic breakdown in oligopolistic situations, another permissive realm, see William Fellner, Competition Among the Few: Oligopoly and Similar Market Structures (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1965), esp. chaps. 5 and 6.
5. See E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1961), 117.
6. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 113.
7. The best empirical studies on asset fungibility that we have are: Robert O. Keohane, International Institutions and State Power: Essays in International Relations Theory (Boulder: Westview, 1989), 53-59 and 84-94;
8. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr., Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977);
9. and Christopher T. Kirkey, "The Canadian-American Bargaining Relationship in the North: Explaining Interstate Bargaining Outcomes" (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1994). In the first study, Keohane accounted for the differences in how the international regimes for trade, finance, and oil changed from 1966-77 by looking at the differences in the specific power assets that the United States wielded in each area. It was the United States that had created and sustained each regime, but as the decline in its power became tangible during the 1966-77 decade, the nature of the rules and behavior of states in each issue area changed. Keohane argues that American power declined at different rates in each area, with different consequences for the international rules and behavior of each regime. In the second study, Keohane and Nye sought to test systematically the situationally specific nature of power by looking at the relations among the United States and its industrial allies during the cold war. Keohane and Nye argued that military power was not used by these governments against one another (since they were allies); therefore, that military power was of minor importance in their relations with each other, and, by implication, that it had little fungibility in this particular case. As a consequence, outcomes in specific issue areas among these states were more a function of the relative distribution of power resources specific to each given issue area. In the third study, Kirkey found that Canadian-American relations on a range of issues were best explained by the domain-specific analysis of power. Although stronger in most domains, the United States chose not to use its strength in those domains to compensate for its weakness in others. The norm of not linking domains obtained in U.S.-Canadian relations thereby made outcomes more domain-specific than they otherwise might have been. Kirkey's analysis suggests that this outcome was a matter of American choice, not necessity.
10. Two sensible discussions of a state's power assets can be found in Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis, chap. 8;
11. and Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 3rd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1964), chap. 10.
12. For a recent excellent demonstration of this point, see Jonathan Kirshner, Currency and Coercion: The Political Economy of International Monetary Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
13. For another view that military power still has some fungibility, see Joseph S. Nye Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 189-90.
14. Exactly where this point is, is difficult to define. One could argue that more military power is reasonable up until the point where other states begin to worry and take counteractions. One could argue that more amounts of offensive power will worry other states more quickly than more amounts of defensive power. One could furthermore argue that the point where reasonable becomes unreasonable is more dependent on the perceived intentions of the state than on its military capability. These are all "reasonable" points. In this article, I cannot settle the debate between "aggressive" and "defensive" realists, nor can I show how to distinguish between offense and defense dominant worlds. (On this point, see Stephen Van Evera, The Causes of War, vol. 1 [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming].) More military power will buy a state more options if other states either do not counter the powerful state, or are unable to keep up with its pace of arming. Offensive military power is more threatening than defensive military power (if the two can be distinguished) and probably more fungible. Defensive military power therefore has less fungibility than offensive power, unless, of course, a militarily powerful state decides to spread its defensive power over another state. I contest none of these points. What I do maintain, however, is that the military instrument possesses more fungibility for the military powerful state than for the militarily weak one. In this regard, the fungibility of force argument applies most particularly to the great powers and especially to the American superpower.
15. David Baldwin, Paradoxes of Power (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 151-52.
16. Baldwin first developed his argument in his "Power Analysis and World Politics," World Politics 31, no. 1 (January 1979): 161-94, which is reprinted in this volume of his previously published essays.
17. Quotes from Baldwin, Paradoxes of Power, 134-35, 135, and 136, respectively.
18. In fairness to Baldwin, these examples were not fully developed, but consist of only a sentence or two. Nevertheless, they are fair game because Baldwin used them as illustrations of his more general point about the limits to the utility of military power. The fact that he did not develop them further led him astray, in my view. He was trying to show with them that military power is less effective than commonly thought. I reinterpret these examples to show how versatile military power in fact is. Neither Baldwin nor I, however, can put a number on the fungibility of military power, and I certainly agree with him that "no political power resource begins to approach the degree of fungibility of money" (quoted in Baldwin, Paradoxes of Power, 135).
19. Baldwin, Paradoxes of Power, 134, 135, 133.
20. For the facts and interpretation of this case, I have relied on Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1971), 385, 387, and 532-37;
21. Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington, D.C.: Blockings, 1978), 48 and 71-72;
22. Richard P. Stebbins and Elaine P. Adam, Documents on American Foreign Relations, 1968-69 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 292-302;
23. and the New York Times Index, 1968, 732-36.
24. Johnson, Vantage Point, 536.
25. Among the things considered to secure the crew's release was the threat of seizing costly fish-processing ships that were being built in the Netherlands for North Korea. See New York Times Index, 1968, 735 (col. 3).
26. Johnson, Vantage Point, 535;
27. Blechman and Kaplan, Force Without War, 72.
28. Baldwin, of course, agrees with this point. He has written: "Actually, any technique of statecraft works poorly in isolation from the others." See David A. Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 143.
29. I have borrowed this term from Ernst Haas, even though I am using it differently than he does. He used the phrase to describe the effects that cooperation on economic matters among the states of Western Europe could have on their political relations. He argued that cooperation on economic matters would spill over into their political relations, induce greater cooperation there, and lead ultimately to the political integration of Western Europe. See Ernst Haas, Beyond the Nation State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), 48.
30. For Haas's later assessment of how effective spill-over effects were, see Ernst Haas, The Obsolescence of Regional Integration Theory (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1974).
31. For a contrary argument, see Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 2. Mercer argues that reputations of states do not carry over from one time to another, or from one set of events to another set.
32. Solvency is to be distinguished from liquidity. A bank can be solvent but not liquid. Liquidity refers to the ability of a bank to meet all its liabilities upon demand. Most banks are not able to do so, however, if all the demands are called at the same time. The reason is that many assets of any given bank are tied up in investments that cannot be called back on short notice, but take time to convert into cash. The function of a central bank is to solve the liquidity problem of a nation's banking system by providing the liquidity in the short term in order to prevent runs on a bank.
33. I have shamelessly borrowed the next few pages from Robert J. Art, "A Defensible Defense: America's Grand Strategy After the Cold War," International Security 15, no. 4 (spring 1991): 33-35.
34. For the basic argument about the links between security and economics during this period, I have relied heavily on what still remains the best statement on the subject, which is Robert Gilpin's U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation: The Political Economy of Direct Investment (New York: Basic Books, 1975), chap. 4.
35. Also see Robert Gilpin, "The Politics of Transnational Economic Relations," in Transnational Relations and World Politics, ed. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 48-69;
36. and John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War," International Security 15, no. 1 (summer 1991): 42-48.
37. For arguments that a bipolar international system is more conducive to fostering freer trade among states than a multipolar one, see Joanne Gowa, "Bipolarity, Multipolarity, and Free Trade," American Political Science Review 83, no. 4 (December 1989): 1245-57;
38. and Joanne Gowa, Allies, Adversaries, and International Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), chaps. 3 and 4.
39. Stephen Krasner and Janice Thompson argue that "the more stable the pattern of property rights the higher the level of economic transactions." See Stephen D. Krasner and Janice E. Thomson, "Global Transactions and the Consolidation of Sovereignty," in Global Changes and Theoretical Challenge, ed. Ernst-Otto Czempiel and James N. Rosenau (Lexington: Lexington, 1989), 198.
40. As Robert Osgood was among the first to point out that in its initial phase, before the Korean War brought a large contingent of American troops to Europe, the function of NATO was broadly psychological, not strictly military. The goal was not to balance the Soviets military power on the continent, but to convince the Europeans that the Americans would not abandon them. For this task, the signing of a military alliance alone would be sufficient. See Robert E. Osgood, NATO - The Entangling Alliance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), chap. 2.
41. These concerns were never far below the surface. For how they affected the very form NATO took, see Timothy P. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance (Westport Greenwood, 1981).
42. For more on the dual function that NATO has served - to deter the Soviets and to sit on the Germans, See Josef Joffe, "Europe's American Pacifier," Foreign Policy, no. 54 (spring 1984): 64-82.
43. This is what Joanne Gowa means when she refers to the security externalities of free trade. See Gowa, "Bipolarity, Multipolarity, and Free Trade."
44. See also Robert Powell, "Guns, Butter, and Anarchy," American Political Science Review 87, no. 1 (March 1993): 115-32;
45. and Joseph Grieco, "Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation," International Organization 42, no. 3 (fall 1988): 167-88.
46. As Robert Keohane puts it: "...functional linkages exist between issue areas, and bargaining linkages are often drawn by policymakers between issue areas that are not functionally linked." See Keohane, International Institutions and State Power, 95.
47. Keohane, International Institutions and State Power, Ibid.95.
48. I am indebted to David Spiro for calling this example to my attention. My analysis of alliance energy politics in 1973-74 draws from David E. Spiro, Hegemony Unbound: Petrodollar Recycling and the De-Legitimation of American Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming), chap. 4;
49. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), chaps. 16, 19, and 20;
50. Ethan B. Kapstein, The Insecure Alliance: Energy Crises and Western Politics Since 1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), chaps. 7 and 8;
51. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Payer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), chaps. 29, 30, 33 and 34;
52. Nadav Safran, Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), chap 13;
53. and Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), chap. 10.
54. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 874;
55. and Yergin, The Prize, 628.
56. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 911.
57. Quoted in Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 916 (emphasis added).
58. Nixon also expressed these views publicly about a month later at a question-and-answer session at the Executives' Club of Chicago. There on 15 March he said: "Now the Europeans cannot have it both ways. They cannot have the United States participation and cooperation on the security front and then proceed to have confrontation and even hostility on the economic and political front" Quoted in Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, ibid., 932.
59. Kapstein, Insecure Alliance, 174.
60. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 898;
61. Kapstein, Insecure Aliance, 174-75.
62. Robert Keohane argues that the IEA achieved some success in coping with the October 1980 oil price rise that was induced by the Iran-Iraq War. I find his evidence thin and think most of the subsequent decline in prices can easily be accounted for by three other factors he mentions: "high levels of stocks [of oil], general weakness in demand, and the willingness of Saudi Arabia to increase production..." (See Keohane, After Hegemony, 231-37.) If we look at the record of oil prices from early 1981 until late 1990, the importance of these factors becomes even more apparent. Oil prices initially fell in the 1980s as a consequence of a global recession, greater energy efficiency by the major oil consumers induced by higher costs for oil, and by the bringing on line of large, more costly-to-produce, non-OPEC supplies that the 1970s price rises made feasible. The experience of the 1980s reinforces the conclusion about October 1980: it was the supply/demand balance (or imbalance), the availability of non-OPEC oil, and the willingness of Saudi Arabia to serve as the swing producer of last resort (increasing or cutting its oil production in order to even out the market swings in pricing) that dominate any putative oil consumer cooperation in the IAE. Such cooperation may have taken place, but it was of marginal importance.
63. For a useful survey of OPEC, see M. A. Adelman, "OPEC as a Cartel," in OPEC Behavior and World Oil Prices, ed. James M. Griffin and David J. Teece (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), 37-63.
64. For a general assessment of the IEA, see Kapstein, Insecure Alliance, chap. 8.
65. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 92.
66. As Gilpin put it: "Partially for economic reasons, but more importantly for political and strategic ones, Western Europe (primarily West Germany) and Japan agreed to finance the American balance of payments deficit." See Gilpin, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation, 154.
67. For this example, I have relied exclusively on David Spiro's original and thorough research. See Spiro, Hegemony Unbound, chap. 4.
68. The quote is from an interview conducted by Spiro in Boston in 1984 with a former American ambassador to the Middle East. See Spiro, Hegemony Unbound, 271. (All page references are for the manuscript version.)
69. Spiro, Hegemony Unbound, Ibid., 261
70. Spiro, Hegemony Unbound, Ibid., 263-66 and 281-83.
71. Spiro, Hegemony Unbound, Ibid., 259 and 287.
72. Yergin, The Prize, 711.
73. Safran, Saudi Arabia, 322, 410-11.
74. See Safran, Saudi Arabia, ibid., 411.
75. Safran, Saudi Arabia, Ibid., 237.
76. For a comprehensive assessment of the political use of American military power in 215 incidents between 1946 and 1975, see Blechman and Kaplan, Force Without War, chaps. 4 and 11.
77. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 110.
78. In the most exhaustive study of economic sanctions done to date, for example, Haufbauer, Schott, and Elliott found that when the goal of sanctions was to destabilize a government, "...economic sanctions unassisted by companion measures [such as covert actions and quasi-military operations] seldom achieve destabilization." See Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: History and Current Policy, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990), vol. 1, 51.
79. David E. Sanger, "Japan Tells U.S. It Will Not Join Embargo On Iran," New York Times, 10 June 1995, A4.