Princeton Studies in International History and Politics

Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East

Etel Solingen

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400828029
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Control de armas

Nuclear Logics examines why some states seek nuclear weapons while others renounce them. Looking closely at nine cases in East Asia and the Middle East, Etel Solingen finds two distinct regional patterns. In East Asia, the norm since the late 1960s has been to forswear nuclear weapons, and North Korea, which makes no secret of its nuclear ambitions, is the anomaly. In the Middle East the opposite is the case, with Iran, Iraq, Israel, and Libya suspected of pursuing nuclear-weapons capabilities, with Egypt as the anomaly in recent decades.Identifying the domestic conditions underlying these divergent paths, Solingen argues that there are clear differences between states whose leaders advocate integration in the global economy and those that reject it. Among the former are countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, whose leaders have had stronger incentives to avoid the political, economic, and other costs of acquiring nuclear weapons. The latter, as in most cases in the Middle East, have had stronger incentives to exploit nuclear weapons as tools in nationalist platforms geared to helping their leaders survive in power. Solingen complements her bold argument with other logics explaining nuclear behavior, including security dilemmas, international norms and institutions, and the role of democracy and authoritarianism. Her account charts the most important frontier in understanding nuclear proliferation: grasping the relationship between internal and external political survival. Nuclear Logics is a pioneering book that is certain to provide an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers, and practitioners while reframing the policy debate surrounding nonproliferation.

PART ONE

Introduction and Conceptual Framework

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

THE QUANDARY

WHY HAVE SOME STATES sought nuclear weapons whereas others have shunned them? Why has the Middle East largely evolved toward nuclearization whereas East Asia has moved in the opposite direction since the 1970s?¹ How have international power distribution, globalization, international institutions, or democracy affected those choices? Will these regional trends remain? This book seeks to answer these central questions in international politics by improving our understanding of “nuclear aspirants” or states that have considered, developed, abandoned, or acquired nuclear weapons programs since the conclusion of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968, a period sometimes labeled the “second nuclear age.”²

Beyond their immediate policy relevance, the contrasting nuclear trajectories of East Asia and the Middle East offer an important analytical puzzle worthy of systematic analysis. In the Middle East, for example, Iraq, Libya, Israel, and Egypt until 1971 have allegedly pursued nuclear weapons relentlessly, and Iran has been widely suspected of similar intentions on the basis of its violations of NPT commitments. Iraq was precluded from acquiring a nuclear device (1981, 1991) by military force. Some sources even include Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Syria as plausible long-standing aspirants.³ Since 1971 Egypt—a leader in the Arab world—became an important exception to the region’s nuclearizing trajectory. Recent concerns with a defiant Iranian nuclear program have arguably led Turkey, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE henceforth) to embark on nuclear power programs that could constitute potential precursors of nuclear weapons (Campbell, Einhorn, and Reiss 2004). Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal declared, “We are urging Iran to accept the position that we have taken to make the Gulf, as part of the Middle East, nuclear-free and free of weapons of mass destruction. We hope they will join us in this policy and assure that no new threat or arms race happens in this region.”⁴ By contrast, ever since China acquired nuclear weapons in 1964, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea renounced nuclear weapons and joined the NPT, while Southeast Asia established a nuclear weapon–free zone (NWFZ). North Korea has been the exception, testing a nuclear weapon in 2006, the first East Asian state to do so in forty-two years, since China’s 1964 test. Even prior to its test, North Korea’s nuclear defiance raised fears that it could galvanize support for reactive proliferation in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, thus ending East Asia’s progression away from proliferation.⁵ Yet the puzzle of contrasting historical trajectories across these two regions remains. Whereas the norm in East Asia has been an apparent evolution toward denuclearization, North Korea has been the anomaly. Conversely, the norm among core Middle East powers has been toward nuclearization, except for Egypt and, more recently, Libya. Egypt’s Ambassador to the United States Nabil Fahmy described the Middle East as

a poster boy for the failure of global and regional nonproliferation efforts. . . . Like most regions, the majority of its member states are card-carrying and committed members of this salient international nonproliferation regime and regulations. . . . Yet very significant questions remain outstanding regarding the present state of play of nuclear nonproliferation in that region. More than a decade ago, Iraq was caught violating its safeguard in NPT obligations. . . . Today, its neighbor Iran, also NPT member, has questions raised about its nuclear program and the degree of its respect of its safeguard obligations. (CEW)

Both traditional and novel theories of nuclear behavior can be applied to explain these diverging trajectories. Neorealist literature in international relations has often traced nuclearization to international structure, relative power, balance of power, and self-help. It is crucial to distinguish between neorealist theory in international relations scholarship, pivoted in the concepts of structural or relative power, international anarchy, and self-help on the one hand, and the common use of the word “realism” in American politics on the other. The latter is frequently applied to visions or policies that are “realistic” or “feasible.” Yet, a policy that some may consider “realistic” in the more colloquial sense can be diametrically opposed to structural or neorealist understandings of international politics. Throughout this book the term neorealism refers to its use in international relations scholarship as a structural theory of politics (and in particular to offensive neorealism), not as a policy that seems “realistic.” While some rely on neorealism as the theory that explains nuclear policy, concerns with existential security are never perfunctory reflections of structural considerations invariably leading to aggression or power maximization, but rather the product of domestic filters that convert such considerations into different policies. The extent to which state—rather than regime security—is invariably the dominant source of nuclear behavior may have been overestimated, precluding alternative—and perhaps more incisive—understandings of what drives the acquisition or renunciation of nuclear weapons.⁶ One such alternative forces greater attention to domestic political considerations of nuclear aspirants. In particular, systematic differences in nuclear behavior can be observed between states whose leaders or ruling coalitions advocate integration in the global economy, and those whose leaders reject it. The former have incentives to avoid the political, economic, reputational, and opportunity costs of acquiring nuclear weapons because such costs impair a domestic agenda favoring internationalization.⁷ Conversely, leaders and ruling coalitions rejecting internationalization incur fewer such costs and have greater incentives to exploit nuclear weapons as tools in nationalist platforms of political competition and for staying in power. This insight may be extended to explain differences between nuclear aspirants in East Asia and the Middle East over nearly four decades. East Asian leaders pivoted their domestic political control on economic performance and integration into the global economy. Middle East leaders relied on inward-looking self-sufficiency and an emphasis on domestic markets and nationalist values for their political survival.⁸ These respective platforms created different incentives and constraints that influenced leaders’ preferences for or against nuclear weapons.

Nuclear behavior should provide an easy arena for testing a theory uniquely pivoted on relative power and state security in an anarchic world, such as neorealism. Lying at the very heart of a state’s security dilemma, nuclear policy loads the dice in favor of this approach. In other words, nuclear behavior provides the “most likely case” or most favorable domain for corroborating neorealist tenets. For that very reason nuclear behavior is perhaps not a crucial arena for validating those canons from a methodological standpoint. A good or crucial test of a theory is one that forces it to survive conditions that are not favorable to confirm it.⁹ On this basis, too many deviations from neorealist predictions regarding nuclear policy constitute potentially significant challenges to the theory. Conversely, nuclear behavior provides an extremely difficult arena for testing theories of domestic political survival as the one offered here. Political leaders can only portray their decisions for or against nuclear weapons as dictated by “reasons of state” rather than by domestic political expediency. Precisely because decisions regarding nuclear weapons are “least likely” to validate the role of domestic politics, they provide a crucial and tough arena for investigating such effects. Thus, even partial substantiation uncovering an important role for domestic considerations in this “unfriendly” terrain, where evidence is much harder to garner, gains particular significance.

From a methodological standpoint, the ability to corroborate that domestic approaches to political survival are more relevant to nuclear behavior than often suspected might be akin to a “Sinatra inference” (Levy 2002): if the theory can make it here, it can make it anywhere. One should certainly not be carried away with this prospect, however. The empirical chapters certainly provide sufficient reason to pay far more attention to this rather understudied source of nuclear behavior. At the same time, each case is explored through a much broader theoretical repertoire to assess the relative advantages and limitations of each approach for improving our understanding of nuclear outcomes. This is not a strict effort to test theories (in no less than nine cases!) but rather to illustrate theory-driven analysis of nuclear decisions in a defined empirical domain. To reiterate, balance-of-power considerations are certainly important but a better understanding of nuclear behavior and outcomes requires theoretical recalibration and a closer examination of competing and complementary perspectives to avoid overestimation of some theories and underestimation of others. As an early study by Meyer (1984) suggested, it is quite likely that some assumptions from different perspectives are valid; the task is identifying when and why. Furthermore, in his view, all motives of nuclear behavior are, in the end, filtered through the domestic politics within which decisions are made. A systematic understanding of these effects makes this approach analytically indispensable in the study of nuclear aspirants.

NONPROLIFERATION: PAST PREDICTIONS AND PRESENT CONUNDRUM

Nuclear choices have wide-ranging implications for international security. The potential proliferation of nuclear weapons served as partial justification for the 2003 war in Iraq and continues to rank high in the foreign policy agenda of major powers and international institutions. The United States, the European Union, Japan, the G-8, and former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan have defined the problem as the preeminent threat to international security, with attending consequences for budgetary allocations and the need for collective action.¹⁰ Although Iran and North Korea are now focal cases, many regard this as a much broader problem, regardless of political persuasions. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand of its “Doomsday Clock” from seven to five minutes, warning that “we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age.” President George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted that more nations have nuclear weapons, and still more have nuclear aspirations.¹¹ Campbell et al. (2004) suggested that we may be approaching a “tipping point” that will unleash a proliferation epidemic, and that we now stand on the verge of a new nuclear age with potentially more nuclear-weapons-states (NWS) and a much greater chance that these weapons will be used. Others regard the nonproliferation regime (NPR) as poised for collapse and fear that the “domino theory” of the twenty-first century may well be nuclear.¹² Former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix declared that “certainly if Iran were to develop further in the wrong direction, there is a risk for other countries considering going for nuclear weapons. And if the North Koreans move on, well the risks are very, very great. If the North Koreans were to test a weapon, yes, it would be very, very serious” (ASAW). IAEA director general Mohammed El-Baradei declared that “we are reaching a point today where I think Kennedy’s prediction is very much alive. Either we are going to . . . move to nuclear disarmament or we are going to have 20 or 30 countries with nuclear weapons, and if we do have that, to me, this is the beginning of the end of our civilization” (CNSW). In 2006 these concerns appeared even more real as North Korea tested a nuclear weapon and fear of a defiant Iran arguably led to declarations by six Middle East countries that they would pursue nuclear energy programs.¹³

Not all agree with this vision, and assessments of past progression vary with different benchmarks. President Kennedy’s 1963 prediction of fifteen to twenty-five NWS by 1973 did not come about.¹⁴ The past three decades reflected declining nuclear aspirations even by technically capable states. As Rosecrance (1964:300) correctly predicted, nuclear weapons did not spread “as ineluctably as the instruments of modern industrialism.” Most states (189) joined the NPT, the most widely subscribed international treaty in existence, including some that had rejected it for decades, as did Argentina and Brazil. Some gave up nuclear weapons, including Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and South Africa. Libya surrendered its program to U.S. and IAEA scrutiny in 2003. More states abandoned than acquired nuclear weapons programs during the past fifteen years (Roberts 1995; Wolfsthal 2005). Yet the number of NWS increased. India and Pakistan conducted tests in 1998 and, like Israel, remained outside the NPT. Israel’s capabilities have been widely asserted although its formal policy of “not being the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the region” remains in place.¹⁵ North Korea proclaimed possession of nuclear weapons in 2003 and tested one in 2006; Iran’s record in acquiring weapons-suitable technologies has not been matched by dutiful reporting to the IAEA. Both North Korea and Iran are deemed to have breached their NPT commitments. The tally of NWS has thus risen from the five recognized by the NPT in 1968 (the United States, Britain, Russia, China, and France) to nine states in 2006.

What explains this variability in behavior, with some states renouncing nuclear weapons altogether, others reversing previous efforts in that direction, and yet others developing them in violation of international commitments? Three decades ago Economics Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling (1976:80) advised that “the emphasis has to shift from physical denial and technology secrecy to the things that determine incentives and expectations.” Nearly three decades later Hans Blix recognized that the task of uncovering the sources of incentives for proliferation still constitutes a fundamental problem (CEW). As Brad Glosserman (2004) puts it, a key obstacle to efforts to counter nuclear proliferation is that “we still don’t know why governments proliferate nuclear weapons. Several explanations have been offered . . . but no single explanation convinces. Until we know why governments acquire nuclear weapons, it will be difficult to stop them from doing so.” The theoretical literature in international relations on this issue is much less copious than the studies on nuclear deterrence, tends to advance mono-causal explanations (a single factor explains it all), and frequently involves case studies by country experts.¹⁶ This book’s objective is to advance our understanding of nuclear behavior and revisit the way we study it. A controlled comparison between East Asia and the Middle East offers several advantages for achieving those objectives.

THE RESEARCH DESIGN

There are at least nine reasons why a focused comparison (George and McKeown 1985) between the two regions that is sensitive to methodological issues in comparative analysis...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART ONE Introduction and Conceptual Framework
• CHAPTER ONE Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO Alternative Logics on Denuclearization
• PART TWO East Asia: Denuclearization as the Norm, Nuclearization as the Anomaly
• CHAPTER THREE Japan
• CHAPTER FOUR South Korea
• CHAPTER FIVE Taiwan (Republic of China)
• CHAPTER SIX North Korea
• PART THREE The Middle East: Nuclearization as the Norm, Denuclearization as the Anomaly
• CHAPTER SEVEN Iraq
• CHAPTER EIGHT Iran
• CHAPTER NINE Israel
• CHAPTER TEN Libya
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Egypt
• PART FOUR Conclusions
• CHAPTER TWELVE Findings, Futures, and Policy Implications
• References