Nuclear strategy can be a difficult subject to study. In the end, our main preoccupation is understanding why there has not been a thermonuclear war, and what we can do to continue this streak. It is close to impossible to craft definite statements about an event that never happened. We have a strong hunch that nuclear deterrence prevents other states from using their weapons. Deterrence, however, is based on characteristics—fear, resolve, assurance—that are psychological in nature, and hard to observe or measure except after deterrence has failed. Nuclear proliferation and nonproliferation can be equally confounding. Given the benefits that nuclear possession supposedly conveys upon states—more or less securing their independence and protecting them from invasion—the fact that the number of states possessing the bomb is in the single digits, far fewer than anyone would have predicted a half century ago, is surprising.
Article Review 119 on “Proof of the Bomb: The Influence of Previous Failure on Intelligence Judgments of Nuclear Programs.”
At the heart of effective statecraft lies the burden of ascertaining the best available truth about the capabilities and intentions of a state’s allies and adversaries. Equal to the high stakes of intelligence performance is the difficulty of the tasks involved. The importance of knowing one’s enemies confronts the enemies of intelligence in a contest that often enough favors the latter. Because intelligence failure is inevitable over time, intelligence agencies are subject to intense external and internal scrutiny.[1] Feeling burned by previous intelligence failures, political leaders may question, sometimes repeatedly, the veracity of the conclusions their intelligence analysts provide; in the extreme, whole-scale organizational and procedural reforms can be imposed so to avoid the commission of similar mistakes in the future. One under-studied form of internally-derived correction that comes in the wake of major intelligence failures is the degree of urgency with which intelligence judgments are rendered.
Authors’ Response to Article Review 118 on “Is Grand Strategy a Research Program? A Review Essay”
We find it somewhat unusual to have a book review essay reviewed by another scholar. But we are pleased that H-Diplo chose to accord our piece “Is Grand Strategy a Research Program? A Review Essay,” this honor. We are also pleased that Dr. Nina Silove chose to devote the time and effort to this task.
Policy Forum on the 2019 European Elections
Elections to the European Parliament are in many respects the ugly duckling of the European election cycle. They lack the obvious importance and immediate repercussions of presidential and parliamentary elections, yet they undeniably embody the core of the European ideal, even in its current battered and beleaguered state. The European Parliament’s 751 members are, after all, directly elected by the European Union’s 500 million citizens. In recent decades, the Parliament’s role in the EU’s institutional architecture has deepened, giving members a prominent role in drafting legislation and approving the EU’s budget. Yet the Parliament’s rising stature has not been matched by equal levels of public awareness of its role. The work of the Parliament and the identity of its members remain largely unknown to most Europeans, except when their behavior symbolizes the EU’s shortcomings (as with the ongoing expenses scandal). Even as the Parliament’s role has expanded, turnout for elections has declined, slipping from 63% in 1979 to 43% in 2014. Moreover, European parliamentary elections are often viewed as little more than barometers of national political moods: despite the spectacular fact (at least from an historical perspective) that twenty-eight countries across the continent, from Spain to Bulgaria, from Malta to Finland, choose members for the same body more or less on the same day, most countries view the elections almost exclusively through the lens of domestic politics.
Article Review 118 on “Is Grand Strategy a Research Program? A Review Essay.”
Thierry Balzacq, Peter Dombrowski, and Simon Reich (BDR) enquire whether grand strategy is a field of study or a mature research program. This is an important question, answers to which would be of tremendous interest to scholars of grand strategy and pivotal for the future of this ever-expanding field of study.
Roundtable 10-28 on Emotional Choices: How the Logic of Affect Shapes Coercive Diplomacy
The topic of emotions is receiving increased attention in the social sciences in general and international politics in particular; the latest and most thorough contribution is Robin Markwica’s Emotional Choices.[1] Our three reviewers are well positioned to analyze the book from different perspectives. Rose McDermott is one of the leading political psychologists of her generation, David Winter is a psychologist who has done path-breaking work applying the study of needs to foreign policy behavior, and Dustin Tingley is a younger eclectic scholar who has worked at the intersection of rational choice and evolutionary psychology.[2] All three praise the book. For Tingley, it is “an intellectual tour de force,” McDermott calls it “impressive,” and Winter says that it makes “important contributions.”
Roundtable 10-27 on Status and the Challenge of Rising Powers
Anyone interested in getting up to speed on the state of status research in international politics should read this roundtable review. It is a testimony not only to the quality of Steven Ward’s book but also to the great distance research on this fundamental human motivation and international politics has come since the 1990s and 2000’s. No longer can scholars write articles and books with introductions lamenting the neglect of this topic. It has become mainstream. It has gone global. Contributions to the literature on status now embrace pretty much all of the methodologies and theoretical schools in international politics, and tackle nearly all subjects of interest from foreign aid and environmental cooperation to international sports.
Article Review 117 on “Killing Norms Softly: US Targeted Killing, Quasi-secrecy and the Assassination Ban.”
How does a democratic (U.S.) government wield secrecy? This is the core question of Andris Banka and Adam Quinn’s “Killing Norms Softly: US Targeted Killing, Quasi-Secrecy and the Assassination Ban,” which advances a theory of how norms of secrecy can be changed to serve executive needs. Focusing on the case of targeted killing under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, the article provides context for the case by explaining how norms develop. The authors challenge the assumption that a change of norms requires public advocacy by arguing that official secrecy can play “an instrumental role in the process of normalizing potentially controversial shifts” (666).
Article Review 116 on “The Grand Strategy of Militant Clients: Iran’s Way of War.”
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the American media paid little attention to the fact that the U.S. was about to end hundreds of years of Sunni supremacy in one of the Middle East’s most important countries. Among the farthest reaching consequences of America’s introduction of democracy to the Shiite-majority country was the fact that it removed a powerful bulwark from Iran’s path to wider regional influence. The most important long-term change after the invasion was not the adoption of a democratic system in ‘the land of the two rivers,’ it was the fact that Iraq had become a weak state susceptible to foreign influence.
Article Review 115 on “A Nation of Feminist Arms Dealers? Canada and Military Exports.”
Canadian military export policies came to unusual public attention following Canada’s 2014 agreement to sell $15 billion worth of armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia. The deal was negotiated under the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and was subsequently given official approval, through the granting of export permits, by the Liberal Government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was elected in 2015. In the debate that ensued, the greater indignation was reserved for the Liberals, who had come to power on the promise of a return to multilateralism and re-engagement with the United Nations—a posture that raised expectations of a renewed exercise of Pearsonian internationalism [1] rather than of record-breaking arms sales to one of the world’s most egregious violators of global human rights standards.
