Benjamin Zala

ADVANCED US CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS AND NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT

The Obama administration has made a great effort to increase the role of advanced conventional weaponry in US national security thinking and practice, in part to help reinvigorate the global nuclear disarmament agenda by reducing the role played by nuclear weapons in the US defense posture. However, such a strategy is fundamentally flawed because increases in US conventional superiority will exacerbate US relative strength vis-à-vis other powers, and therefore make the prospect of a nuclear weapon-free world seem less attractive to Washingtons current and potential nuclear rivals. Consequently, it is highly likely that the impact of efforts to increase US advanced conventional superiority through ballistic missile defense and a conventional “prompt global strike” program will ensure that the Obama administration is adopting a pathway to nuclear abolition on which it is the sole traveler for the foreseeable future.

The ‘Other’ Global Security Challenges

The ten years since 9/11 have seen Western security policies dominated by the attempt to control global terrorism via the War on Terror. The anniversary of the attacks provides an opportune moment to reflect on the effectiveness or otherwise of this approach and discuss the lessons for responding to two of the most important global security challenges in the years ahead – the interlocked trends of deepening socioeconomic divisions and a rapidly warming global climate.

Coordinating the arm swing with the pivot: nuclear deterrence, stability and US strategy in the Asia-Pacific

Abstract United States’ foreign policy towards the Asia-Pacific region is set to be fundamentally altered by two developments in Washingtons defence policy. The first is the so-called pivot towards the region in terms of overall defence strategy. The second, occurring at roughly the same time, is a move towards a far greater role for advanced conventional weaponry in the US defence posture. We analyse the interaction of these two trends and discusses a central tension between short and long-term challenges, suggesting that, contrary to current developments, either a freeze in the deployment of these weapons programmes or a return to a strategy underpinned by traditional notions of deterrence may well be necessary.

Rising powers and order contestation: disaggregating the normative from the representational

Abstract A central theme of the literature on rising powers is that new aspirants to great power status pose a challenge to the underlying principles and norms that underpin the existing, Western-led order. However, in much of the literature, the nature and significance of rising powers for international order are imprecisely debated, in particular the concept and practice of ‘contestation’. In this article, we aim to establish a distinction between normative contestation and what can be thought of as ‘contestation over representation’: that is, contestation over who is setting and overseeing the rules of the game rather than the content of the rules themselves and the kind of order that they underpin. The paper engages with debates on international order and international society, and its empirical basis is provided by a thorough analysis of the discourse of rising power summitry.

Great power management and ambiguous order in nineteenth-century international society

This article considers what the nineteenth century can tell us about the nature of great power management under conditions of ambiguity in relation to the holders of great power status. It charts the development of an institutionalised role for the great powers as managers of international society but with a specific focus on the mutual recognition, and conferral, of status. Such a focus highlights the changing, and sometimes competing, perceptions of not only which states should be thought of as great powers, but also therefore whether the power structure of international society remained multipolar or shifted towards bipolarity or even unipolarity. The article argues that a ‘golden age’ of great power management existed during a period in which perceptions of great power status were in fact more fluid than the standard literature accounts for. This means that predictions surrounding the imminent demise of the social institution of great power management under an increasingly ambiguous interstate order today may well be misplaced.

The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

Bold statements about systemic change in world politics are relatively rare in an era of increasing specialisation in scholarship. If anyone is to provide a take on the nature of power and statecraft in the contemporary global order, there are few better placed to do so than Anne-Marie Slaughter. As a long-time academic, a former director of Policy Planning at the US State Department and someone who regularly features on lists such as Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, the challenge of big-picture analysis in this area is home turf for Slaughter. Originating in the Henry L Stimson Lectures that Slaughter delivered at Yale University in 2015, this book makes the case for an entirely different approach to foreign and security policy from those we have become used to in the modern era. Building on her previous analysis in A New World Order (Princeton University Press, 2004), Slaughter’s central argument is that world politics is increasingly becoming defined by networks. These networks are the web of connections between nation states, sub-state authorities, corporations, NGOs, regional and multilateral bodies, and even individuals. Thinking seriously about the implications of living in a networked global order should lead to a fundamentally different kind of statecraft and this book is focused specifically on detailing what this might be. In a networked world, Slaughter argues that ‘power with’ is beginning to outweigh ‘power over’ as the ability to connect with others becomes the most effective path to success in foreign policy. The starting premise is that there is no ‘playbook’ for strategies of connection. The idea of shifting from the ‘chessboard’ to the ‘web’ – to which the title alludes – is that just as scholars – such as Thomas Schelling – turned to game theory to guide decision-makers in the chessboardlike arena of the Cold War, they must now turn to the network theory of Manuel Castells and others in this new era. The book makes the case for thinking about networks in the broadest possible sense, but central to the argument is a focus on non-state actors. Remove the role of non-state actors, including sub-state actors, from terrorist groups to city authorities, and the book’s central thesis effectively disappears. As with most analysis that focuses on the power of non-state actors, the novelty is somewhat overstated. While the recent success of non-state paramilitary groups – even in the face of the world’s greatest military superpower, the US – may seem to call into question the dominance of the great powers in what might be thought of as their ‘home turf’ (military capability), this is hardly new. The history of great powers coming off second best to guerrilla fighters playing to their local advantage includes Britain in America in the 1770s, France in the Peninsular War in the 1800s and 1810s, and again in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, the US in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. While the number of successful guerrilla campaigns waged against major powers has sharply increased since 1945, this has gone hand-in-hand with a sharp decrease in major power war, thus making this phenomenon seem statistically more

Conventional prompt global strike: arms racing and strategic stability in a post-unipolar world

Some two decades after the US-led Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), advances in military technology and engineering have allowed the development of an array of advanced precision conventional weaponry that is increasingly prominent at the strategic level. This includes various new global strike capabilities (including antisatellite forces), significant improvements in antimissile defenses, as well as a host of more nebulous cyber capabilities. All of these technologies have implications for how we think about and manage nuclear weapons and major power relationships, and will create, in the words of Joshua Pollack (“Boost-glide Weapons and US-China Strategic Stability,” 22.2, June 2015, pp. 155-64), “a more complex set of interactions” within an already fragile nuclear order. Taken together, these developments suggest that we are now standing on the edge of a major new era of nuclear affairs—one in which advanced conventional weapons become significant factors in the defense postures of the major nuclear-armed states—and one that will have significant implications for strategic stability and crisis management, arms control, and the global nuclear order more broadly. This is why the relative lack of scholarly attention to the issue of conventional prompt global strike (CPGS) programs has been of such concern to the handful of analysts who have been following their development in recent years. As the excellent articles in the same issue by Dennis Gormley (“US Advanced Conventional Systems and Conventional Prompt Global Strike Ambitions: Assessing the Risks, Benefits, and Arms Control Implications,” pp. 123-40), James Acton (“Russia and Strategic Conventional Weapons: Concerns and Responses,” pp. 141-54), and Pollack point out, the development of CPGS (alongside other strategic conventional weapons) has the ability to pose very serious challenges for major power relations in the years ahead. In particular, Washington’s current inability to recognize a classic “security dilemma” means that it is pressing ahead with a program which Russia views as, in Acton’s words, “profoundly threatening.” It also applies pressure to China’s strategic posture that is, according to Pollack, “potentially significant, with deleterious effects on crisis stability.” The authors are to be congratulated for raising this often-overlooked issue in contemporary strategic affairs and, importantly, for doing so in the pages of the premier scholarly journal on nuclear weapons issues. This is not just an “emerging technologies” issue but something that is of direct concern to anyone concerned with the avoidance of nuclear war. The three articles all point to this issue as being highly problematic in terms of Washington’s relations with the two states that might be thought of as its actual or potential strategic rivals: Russia and China. Yet the picture that emerges from their analysis—of an action-reaction dynamic with the potential to create a new advanced conventional

The Australian 2016 Defence White Paper, great-power rivalry and a ‘rules-based order’: an imagined correspondence between Carr, Bull and Bell

ABSTRACT This piece is an imagined email correspondence between three renowned international relations scholars, E. H. Carr, Hedley Bull and Coral Bell, who are discussing the Australian 2016 Defence White Paper. The purpose of such an exercise is to reflect on the ‘big-picture’ international relations questions posed by what might otherwise be thought of as a relatively technical defence policy document. In particular, the correspondence between the three focuses on the central importance of the White Paper’s assumptions of a ‘rules-based global order’ and the relationship between this order and US power. In their time, all three authors spoke directly to questions of power, law and order in their scholarly work, which had been deeply influenced, in all three cases, by periods spent working at the ‘coalface’ of these issues in government in Britain and Australia. As such, Carr, Bull and Bell have much to say about how Australia is positioning itself for a post-unipolar world.