Stephen Walt on the Genius of Neoconservatism

This is a good piece on neoconservatism in US politics. It also helps in understanding the nonconservative logic in US foreign policy and that why even when neocons represent an extreme in foreign policy thinking, they often get their way in terms of policy implementation. Another plus is to observe the eclecticism of knowledge which is required for making sharp academic arguments. Walt, at one point in time, is using a reference from market economics to validate his point. Through analysis needs expertise, academic genius,  rather, in my humble opinion, is dependent upon eclecticism of knowledge and not domain specialisation.

The 'genius' of neoconservatism

Posted By Stephen M. Walt  Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - 10:17 AM   Share

As expected, the debate on Monday night was long on posturing and short on specifics. I thought Romney did a good job of sounding like a less well-informed Obama, while trying to suggest that he'd implement Obama's foreign policy better than Obama has. For his part, Obama showed a command of the issues worthy of a commander-in-chief, and worthy of someone who has done a good job of implementing President George W. Bush's second term foreign policy agenda.

But Romney's sudden lunge toward moderation raises the following obvious question, which Bob Schieffer (and the president) didn't ask:

"Governor, you maintain that you're a tough-minded, smart manager who knows how to pick good people. If so, why are you taking foreign policy advice from all those discredited neoconservative retreads? There are some sensible voices in your foreign policy brain trust, but also an awful lot of people who played key roles getting us into Iraq and generally screwing up our entire international position. Why in God's name are you listening to them?"

To be fair, an awful lot of supposedly sensible Democrats supported the war too, including a lot of senior officials in the Obama administration. But they didn't dream up the war or work overtime to sell it from 1998 onward. They just went along with the idea because they thought it was politically expedient, they couldn't imagine how it might go south, or they were convinced that Saddam was a Very Bad Man and that it was our duty to "liberate" the Iraqi people from him. They were right about Saddam's character, of course, but occupying the entire country turned out to be a pretty stupid way of dealing with him.

Nonetheless, the unsinkable resiliency of the neoconservative movement remains impressive. Indeed, there is a certain genius to neoconservatism, which one must grant a certain grudging respect. Unlike their liberal interventionist counterparts, who are always looking for consensus and eager to compromise, the neocons are both remarkably uncompromising and notoriously unrepentant. They don't look back, if only because staring at their record of consistent failure would be depressing. So they always look forward, confident that their fellow citizens won't remember the past and can be bamboozled into heeding their advice once again.

The success of neoconservatism can be traced to three key strategems. The first and most obvious element is their relentless championing of America as the model for the entire world, from which our duty to export democracy supposedly follows. Never mind that neocons aren't very consistent in applying that principle (e.g., you don't hear many of them talking about using American power to advance the democratic rights of Palestinians), and they routinely forget that their favorite tool -- military force -- is usually a very bad way to spread democracy. But their brand of jingoistic rhetoric resonates with America's deep political traditions and helps them portray their critics as insufficiently devoted to America's liberal/Wilsonian ideals.

Second, and more importantly, neoconservatives understand the efficacy of taking extreme positions and sticking to them. By recommending policies that are at the very edge of what is acceptable (and sometimes a bit beyond it), neoconservatives seek to gradually drag the consensus in their direction. Just look at the slow-motion march toward preventive war against Iran, where constant pressure from the right (and the Israel lobby) has forced even a sensible leader like President Obama to constantly reiterate his willingness to use military force if it becomes necessary to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Such threats merely increase Iran's interest in some sort of deterrent, of course, but strategic consistency is less important than making sure Washington takes a tough line.

Interestingly enough, this tactic has some grounding in behavioral economics. In a justifiably famous experiment reported in the Journal of Marketing Research, Itamar Simonson and Amos Tversky showed that consumer choices were powerfully influenced by "framing effects," and in particular, by the set of choices that the test subjects were given. When the subjects were offered a choice between a cheap camera with relatively few features and a more expensive camera with lots of them, their choices divided more-or-less evenly between the two. But when a similar group was given the same two options plus a third -- an even more expensive camera with even more features -- the percentage that preferred the middle choice rose dramatically. Why? Because being presented with the option of a really expensive camera made choosing the second most expensive seem less extravagant: It became the sensible "compromise" choice.

And that's the genius of neoconservatism's frequently outlandish policy recommendations. They are always calling for the United States to spend excessive amounts of money on defense, to threaten potential enemies with dire consequences if they don't bend to our will, and to use force against just about anyone that the neocons don't like (and it's a long list). No president -- not even George W. Bush -- has done everything the neocons wanted, but by constantly pushing for more, it makes doing at least part of what they want seem like a sensible, moderate course. And as we saw after 9/11, every now and then the stars may line up and the neocons will get what they're pushing for (See under: Iraq). Too bad it never works out well when they do.

Neoconservatism's final strand of twisted genius is its imperviousness to contrary evidence. Because most of their prescriptions are so extreme, they can explain away failure by claiming that the country just didn't follow their advice with sufficient enthusiasm. If we lost in Iraq, that's because Bush didn't attack Iran and Syria too, or it's because Obama decided to withdraw before the job was really done. (Such claims are mostly nonsense, of course, but who cares?) If Afghanistan turned into a costly quagmire on Bush's watch, it's because Clinton and Bush refused to ramp up defense spending as much as the neocons wanted. If we now headed for the exit with little show for our effort, it's because we didn't send a big enough Afghan surge in 2009-2010. For neocons, policy failure can always be explained by saying that feckless politicians just didn't go as far as the neocons demanded, which means their advice can never be fully discredited.

To be sure, neoconservatives are not the only people who employ the latter tactic. Liberal economist Paul Krugman famously argues that Obama's stimulus package failed to produce the desired results because wasn't big or bold enough; the difference between Krugman and most neocons is that Krugman may well be right. By contrast, there's hardly any evidence to suggest that the United States would be better off if it had done all of the things that neoconservatives advised; all we can say with confidence is that the country would now be poorer, less popular around the world, and more American soldiers would now be dead or grievously wounded. 

In this sense, neoconservatives are like someone who is constantly telling you to jump off a twenty story building, and promising that if you do, you'll fly. If you decide to be prudent and jump from the 10^th floor instead, and find yourself plummeting toward earth, they'll just say you failed because you didn't follow their advice to the letter.  

In the end, one can only admire the esprit de corps and resolve that has kept neoconservatism alive and well despite its manifold failures. Of course, it helps to have lots of supporters with deep pockets who are willing to pay to keep them ensconced in safe sinecures at AEI or the Council on Foreign Relations. And I suppose it also helps that presidential candidates often know very little about foreign policy, and thus can't tell the difference between a smart strategist and a snake oil salesman.

Which brings us back where we started. If Mitt Romney is such a good judge of character and policy advice, and really a moderate at heart, what's he doing with all those neocons?

This article was originally published in Foreign Policy. It can be located here.

Adam Gopnik on the Renaissance of Geographic History

Here is a link to a recent New Yorker essay by Adam Gopnik reviewing the rise of the new geopolitics.  Though the essay does not deal with materials we use in this course, it deals with many of the themes that we have dealt with – explanations of broad geopolitical trends and rise and fall of great powers.  Gopnik writes beautifully – another reason I like reading him, though my own perspective on many issues are very different.  He concludes with plea for humility in grand narratives, something I hope I have stressed sufficiently.

Enjoy!

Prof. Rajesh Rajagopalan

50 years of Cuban Missile Crisis

If we would have been living in the year 1962, in a couple of days the world's worst nuclear crisis would have dawned upon us. The Cuban missile crisis started on October14,1962 and US and USSR remained at loggerheads till 27th of that fateful month.

The Foreign Policy magazine is covering some of the aspects of those Thirteen Days, to use the title of the  book written by Bobby Kennedy, JFK's younger brother and his Attorney General.

Here is a wonderful piece on Fidel Castro and his bravado of using the nuclear weapons against the US. In fact, it conclusively shows that Castro was even ready to loose Cuba in response to a nuclear strike on US. It is a rich historical account and feeds into  archival research done on some recently released documents. Also, read the correspondence between Castro and Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan. It can be located here: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/10/cuba_almost_became_a_nuclear_power_in_1962

A second article is on deconstructing the myth that the Cuban Missile Crisis was a one-sided diplomatic victory for USA. In fact, the author is arguing that the myth of absolute victory in the Cuban Missile crisis, which in fact it was not since a number of compromises were made by the US itself including a pledge not to invade Cuba and also to remove the Jupiter Missiles from Turkey, induced rigidity in US foreign policy  to the effect that compromises became extremely rare in US diplomacy in subsequent years. Find it here:  http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/the_lie_that_screwed_up_50_years_of_us_foreign_policy?page=0,0

Adapting it the McDonald's way

So here is something funny and interesting. This post in Foreign Policy magazine looks into the culinary adaptations made by McDonald's across the world and tells us why this global food chain is so smart in getting people queued up for its various delights. And the first item in the list is obviously the Indian adaptation of what I may call the Paneer Pakora which one can easily find in those ubiquitous sweet shops across Delhi (strange is the fact that all those shops have the same name- Agarwal Sweets). For the full list of McD's globalised cuisine, go to the original post in Foreign Policy here.

IDSA Issue Brief

Just published an Issue Brief on IDSA website debating the necessity of nuclear disarmament as an issue in Indian foreign policy. Comments and criticisms are welcome and will be greatly appreciated. The original article can be located here. Sincere thanks to Dr. Kalyan Raman for his incisive comments which helped refine the arguments presented here.

Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://idsa.in/system/files/IB_IndiasDisarmamentMyths_YogeshJoashi_101012.pdf

ISSUE BRIEF

India’s Disarmament Myths and Political Realities*

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Yogesh Joshi

October 10, 2012

Arming the Self for Disarming Others

India's romance with nuclear disarmament has been a long one. The fact that Pandit Nehru was an avid champion of a world free of nuclear weapons injected nuclear disarmament into the very DNA of the Indian state. Even when India faced grave security threats, it saw, even though after 1964 in an increasingly rhetorical sense, an escape from the anarchic pressures of international politics in the high ideal of nuclear disarmament. However, this great passion for nuclear disarmament has created a rather strange psychological condition when it comes to India's politics on the issue: over a period of time, it has come to be uncritically assumed in India's world view that the country can never do anything inimical to the cause of nuclear disarmament. Even when India explodes the bomb, it is in the cause of a global nuclear zero.

Does anyone remember George Fernandez saying after the 1998 nuclear weapons tests that "India can now pursue, with credibility and greater conviction, our long term campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons"?1 Politicians notwithstanding, a number of strategic thinkers have also argued that India’s nuclear weapons tests were a service in the cause of nuclear disarmament. 2

To put it simply, India's quest for nuclear weapons engenders from a very different kind of logic: to rid the world of nuclear weapons. And it is because of this logic of aggressive benevolence that nuclear disarmament, even in the present times, claims an extraordinary place in the hearts and minds of the Indian foreign policy and security community. Clearly, if there is a proverbial ostrich in international politics with its head buried in the sand when it comes to the issue of nuclear disarmament, it is India. Rather than accepting that the imperative of security and the aspiration for great power status have driven India's nuclear weapons programme, it instead attaches unnecessary virtues to it: recall the flutter in media and policy circles when the National Security Advisor defended the need for nuclear weapons on the pretext of national security at a recent conference in Vigyan Bhawan. 3

The question which therefore demands an explanation is what purposes does the hallowed goal of nuclear disarmament serve for India? Among a host of arguments ranging from the achievement of world peace to the contribution of Indian civilization to global justice, only two arguments are worth their salt. First is the idea that India's strategic interests are better served in a world without nuclear weapons. And second, that pursuing nuclear disarmament increases India's profile in the world and its soft power. But can these arguments withstand critical analysis?

Contra Strategic Interests

The logic of India's strategic interests and nuclear disarmament serving them is quite straight forward. These strategic interests correspond to the wishes of many in the strategic community to establish Indian hegemony in the South Asian region, which stands challenged by Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapons capability. Since the 1988 Brasstacks crisis, and through the Kashmir crisis of 1990, the Kargil war of 1999, the military stand-off after the December 2001 attack on Parliament and the downturn in India-Pakistan relations in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November 2008, the Indian strategic community has come to realise that India has now become a victim of what Paul Kapur characterised as the 'instability-instability paradox'. 4 By proclaiming artificial instability at the nuclear level - Pakistan's tendency to link all levels of conflicts with the possibility of nuclear exchange between the two South Asian neighbours - Pakistan has been able to fuel sub-conventional violence – terrorism and limited infiltration across the Line of Control – without giving serious thought to possible Indian retribution. In some sense, therefore, nuclear weapons have not only created an artificial parity between India and Pakistan but they have also created circumstances that favour Pakistan’s proxy war against India. Nuclear disarmament would therefore set the situation right and India will finally be able to use its conventional superiority on its petulant neighbour. 5 So goes the argument of nuclear disarmament serving India's strategic interests.

However, people who make such an argument do not understand strategy nor have a comprehensive understanding of what India's real interests are. Strategy is never made in a vacuum; it is a dialectic shaped as much by the actions and interests of the other side, as it is defined by one's own goals and resources. And if this is the nature of strategy, to think that Pakistan would accept nuclear disarmament because it serves India's strategic interests is to engage in an exercise in self-deception. The very fact that India remains threat number-one for Pakistan is reason enough for the latter to hold on to its nuclear weapons and more dearly than ever.

Many would argue that if all causes of animosity between India and Pakistan – including and particularly Kashmir – were to be resolved, there is no reason for Pakistan not to embrace nuclear disarmament. There are two main problems with such an argument. First, identification of causes behind animosity does not make resolving those conflicts any easier. In fact, it often makes states realise the very enormity of the situation at hand and therefore restrains statesmen from any immediate action, insofar as states behave in an extremely conservative fashion when it comes to accommodating the interests of others and particularly that of their adversaries, until and unless the tyranny of circumstances demand so. Add to it the intricacies and ad-hocism of domestic politics and one can clearly see the problems in the argument. It is quite revealing that India and Pakistan, for more than 60 years now, have known well that Kashmir is the key to peace between them. This conscious acknowledgement rather than leading to a resolution of the conflict has instead led to many wars. The second problem engenders out of the very nature of international politics, which lacks any guarantee for the safety of individual states. In a self-help system, even states with perfectly benign motives constantly seek to enhance their security by accumulating economic and military power. The fact that India occupies a towering presence in the South Asian region with huge military capabilities is reason enough for Pakistan to be wary of India’s motives and intentions, not to talk about the particularly bloody history of the India-Pakistan relationship which complicates the matter further. Under these circumstances, nuclear parity has enabled Pakistan to effectively challenge India’s ability to coerce it even conventionally. 6 Clearly, from the perspective of a smaller and vulnerable state, which to our dismay has not accepted India’s hegemony in the region, these ambitions appear rather valid.

If, therefore, arguing in favour of nuclear disarmament as a strategy to deal with Pakistan is a serious strategic folly, what about the argument that disarmament serves India's interests? If India's behaviour in the past 60 years is any guide, it seems to be contented with the territorial status quo in South Asia. Nehru's last-ditch effort to settle the Kashmir imbroglio after the 1962 war, narrated in detail in Gundevia’s account Outside the Archive, provides serious evidence in this regard and so is the fact that India sought no territorial gains in the aftermath of the 1971 War with Pakistan. If territorial status quo has been India's real interest, then nuclear weapons have settled the issue once and for all. Not only along the border with Pakistan, but even with China, nuclear weapons have made any forceful usurpation of Indian territory a very inconvenient and dangerous exercise. However, there are two counter-arguments which need to be accounted for here.

First is the space provided for fomenting internal dissension in India, which nuclear weapons seem to have provided Pakistan. Pakistan, under the safety of its nuclear weapons, has tried to create trouble by assisting and abetting terrorist elements in Kashmir and other regions, so goes the argument. However, to singularly blame Pakistan for the internal conflicts in India is to remain wilfully blind to the structural deficiencies of Indian polity. It is a well documented fact that much before Pakistan entered the game, militancy in Kashmir was a spontaneous and indigenous response to the stifled political aspirations of the local people.7 All that Pakistan did was to make shrewd use of the Kashmiri discontent; it cannot be called the progenitor of the Kashmiri militancy. Of course, the Indian political class has made Pakistan and the nuclear stalemate a scapegoat for its own political failings. Nuclear stalemate between the two countries has actually done more service to India than is otherwise realised; it has shifted our attention to our own political failings and the need to set right the internal political, social and economic order in troubled areas like Kashmir. Also, the lesson from the collapse of Soviet Union is there for everyone to grasp: nuclear weapons play no role in the internal politics of the state, where peace and order is essentially a function of the politics of legitimacy and not military hardware including nuclear weapons

Nuclear weapons, in a very different way, also help India's diplomatic crusade against Pakistan's support for terrorism in India. Today, the world, by and large, accepts that Pakistan is a hotbed of international terror and its involvement in Kashmir is deemed unacceptable by most. But the situation was not always the same. In fact, many in the West, for a considerable period of time in the 1990's, sided with Pakistan's version of the Kashmir story. However, nuclear weapons have an uncanny ability to alter political values: what is politically acceptable and what is not. Revisionism of all kinds gets the boot and status quo is embraced for the simple reason that revisionism of any kind might induce instability in a nuclear dyad with grave political consequences. 8 Also, since the status quo is easier to maintain than attempting a revision of existing boundaries, the former is generally preferred over the latter. The fact that the Cold War was ultimately won by a side which was considered to be a status quo power further cemented this perception among Great Powers and especially the United States. Here, the role of the United States and of the international community at large during both the Kargil War and Operation Parakram comes to mind. International pressure and especially of the US, many argue, was the real reason behind the arrest of escalation on both these occasions. 9 It is interesting to note that at the height of these crisis-situations, both Pakistan and India appealed to the world community with equal intensity but international opinion came to favour India’s position rather than Pakistan’s. Internationalisation of the conflict alone, therefore, cannot explain why the US and other major powers favoured India over Pakistan since both countries tried to internationalise the issue for their own benefit. The reason that the US sided with India and castigated Pakistan for its revisionist actions therefore emanates from what is politically acceptable and what is not under the shadow of nuclear weapons.

Second, some hyper-nationalists would claim that unlike India, Pakistan and China remain in illegal occupation of Indian territory and therefore, to be contented with the territorial status quo is against India's fundamental interests. But then it has always been very difficult to set right the wrongs done by history. Further, if one goes by that logic, why stop at the boundaries which the British bequeathed to independent India and not seek the territorial integrity of Akhand Bharat, an expansive depiction of India's true territorial extent encompassing some parts of Myanmar and Iran as well? 10 The material reality of nuclear weapons and the enormous destructive potential any territorial conflict going nuclear carries with itself, gives enough incentives for all states to at least accept the existing territorial equations, de facto if not de jure. This realisation over a period of time may also help in cementing this de facto status into juridically defined boundaries in South Asia. Even without use, nuclear weapons can create their own reality.

Hard Power Rendered Soft

Raymond Aron once said: ‘In the present world, every great power is identified with a great idea’. Churchill meant the same thing when he said that ‘Empires of the future’ are ‘the empires of the minds’. 11 The second reason for India's constant support for nuclear disarmament engenders from this ideological grandeur associated with the proselytizing nature of great powers. In some sense, given the historicity of India's involvement with nuclear disarmament, India has the right credentials to champion the cause of a world free of nuclear weapons. And with the rise of India on the global power scene, it not only has the moral authority but also the material power to drive the idea home. It also adds to India's soft power, an element of national power so much in vogue nowadays. However, these arguments, like is the case with all sorts of propaganda, hide much more than they reveal.

First, no great power in the history of international politics pursued an idea that did not serve its interests. If Britain fought for open seas, it was because its trade and indeed its economic existence were dependent upon it. 12 And if for the United States the liberal economic order is a priority, it is clearly because it helps it to maintain its superpower status in the world. 13 And since all great ideas are under-girded by both selfish interests and military power, they have engendered both awe and ridicule in equal proportion. Given the fact that nuclear disarmament neither corresponds with India's true strategic interests (as has been argued above) nor does India possess the necessary hard power to convince others about its necessity, championing the cause is at best a futile enterprise.

What about soft power or what E. H. Carr earlier called the 'power of propaganda'? 14 May be, nuclear disarmament could help in augmenting India's soft power and its receptivity as a great power in the eyes of the global audience. However, we should note here that when India advocated nuclear disarmament for the first 50 years of its independence, it remained confined to the backwaters of global politics. And when it actually began to pursue overt weaponisation after 1998, it has received unprecedented attention from the major powers so much so that within a decade of the 1998 tests it has even been accommodated in the international nuclear order. 15 Even though the real reasons behind the nuclear deal were geopolitical – the long term balancing of China – the nuclear tests were the political indicator of the fact that India is ready to play serious geopolitics based on realpolitik considerations and has shed its high idealism which always made the West and especially the United States shy away from even thinking about any kind of strategic cooperation with India. Nuclear weapons tests therefore signalled seriousness of purpose on India’s part and conveyed the same to the hegemon. Clearly then, influence increases with hard actions and not pronouncements about soft intentions.

However, there is another issue in associating soft power with the idea of nuclear disarmament. If nuclear disarmament is purely a propaganda tactic because it is impossible to achieve it in the first place, it is quite understandable and may be clever thinking on the part of those advocating it. However, when such subterfuge becomes the basis for India’s activistmoralpolitik, the subtle difference between policy and propaganda would dissipate rather quickly. The import of this is not lost on those who belong to the non-nuclear world, which was quite evident at the 2010 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference when many countries, even from the non-aligned movement, reserved especial criticism for the India-US civilian nuclear cooperation agreement.16 India’s undoing in this regard is aptly captured in Adlai Stevenson’s famous remark: “it is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them”.

Conclusion

Disarmament has remained a hallowed goal of India’s foreign policy without serious self-reflection. Even a sea change in India’s global circumstances has not ushered a new line of thinking on the desirability and utility of nuclear disarmament. This is partly a result of a wrong reading of the Nehruvian legacy on nuclear disarmament, partly because of the lack of serious self-reflection within India’s strategic and foreign policy community and also a part of that politically convenient myth-making exercise which feeds the narrative of India being a different kind of great power. However, as we saw, nuclear disarmament neither serves India’s strategic interests nor does it help it in increasing its global influence.

The need, therefore, is to debate both the necessity and desirability of nuclear disarmament without being burdened by India’s idealistic aspirations and unfounded assumptions about the heft that this premature superpower carries in the uncertain waters of international politics. But are the disarmament pundits listening?

===
*The title of this essay is inspired by an essay by Kenneth Waltz called ‘Nuclear Myths and Political Realities’ presented in his inaugural address as the President of the American Political Science

1. 1.Quoted in George Perkovich (2000), “The Bomb that Roared”, in India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 417.
2. 2.Manpreet Sethi (1998), “The Indian case might help the Nuclear Disarmament Cause”, Strategic Analysis 22(3): 495-498.<./fn> However, such virtuous rationalizations of India’s quest for nuclear weapons are not restricted to the second Pokhran tests. Shrewd metaphors and unconvincing acts of legitimisations have always played a part in explaining away India's own violations of its undying spirit of nuclear disarmament in the past: Indira Gandhi herself designated the 1974 nuclear weapons tests as peaceful in nature as if the very physics of the atom would be subject to change depending upon the euphemism used to describe India's first nuclear test. Also, many nuclear pundits today contend that the reason behind Rajiv Gandhi's yes to the nuclear weaponeers after 1988 was the cold shoulder which his eponymously-named action plan for 'universal and time bound disarmament' received at the United Nations.
3. 3.P.R. Chari, (2012), "India: Double Speak on Nuclear Disarmament", available at http://www.ipcs.org/article/india/india-double-speak-on-nuclear-disarmament-3711.html.
4. 4.S. Paul Kapur (2007), Dangerous Deterrent: Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and Conflict in South Asia, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
5. 5.See V. R. Raghavan (2010) (ed.), India and Global Nuclear Disarmament: Defining India’s Moves, New Delhi: MacMillan.
6. 6.Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur (2010), India, Pakistan and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia, London: Columbia University Press.<./fn> And Pakistan sees this development not only through the lens of national security, but as a virtuous challenge to India’s attempt at exercising hegemony in the South Asian region. Naeem Salik (2010), The Genesis of South Asian Nuclear Deterrence: Pakistan’s Perspective, New York: Oxford University Press.
7. 7.Sumit Ganguly (1997), The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Also see Sumantra Bose (2003), Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
8. 8.Henry Kissinger (1957), Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, New York: Harper and Brothers. For a brief summary of the arguments made by Henry Kissinger see, Yogesh Joshi (2010), “Unlimited Weapons and Limited Wars: Confronting the Dilemmas of the Nuclear Age”, IPCS Book Reviews, available at http://www.ipcs.org/books-review/nuclear/nuclear-weapons-and-foreign-pol.... Also see Kenneth Waltz (2010), “Towards Nuclear peace” and “Nuclear Myths and Political Realities”, in Realism and International Politics, Routledge: London.
9. 9.Srinath Raghavan (2009), “A Coercive Triangle: India, Pakistan, the United States and the Crisis of 2001-2002”, Defence Studies, 9(2): 242-260. Paul Kapur (2008), “Ten Years of Instability in a Nuclear South Asia”, International Security, 33(2): 71-94. Pervez Musharraf (2006), “The Kargil Conflict”, in In the Line of Fire, London: Simon and Schuster.
10. 10.For the concept of Akhand Bharat, see http://www.akhandbharat.org/.
11. 11.Qouted in Christopher Layne and Bradley A. Thayer (2007), American Empire: A Debate, New York: Routledge, p. 7.
12. 12.A critical reading of Niall Ferguson’s book Empire makes this point amply clear. See Niall Ferguson (2003), Empire: How Britain made the Modern World, London: Allen Lane.
13. 13.Moreover, none of these great ideas would have spread without the use or at least the threat of use of force. John J. Mearsheimer (2001), The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York: W.W. Norton.
14. 14.E.H. Carr (1964), The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919-1939, New York: Harper and Row.
15. 15.Harsh V. Pant (2011), The Indo-US Nuclear Pact: Policy, Process and Great Power Politics, London: Oxford. Also see P.R. Chari (2009) (ed.), Indo-US Nuclear Deal: Seeking Synergy in Bilateralism, New Delhi: Routledge.
16. 16.Sharon Squassoni (2010), The US-Indian Nuclear Deal and its Impact, Arms Control Today, available at http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2010_07-08/squassoni<./fn> When India's actions in the nuclear field, where its appetite for the nuclear triad, fast breeder reactors and ballistic missile defence shows no signs of remission, the legitimacy of its pronouncements on the need and desirability of nuclear disarmament comes under serious strain. If symmetry between rhetoric and action is fundamental for the generation of soft power, as Nye argues, then clearly this divergence in India's realpolitik when it comes to building its own nuclear arsenal and its moralpolitik of preaching nuclear disarmament is surely not going to help India's soft image. Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (2011), The Future of Power, New York: Public Affairs. Also see Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (2004) Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, New York: Public Affairs.

Stephen Walt Again but now on Public Policy and the role of IR scholars

I can't get enough of this guy. Not only he is one of my favourite IR scholars but also sits comfortably well with those whom I admire for their honest opinions and lucid prose. Here is another of Walt's blog posts which reflects on the role of IR scholars in the domain of public policy. For all of us, who have chosen academics as a profession, a realisation must dawn upon us that we are not some woolly-headed thinkers who eat, pray and love abstractions and theories but who also have something substantial to contribute to the 'real world'.

What role should IR scholars play in policy-making?

Posted By Stephen M. Walt  Wednesday, September 26, 2012 - 11:50 AM

I'm off to Brown University today to deliver a lecture at the Watson Institute on "International Relations and the Public Sphere: Some Personal Reflections." I'm going to be talking about: 1) the contributions that university-based scholars can make to public discourse on global affairs, 2) the reasons why university-based scholars seem to be contributing less than they once did, and 3) some specific measures that could encourage academics to be more fully engaged in public discourse.

For those of you who are interested and don't live in Providence, check the Institute's website for a video here.  As an alternative, you can also read my earlier post on this topic here. Or you can take a look at the article on which the talk is based, just published in the Yale Journal of International Affairs. Here's a teaser:

"Academic scholars -- including IR theorists -- have at least three useful roles to play in the broader public discourse on international affairs. First, those who have thought longest and hardest about the nature of modern world politics can help their fellow citizens make sense out of our "globalized" world. Ordinary people often know a great deal about local affairs, but understanding what is happening overseas generally requires relying on the knowledge of specialists. For this reason alone, university-based academics should be actively encouraged to write for and speak to broader audiences, instead of engaging solely in a dialogue with each other.

Second, an engaged academic community is an essential counterweight to governmental efforts to manipulate public perceptions. Governments have vastly greater access to information than most (all?) citizens do, especially when it comes to foreign and defense policy, and public officials routinely exploit these information asymmetries to advance their own agendas. Because government officials are fallible, society needs alternative voices to challenge their rationales and suggest different solutions. Academic scholars are protected by tenure and not directly dependent on government support for their livelihoods, so they are uniquely positioned to challenge prevailing narratives and conventional wisdoms. For these reasons, a diverse and engaged academic community is integral to healthy democratic politics.

Third, the scholarly community also offers a useful model of constructive debate. Although scholarly disputes are sometimes heated, they rarely descend to the level ofad hominem attack and character assassination that increasingly characterizes political discourse today. Indeed, academics who use these tactics in a scholarly article would probably discredit themselves rather than their targets. By bringing the norms of academic discourse into the public sphere, academic scholars could help restore some of the civility that has been lost in contemporary public life.

How might these miracles be accomplished? I have no illusions about creating some sort of philosopher kingdom where academics rule, and thirty years at three different universities and three different think tanks have convinced me that such a world would almost certainly not be an improvement. But should academic scholars of international relations really be proud that so few people care about what we have to say?"

This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy. It can be located here. 

On American Hegemony

With the  hustle and bustle of US presidential elections gaining momentum, the same old story of US decline and the appropriate strategies to fix the American slide is doing rounds among both the republicans and the democrats.  Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are promising the US electorate that they will, if chosen  to the Oval office, arrest this slump in US power and again make the 'star spangled banner' fly high among the comity of nations.

Stephen Walt, in this provoking piece in Foreign Policy, not only questions the unqualified assumptions of US decline but also points out that the real problem is not that the American power is on the wane. Rather, it is being expended without prudence as is the case in Afghanistan and Iraq. A wonderful reading, this will also allow us to think of  US hegemony in a different light, given that we are going to have a discussion on this subject in the coming week or so.  Enjoy fellas!

Power and decline: Why other countries ought to envy the United States

Posted By Stephen M. Walt  Monday, October 1, 2012 - 11:37 AM   Share

A recurring theme in this year's presidential election is (fear of) American decline, with both candidates seeking to convince voters that they will reverse recent trends and foster an American resurgence. President Obama portrays himself as having repaired some of the self-inflicted wounds imparted by the Bush administration, and he pledges to do still more if reelected. For his part, challenger Mitt Romney promises voters that electing him will ensure that the next 88 years will be an "American Century" just like the last one. Both pitches seek to exploit the lingering fear that America's best days are behind us.

This is hardly a new concern. Americans seem to have been fretting about losing their mojo ever since World War II. We worried that communism was on the march in the 1950s, saw Sputnik as a grave challenge in the 1950s, and feared becoming a "pitiful, helpless giant" (to use Richard Nixon's phrase) in the 1970s. During the 1980s, Americans grew anxious about "Japan as #1" and thought we might succumb to "imperial overstretch" that same way Britain had. There was a brief burst of triumphalism following the collapse of the USSR, but it barely lasted a decade. Since 2000, the combination of 9/11, the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the lingering effects of the financial collapse have reanimated the perennial fear that we are in an irreversible descent.

How seriously should we take this issue? Let's start by acknowledging that measuring the power of different countries is a very imprecise business, even among professional IR scholars. We don't have a clear consensus on how to define or measure national power, so we end up using various crude approximations like GNP or more complicated indices that combine GNP, population, military strength, technological capacity, etc. But such measures ignore geography, "soft power," national cohesion, quality of life, etc., and all the other intangibles that can help states to secure their interests and provide both safety and prosperity for their citizens.

Matters get even more complicated when we shift from power to "influence." Power is most usefully conceived as capability -- no matter how it is measured -- and stronger states can generally do more things and affect others more than weaker states can. But having a lot of power doesn't translate directly into influence, which is the capacity to get others to do what you want. Sometimes very powerful states can't convince weaker states to do their bidding, because the weaker powers care more about the issue in question and are willing to make greater sacrifices to get their way. And sometimes even very powerful states lack the capacity to dictate or shape events because the tools they have available aren't up to the task. Having a lot of power doesn't enable a country to defy the laws of physics, for example, or guarantee that it can successfully engage in large-scale social engineering in a distant foreign land. Among other things, this is why it is pretty silly to criticize the Obama administration for failing to "control" the Arab spring, as if any U.S. president has the capacity to control a vast and fast-moving social upheaval involving hundreds of millions of people.)

When we think about power, there's an inevitable tendency to look at trends over time. The question we tend to ask is whether Country X is getting stronger or weaker. Here in America, this approach is usually accompanied by a nostalgic yearning for some by-gone era where the United States was supposedly near-supreme and could do whatever it wanted. Leaving aside the obvious point that things were never really like this, the history of the past century does tend to make Americans more worried than they ought to be.

Why? Because there have in fact been a couple of historical moments when a combination of good fortune and skillful policy put the United States in a highly unusual position of primacy. The United States produced about 50 percent of gross world product in 1945 and had unmatched military power, mostly because the other major economies were mostly in ruins. This was a decidedly unnatural condition, however, and there was nowhere to go but down once the rest of the world recovered from the war. Similarly, the breakup of the USSR and the collapse of Japan's bubble economy in the early 1990s briefly put the U.S. back on top by a significant margin, and all the more so because other potentially powerful countries (e.g., Japan and the EU) had been free-riding on the US and were punching below their weight.

The point is that relative decline from these two lofty perches was essentially unavoidable, and especially because some less-developed countries like China, India, or Brazil were ideally positioned for rapid growth after 1990. America's relative decline was accelerated by Bush's blunders and the financial crisis, but it would have happened anyway regardless of who had been in the Oval office.

There is another way to think about America's power position, and it ought to give comfort to those who worry that the country is slowly sliding into a position of vulnerability. Just compare the U.S. to other countries today, and ask yourself which states are in the best position to defend their true vital interests (as opposed to all those optional objectives that great powers habitually take on). Which states are masters of their own fates to a considerable extent, instead of having to worry constantly that others might threaten their independence or territorial integrity? Put differently: If you were going to be put in charge of any country's foreign policy, which country would you pick?

From this perspective things still look pretty good for the United States. It still has the world's largest and most diverse economy, and its per capita income is much higher than China's, which means there is more wealth available to mobilize for shared national purposes. It has no serious enemies nearby. It has thousands of nuclear weapons, which means that no state could attack us directly without risking its own destruction. U.S. conventional military forces are far larger than needed to defend American soil, and that remarkable level of territorial security allows U.S. leaders to take on lots of discretionary projects in places like Afghanistan or Yemen or the Phillipines or Africa or Colombia or Libya and to have endless debates about whether we ought to be taking on even more.

The U.S. economy isn't doing great, of course, but it is performing better than most of the other industrial powers. And despite the current level of partisan rancor and a level of government dysfunction that ought to embarrass us all, there's virtually no risk of major political upheaval here.

If all we were trying to do was defend Americans against major threats and foster continued economic advancement, running U.S. foreign policy would in fact be relatively easy. The main reason American foreign policy looks difficult is because Washington keeps taking on really difficultobjectives, like occupying Iraq, trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern, Western-style state, attempting to coerce Iran into giving up all nuclear enrichment in exchange for precisely nothing from us. And that's just for starters. No matter how strong you are, you can make your job more difficult if you consistently try to do things that are both very, very hard and not necessarily all that important.

Now consider how the world looks to some other countries. If you were a member of China's leadership, you'd be deeply fearful of an economic slowdown that might trigger a major challenge to communist party rule. You have border disputes with many of your neighbors (some of them close allies of the mighty United States), and there's a least some risk that some of them might turn hot. You're dependent on trade that flows through a variety of maritime choke points. You have more power and more influence than your Maoist predecessors did, but you don't have any powerful allies and you don't have an attractive ideological model to offer the rest of the world. From a geopolitical perspective, you'd be thrilled to switch places with the United States, which has no serious rivals, no border disputes with anyone, and still has lots of allies around the world.

And if you were Japanese, Spanish, Iraqi, Iranian, Bahraini, Israeli, Greek, Egyptian, Vietnamese, or Indian, you'd have even more to fret about. So the next time you hear someone bemoaning American "decline," tell them to get a grip and be grateful for the country's good fortune. And while you're at it, remind them that most of our foreign policy problems are voluntary: They result from projects we've chosen to take on rather than ones that have been forced upon us by necessity. That's another sign of U.S. power: we have the luxury of choosing how much or how little to do (though it seems to be mostly the former).

In short, Bismarck may have been right when he said God had a "special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States." Which is not to say we can't make it harder for Him.

This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy and can be located here.

On America's decreasing influence in Pakistan

This article first appeared in  GJIA's (Georgetown Journal of International Affair) blog. It can be found here. My sincere thanks to Matthew Sullivan and Lucas Chan of Georgetown University for their help in getting it published.

U.S. Retreat from Pakistan is Not in India’s Interests

Lidderwat Mountain, Kashmir. Image: Arthur Chapman

As the state of U.S.-Pakistan relations continues to worsen, there is an increase in engagement across the border between India and Pakistan. While the Obama administration was busy designating the Haqqani network as a terrorist organization, the Indian foreign minister was visiting Islamabad negotiating greater economic engagement and a relaxation in visa regimes between the two nations.

The decline in U.S.-Pakistan relationship and this sudden bonhomie between two traditional rivals in South Asia are not isolated events. Rather, diplomacy with India is a part of a concerted effort by Pakistan to counter the decline of its relationship with the U.S. The threat of economic collapse without the largesse of the U.S. has made Pakistan open to the idea of a stronger economic relationship with India. To secure itself strategically, Pakistan has also started embracing China with a renewed vigor. This is evident in expanding military engagement between the two, which includes joint military exercises as well as joint production of military hardware. Sino-Pakistan nuclear cooperation is also a part of the same strategy.  Strategically getting closer to China and economically embracing India has, therefore, become Pakistan’s strategy to counter the breakdown in its relationship with the U.S. and its effects on its strategic and economic health.

While Pakistan is doing its best to prepare for a diminished U.S. role in the region, the retreat of the U.S. from the South Asian region might not be beneficial to India’s cause. The argument of economic interdependence notwithstanding, the United States’ decreasing influence in Pakistan’s polity could adversely affect India’s strategic interests in the long term, especially when it comes to stability during crises in the region.

Some would argue that the economic interdependence between India and Pakistan precludes the possibility of conflict, but historically it has been no guarantee. Germany and Britain boasted one of the highest volumes of trade in global history during the late 18th and early 19th century. Still, this tight economic interdependence could not stop them from going to war in 1914. A contemporary example concerns China and Japan. The volume of trade between the two super-economies of Asia is close to 340 billion dollars. However, even such extraordinary interdependence has not been able to calm their territorial anxieties as is evident in the conflict over the contested islands in the East China Sea. Some Japanese business houses are packing their bags and leaving lucrative commercial investments in China.

Trade volume between India and Pakistan is not even one percent ($3 Billion) of Sino-Japanese trade. Also, the two nations not only share a bloody history, but also have a serious ongoing territorial dispute over Kashmir. To think, therefore, that economic interdependence will bring peace in the region is a utopian dream.

If reliance on economics as a driver of peace in South Asia is ill founded, it is important to acknowledge that strained bilateral ties between Pakistan and the U.S.–the principal driver behind Pakistan’s decision to open up economically–is not in India’s strategic interests. Though non-interference in bilateral relationship has always been India’s preferred position, it has in the past asked the U.S. to use its political influence in diffusing acute crisis situations between the two nuclear rivals in South Asia. In fact, if one looks at the history of last twenty or so years, U.S. involvement has been one of the major reasons behind crisis de-escalation in South Asia. This was evident in the Blair House meeting between Prime Minister Nawaj Sharif and President Bill Clinton at the height of the Kargil war in 1999. As a result of the meeting, Pakistan formally announced its decision to retreat from Indian territory. Similarly, India amassed half a million troops on its Western borders in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the Indian parliament. In such an extremely volatile situation, the U.S. provided India a face-saving exit from the brink of escalation by pressurizing President Pervez Musharraf to clearly renounce terrorism as a state policy. As U.S. influence wanes, it will become even more difficult to head off conflict scenarios between India and Pakistan.

The retreat of the U.S. will also inevitably result in the resurgence of China in the South Asian scene. A number of commentators have argued that China is extremely shy of any long-term strategic commitment to Pakistan. However, alliance politics often result in entrapment for the more powerful partners. China has a strategic interest in Pakistan, but it might find itself getting more involved in the region than it presently envisions. However, given the historic rivalry between India and China, the direct source of conflict in the form of the border dispute and both nations’ quest for leadership in Asia, such a situation could become geo-politically explosive.

Therefore, unlike many who think that a U.S. exit from Pakistan’s strategic landscape may be beneficial for India, the actual results of the U.S. retreat may be far more dangerous in times of crisis or escalation in the subcontinent.

Yogesh Joshi is a Ph.D candidate at the Center for International Politics, Organisation and Disarmament, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a CSIS-Pacific Forum Young Leader