scholarly journals To Arm or to Ally? The Patron's Dilemma and the Strategic Logic of Arms Transfers and Alliances

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keren Yarhi-Milo ◽  
Alexander Lanoszka ◽  
Zack Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Arms Transfers ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Common Security ◽  
Strategic Logic

How do great powers decide whether to provide arms to or form alliances with client states? This “patron's dilemma” revolves around a decision about how to best provide security to clients without becoming entrapped in unwanted conflicts. Strong commitments worsen the risk of entrapment, whereas weak commitments intensify fears of abandonment. This traditional alliance dilemma can be addressed through the provision of arms and alliances. Great power patrons primarily make such decisions on the basis of two factors: first, the extent to which the patron believes it and its client have common security interests; and second, whether the patron believes that its client has sufficient military capabilities to deter its main adversary without the patron's assistance. Patrons assess the degree of shared threat and the local balances of capabilities in determining whether to support their clients with arms, alliances, or both. As demonstrated in the U.S. provision of security goods to Taiwan and Israel during the Cold War, this strategic logic explains how great powers manage the patron's dilemma.

Seeking support beyond alliance? Rethinking great power partner politics after the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lu Ding ◽  
Xuefeng Sun
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
The Self ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Great Power Politics ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Since the end of the Cold War, establishing partnerships has been part and parcel of the grand strategy of great powers. The partners that great powers seek fall under the two categories of security partners and political-economic partners. Statistics show a significant variation in the proportions of great powers’ security partners. The authors argue that such variation is mainly determined by two factors, namely, great powers’ strategic threats, and their ways of maintaining national security [self-help or security-dependent (on the United States)]. Specifically, both the security-dependent great powers that are under China’s strategic threat and the self-help great powers that are under the US’s strategic threat have a higher proportion of security partners than the security-dependent great powers that are not under China’s strategic threat and the self-help great powers that are under China’s strategic threat. These findings will help to refine the current theories of great power politics.

South Asia

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Rotter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
South Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
Negative Reaction ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Military Aid ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines the history of the Cold War in South Asia. It describes the position of South Asia in the Cold War, and investigates the reasons why Pakistan decided to side with the United States while India sought to avoid great power alliances and keep the Cold War at arm's length. The chapter highlights the negative reaction of India on the decision of the U.S. government to provide military aid to Pakistan, its main rival, and also considers Cold War legacies and the legacy of colonialism in India and Pakistan.

The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy

2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 7-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keir A. Lieber ◽  
Daryl G. Press
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Long Range ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Nuclear Exchange ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

For nearly half a century, the world's most powerful nuclear-armed states have been locked in a condition of mutual assured destruction. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the nuclear balance has shifted dramatically. The U.S. nuclear arsenal has steadily improved; the Russian force has sharply eroded; and Chinese nuclear modernization has progressed at a glacial pace. As a result, the United States now stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy, meaning that it could conceivably disarm the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia and China with a nuclear first strike. A simple nuclear exchange model demonstrates that the United States has a potent first-strike capability. The trajectory of nuclear developments suggests that the nuclear balance will continue to shift in favor of the United States in coming years. The rise of U.S. nuclear primacy has significant implications for relations among the world's great powers, for U.S. foreign policy, and for international relations scholarship.

scholarly journals Proxy Wars: Implications of Great-Power Rivalry for the Onset and Duration of Civil War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indra de Soysa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Multilevel Models ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Time Inconsistency ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Cold War

Theories of civil war focus largely on factors internal to countries, generally ignoring the systemic effects of superpower rivalry during the Cold War, or great power politics associated with regional rivalries and ambitions. The question of the importance of proxiness of civil wars potentially challenges notions of commitment and time-inconsistency problems associated with explanations of why rational agents fail to find less costly bargains compared with fighting costly wars. Great powers often influence the politics of lesser powers by supporting sides in contentious politics as a means to achieve foreign policy objectives relatively cheaply. Models of civil war that focus exclusively on in-country ills, thus, would have very limited predictive power. It is argued here that great powers influence the politics of other nations without bearing the costs of direct involvement by supplying the logistics that allow the feasibility of rebellions. Examining these issues is all the more critical today because the multipolar world emerging out of the Cold War era promises to generate proxy struggles in many strategic places. While the study of civil war moves in the direction of disaggregating in order to understand micro processes associated with rebellion, it might be prudent to examine the interplay of factors between the micro and macro processes in multilevel models because the feasibility of fighting over not fighting is likely to be decided at higher rather than lower levels of aggregation. How to cauterize great-power machinations in civil war must in turn become a primary focus of international institutions, such as the United Nations, for strengthening instruments that would curtail external influences that propagate civil wars.

scholarly journals Globalization, deglobalization and Great Power politics

2021 ◽  
Vol 97 (5) ◽  
pp. 1317-1333
Author(s):  
Norrin M Ripsman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
The Us ◽  
Security Relations ◽  
Great Power Politics ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Commercial liberalism would suggest that whereas globalization was conducive to great power cooperation—or at least moderated competition—deglobalization is likely to ignite greater competition amongst the Great Powers. In reality, however, the picture is much more complex. To begin with, the intense globalization of the 1990s and 2000s is not responsible for moderating Great Power tensions; instead, it is itself a product of the security situation resulting from the end of the Cold War. Furthermore, while globalization did serve to reinforce cooperation between the United States and rising challengers, such as China, which sought to harness the economic gains of globalization to accelerate their rise, it also created or intensified fault-lines that have led to heightening tensions between the Great Powers. Finally, while we are currently witnessing increasing tensions between the US and both China and Russia, deglobalization does not appear to be the primary cause. Thus, geoeconomic conditions do not drive security relations; instead, the geoeconomic environment, which is itself influenced by Great Power politics, is better understood as a medium of Great Power competition, which may affect the character of Great Power competition and its intensity, but does not determine it.

scholarly journals BIDEN’S APPROACH TOWARDS RUSSIA: A “RESET LIGHT”?

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/2021) ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Vladimir Trapara
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
First Year ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

The topic of this paper is foreign policy course towards Russia employed by the incumbent United States president, Joseph Biden, during his first year in office. Motivated by the recent Biden-Putin bilateral summit and Biden’s remark on the U.S. and Russia as “two great powers”, the author presents a research question whether this event could be observed as the beginning of a “reset light” approach in Washington’s Russia policy. Unlike the previous “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations this time the goal would not be rapprochement, but structured confrontation between the two countries (such as the one which prevented escalation during the Cold War), with cooperation in areas where it is possible. Having considered Obama/Trump legacy, put Biden’s rhetoric and actions in current international and domestic context, and analyzed different issues over which Russia and the U.S. are in conflict/can cooperate, the author concludes that Biden’s approach can be considered a “reset light”, but that its success in the longer run is uncertain.

scholarly journals The United States in a World of Great Power Competition

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 78-94
Author(s):  
J. Mankoff
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Public Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
New Thinking ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

The adoption of the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) marked Washington’s official pivot to “great power competition” as the conceptual framework for U.S. foreign policy. The shift to great power competition as the foundation for U.S. foreign policy represents an acknowledgment that the “forever wars” in the Middle East had become an expensive, strategically dubious distraction from the more pressing challenge posed by a revanchist Russia and a rising China. The template for much of the “new” thinking about great power competition is the Cold War – the last time the U.S. faced a peer competitor – whose shadow hangs over much thinking about U.S. policy toward Beijing and Moscow. In many ways, though, the Cold War was an outlier in the history of U.S. foreign policy, a product of very specific circumstances that are unlikely to be replicated in the 21st century. A danger exists in seeing the Cold War as a typical example of great power competition, or in using it as a template for U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century. Great power competition is usually a chronic condition, which is to say, more or less incurable. In order for a country like the United States to enter a new era of great power competition with China and Russia, it will need to convince the American public that the stakes are high and the dangers are great enough to justify the costs. Without the ideological or existential stakes of the Cold War, public support for an assertive strategy of containing Chinese and Russian influence will likely be hard to maintain. Rather, the U.S. is likely to continue the reversion toward its pre-Cold War pattern of seeking to insulate itself from the dangers of the world, and increasingly pass the burden of resisting the expansion of Chinese and Russian influence to others.

Philip Wayne Powell, the Cold War, and the Conquest of Northern Mexico

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-304
Author(s):  
Raphael B. Folsom
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Northern Mexico ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

The writings of the U.S. scholar Philip Wayne Powell have had an enduring influence on the historiography of colonial Mexico and the Spanish borderlands. But his writings have never been examined as a unified corpus, and so the deeply reactionary political ideology that lay behind them has never been well understood. By analyzing Powell’s political convictions, this article shows how contemporary scholarship on the conquest of northern Mexico can emerge from Powell’s long shadow. Los escritos del estudioso estadounidense Philip Wayne Powell han ejercido una influencia perdurable sobre la historiografía del México colonial y las zonas fronterizas españolas. Sin embargo, dichos escritos nunca han sido examinados como un corpus unificado, de manera que la ideología política profundamente reaccionaria detrás de ellos nunca ha sido bien comprendida. Al analizar las convicciones políticas de Powell, el presente artículo muestra cómo puede surgir un conocimiento contemporáneo sobre la conquista del norte de México a partir de la larga sombra de Powell.

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