From the editors

Strategists deal with the use of military force in international politics. But force is not the only thing that matters; states have other tools at their disposal. This issue of The Journal of Strategic Studies explores how states use time and alliances to their advantages, and why those factors create new dilemmas.

In ‘It’s about time: Strategy and temporal phenomena,’ Andrew Carr of Australian National University provides a broad theoretical framework for strategy and time. Fundamental questions about politics and war are about time. How do states behave in crises, when time is compressed? Why do some wars end quickly while others are prolonged? How might states end the fighting in order to achieve an enduring peace? Despite the continuing interest in these questions, writes Carr, ‘time’s role in strategy has been empirically under-studied and theoretically neglected by scholars’. To inspire a deeper inquiry, he disaggregates time into four basic concepts: order, duration, significance, and transition. Applying these concepts to familiar questions may yield unexpected but important new ideas, and provide answers to stubborn puzzles about strategic behaviour.¹

The shadow of the future, for example, looms over state decisions to invest in domestic defence industries. According to Marc Devore of The University of St. Andrews, such investments are economically suspect and politically dangerous. In ‘Armaments after autonomy: Military adaptation and the drive for domestic defence industries,’ he argues that such investments hurt the economy by wasting resources, and threaten the peace by provoking arms races. Devore finds that states nonetheless invest in order to hedge against uncertainty. Fears of insecure international supply chains give them immediate reason to buy at home, and nationalism plays a role in sustaining that investment. More importantly, leaders believe that domestic defence industries enable future adaptation.²

Domestic resources allow states to hedge against uncertainty, and unilateral decision-making gives them freedom of action. Yet states have always sought alliances. These relationships are valuable because allies can pool resources, gain access to new regions, and reap the benefits of collective knowledge. The structure of alliance systems varies across time and space, however, suggesting that how states interact is as important as why they choose to join forces in the first place. In ‘Nodal defence: the changing structure of U.S. alliance systems in Europe and East’, Luis Simón of the Free University of Brussels, Alexander Lanoszka of the University of Waterloo, and Hugo Meijer of Sciences Po, explore the changing nature of U.S. alliances in Europe and Asia. The stylised distinction between the European model (multilateralism) and the Asian model (hub-and-spokes) fails to describe how both alliances have evolved over time. Instead, they introduce the concept of a ‘nodal defence,’ a hybrid system that encourages flexible responses to a variety of threats by organising allies around specific roles. The authors’ discussion of hybrid alliance structures is important for contemporary strategy, but it also opens up questions about how we understand previous systems.³

Cultivating foreign partners sometimes creates risks. Not all states are equally willing to take action against common adversaries, and in some cases cautious states have to spend considerable diplomatic capital to placate their more aggressive partners. In ‘The dilemma of a ‘trigger happy’ protégé: Israel, France, and President Carter’s Iraq policy’, Or Rabinowitz of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem focuses on a specific dilemma. What should status quo nuclear powers do when protégés seek to conduct an armed attack on a third-party’s nuclear facilities? In extreme cases, writes Rabinowitz, they can support or sabotage such a strike. In the middle lies what she calls ‘status quo adherence,’ an attempt to dissuade the protégé while simultaneously accommodating its other diplomatic interests. Rabinowitz uses recently declassified documents to explore how the United States attempted this course in the Carter administration. Lessons from the 1970s remain important today, given continued concerns about proliferation in the region.⁴

Diplomacy is not just important for those going on the offensive. States in the process of ending foreign campaigns engage in extensive bargaining with third parties. Territorial withdrawal is not a unilateral process, writes Rob Geist Pinfold of the University of Haifa. His article, ‘Territorial withdrawal as multilateral bargaining: Revisiting Israel’s “unilateral” withdrawals from Gaza and southern Lebanon’, describes a parallel process of violent bargaining with enemies and diplomacy with the United States and others. Domestic politics add another layer of complexity to military withdrawals. Overlapping international and internecine bargaining processes help explain why military retrenchment, though straightforward in principle, can take a very long time in practice.⁵

Notes

¹ For a discussion of time and cyberspace, see Max Smeets, ‘A matter of time: On the transitory nature of cyberweapons’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 41/1-2 (2018). For a discussion of time and civil–military relations, see Lawrence Freedman, ‘Political impatience and military caution’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 44/1 (2021). On the late stages of war and its aftermath see Chiara De Franco, Anders Engberg-Pedersen and Martin Mennecke, eds., Special issue, ‘How Do Wars End?’ The Journal of Strategic Studies 42/7 (2019).

² For recent country studies on national defence industries, see Katarzyna Zysk, ‘Defence innovation and the 4th industrial revolution in Russia’, The Journal of Strategic Studies (forthcoming); Daniel Fiott, ‘A Revolution Too Far? US Defence Innovation, Europe and NATO’s Military-Technological Gap,’ The Journal of Strategic Studies 40/3 (2017); and Richard A. Bitzinger, ‘Reforming China’s defense industry’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 39/5-6 (2016).

³ On the evolution of NATO, see Sergey Radchenko, Timothy Andrews Sayle and Christian Ostermann, eds. ‘Introduction to the Special Issue, NATO: Past & Present’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 43/6-7 (2020). On the Asian alliance system, see Sanjana Pattabi Raman’s review of Victor D. Cha, ‘Powerplay: The Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia (Princeton University Press, 2016)’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 42/2 (2019). On evolving regional patterns of association, see Paul M. McGarr, ‘The long shadow of colonial cartography: Britain and the Sino-Indian war of 1962ʹ, The Journal of Strategic Studies 42/5 (2019).

⁴ On preventive strikes and nuclear proliferation, see Steven E. Lobell, ‘Why Israel launched a preventive military strike on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program (1981): The fungibility of power resources’, The Journal of Strategic Studies (forthcoming); and Sarah E. Kreps & Matthew Fuhrmann, ‘Attacking the Atom: Does Bombing Nuclear Facilities Affect Proliferation?’ The Journal of Strategic Studies 34/2 (2011). For a discussion of more recent US-Israel relations, see Ruike Xu and Wyn Rees, ‘Comparing the Anglo-American and Israeli-American Special Relationships in the Obama Era: An Alliance Persistence Perspective’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 41/4 (2018).

⁵ For comparative cases of the dynamics of termination and withdrawal, see Gregory A. Daddis, ‘“A Better War?” – The View from the Nixon White House’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 36/3 (2013); Christopher D. Kolenda, ‘Slow failure: Understanding America’s quagmire in Afghanistan’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 42/7 (2019); and Audrey Kurth Cronin, ‘The “War on Terrorism”: What Does it Mean to Win?’ The Journal of Strategic Studies 37/2 (2014).