International and Regional Security

The Causes of War and Peace

Benjamin Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317285540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Sicurezza nazionale

This volume is a collection of the best essays of Professor Benjamin Miller on the subjects of international and regional security.

The book analyses the interrelationships between international politics and regional and national security, with a special focus on the sources of international conflict and collaboration and the causes of war and peace. More specifically, it explains the sources of intended and unintended great-power conflict and collaboration. The book also accounts for the sources of regional war and peace by developing the concept of the state-to-nation balance. Thus the volume is able to explain the variations in the outcomes of great power interventions and the differences in the level and type of war and peace in different eras and various parts of the world. For example, the book's model can account for recent outcomes such as the effects of the 2003 American intervention in Iraq, the post-2011 Arab Spring and the conflicts between Russia and Ukraine. The book also provides a model for explaining the changes in American grand strategy with a special focus on accounting for the causes of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Finally, the book addresses the debate on the future of war and peace in the 21st century.

This book will be essential reading for students of international security, regional security, Middle Eastern politics, foreign policy and IR.

1
Introduction: The Key Themes of My Work

Some major revisionist challenges to the international order have emerged in three different regions in the past few years: Russian annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine; Chinese claims in the South China Sea and its efforts to take control of large parts of it; and the violent non-state challenges to the Middle East state-system.

There are distinctive regional elements in each of the cases, which shape security in the whole region and not only the dyadic relations emphasized so much in the literature. Still, these developments have major repercussions for the international system, while international politics affects also the regional processes. This demonstrates the relevance of this book’s subject, which analyzes the links between international and regional affairs. Moreover, a key component of my work, to be presented below, provides an integrated explanation of these three emerging challenges to the territorial integrity norm.

How did I come to be interested in these subjects of international and regional security?

I was born and raised in Israel. My childhood – like that of many other children in the region – was under the shadow of quite a few wars, infiltrations by Arab terrorist groups, and retaliatory activities by Israel. Naturally, I became interested in questions of conflict and security. My concern with questions of war and peace was dramatically reinforced during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As a young draftee I was a member of a tank company which was air-lifted from our training in the Negev desert in the South of Israel to reinforce the IDF (Israel Defense Force) on the northern front – in the Golan Heights – just a day before the start of the Syrian attack. Following almost a day of fierce fighting, I found myself in a small – and quite exposed – bunker with a few other soldiers surrounded by a massive Syrian force. We were left behind the advancing Syrian forces and it took almost two long days until the IDF re-occupied the area. Unfortunately, thirty-four young soldiers died in the battles around this small hill. I continued to fight, taking part in the Israeli counter-invasion of Syria later in the war. Toward the end of the war I became an ad-hoc “expert” on Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the region, giving informal – and quite dilettante – “explanations” to my fellow troops on the chances for an extended cease-fire.

It was the first time I was exposed to the international politics of the Middle East. Partly inspired by this experience, a few years later I joined the diplomatic cadet course of the Israeli Foreign Service. After serving as a member of the Israeli delegation to the UN General Assembly in New York City, I headed to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. The other “real-world” experience came a bit later while I served in the reserves in the Strategic Planning department of the IDF.

Readers might ask why did I resign from the secure career in the Foreign Service and instead preferred a very insecure academic path? Indeed, I was tenured in the Foreign Ministry at the age of 26 and got a tenure at Hebrew University just about 15 years or so later (following graduate school, a few post-docs and the tenure track at the University). Moreover, I liked the exciting and challenging opportunities offered by serving my country overseas. The reason for the career change was more attraction than disenchantment. Studying in a leading American university, especially UC Berkeley, looked to me like a great intellectual challenge. While I couldn’t be sure that I’d land eventually in a good academic job after completing my PhD, I believed that it would be more fulfilling for me to develop an independent understanding of world affairs under the greater intellectual autonomy offered by academia than under the much greater constraints on one’s intellectual freedom in government service. On the whole, I was not disappointed. Indeed, numerous difficulties emerged along the demanding scholarly road. Yet, I was compensated by a thrilling journey of getting to know many wonderful colleagues from all over the world, visiting exciting places and, yes, working long hours, trying to overcome quite a few scholarly challenges.

Building on my earlier experiences, the graduate studies at Berkeley, especially my dissertation work under the late Professor Kenneth Waltz, inspired me to think theoretically on some of the key questions of international politics. I focused initially on the sources of international conflict and cooperation. The conceptual inspiration for addressing these – and related – issues was sharpened even further when an opportunity for a two-year fellowship landed for me in Cambridge, MA, following my graduate studies at Berkeley, first in the late Samuel Huntington’s Olin Fellowships in National Security at Harvard University and later with the Defense and Arms Control Program at MIT. Over the years I was also privileged to visit – as a Research Fellow or a Visiting Professor – a few other great US and Canadian universities: Princeton (twice); Duke; the University of Colorado, Boulder; McGill University; and Dartmouth College.

All these academic endeavors as well as conversations with a lot of leading –and emerging – scholars have clarified the depth of the theoretical debate, especially the realist-liberal divide and also the level-of-analysis question. Both realist and liberal theories as well as the different levels of analysis seemed to provide powerful explanations of international phenomena such as conflict and cooperation. But how can all these theories be right if their theoretical claims are so different from each other? One idea which came to mind was to conceive of creative ways for bridging this divide. The key question then becomes how can a scholarly synthesis be formed building upon the insights of both (or more) competing theoretical camps while still advancing an overall parsimonious explanation? In other words, the explanation should include a minimal number of causal factors while providing a more satisfactory account of the phenomenon to be explained than the existing accounts.

The need for a synthesis becomes clear as we present in the following lines a brief sample of great variations between patterns of conflict and cooperation in a certain period and also transitions between discord and collaboration in different periods. Thus, my work introduces the conditions under which competing theories are more applicable. In this sense, in contrast to the traditional paradigmatic approaches in the field, my research focuses not on the question of whether a particular theoretical approach is applicable, but when. Some of my other contributions include a number of new conceptual typologies in war and peace and grand strategy and especially the explanation of the variations they address. Accordingly, I’ll present my key novel theory of the state-to-nation balance and describe its power to explain variations in and transitions between war and peace. I’ll also introduce a theoretical model which accounts for key changes in a state’s grand strategy.

Variations in Conflict and Cooperation: Some Examples

While realist scholars in IR expect conflict to dominate international politics, the 19th-century Concert of Europe shows the possibility for cooperation even among all the great powers of the day. Patterns of international cooperation seemed also to get much stronger in the post-Cold War era. Idealist and many liberal observers indeed believe in the great potential for international cooperation, yet the 20th century witnessed some devastating and costly conflicts in the two world wars and also during the Cold War. Even the Concert of Europe eventually collapsed into large-scale violence in the 1854–56 Crimean War, later again in the wars of German unification, and most disastrously in World War I. In contrast, following World War I and, to a greater extent, in the aftermath of World War II, important international institutions have been established, presiding over collaboration in different issue-areas. Even during the Cold War itself some notable patterns of cooperation emerged between the superpowers; some of these patterns are analyzed in the first article below.

Such notable variations between conflict and collaboration raise intriguing questions about the sources of cooperation and rivalry in the international arena. These questions are highly relevant to the post-Cold War system where rising international cooperation has taken place. Examples include the containment of aggressive states such as Iraq following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, various international attempts to bring peace to the Arab-Israeli conflict and to prevent the proliferation of WMD (weapons of mass destruction), particularly nuclear weapons. Especially following 9/11, multilateral cooperation against terrorism has grown considerably. On the whole, levels of inter-state warfare have declined markedly, while states have usually adhered to the territorial integrity norm. In various regions, greater levels of integration have been on the rise while globalization in the economic field reached unprecedented levels with huge levels of trade, foreign direct investment, and monetary transfers in addition to services, industries, people, and ideas crossing national and regional boundaries in high numbers.

At the same time, violent conflicts seem to persist or even to re-emerge in some regions such as the post-Soviet domain, the Middle East, and parts of Africa and Asia. More recently, great-power competition seems to be re-surfacing with the US and the EU in conflict with Russia over Ukraine and Syria and the US and China in disputes over the South China Sea, among other issues.

The end of the Cold War apparently signified some key transformations in world politics. It is quite important to identify which of the post-Cold War changes brought about higher levels of collaboration and which changes contributed to the re-emergence of conflict.

Knowing which changes mattered and how they mattered will help us expect future patterns of continuity and change in international conflict and cooperation. Bipolarity – the two-superpower world dominated by the US and the Soviet Union and their Cold War competition – was replaced by a unipolar world of a single superpower, the US. Which is the key post-Cold War change: this structural transition from bipolarity to unipolarity and perhaps now the gradual start of the shift to multipolarity? Or maybe the key development occurred at the domestic level – regime changes – the spread of democracy, especially in the early post-Cold War era and then the halting process of democratization in the post-Soviet region, no democratization in China and the turbulence of the Arab Spring? Other observers focus on what appear like some important ideational and normative transformations entertaining the potential for more cooperative and peaceful conduct and outcomes in world affairs.

Realists highlight the effects of structural factors – the anarchic international system and the distribution of capabilities – on key patterns of conflictual and cooperative behavior and war and peace outcomes (Waltz 1979; Mearsheimer 2001). In contrast, liberals and others focus mostly on unit-level factors such as the type of regime, and also the state economic structure (Russett and Oneal 2001). Constructivists, for their part, highlight the effects of the normative and ideational changes (Katzenstein 1996; Wendt 1999).¹

Resolving Major Scholarly Debates in IR

This book of essays analyzes some of the key themes in the fields of international and regional security and the links between the two. My work focuses on explaining patterns of international conflict and cooperation, and the sources of war and peace. I account for continuity and change by synthesizing levels of analysis (in particular the international system and domestic politics).² The field of International Relations is distinctive not only because it addresses competition in the real world of international politics, but also because of the intense conflict in the academic world among its competing explanatory perspectives (the so-called “war of the isms”). My theoretical approach is to bridge the sharp and counterproductive divisions in the field through a rigorous integration of some of these competing perspectives. The goal is to explain phenomena that were previously explained by a host of distinctive and unconnected theories in a single coherent overarching framework. This approach is evident in my books and articles.

What are the sources of international conflict and cooperation? What is the most powerful explanation of variations between war and peace, especially on the regional level? What are the effects of the international system on regional conflicts? What best explains changes in grand strategy? How should we define the concept of security following the great changes in the post-Cold War era? These are among the key questions I have addressed for a quarter of a century. The essays in this book are some of the fruits of these efforts. In all of these questions there are tensions between two – or more – competing sets of explanations. In response, my work generates an integrative account or an alternative explanation while maintaining relatively parsimonious explanations.

Creating a synthesis draws on the insight that while each school is able to explain a certain type of major outcomes, it is unable to explain other important outcomes. Thus, there is a need to distinguish between different types of outcomes and then to look for their most powerful explanations.

Locating the most powerful explanation depends at least partly on the type of phenomenon to be explained. I argue that, in the area of conflict and cooperation, intended outcomes (notably premeditated wars and conflict resolution) are best accounted for by the unit-level factors, while unintended ones (such as inadvertent wars and tacit rules for the use of forc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Key Themes of My Work
• THEME I The Sources of Great Power Conflict and Cooperation
• THEME II International Effects on Regional Conflicts
• THEME III The Sources of Regional War and Peace
• THEME IV Grand Strategy, Intervention and National Security
• Index