Читать книгу Fateful Transitions - Daniel M. Kliman - Страница 8

Chapter 2

Power Shifts and Strategy

This chapter connects power transitions, regime type, and the choices that democratic leaders make as they navigate the rise of other nations. The argument is that democracy in an ascendant state reassures while autocratic rule creates a climate of uncertainty and mistrust. Democracies can rise without sowing alarm because their domestic institutions clarify intentions and allow outsiders to shape their strategic behavior. Conversely, rising autocracies provoke anxiety because centralized control and pervasive secrecy obscure their ambitions and reduce opportunities to influence their trajectory. What this means is that democratic powers pursue different strategies as democracies and autocracies rise. They appease newly powerful democracies in order to remove points of conflict and pave the way for integration into international institutions. However, autocratic rule in a rising state necessitates a different approach. Democratic powers will avoid appeasement, and instead attempt to embed rising autocracies in international institutions while looking to military capabilities and alliances as a hedge. This approach amounts to a delicate balance between two disparate strategies. Containment becomes attractive if an autocracy’s behavior as its rise continues unmistakably demonstrates the failure of integration to have a moderating effect.

Power and Perceptions

Changes in the balance of power and the balance of perceptions precede a fateful transition. Clever diplomacy or convincing rhetoric may, for a time, boost a nation’s status in world affairs, but without an accompanying accumulation of economic and military assets, this ascendance will prove short lived. To rise, a state must bring about a shift in the prevailing balance of national capabilities. Yet that state’s emergence may initially go unnoticed by outsiders. Fateful transitions unfold only when democratic leaders begin to perceive another nation’s rise. This section unpacks the balance of power and the balance of perceptions because a detailed understanding of each is critical to identifying the universe of cases relevant to the book.

The Balance of Power

Although power lies at the heart of a vast body of international relations scholarship, its main components remain contested. Theorists such as Kugler and Organski put forward gross national product as a concise indicator of overall national strength.¹ To measure the balance of power, more recent academic work has used gross domestic product (GDP) and the Correlates of War, a composite index of state capabilities.²

It is tempting to simply define the balance of power as the balance of wealth using GDP. Yet when inflated by a large population size, GDP can provide a misleading indicator of national capabilities. As Fareed Zakaria observes, a state’s power reflects the resources the national government can command.³ If much of a state’s population exists at the level of subsistence, a government can harness few resources despite the overall size of the economy.⁴ History demonstrates the disjuncture between GDP and the balance of power. Well into the nineteenth century, China boasted the largest GDP of any nation. Yet the government of Great Britain—able to extract more resources from an industrializing economy—could impose its will on China.⁵ GDP may overstate a nation’s actual capabilities for another reason: the state refrains from translating economic prowess into military might. Blessed by a favorable geography and distrustful of standing armies, the United States long avoided maintaining a military commensurate with its economic clout. Contemporary Japan has yet to develop military forces proportionate to its status as the world’s third-largest economy.⁶ In short, GDP as a catchall indicator of national power is highly problematic.

Composite measurements of the balance of power can also mislead. The Correlates of War index contains six indicators of national capabilities: energy consumption, iron and steel production, military expenditures, military personnel, total population, and urban population.⁷ These indicators are fixed: the index treats them as valid measures of national power from the nineteenth century to the present. In reality, what defines the balance of power has evolved over time. To give only one example, steel production once attested to a nation’s overall level of economic development and war-making potential but long ago ceased to be a cutting-edge industry or a vital military input. The same applies to all indicators in the Correlates of War index except a state’s military expenditures.

To accurately capture the balance of power requires historical context. From the late nineteenth century to the present, three indicators of national power have remained relevant: a nation’s economic output, international trade, and military expenditures. Other indicators of national capability speak to the balance of power at specific junctures. In the pre-World War I period, observers looked to steel production and warship tonnage when evaluating the balance of power. The interwar years saw first-line aircraft join these two indicators as a period-specific measure of national capabilities. As the Cold War emerged, possession of the atomic bomb loomed large in contemporary assessments of power balances. Today, spending on research and development (R&D), along with GDP, international trade, and military expenditures remain seen as indicators of national strength. Table 1 summarizes how the defining characteristics of the balance of power have varied over time.

Table 1: Balance of Power

Key indicators
Period	Type
All	GDP International trade Military expenditures
Prewar	Steel production Warship tonnage
Interwar	Steel production Warship tonnage First-line aircraft
Early Cold War Present	Atomic bomb R&D spending

This century-plus span is rarely amenable to precise benchmarks that demarcate when changes in the balance of power amount to a state’s rise. While a state’s share of key capabilities should expand relative to the share of the democratic power, there is no clear-cut threshold marking the start of a power transition. The benchmark this book uses is a shift in the distribution of capabilities along multiple dimensions, with at least one dimension an enduring indicator of national power. The gap between the democratic power and the other state should narrow over time, though it need not close entirely.

The Balance of Perceptions

The balance of perceptions presents a different sort of measurement challenge. Perceptions of another state’s rise usually take the form of a comparison, with democratic leaders expressing concern about their country’s loss of preeminence going forward. To the degree that such concerns exist within a democratic elite, they are chronicled in public speeches, government documents, private correspondence, memoirs, newspapers, and magazines.

Various statements would indicate that democratic leaders worry about their country’s relative decline. Most explicitly, they could project that another state will overtake their own as the leading regional or global power. They could also anticipate a loss of preeminence in a more circumscribed area. On the economic side, this could include relative size of GDP, dominance of major export markets, or technological leadership. On the military side, democratic leaders might worry about a loss of military superiority, the advent of parity in conventional or nuclear capabilities, or a changed balance of power in a specific region.

In a democracy, the balance of perceptions hinges on mainstream elite opinion. If a handful of prescient pessimists foresee relative decline but democratic leaders as a whole express confidence about their nation’s prospects compared to another power, the balance of perceptions remains unmoved. For a shift to occur, democratic elites across bureaucratic and partisan lines should articulate concern about a diminishment of their state’s dominant position. Together with a change in the balance of power, this transformation of perceptions marks the moment when a democratic state begins to confront a fateful transition.

Identifying Cases

Together, power and perceptions determine the universe of cases relevant to the book. This universe encompasses “hegemonic transitions” where a democratic power’s global dominance comes under pressure from an ascendant state. Great Britain before World War I and the United States after 1945 have held international positions that approached hegemony. The book examines British strategy toward the emergence of the United States and Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, America’s approach to the Soviet Union’s postwar ascendancy, and the ongoing U.S. response to China’s rise. These cases feature changes in the balance of power and the balance of perceptions.

However, the criteria that define fateful transitions point to a broader set of cases than these four. Although its commercial and maritime primacy had faded, Great Britain during the 1930s was still a pivotal democratic state. Nazi Germany’s upending of a balance of power that favored Great Britain falls squarely within the universe of cases. So does China’s recent eclipse of Japan, the most influential democracy in East Asia. Both of these cases feature a reversal in the bilateral distribution of capabilities, and perceptions of a sharp power inversion by democratic leaders.

Power and perceptions limit the universe of cases to these six. British strategy toward czarist Russia and Meiji Japan, U.S.-Japan and Anglo-Soviet relations during the interwar period, and U.S. policy toward Japan in the 1980s have some resemblance to fateful transitions, but ultimately each historical juncture fails to meet one or both of the criteria set out. These cases were considered but ultimately omitted.⁸ The argument advanced by the book does not necessarily pertain when democratic leaders confront—or perceive—only limited fluctuations in the balance of power.

Democratic Strategies

Four strategic options—appeasement, integration, hedging, and containment—encompass the full range of policies that democracies have historically embraced as they navigate power transitions. These strategies vary widely in terms of the resources required and the actions involved. They do not capture polices that, while potentially effective, have no historical precedent, such as democratic leaders waging preventive war against a rising state or comprehensively encouraging an emerging power’s political liberalization.⁹

Appeasement

A democracy can appease a rising state. The historian Paul Kennedy classifies appeasement as a strategy designed to avert armed conflict by “admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise.”¹⁰ Stephen Rock in his book Appeasement in International Politics presents a similar definition—a “policy of reducing tensions with one’s adversary by removing the causes of conflict and disagreement”¹¹ He adds that appeasement may include mutual accommodation, but the appeaser takes the “initiative in offering inducements and will ultimately make greater sacrifices than its opponent.”

Both Kennedy and Rock provide for a relatively expansive definition of appeasement. In any instance of international negotiations, the final outcome may be uneven, with one party making more concessions than the other. If appeasement ranges from unilateral accommodation to relative reciprocity, it becomes difficult to distinguish from other strategies that a democracy might implement. A more operational definition ought to focus on resources and actions. Appeasement is a strategy that demands few national resources and entails virtually unilateral concessions by democratic leaders in negotiations with the rising state.

Integration

Democratic leaders can decide to integrate a rising power into international institutions. These institutions can differ substantially in structure and total membership, ranging from bilateral alliances with a rising power—pacts of restraint¹²—to multilateral security or economic arrangements in which many nations in addition to the rising power participate. To varying degrees, membership in institutions creates “long-term security, political, and economic commitments that are difficult to retract.”¹³ Integration thus holds the potential of altering the cost-benefit calculations of a rising state in a direction that renders competitive behavior less attractive. A strategy of integration also endows an ascendant state with a “place at the table” where it may voice concerns and cooperate with other nations in shaping the future global order.¹⁴ Participation in international institutions has the potential to reshape a rising power’s interests, though this outcome is far from assured.

The institutional toolkit available to democratic leaders has evolved over time. During the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, international regimes were few and weak; for the most part, integration consisted of bilateral pacts or attempts to construct multilateral arrangements from scratch. In the post-World War II era, the establishment of a robust architecture of international governmental organizations has given democratic leaders a much larger set of institutions in which to embed rising states.¹⁵

Integration demands modest resources from a democratic power, namely, the time and attention government officials take to negotiate treaties, sustain consultative mechanisms, and manage multilateral regimes. Implementation of an integration strategy should feature efforts by democratic leaders to incorporate a rising state into new or preexisting international institutions.

Hedging

A democracy can hedge against another power’s ascendancy. What hedging actually entails remains somewhat nebulously defined in international relations scholarship and security studies. Without explicitly using the term, Randall Schweller notes the potential for strong states to “mix concessions with credible threats, to use sticks as well as carrots” when confronting a rising power.¹⁶ Rock similarly points to the possibility of “combining appeasement with deterrent threats in a mixed influence strategy.”¹⁷ Unsurprisingly, work on China’s ascendance features the most detailed definitions of hedging. Assessing relations between Washington and Beijing, Evan Medeiros defines hedging as “policies that, on one hand, stress engagement and integration mechanisms and, on the other, emphasize realist-style balancing.”¹⁸

Each of these scholars, though capturing aspects of hedging, falls short of an operational definition. When classified as a mixed strategy that harnesses threats and concessions, hedging blurs into coercive bargaining. The definition that Medeiros offers, on the other hand, combines two distinct approaches to a new power’s rise: hedging as well as integration. Resources and actions provide a more precise framework. Hedging is a strategy that demands considerable diplomatic attention and financial investment from democratic leaders. Its execution involves policies designed to establish diplomatic or military leverage against the rising state, such as the redeployment of existing military assets, the development of new military capabilities, and the pursuit of alliances.¹⁹

Containment

The term “containment” originated in 1947 with George Kennan’s efforts to devise a U.S. approach toward the Soviet Union.²⁰ It initially meant checking Soviet expansion on the Eurasian landmass, and has since become synonymous with America’s strategy throughout the Cold War. Yet containment, as a strategy available to democratic leaders, existed long before the dawn of U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Its execution has always carried a steep cost, in time, in treasure, and potentially, in the lives of a nation’s citizens. Containment goes well beyond hedging; it is a strategy of arresting another power’s rise by imposing economic sanctions, using military capabilities and alliances to deter aggression, and if necessary, taking military action to roll back territorial conquest.

Regime Type and Power Transitions

During power transitions, democratic leaders should, in theory, always prefer integration over other approaches. Integration demands modest resources while holding out the hope of modifying behavior and reshaping interests. No other strategy for navigating a new power’s rise offers such a favorable tradeoff of resources to outcomes. Although less costly, appeasement cannot create enduring incentives for responsible international conduct. Nor can appeasement promote a convergence of interests where the rising state gradually takes on the preferences of the democratic power. Hedging delivers none of the benefits associated with integration and demands substantial resources. Even if democratic leaders try to rely mostly on alliances—to hedge on the cheap—they can only attract and retain partners by fielding some military capabilities.²¹ For a democracy, containment should hold negative appeal. Imposing economic sanctions against a rising state means forgoing trade and investment opportunities and terminating existing commercial ties. Additionally, deterring territorial expansion requires an expensive peacetime military, while rolling back aggression carries a steep human cost.

Yet from the late nineteenth century to the present, democratic leaders have tried every strategy in their toolkit. They have paired integration with hedging, appeased, contained, and sometimes alternated among strategies during the course of a new power’s emergence. In a world of complexity, no single factor explains this variation, but one factor does stand out: the regime type of the rising power.

Democracy and Power Transitions

Democracy functions as a source of reassurance on multiple levels. In a democracy, authority is dispersed across a number of decision-makers, either through constitutionally enshrined checks and balances, or through deeply respected traditions of rule of law. Either way, a diverse array of domestic actors plays a role in foreign policymaking. At the same time, an essential element of democratic government is transparency. Transparency describes the visibility of a state’s policymaking process. Under democratic rule, a government’s daily proceedings largely occur in the open. Debates about policy take place in the public eye. And, because democracy places a premium on transparency, the press enjoys legal safeguards.²²

The combination of decentralized authority and transparency prevents a democracy from concealing its true intentions. With numerous domestic actors privy to foreign policy deliberations, information inevitably leaks, making secrecy about strategic level decisions virtually impossible. Moreover, because transparency operates as a domestic norm, “any embassy can subscribe to the major newspapers that provide day-to-day investigative services on the policymaking activities” of a democratic government.²³ Outsiders may fail to predict every perturbation in a democracy’s foreign policy, but they will have a clear understanding of its broader objectives.²⁴

Beyond clarifying intentions, the institutions underpinning democracy also generate opportunities for access—the shaping of strategic behavior by cultivating, lobbying, and manipulating influential groups in another state.²⁵ By opening up the foreign policymaking process to a large number of domestic actors, decentralized authority creates conditions conducive to access. The diffusion of power under democratic rule increases the likelihood that outsiders can locate sympathetic groups who have a hand in foreign policy. In addition, enlarging the circle of decision-making virtually guarantees that internal disagreements will surface, a development that outsiders can exploit, for example, by promoting deadlock to prevent an undesired policy shift.²⁶

In a democracy, transparency works in tandem with decentralized authority to create access opportunities. Publicly available information enables outsiders to locate sympathetic domestic groups to cultivate. Also, the activities of a free press lay bare foreign policy disagreements that would otherwise go unnoticed. Transparency thus allows outsiders to become intimately familiar with the contours of another country’s internal debates, a prerequisite for access. Last but not least, transparency at home extends to dealings with foreigners. Because a democracy accepts considerable information flows, its citizens can more or less freely engage with the representatives of other states. This high degree of latitude is essential for outsiders to leverage points of access.

During a power transition, democratic government in the rising state reduces mistrust. Outsiders can draw upon diverse sources speaking to the emerging power’s intentions. They need not conflate ambitions with military forces deployed, a formula guaranteed to generate mistrust because any ascendant state will eventually translate some of its newfound wealth into military power.²⁷ Information about intentions is one source of reassurance; the other is the existence of access opportunities. The ability to shape strategic behavior constitutes the ultimate safeguard against the disruptions accompanying a new power’s emergence. A rising democracy may harbor expansionist ambitions, but leaders in the other democratic power can partner with sympathetic domestic actors and leverage internal divisions to moderate its external objectives over time. Table 2 summarizes how democracy in an ascendant state can function as a source of reassurance.

Table 2: Democracy and Power Transitions

Institutions	Implications
Decentralized authority	Clear intentions
Transparency	Many access opportunities

Autocracy and Power Transitions

A state under autocratic rule lacks the reassurance mechanisms outlined above. Autocracy centralizes power, confining foreign policy decisions to an elite few, or even to a single individual. In addition, to maintain control over the population, an autocracy limits the flow of information.²⁸ Secrecy is pervasive. The government walls off its daily proceedings from public view: policy debates unfold behind closed doors. The need for information control renders a free press intolerable to an autocracy. Whatever media exist operate under state supervision and without meaningful legal protection.

The institutions central to authoritarian government obscure a state’s intentions. With foreign policy an exclusive domain, the details of internal discussions remain closely held. Add to this sweeping state secrecy laws, and the potential for information leaks is low. Straitjacketed media have little capacity to report on policy deliberations within an autocracy, and because of state controls, outsiders largely discount whatever information the media do convey. Centralized authority and nontransparency thus generate considerable uncertainty about a state’s ambitions.

The institutions associated with autocratic government also deprive outsiders of opportunities to shape strategic behavior. Centralized authority is inimical to access. Foreign policy decisions at most involve a handful of domestic actors. Business and civil society groups that might become points of access in a democracy are relegated to the sidelines. The concentration of power that underpins autocracy also decreases the probability of internal divisions that outsiders can exploit.

Nontransparency further restricts opportunities for access. Pervasive secrecy and the consequent lack of a free press prevent outsiders from understanding the landscape of power within an autocracy. It is difficult to determine who to cultivate, who to lobby, and who to manipulate. And obtaining such information would prove of little value because nontransparency applies to how citizens of an autocracy relate to foreigners. A regime that prizes secrecy will regulate interactions with outsiders, particularly on sensitive issues like foreign policy. There are inherent limits to engaging domestic actors within an authoritarian state.

Autocracy exacerbates the concerns accompanying a powerful state’s emergence. The problem created by a lack of transparency is less the possibility of a surprise attack and more the uncertainty that overhangs a rising autocracy’s ambitions. Outsiders confront an unanswerable question: will the ascendant state be content to peacefully accumulate influence or will it use force to rewrite international rules of the road? The new power’s military capabilities will inevitably loom large as a key indicator of intentions when external observers lack alternative sources of information. Against a backdrop of uncertainty, a rising power’s military buildup will trigger growing mistrust. So will the dearth of access opportunities. When outsiders lack the ability to shape strategic behavior, they become highly vulnerable to the potential downside of another power’s rise. Table 3 encapsulates how authoritarian rule amplifies mistrust of an ascendant state.

Implications for Democratic Leaders

The regime type of a rising state sets the broad boundaries for democratic leaders navigating a power transition. Democracy in the ascendant nation reduces risk and bolsters trust by clarifying intentions and opening up opportunities to shape strategic behavior. This removes the need for outsiders to hedge: democratic leaders can forgo enhanced military capabilities and strengthened alliances and pursue a course of accommodation.

Table 3: Autocracy and Power Transitions

Institutions	Implications
Centralized authority	Unclear intentions
Nontransparency	Few access opportunities

Although integration offers the most favorable tradeoff between resources and outcomes, this strategy can only succeed over a long time horizon. To the extent that international institutions can impose constraints on behavior, these constraints do not emerge overnight. Rather, they strengthen over time as a rising state becomes increasingly invested in a growing array of bilateral agreements and multilateral regimes.²⁹ Likewise, international institutions hold the potential to reshape a rising state’s interests only after an extended period of participation.

To ensure the time needed for integration to succeed, democratic leaders will tend to favor a course of appeasement at the onset of another democracy’s rise. Appeasement removes points of conflict that could become future impediments to embedding a democracy in international institutions as its rise accelerates. The stability cemented by appeasement creates conditions conducive to long-term integration. In this sense, appeasement is a bridge to the strategy democratic leaders inherently prefer when confronting a new power’s rise.

By contrast, at the start of an autocracy’s ascendance, a democracy will likely favor a different, less accommodating approach. A rising autocracy’s opaque intentions and lack of access opportunities generate risk and foster mistrust. Democratic leaders will shy away from appeasement, which offers insufficient protection against the possibility that an autocracy will grow into a powerful adversary. Containment will, at least initially, appear to carry an excessive price tag. Democratic leaders will therefore favor a two-pronged approach. They will try to integrate the rising autocracy in the hope that international institutions will constrain its behavior and ultimately transform its interests. At the same time, they will develop military capabilities and alliances to hedge against the uncertainty accompanying the autocracy’s emergence on the world stage.

This dual strategy is inherently fragile. It will endure so long as the rising autocracy’s behavior demonstrates restraint—a sign to democratic leaders that the combination of integration and hedging remains sufficient. However, if over time the rising autocracy engages in diplomatic or military brinksmanship, democratic leaders will increasingly question the viability of integration. Lacking alternative sources of information that might offer a more nuanced view of the rising autocracy’s behavior, they will have little recourse but to treat diplomatic and military brinksmanship as a decisive indicator of antagonism. The apparent failure of integration coupled with perceived evidence of the other state’s hostility will motivate a shift to containment. Figure 1 visualizes how democratic leaders select strategies during power shifts.

Figure 1. Democratic strategy during fateful transitions.

The decision-making process illustrated in Figure 1 revolves around the clarity of a rising state’s intentions and the availability of access opportunities. Democratic leaders make choices based on these byproducts of regime type, not on their perceptions of a new power’s form of government.³⁰ As they navigate power transitions, democratic leaders may never refer to the rising state’s regime type as a driver of strategy, and they may even dismiss common values as a foundation of foreign policy. Yet the rising power’s domestic institutions still frame leaders’ choices, because they are responding to whether they possess information about the other state’s ambitions and whether they can locate opportunities to influence that state’s strategic behavior from within.

Defining Regime Type

Regime type will reappear in subsequent chapters as a key factor that shapes power transitions. It is therefore important to define regime type in a way that is historically consistent and relevant to the book’s main argument. One potential measure of regime type is Polity IV, a quantitative dataset commonly used in scholarship on the democratic peace. This dataset aggregates indicators of executive recruitment, executive independence, and political competition into a single numerical score. The positive end of the polity scale (+10) denotes a strongly democratic regime, while the negative end (–10) indicates a strongly autocratic regime. Although polity scores at either extreme accurately capture regime type, the middle of the scale offers a more “muddled” picture of a state’s domestic institutions.³¹ Polity IV data therefore serves as a first cut when assessing the regime type of an ascendant state. To ensure accuracy—and more closely link measurements of democracy and autocracy to the book’s argument—the diffusion of political authority and domestic transparency provide a second set of criteria for defining the regime type of the rising power.

The World Bank Database of Political Institutions contains a robust methodology for measuring centralization of power within a regime. This database calculates the number of checks and balances by counting domestic actors legally endowed with veto authority and political parties essential to maintaining a governing coalition.³² To qualify as decentralized, a regime must contain at least three checks and balances. This threshold is based on the fact that no country commonly regarded as a democracy has less than three checks and balances in the database.³³ A regime qualifies as centralized when only a single check and balance exists. Two checks and balances indicate a transitional domestic power structure. The World Bank database has an inherent limitation: it only starts in 1975. However, the coding procedure is easily replicable for the historical case studies contained in this book.³⁴

Freedom of the press provides a valid measurement of the level of transparency in a regime. The NGO Freedom House conducts a regular worldwide survey of state interference in the media that codes countries as free, partly free, and unfree. Since its inception, the survey has evolved to include twenty-three questions across three categories—the legal, political, and economic environments in which the media operate. A subset of the twenty-three questions suffices to capture how much freedom of the press a rising state permits.³⁵ This abbreviated survey for evaluating state control over the media contains six questions listed in Table 4.

Conclusion

Power transitions are fraught moments in international relations, yet they differ depending on the domestic institutions of the ascendant state. Democratic leaders at these pivotal junctures make strategic choices that ultimately hinge on the rising state’s type of regime, which determines the transparency of that state’s intentions and the existence of access opportunities. This critical insight has repercussions for today’s established and emerging powers. However, it is incomplete without a concrete grasp of how regime type has framed power transitions and influenced the formulation of strategy, an understanding that only history can provide. The next chapters explore six cases in which democratic states have confronted fateful transitions.

Table 4: Freedom of the Press

Legal environment

1. Does the constitution contain provisions designed to protect freedom of the press? (Y=0; N=1)

2. Do the penal code, security laws, or any other laws restrict reporting and are journalists punished under these laws? (Y=1; N=0)

Political environment

3. Are media outlets’ news and information content significantly determined by the government or a particular partisan interest? (Y=1; N=0)

4. Is there official censorship? (Y=1; N=0)

5. Are journalists or media outlets subject to extralegal intimidation or physical violence by state authorities? (Y=1; N=0)

Economic environment

6. Are significant portions of the media owned or controlled by the government? (Y=1; N=0)

Score: Free=0; Partly Free=1–2; Unfree=3–6