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rfmcdonaldThis weekend Noel Maurer started a debate on his blog, arguing that war between European Union member-states was implausible.
In the context of Europe specifically, one reason western European powers were so slow to respond to the Yugoslav wars is that the idea of nationalist civil war in Yugoslavia had been considered trivial, that until the 1990s Yugoslavia had seemed to be a relatively stable and pluralist, if authoritarian, country ensconced on the peripheries of Europe, a reliable source of package vacations and migrant workers and low-end manufactured goods and agricultural exports. And the Yugoslav wars were about as close to the European core as one could get.
The same sort of phenomenon prevails among democracies generally, I'd argue. Argentina might vigourously dispute British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, and Anglo-Argentine relations may remain perennially embittered by the dispute over those islands and the war fought for them, but a second Argentine invasion of the Falklands strikes me as unlikely in the extreme. The Falklands War was initiated by a dictatorship that had already killed tens of thousands of Argentine citizens; the Argentine government at the time was already quite willing to kill large numbers of Argentines for the sake of the country, never mind foreigners. Argentina might have issues, but a relapse into the dirty war mentality strikes me as very unlikely.
A Daniel Drezner post from the 22nd of December, "
These crazy IR kids today, with their wacky threat assessments..... ", seems relevant, most relevant part quoted below. Drezner, here, is concerned particularly with the prospect of global conflicts, but he makes points relevant to smaller-scale wars as well.
“Unthinkable” is an overused term. It’s usually used to mean “awfully bad, and to be avoided.” Or, more accurately, “Too unlikely or undesirable to be considered a possibility.” That meaning, obviously, is hyperbole.
But there is a second meaning: impossible to imagine occurring in reality. That is a very concrete meaning. One can imagine all sorts of impossible things, but an unthinkable one is something that slips from your grasp when you sit down and try to think about how it might come about.
There are a lot of incredibly improbable things that are not unthinkable on a 50-year scale. Since this great debate attempt is about war, let’s give an example: a civil war in the United States. That is incredibly bloody unlikely even in a 50-year scale, I’d bet large sums against it, I’ll argue strongly that it won’t happen ... but one can imagine plausible scenarios. It reaches the first level of unthinkability (too improbable to be worth seriously considering) but not the second.
Proposition: interstate war in Western Europe has reached the second level of unthinkability.
In the context of Europe specifically, one reason western European powers were so slow to respond to the Yugoslav wars is that the idea of nationalist civil war in Yugoslavia had been considered trivial, that until the 1990s Yugoslavia had seemed to be a relatively stable and pluralist, if authoritarian, country ensconced on the peripheries of Europe, a reliable source of package vacations and migrant workers and low-end manufactured goods and agricultural exports. And the Yugoslav wars were about as close to the European core as one could get.
The same sort of phenomenon prevails among democracies generally, I'd argue. Argentina might vigourously dispute British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, and Anglo-Argentine relations may remain perennially embittered by the dispute over those islands and the war fought for them, but a second Argentine invasion of the Falklands strikes me as unlikely in the extreme. The Falklands War was initiated by a dictatorship that had already killed tens of thousands of Argentine citizens; the Argentine government at the time was already quite willing to kill large numbers of Argentines for the sake of the country, never mind foreigners. Argentina might have issues, but a relapse into the dirty war mentality strikes me as very unlikely.
A Daniel Drezner post from the 22nd of December, "
These crazy IR kids today, with their wacky threat assessments..... ", seems relevant, most relevant part quoted below. Drezner, here, is concerned particularly with the prospect of global conflicts, but he makes points relevant to smaller-scale wars as well.
[T]he threat [environment] does seem higher now than twenty years ago, as the Soviet Union was about to collapse. China is more economically powerful, Russia is more revanchist, North, Korea, Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, the barriers to entry for non-state actors to wreak havoc has gone up. The likelihood of a conventional great power war is lower, but the likelihood of a serious attack on American soil seems higher than in late 1991. So in terms of trend, it does feel like the world is less safe.
What's also changed, however, is the tight coupling of the Cold War security environment (ironically, just as the security environment has become more loosely coupled, the global political economy has become more tightly coupled). Because the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were such implacable adversaries and because they knew it, the possibility of a small dispute -- Berlin, Cuba, a downed Korean airliner -- escalating very quickly was ever-present. The possibility of an accident triggering all-out nuclear war was also higher than was realized at the time. The current threat environment is more loosely interconnected, in that a small conflict seems less likely to immediately ramp up into another Cuban Missile Crisis. Indeed, the events of the past year support that point. Saudi Arabia essentially invaded Bahrain, and Iran did.... very little about it. The United States deployed special forces into the heart of Pakistan's military complex. The aftermath of that is undeniably uglier, but it's not we-are-at-DEFCON-ONE kind of ugly. Miller might be more accurate in saying that there is a greater chance of a security dust-up in today's complex threat environment, but there's a much lower likelihood of those dust-ups spiraling out of control.
In Miller's calculations, it seems that any country with a nuclear weapon constitutes an equal level of threat. But that's dubious on multiple grounds. First, none of the emerging nuclear states have anywhere close to a second-strike capability. If they were to use their nukes against the United States, I think they know that there's an excellent chance that they don't survive the counterstrike. Second, the counter Miller provides is that these authoritarian leaders are extra-super-crazy. I'm not going to defend either the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or Kim the Younger, but are these leaders more crazy than either Mao or Stalin or Kim Jong Il? Those are three of the worst leaders in history -- and none of them came close to using nuclear weapons. Finally, the Pakistan case is instructive -- even after getting nukes, and even after getting very cozy with radical terrorist groups, that country has refrained from escalating hostilities with India to the point of another general war.
As for the non-state threats, they are disturbing, but I'd posit that on this front the United States really is safer now than it was a decade ago. The only organization capable of launching a coordinated terrorist strike against the United States is now a husk of its former self. Indeed, I'd wager that Miller's emotions, or his memory of 9/11, are getting in the way of dispassionate analysis.
In essence, Miller conflates the number of possible threats with a greater magnitude of threats. I agree that there are more independent threats to the United States out there at present, but combined, they don't stack up to the Soviet threat. To put it another way, I prefer avoiding a swarm of mosquitoes to one really ravenous bear.
