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Abstract
This paper employs the concept of smart power to construct an analytical framework for assessing wartime alliance management. It makes two arguments. First, wartime sources of soft power differ from those obtaining during peacetime. Second, the coerciveness with which an alliance leader wields hard power towards actual or prospective allies should vary inversely with the amount of soft power it possesses. The smart power framework illuminates three types of alliance management failure. The paper’s key contentions are illustrated with examples furnished from the record of US alliance leadership since World War II.
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Acknowledgements
For their helpful advice, comments, and critiques, the author thanks the external reviewer, Alan Chong, Timothy Crawford, Giulio Gallarotti, Robert Jervis, Ong Weichong, Pascal Vennesson, and Keren Yarhi-Milo. He is also grateful to Ong Weichong for inviting him to participate in the 2012 Goh Keng Swee seminar that spawned this special issue. Part of this article was researched and written while the author was a Visiting Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University, during the summer of 2014. He is grateful to SIWPS Director Richard K. Betts for granting him this opportunity.
Notes
1 In this paper, I employ the terms ‘alliance’ and ‘alliance leader’ loosely. I use the former to denote the wartime behavior of both formal standing alliances and informal ad hoc coalitions. I use the latter to denote the most powerful member of a given wartime alliance, which nominally bears the greatest share of responsibility for the alliance’s functioning and has the most resources to deploy on its behalf. Logically, any alliance member can deploy hard and soft power towards its partners during wartime, but non-leading (or weaker) members will generally have smaller amounts of both varieties of power to deploy and their efforts will thereby be less salient in influencing the dynamics of the alliance.
2 William H. McNeill, America, Britain, and Russia: Their Co-operation and Conflict 1941–1946 (New York: Johnson Reprints Corp. 1970); Patricia A. Weitsman, Waging War: Alliances, Coalitions, and Institutions of Interstate Violence (Stanford UP 2014), Chs. 3, 5, and 6 (48–73, 99–163).
3 Joseph S. Nye, Jr, ‘Power and Foreign Policy,’ Journal of Political Power 4/1 (2011), 16.
4 Ibid., 20–1.
5 Joseph S. Nye, Jr, The Future of Power (New York: Public Affairs 2011), 84.
6 Ibid., 22–3.
7 Nye, ‘Power and Foreign Policy,’ 20.
8 CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies 2007), 32. Nye’s blanket assertion that the US should routinely favor standing alliances over ad hoc coalitions is not addressed in this article, but has been disputed elsewhere. See Sarah E. Kreps, Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions After the Cold War (New York: OUP 2011); and Weitsman, Waging War.
9 According to James Fearon, ‘war is costly and risky, so rational states should have incentives to locate negotiated settlements that all would prefer to the gamble of war.’ James D. Fearon, ‘Rationalist Explanations for War,’ International Organization 49/3 (Summer 1995), 380.
10 Andrew Mack, ‘Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict,’ World Politics 27/2 (Jan. 1975), 175–200; and Ivan Arreguin-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict (New York: CUP 2005).
11 To some degree, a state’s military power is manipulable during wartime insofar as its political leadership is able to expeditiously convert the country’s economic power (or latent military power) into (actual) military power. On this distinction, see John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, updated ed. (New York: Norton 2014), Ch. 3 (55–82).
12 Stephen Walt conceptualizes threat as a compound variable consisting of four elements: aggregate capabilities (i.e., power), geographic proximity, offensive capabilities, and aggressive intentions. Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1987), 21–6.
13 Nye does note that one of the functions of military power is to provide ‘protection’ to other states and that this can be a source of soft power, but he proceeds to exclusively discuss this modality in the context of peacetime relations between states. Nye, The Future of Power, 45–7.
14 Walt, The Origins of Alliances, 38; Evan N. Resnick, ‘Strange Bedfellows? US Bargaining Behavior with Allies of Convenience,’ International Security 35/3 (Winter 2010/11), 147.
15 See Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 3: The Grand Alliance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1950), 370–1; and ‘[Letter from] Roosevelt to Churchill, No. 219, November 19, 1942,’ in Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jonas (eds), Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (New York: E.P. Dutton 1975) Doc. 185, p. 282.
16 McNeill, America, Britain, and Russia.
17 Randall L. Schweller, ‘Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In,’ International Security 19/1 (Summer 1994), 104–5.
18 Ibid., 103–4.
19 The seminal work on prospect theory is Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk,’ Econometrica 47 (1979), 263–91. On the application of the theory to foreign policy decisionmaking, see Jack S. Levy, ‘Psychology and Foreign Policy Decision-Making,’ in Leonie Huddy, David O. Sears, and Jack S. Levy (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (New York: OUP 2013), 314–16.
20 For a useful discussion of the differences between risk-acceptant and risk-averse revisionist great powers, which includes several empirical examples of each type, see Randall L. Schweller, ‘Managing the Rise of Great Powers: History and Theory,’ in Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross, Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power (New York: Routledge 1999), 21–3.
21 Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty – Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1970).
22 Nye, The Future of Power, 93.
23 The CCC’s headquarters was located in Washington DC, which arguably afforded the US an upper hand over Britain in terms of agenda-setting and persuasion. Mark A. Stoler, Allies in War: Britain and America Against the Axis Powers 1940–1945 (London: Hodder Arnold 2005), 43–7.
24 Ulrich Pilster, ‘Are Democracies the Better Allies? The Impact of Regime Type on Military Coalition Operations,’ International Interactions 37/1 (Jan.–March 2011), 59.
25 Pilster, ‘Are Democracies the Better Allies?’, 58–60; Gordon Tullock, Autocracy (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1987), 24; Charles Lipson, Reliable Partners: How Democracies Made a Separate Peace (Princeton UP 2003), 87.
26 Schweller, ‘Bandwagoning for Profit,’ 104.
27 To wit, Jonathan Adelman notes that during World War II, Nazi Germany’s foremost allies were right-wing dictatorships ‘which shared some features of the German world view but rejected its core of a radical transcendent restructuring of the world with Germany as the dominant power.’ Jonathan R. Adelman, ‘Introduction,’ in Jonathan R. Adelman (ed.), Hitler and his Allies in World War II (New York: Routledge 2007), 19.
28 Giulio M. Gallarotti, Cosmopolitan Power in International Relations: A Synthesis of Realism, Neoliberalism, and Constructivism (New York: CUP 2010), 51.
29 Timothy W. Crawford, ‘Preventing Enemy Coalitions: How Wedge Strategies Shape Power Politics,’ International Security 35/4 (Spring 2011), 156, 158, 159–64. Although Crawford is generally sceptical about the prospects of purely coercive ‘wedge strategies’ aimed at severing adversary alliances, Yasuhiro Izumikawa is more sanguine about their utility. See Ibid., 160–64; and Yasuhiro Izumikawa, ‘To Coerce or Reward? Theorizing Wedge Strategies in Alliance Politics,’ Security Studies 22/3 (2013), 498–531.
30 Martha Crenshaw, ‘Coercive Diplomacy and the Response to Terrorism,’ in Robert J. Art and Patrick M. Cronin (eds), The United States and Coercive Diplomacy (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press 2003), 335–42.
31 Dennis Kux, Disenchanted Allies: The United States and Pakistan 1947–2000 (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press 2001), 256–358.
32 Suzanne Goldenberg, ‘Bush Threatened to Bomb Pakistan, Says Musharraf,’ The Guardian, 21 Sept. 2006, <www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/22/pakistan.usa>. Within days, however, the Bush administration shifted to a strategy of side-payment bribery towards Islamabad. After successfully lobbying Congress to rescind its nuclear sanctions against Pakistan, the administration began providing large-scale military aid to the Musharraf regime, which totaled upwards of $8 billion by the time the Pakistani leader stopped down in 2008. Bruce Riedel, Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of Global Jihad (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press 2011), 72.
33 If the amount of soft power possessed by the alliance leader lies somewhere between ‒1 and 0, a mixed strategy of coercion and bribery will be preferable.
34 Weitsman, Waging War, 156–61.
35 Ibid., 141–2. The administration also promised its coalition partners that it would provide them with both subsidies and contracts to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure after the war.
36 Carol Migdalovitz, Iraq: Turkey, the Deployment of US Forces, and Related Issues, Congressional Research Service Report RL31794, 2 May 2003. Obtained from Wikileaks Document Release, <http://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS-RL31794>, 13.
37 Ibid., 15.
38 Ibid., 5–11. Notably, within days of the commencement of the invasion, Turkey agreed to much scaled-down US requests for access to Turkish airspace, the provision of food, fuel, and other non-lethal supplies to US troops in northern Iraq, and Turkey’s pledge not to enter northern Iraq. In return, the Bush administration agreed to provide Turkey with $1 billion in economic aid, which it could use to leverage an additional $8.5 billion in private loans (21–2).
39 To wit, in the several months leading up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell did not pay a single visit to Turkey and instead delegated negotiations with Ankara to a subordinate who had little experience in Turkey. Michael Rubin, ‘A Comedy of Errors: American-Turkish Diplomacy and the Iraq War,’ Turkish Policy Quarterly 4/1 (Spring 2005), 3–4.
40 For states that are weakly motivated to fight, the alliance leader may have to resort to both side-payment bribes and conditional bolstering. For example, during the 2003–11 Iraq War, the Bush administration not only agreed to issue a security guarantee to Poland and station ballistic missile defense batteries on Polish soil (i.e. side-payment bribery), but also transferred $240 million to the Polish government to support its forces in Iraq (i.e. bolstering). Weitsman, Waging War, 141.
41 R.G.D. Allen, ‘Mutual Aid Between the US and the British Empire,’ Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 109/33 (1946), 250. Apart from Lend-Lease, the administration engaged in intensive intelligence-sharing with the British and, to a lesser extent, the Soviets. See Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: Norton 1995), 219–20.
42 President Roosevelt to the British Prime Minister (Churchill), telegram, 18 Nov. 1944, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1944, Vol. 7: The American Republics (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office 1967), 365; President Roosevelt to the Ambassador in the United Kingdom (Winant), telegram, 24 Nov. 1944, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1944, Vol. 2: General Economic and Social Matters (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office 1969), 589.
43 Acting Secretary of State and the Foreign Economic Administrator Leo Crowley to President Truman, memorandum, 11 May 1945, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945, Vol. 5: Europe (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office 1967), 999–1000.
44 George C. Herring, Jr, Aid to Russia 1941–1946: Strategy, Diplomacy, and the Origins of the Cold War (New York: Columbia UP 1973), 229–30.
45 Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton UP 1976), 31.
46 Richard Ned Lebow, ‘The Long Peace, the End of the Cold War, and the Failure of Realism,’ in Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen (eds), International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia UP 1996), 26–33; R. Harrison Wagner, ‘What Was Bipolarity?’, International Organization 47/1 (Winter 1993), 77–106; Keren Yarhi-Milo, ‘In the Eye of the Beholder: How Leaders and Intelligence Communities Assess the Intentions of Adversaries,’ International Security 38/1 (Summer 2013), 7–51.
47 Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (New York: Columbia UP 1989).
48 Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics.
49 Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials, Investments, and US Foreign Policy (Princeton UP 1978).
50 Sarah Kreps, ‘When Does the Mission Determine the Coalition? The Logic of Multilateral Intervention and the Case of Afghanistan,’ Security Studies 17 (2008), 531–67.
51 Ibid., 532.
52 Text of United Nations Security Council Resolution #1368, adopted 12 Sept. 2001, <http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N01/533/82/PDF/N0153382.pdf?OpenElement>.
53 Text of North Atlantic Treaty, signed 9 April 1949, <www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_17120.htm>.
54 Nora Bensahel, The Counterterror Coalitions: Cooperation with Europe, NATO, and the European Union (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 2003), 8–9.
55 Bensahel, The Counterterror Coalitions, 16–17.
56 Kreps, ‘When Does the Mission Determine the Coalition?’, 542–4.
57 Bensahel, The Counterterror Coalitions, 16.
58 Weitsman, Waging War, 122–123.
59 Ibid., 99–131; David P. Auerswald and Stephen M. Saideman, NATO in Afghanistan: Fighting Together, Fighting Alone (Princeton UP 2014).
60 Ibid., 123.
61 Memorandum by the Acting Secretary of State and the Foreign Economic Administrator (Crowley) to President Truman, 11 May 1945, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945, Vol. 5: Europe, 1000.
62 Herring, Aid to Russia 1941–1946, 181, 206.
63 Robert M. Hathaway, Ambiguous Partnership: Britain and America, 1944–1947 (New York: Columbia UP 1981), 145–7.
64 Quoted in Ibid. Truman’s actions amounted to a betrayal of Roosevelt’s earlier pledge to Churchill that Lend-Lease aid would continue to flow during the interregnum between the defeat of Germany and subsequent defeat of Japan. Hathaway, Ambiguous Partnership, 65–6.
65 Herring, Aid to Russia, 1941–1946, 236.
66 Quoted in Jonathan Colman and J.J. Widen, ‘The Johnson Administration and the Recruitment of Allies in Vietnam, 1964–1968,’ History 94/316 (Oct. 2009), 484.
67 Ibid., 485–90.
68 Ibid., 492.
69 Quoted in Ibid., 496.
70 Ibid., 497.
71 Quoted in Dennis Kux, Disenchanted Allies, 151.
72 Notes of Meeting, 19 June 1968, Document 276, Foreign Relations of the United States 1964–1968: Vol. 6, Vietnam, Jan.–Aug. 1968 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office 2002).
73 On offshore balancing, see for example, Christopher Layne, ‘From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America’s Future Grand Strategy,’ International Security 22/1 (Sept. 1997), 1–39; Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for US Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2014); John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Imperial By Design,’ The National Interest, No. 111 (Jan./Feb. 2011), 16–34; and Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy (New York: Norton 2005).
74 Mearsheimer, ‘Imperial By Design,’ 18.
75 Exemplars of primacy, in both its neoconservative and liberal varieties, include William Kristol and Robert Kagan, ‘Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,’ Foreign Affairs 75/4 (July/Aug. 1996), 18–33; Samuel P. Huntington, ‘Why International Primacy Matters,’ International Security 17/4 (Spring 1993), 68–84; G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton UP 2011); Stephen G. Brooks and William Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton UP 2008); and Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth, ‘Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment,’ International Security 37/3 (Winter 2012/13), 7–51.
76 Robert, ‘Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,’ World Politics 30/2 (Jan. 1978), 204.
77 The US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Univ. of Chicago Press 2007), Ch. 1 (1–52).
78 See, respectively, Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: W.W. Norton 2010); and Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, From George W. Bush to Barack Obama (New York: Vintage 2013).
79 Ben Connable and Martin C. Libicki, How Insurgencies End (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 2010).
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Evan N. Resnick
Evan N. Resnick is assistant professor and Coordinator of the United States Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.