It’s 3:35 AM here in Washington, D.C. A last survey before bed turns up still very little commentary of much use regarding events in Pakistan. One of the strange things about D.C. is the proximity to the powers that be gives at least me the sense of hidden events unfolding. One can see in the mind’s eye the chaos that must be going on at the National Security Council, the State Department and the Pentagon even at this late hour. The encrypted channels to India and Israel have to be at capacity right about now. There is a lot of intelligence to exchange, contingencies to be agree upon and reassurances to be extracted. I imagine that if I were to bike down to the White House campus right about now, the lights at the Old Executive Office Building would be blazing. Twenty copies of an about fiver-hundred page briefing book are expected at the West Wing tomorrow at 7:30 AM. More darkly, I imagine that they will also be working overtime at STRATCOM and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The thing that I am worried about the most is what is going on in the Office of the Vice President tonight and into tomorrow. Or at least it’s the thing I’m most worried about in my own neck of the woods. Even a mind’s eye can only perceive to the horizons of one’s imagination. Dark plans, as yet unrevealed to the world, are unfolding everywhere.
Category Archives: international politics
Soft Balancing on Iran
A few days after the key findings of the Iran NIE were released Kevin Drum suggested that with the war hawks’ position so heavily damaged and the policy danger that they pose having been diminished, many, including some countries, might feel freed up to take a more hardline position now that they no longer have to tread between the Charybdis of Iran’s nuclear program and the Scylla of the Office of the Vice President (“Counterintuitive Thought for the Day on Iran,” Political Animal, Washington Monthly, 10 December 2007). He even speculated that that the continued progress of a U.N. sanctions resolution might confirm this theory (“Sanctions and the NIE, Political Animal, Washington Monthly, 10 December 2007).
But what would this mean, that countries slow-walk actions to constrain a potential Iranian nuclear program out of fear of becoming a party to a larger U.S. plan against Iran? It would mean that a group of countries have formed a tacit — or perhaps not so tacit — agreement to impede the United States. Wouldn’t one have to admit this as a sort of primitive soft balancing against the United States. I don’t think that the case is exactly strong here. This is probably no different than the sort of actions that one could point to probably dozens of instances during the Cold War where U.S. alliance partners felt the need to mitigate some particularly egregious U.S. policy position. States engaging in minor acts of diplomatic defiance is nothing new.
On the other hand, when you consider that there have been some more hard balancing-like actions (“A Caspian Balance?,” 23 October 2007), it seems like there is a context where this doesn’t look like diplomacy as usual. Perhaps there is a slowly building effort to constrain the U.S. in the Middle East.
It’s also disturbing that the U.S. is considered a threat to stability of such a scale that states find themselves having to stake out some middle ground between us and Iran.
It’ll All End In Tears, Redux
The Financial Times today (Stephens, Philip, “A Physicist’s Theory of the Transatlantic Relationship,” 14 December 2007):
The overarching geopolitical fact of coming decades is likely to be the relative decline of US power. The word relative is important. Measured by economic, technological and military might, America is likely to remain the pre-eminent nation during the first half of the present century and, perhaps, well beyond. But the US is already an insufficient as well as an indispensable power. As China, India and others rise, and Russia re-asserts itself, the US will become more dependent on the goodwill of others. How it responds to the shifts will in large degree shape the new international order — or disorder.
The image of the future in the minds of many is of a multipolar system, with power shared between two or three groups of nations. … Others — in the US as well as Europe — conjure up a world divided into two competing blocs: the liberal democracies on one side, the authoritarian capitalists, notably but not exclusively China and Russia, on the other. …
More probably we are on the cusp of an era of great power competition in which alliances and allegiances shift according to accidents of circumstance and geography. Those who like historical analogies could look back at the second half of the 19th century.
The problem with looking back at the second half of the Nineteenth Century is that we all know how that ended.
Confrontation Between Israel and Iran is Strategic, Not Ideological
Yesterday I went to the Center for American Progress event, Nuclear Meltdown: Rebuilding a Coherent Policy Towards Iran (Washington, D.C., 13 December 2007). It was moderated by Center for American Progress Director for Nuclear Policy Joseph Cirincione and consisted of a discussion with authors Barbara Slavin and Trita Parsi whose books are Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S., and the Twisted Path to Confrontation and Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, respectively. Both Ms. Slavin and Mr. Parsi were phenomenally interesting and well informed. As Mr. Cirincione points out, their books really complement each other and both have been reviewed in tandem in most papers.
The single point that most fascinated me from their discussion — and apparently it impressed Mr. Cirincione as well as he allows in his question — is Mr. Parsi’s dismissal of the ideology and the rhetoric of Israeli-Iranian relations in favor of a purely geostrategic analysis. In this regard, the first Gulf War of 1991, rather than the Iranian revolution of 1979 was the real turning point in Israeli-Iranian relations.
The Center for American Progress already has a video of the event up and Mr. Parsi gives a thumb-nail version of his theory starting about a quarter of the way in, but here is a transcript of what he says:
… Iran and Israel did have a strong relationship during the 50s, 60s and 70s. From the Israeli’s side there was the doctrine of the periphery, the idea that Israel’s security was best achieved by making alliances with the non-Arab periphery states in the region — basically Turkey, Iran and Ethiopia — in order to weaken the Arab states in Israel’s vicinity — the inner and the outer circle.
And there is a myth out there in my view and I argue strongly against it in the book that Israeli-Iranian relations radically change in 1979 because of the revolution. And certainly the revolution did change a lot. Iran had a completely new ideology and very aggressive anti-Israeli rhetoric, but the common threats that had pushed Iran and Israel closer together during the preceding decades — the common threat from the Arab world and the common threat from the Soviet Union — was still there after 1979. And strategically Israel believed that Iran was still a very, very strong periphery power that it needed to have a strategic relationship.
And immediately after the revolution the Israelis were doing everything the could to reach out to Iran, to sell arms to Iran in spite of an American arms embargo and even lobby the United States not only to talk to Iran but also that the U.S. should sell arms to Iran and that the U.S. actually should not pay attention to Iranian rhetoric because the rhetoric was not reflective of the policy. Which is a drastically different position than the Israelis took only a couple of years later.
What really changes the relationship is the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Saddam in the first Persian Gulf War because then at the end of the Cold War the Soviet Union collapses and the last standing Arab army that could pose a conventional military threat to both Iran and to Israel was defeated by the United States. You have a completely new reconfiguration of the geopolitical map in the Middle East in which Iran and Israel emerge as two of the more powerful states. And just as much from the Israeli perspective Iran was needed to balance Iraq to a certain extent they also felt that Iraq was needed to balance Iran but there was no longer a balancer of Iran. They started to view Iran as a potential threat in the future.
So it’s in 1992 that you see a sudden shift in the Israeli position vis-à-vis Iran. Throughout the 1980s in spite of Khomeini’s tremendously aggressive rhetoric against Israel, the Israelis do not talk about an Iranian threat, they reach out to the Iranians. But after 1992 when the Iranians actually become much more pragmatic in their foreign policy their revolutionary zeal is plummeting, that’s when Israel starts to depict Iran as a global and existential threat, out of a fear that in the new Middle East if the United States was now reaching out to the Arab states as it was in the Persian Gulf War and if in addition to that they were to make some sort of a deal with the Iranians, the deal would come at the expense of Israel’s interest.
And the calculation on the Israeli side was they need to make sure that type of political process does not take place. And that is achieved by creating the political obstacles to such a process by imposing new sanctions, by depicting Iran as a global threat. And this initially actually came as a great surprise to the United States because only five years earlier the Israelis had been pushing the Iran-Contra scandal.
That last comment about the Iran-Contra scandal may just seem like a throw-away jibe at the Reagan administration, but I think it’s an important piece of evidence in favor of Mr. Parsi’s case. When I heard it, it really made things fall into place for me. I always wondered what the Israelis were doing as middle-men in that fiasco and how it was that their relationship with Iran was adequate to allow them to act in that capacity, whereas ours was not. Anyway, Mr. Parsi’s theory is what I was missing to explain that recalcitrant fact.
Foreign Policy Micro-Initiatives
Matthew Yglesias comments (“Resilience,” The Atlantic.com, 30 October 2007) on Robert Kagan’s Sunday editorial (“Free Elections Come First,” The Washington Post, 28 October 2007, p. B7):
The unfortunate reality for those like Kagan who’d like to believe that an incredibly aggressive, violent, coercion-oriented US foreign policy is the height of moral probity is that living conditions around the world are, in general, improving for the better without us. There are major exceptions in Sub-Saharan Africa and North Korea but there’s nothing about a glance at those places — Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories — that have benefited from American “democracy promotion” policy that would make any sane person think we need to Kaganize our approach to Russia or China.
This should not be to say that the U.S. should sit passive, but rather than blowing the entire budgetary and soldierly load on one or two high risk foreign policy extravaganzas, what the U.S. should pursue is multifaceted, low-grade, low risk diplomatic pressure and programs across a wide range of countries and issues. It has a higher probability of success, failures have less consequence and unlike massive military interventions, history is on our side here.
Unfortunately foreign policy thinking under the tutelage of George W. Bush, et. al. and the right more generally has taught the country to love the spectacle. The slow, meandering work of diplomacy is no longer enough to capture and hold the imagination of a people who have come to expect “shock and awe,” explosions, daisy-cutter bombs, multi-million dollar airplanes and soldiers looking like a bunch of badasses. No besuited pencil-necks touting human rights reports will suffice for this appetite.
In this regard the President and Congress are no longer really strategists who take as their primary object the international situation, so much as senior public relations people involved in the creation of images for mass public consumption. The images then become the raw material of a primal American dialog about manliness, virility, strength, fear, safety, children, et cetera that takes place in an almost entirely solipsistic fantasy world. So the terms of our foreign policy debate have become whether or not a scrawny Greek guy looks convincing driving a tank, how manly George Bush looks in a flight suite and who would be better received serving Thanksgiving dinner at a surprise visit to a FOB.
The problem with foreign policy micro-initiatives is that they don’t enter into the symbol system of U.S. political dialogue.
Hegemony Corrupts
Francis Fukuyama argues that the misbehavior of the United States in the last few years — he includes the Clinton years — is in fact systematic (“A Self-Defeating Hegemony,” Real Clear Politics, 26 October 2007):
But the fundamental problem remains the lopsided distribution of power in the international system. Any country in the same position as the US, even a democracy, would be tempted to exercise its hegemonic power with less and less restraint. America’s founding fathers were motivated by a similar belief that unchecked power, even when democratically legitimated, could be dangerous, which is why they created a constitutional system of internally separated powers to limit the executive.
Such a system does not exist on a global scale today, which may explain how America got into such trouble. A smoother international distribution of power, even in a global system that is less than fully democratic, would pose fewer temptations to abandon the prudent exercise of power.
A “smoother international distribution of power” could come about through any of a number of ways. The United States could revert to the former system whereby it conducted itself with a self-imposed restraint and voluntarily submitted to a series of treaty-based limitations on its power — ones largely imposed consistently on actors throughout the international system. This would require some measure of calm and circumspection on the part of the U.S. electorate, desiderata for which I am not going to hold my breath. The alternative is that restraint will be imposed upon us by the emergence of a competing power center. The latter is fraught with all the normal dangers of system transition.
So hopefully Mr. Fukuyama’s next book will be on the necessity for one world government.
A Caspian Balance?
Again, the trump argument in the debate over whether the standard predictions of realism, that hegemony always produces a balance, applies as well to Twenty-First Century U.S. unipolarity as it has all other hegemons, is to ask, “Where is the balance?” Realists have been hard-pressed to answer this question and have made recourse to the notion of the “soft balance.” This has evoked a bit of ridicule from their neoconservative opponents, who reply that there is no such thing as soft balancing, or if there is such a thing it doesn’t count.
Well, how about last week’s Caspian Sea Leaders Summit for a hard balance (Fathi, Nazila and C. J. Chivers, “In Iran, Putin Warns Against Military Action,” The New York Times, 17 October 2007)?
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said at a summit meeting of five Caspian Sea nations in Iran on Tuesday that any use of military force in the region was unacceptable. In a declaration, the countries agreed that none would allow their territories to be used as a base for military strikes against any of the others.
…
Later he had a meeting with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in which he said he had expressed a desire for “deeper” relations between the countries, Reuters reported.
[Mr. Ahmadinejad said,] “The goal is to keep the sea clear of military competitions and keep foreigners out of the region.”
The article concedes that, “their statements appeared to have more political than military significance, and were not a departure from the status quo.” It looks to me like a departure from the status quo in so far as while it is not a clear-cut case of hard balancing — there were no mutual defense pacts signed or declarations that an attack on one would be viewed as an attack on all — a couple of states banding together in a show of solidarity to compel the hegemon to back down seems like a pretty far cry from soft balancing too.
Amping Up The Coercion
Matthew Yglesias has a nice real world example (“Back in the U.S.S.R.,” The Atlantic.com, 21 October 2007) that illustrates one of the points from my Thursday theoretical post (“Bandwagoning, Network Benefits and the Stability of U.S. Unipolarity,” 18 October 2007). He refers to this passage from Vice President Cheney’s recent address to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (“Vice Presidents Remarks,” Lansdowne, Virginia, 21 October 2007):
Dr. Bernard Lewis explained the terrorists’ reasoning this way: “During the Cold War,” Dr. Lewis wrote, “two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: ‘What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?'” End quote.
This is amazing. In the White House you have a bunch of people who reject the Cold War theory of containment. The issue is slightly muddled when you think that they reject it in favor of some third theory of how to prosecute the war on terrorism, but in fact they reject containment, the strategy pursued by the winning side in the Cold War, in favor of that theory of international relations held by the losing side. I see that the present issue of The Weekly Standard castigates liberals as the stupid faction of U.S. politics (Ceaser, James, “The Stupid Party,” vol. 13, no. 6, 22 October 2007, pp. 22-26), but with such historical geniuses as the present crop of Republicans running the show, where can we go wrong?
But to link this up with Thursday’s point:
- U.S. foreign policy is in fact becoming much more nasty. To the extent that it is not, it is presently run by people whose objective is to make it more so — people who find at least something to admire in the Soviet conduct of foreign affairs.
- As a strategy for achieving its objectives, a state can always just amp up the consequences for non-compliance. The success of this strategy will depend on where a state sits on the spectrum of profitability as a power with which to bandwagon. And I say again that this is not an absolute consideration, but one made in a competitive environment. It is something of which a state can get away with more when the alternatives are slim, but not at all when they are many. Whatever the case, there is a point beyond which even bad alternatives start to look acceptable and states pursuing this option should be mindful of the international environment.
- A state can switch to a policy of no positive inducement, but instead solely of making defiance so costly as to be ruled out by all potential dissenters. Such a policy is one of pure coercion. As a basis for alliance, pure coercion seems a pretty bad one. Hence the rapid dissolution of the Warsaw Pact after the revelation of the hollowness of Soviet power. Pure coercion can only work so long as a state is absolutely feared. A few displays of anything less than omnipotence invite further probes. Now a state faces the dilemma of George Orwell in “Shooting and Elephant”: the logic of the spectacle. Under a system of all cost, no benefit, the search for an alternative will be pretty desperate on the part of the subordinated. The gamble of a state pursuing pure coercion is that it can always and for all time prevent the emergence of alternative security arrangements.
As Machiavelli wrote, it is best to be both feared and loved, but if both together are not possible it is best to be feared. The United States in the Twenty-First Century doesn’t necessarily have to choose between being loved and feared, but our foreign policy is dominated by people who have chosen to be feared where no necessity for such a choice was presented. Admiration should be automatic in the right wing mindset, or is a sort of byproduct or side benefit to being feared. Admiration is discounted as a specific objective and consigned to the fates (kind of like conservation: merely a personal virtue). Fear is all.
Bandwagoning, Network Benefits and the Stability of U.S. Unipolarity
There is a debate going on between neoconservatives and others on the right versus traditional international relations theorists and liberals about the stability of the international system of U.S. unipolarity. International Security recently devoted an entire issue to the debate (vol. 30, no. 1, Summer 2005). Obviously it has significant implications for future foreign policy. The argument of the neoconservative has to date been all too easy: if hegemony always provokes a balance, where is it? It has been nearly twenty years since the dissolution of the bipolarity of the Cold War and nothing. And by the way, soft balancing doesn’t count.
The obvious answer to this criticism is that such politically costly, wrenching determinations are very difficult for states to make. Foreign policy establishments are extremely conservative — and rightly so since the survival of the state is at stake — and so only make such a drastic choices as to alter a decades-long foreign policy precedent after the long accumulation of failures — or after the indisputable occurrence of one catastrophic failure.
The choice between bandwagoning versus counterbalancing is essentially an economic calculation. Bandwagoning entails certain costs, mostly those of subordination, but so long as the benefits outweigh the costs, bandwagoning will remain a profitable national security choice. But the cost-benefit analysis is not carried out in a vacuum. Like all such analyses, it is one made in a competitive environment. Bandwagoning might be preferable, even when the costs are extremely high, if the field of choice consists of a security monopoly (unipolarity) — in other words, if the alternative is to go it alone. However, in a system where states have the option of bandwagoning with one of an array of powers, a state will badwagon with the state or alliance in which it perceives the most profitable arrangement of costs and benefits.
A significant advantage to bandwagoing with the United States to date has consisted in the benefit column of the array of international public goods supplied by the U.S. and by the network effects of the U.S.-centric system. On the cost side, historically the U.S. has made the price paid by allied states comparatively very low — think of the subordination costs of allying with the Soviet Union. But two things are happening under right-wing domination of U.S. foreign policy.
First, the U.S. is altering the calculation of costs and benefits. As the U.S. becomes more tight-fisted and capricious in the provision of international public goods, the benefit side starts to look pretty skimpy. And as the majority of the cost side comes from subordination costs, the more the U.S. demands a unidirectional loyalty, the greater the costs to a potential ally become. An act of loyalty is an exchange. When one nation makes a compromise with another, its aim is to make a purchase on some future reverse compromise. A nation compromising keeps a balance sheet of its sacrifices and when it sees that it is garnering nothing comparable in return, it will conclude that it is being ripped off.
A related problem, and much more significant over the long-tem, is that network effects are zero sum. The benefits to using Microsoft products are only partly the quality of the products themselves. The rest of the benefit comes from the fact that everyone else uses Microsoft products too. To e-mail a document is easy because you can rest assured that the recipient uses Word too. If everyone was using Linux instead, the benefits would accrue there and it wouldn’t matter so much how slick Microsoft products were.
One alliance is advantageous in so far as the states comprising the alliance are many, powerful, tightly bound together and offer a broad and deep array of public international goods. These advantages aren’t absolute, but comparative.
States allying with the U.S. are all different, with differing perceived interests and security problems, owing to differing geography, ethnic populations, levels of development, economic makeup, trading partners, and so on. As a result, each makes a different calculation of the profitability of its alliance with the United States. As the United States toughens the terms of its relations with the rest of the world, different nations will drop out at different assessed levels of cost and benefit. But here is where the zero-sum of network benefits becomes so pernicious. For each nation pursuing a security option other than bandwagoning with the United States, the net benefit of allying with the U.S. is reduced and that that of other options, namely that of joining a counterbalancing coalition, is increased.
And there is a feedback loop where this alters the analysis of cost and benefit of bandwagoning with the U.S. The more states that are in a counterbalancing coalition, the more attractive becomes that coalition — all other things being equal. Since the advantages of one coalition is comparative with other coalitions in the system, the strength of one is the weakness of another. And since membership in one alliance typically entails some consequence among states part of a competing alliance, each defection simultaneously decreases the value of membership in the spurned alliance and increases that of the alliance embraced. As more states join the counterbalancing coalition, the deeper the pool of international public goods on offer becomes.
At some point along the spectrum of the United States toughening the terms of its relations with the rest of the world and the trading off of network benefits, a tipping point is reached. The opposing alliance becomes competitive with and then overcomes that that of the United States. They are then in a position to use negative inducements to wrench the plum alliance partners from the U.S. coalition. The contenders find themselves in a position similar to the U.S. during, say, the lead up to the Iraq war, where nations that opposed opted to lay low or feign support, lest they engender the wrath of the U.S.
The two outstanding benefits of bandwagoning with the United States are coverage under the U.S. security umbrella — including that of extended nuclear deterrence — and access to U.S. markets. But both of these will be in declining absolute and comparative value in the next few decades.
U.S. relative military power — and relative military power is all there is — has been on the decline since its apex in 1945. Most pernicious is that though while relative U.S. military spending has been rising throughout most of this period, relative U.S. military strength on the ground has been declining. As the Iraq war shows, at the present price level the U.S. cannot subdue a nation with ten percent of our population and six-tenths of a percent of our gross national product. In al Qaeda we have a small distributed network funded to the tune of a few million dollars a year, whose military capital is even smaller a proportion of our own than their manpower, that now apparently represents an existential threat to the U.S. and is a dogged, nearly unconquerable menace.
Nuclear proliferation will complicate extended deterrence to the point where it can no longer be maintained. The U.S. could nearly convince the Europeans that we were willing to trade Paris for New York when a potential Soviet takeover of Europe was at stake, but could we convince Saudi Arabia that we would trade Los Angeles for Riyadh in a contest with Iran? Hence another reason for missile defense: to preserve the credibility of extended deterrence and thus the benefit to states of subordinating themselves to U.S. designs for a little longer.
The economic story of the latter half of the Twentieth Century is similarly that of the relative economic decline of the United States. This is a trend that will only accelerate in the Twenty-First Century as China and India continue to develop. The Economist Intelligence Unit predicts that the GDP of China may surpass that of the United States in purchasing power parity as early as 2017. Dean Baker similarly predicts about a decade, with China’s economy growing to three times that of the United States by the end of the Twenty-First Century (“The World in 2026“, The World in 2006, Special Edition; Baker, Dean, “The Social Security Shortfall and the National Defense Shortfall,” CEPR, April 2005; though Sun Bin predicts that China will never surpass more than 80 percent of U.S. GDP, “When will China’s GDP overtake the US?,” 29 December 2005). With a billion people each, neither country has to match the U.S. in GDP per capita or standard of living for total economy, aggregate purchasing power, tax receipts and military spending to outstrip that of the United States. And while they’re at it, why not outbid the United States at the IMF, hence gaining a controlling vote at that institution.
It’s like global climate change: U.S. military exhaustion is the thawing northern permafrost and the rise of the Chinese economy is the melting Greenland Ice Sheet of the international system. Both are cataclysms that threaten to push the international system over the hump where the trends become accelerating and self-sustaining.
To the too easy neoconservative argument of “show me a balance,” should be a similarly easy retort that the future is long. Things obviously won’t stay the same: they are already well down the path to changing. When material circumstances change, the relation of nations will follow. They always do; it’s just that sometimes ideology is a lagging indicator.
Jacksonians and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
My last two posts have been about the ways that the right seeks to undo the international system built up over the last 65 years. Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns and Money assesses that they have also succeeded in ruining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as well (“The NPT is Dead,” 13 October 2007):
The strike [by the Israeli air force on a possible Syrian nuclear reactor], and especially the apparent acquiescence of the United States in its planning and execution, means that the NPT is pretty much a dead letter… and has been replaced by a de facto arrangement in which states that the US approves of are allowed to have nuclear power, while states we dislike get airstrikes. … Combine this with the recent nuclear deal with India, and I’d have to say that the Bush administration’s effort to kill a legal cornerstone of international stability have been remarkably successful.
To which Matthew Yglesias adds (“The End of the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” The Atlantic.com, 14 October 2007),
Iraq was the neocons’ big chance to show that the approach to WMD policy they prefer — basically an ad hoc regime enforced by American military power and undergirded by nothing more principled than American whim — was workable. To make it work, they needed to show that we could successful topple a regime we didn’t like and replace it with one we liked better cheaply and easily enough to make it credible that we’d go and do it again. But it failed. The low-cost airstrike approach isn’t going to succeed against any kind of determined adversary, and the more we act like a rogue superpower the harder it will be to get our way.
This is another masterstroke for the Bush administration. They rip to shreds the one bulwark we do have against nuclear proliferation — one that has been fairly successful over the last 40 years — and have ready in its place absolutely nothing. In this case not even the credible threat of U.S. force.
Marching Under Banners 