Ido Oren

The War Proneness of Alliances

In the theoretical literature, alliances have been hypothesized to lead to war as well as away from war. This study statistically examines the relationship between the size of alliances and the war proneness of their members. Analyzing data on the war record of 126 major power alliances formed during the period 1816-1980, it is shown that the larger the alliance, the more wars each of its members is likely to be involved in. This result is consistent with, and enhances the credibility of, past empirical research showing that alliance membership affects the expansion of wars rather than their outbreak. This study also explains a puzzle that threatened the validity of past aggregate analyses of the alliance-war relationship: the mysterious reversal of the sign of the relationship around the turn of the twentieth century. The source of the puzzle is demonstrated to have been a failure to think through the theoretical implications of the operationalization of war, not a fundamental change in the nature of the underlying linkage between alliances and war.

Can Political Science Emulate the Natural Sciences? The Problem of Self-Disconfirming Analysis

American political science has long aspired to emulate both the objective research methods of the natural sciences and their practical successes in controlling their objects of study. Regrettably, the putative tension between these two ambitions is rarely discussed. This essay seeks to touch off such a discussion by illuminating a significant problem that produces tension between objective knowledge accumulation and practical control of politics, but not of nature: self-disconfirming analysis. The problem is that in some situations, successful realization of the normative implications of political analysis may create new political patterns that are no longer consistent with the law-like regularities uncovered by that analysis. I demonstrate how this problem is manifest in the work of Robert Putnam, whose career exhibits a commitment to (naturalistic) scientific rigor as well as a passion for sociopolitical change. If the agenda implied by Putnams scientific research were to be implemented, some of the causal claims established by that research would be removed from actual operation. I argue that the failure of political science to realize its naturalistic aspirations is at least partly attributable to this problem.

The Unrealism of Contemporary Realism: The Tension between Realist Theory and Realists' Practice

Realist International Relations thinkers often intervene in political debates and criticize their governments’ policies even as they pride themselves on theorizing politics as it “really” is. They rarely reflect on the following contradictions between their theory and their practice: if there is a “real world” impervious to political thought, why bother to try to influence it? And, is realist theory not putatively disconfirmed by the fact that realist thinkers have so often opposed existing foreign policies (e.g., the wars in Vietnam and Iraq)? I argue that these contradictions are not inherent in realism per se so much as in the commitment of contemporary realists to naturalistic methodological and epistemological postulates. I show that Hans Morgenthau and especially E. H. Carr, far from being naive “traditionalists,” have grappled with these questions in a sophisticated manner; they have adopted non-naturalistic methodological and epistemological stances that minimize the tension between realist theory and the realities of realists’ public activism. I conclude with a call for contemporary realists to adjust their theory to their practice by trading the dualism underlying their approach— subject-object; science-politics; purpose-analysis—for E. H. Carr’s dictum that “political thought is itself a form of political action.”

WMD, WMD, WMD: Securitisation through ritualised incantation of ambiguous phrases

We seek to reinvigorate and clarify the Copenhagen Schools insight that ‘security’ is not ‘a sign that refers to something more real; the utterance [‘security’] itself is the act’. We conceptualise the utterances of securitising actors as consisting not in arguments so much as in repetitive spouting of ambiguous phrases (WMD, rogue states, ethnic cleansing). We further propose that audience acceptance consists not in persuasion so much as in joining the securitising actors in a ritualised chanting of the securitising phrase. Rather than being performed to, the audience participates in the performance in the manner in which a crowd at a rock concert sings along with the artists. We illustrate our argument with a discussion of how the ritualised chanting of the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ during the run-up to the Iraq War ultimately produced the grave Iraqi threat that it purportedly described.

Why Has the United States Not Bombed Iran? The Domestic Politics of America's Response to Iran's Nuclear Program

Why has the United States (US), under both the Bush and Obama administrations, refrained from attacking Iran even though US officials have depicted the Iranian threat in all but apocalyptic terms and even though a loud chorus in Washington has been persistently calling for a preventive strike against Iran? I present an analysis—informed by Graham Allisons famous bureaucratic politics model—of the main political and bureaucratic forces in Washington acting to promote or impede a preventive attack on Irans nuclear sites. I argue that Americas abstention from attacking Iran should be understood not as a coherent national response to Irans nuclear programme but rather as (in Allisons terms) an ‘intra-national political outcome’ resulting from the ‘pulling’ of ‘Iran Threat’ interests—primarily Vice President Cheneys camp in the Bush White House, members of Congress, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—and the countervailing ‘hauling’ of the Pentagon, the militarys top brass, the intelligence community and the Department of State. The main reason why neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has opted for a military strike is that the ‘haulers’, who were led by a formidable bureaucratic-political player, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have had the upper hand over the hawkish ‘pullers’.

Uncritical Portrayals of Fascist Italy and of Iberic-Latin Dictatorships in American Political Science

Historians have documented extensively the fascination of many American intellectuals with the Soviet Union and fascist Italy during the 1920s and 1930s (Diggins 1966; 1972; Feuer 1962; Filene 1967; Warren 1993). They have also drawn a compelling analogy between the sympathetic attitudes of American intellectuals toward Soviet Russia and the sympathy of a later generation of intellectuals towards Cuba, China and North Vietnam (Skotheim 1971: 96-106; Hollander 1981; Caute 1988). However, little effort has been made to examine whether the forgiving attitudes toward fascist Italy might also have had a historical analogue in the form of forgiving attitudes toward other, non-communist, dictatorships. The reason for this omission might be that fascism, unlike communism, had lost any respectability as a philosophy or self-descriptive identification. While numerous postwar regimes raised the red flag, not a single regime openly identified itself as fascist after the defeat of the Axis powers. Still, during the 1930s and early 1940s there emerged several dictators whose ideological sympathies lay with the fascist powers, yet who shrewdly avoided joining the Axis: Francisco Franco in Spain, Antonio Salazar in Portugal, Juan Peron in Argentina, and Getulio Vargas in Brazil. These dictators were strongly influenced by Italian fascism, but as the tide of the war turned against the Axis they abandoned their pro-fascist rhetoric and distanced their regimes from fascism. Might there

Capability and hostile behavior in arms race models

The interplay of capability and hostile behavior as indicators of threat is under‐conceptualized in arms‐race research. I propose that the motivation (intentions) attributed to a states hostile acts depends on its capability: the less capable it is, the stronger the motivation. Controlling for the amount of hostile acts, if a states capability level rises overtime its intentions would appear less malign, hence the state might seemless threatening (if threat perception is sensitive to intentions). In a static arms‐competition model this implies a hypothesized negative sign for the arms‐reaction coefficient. I support this interpretation primarily by testing a statistical model of the U.S.‐Soviet arms competition and, secondarily by showing that past quantitative research also generated considerable, yet little‐noticed, evidence of negative coefficient signs.

WMD: The Career of a Concept

The danger posed by “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) was the Bush administrations chief justification for invading Iraq. Amid the din of the chorus that ceaselessly repeated this phrase in 2002–2003, hardly anyone stopped to ask: what is “WMD” anyway? Is it not a mutable social construct rather than a timeless, self-evident concept? Guided by Nietzsches view of the truth as a “mobile army of metaphors [and] metonyms… which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,” we present a history of the metonym WMD. We describe how it was coined by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1937, and subsequently how its meaning was “transposed” and “enhanced” throughout Cold War arms negotiations, in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and in US domestic law. We also discuss how, in the run-up to the Iraq war, “WMD” did not merely describe an Iraqi threat; it was rather “embellished poetically and rhetorically” in ways that produced and inflated the threat.

Is Political Science Really Young

Kim Quaile Hill ( PS: Political Science and Politics , July 2004) seeks to debunk five “myths about the physical sciences” that “pose notable hurdles for appreciating the social sciences as legitimate scientific enterprise” (467). One of these myths is that “the physical sciences have always been highly successful in explaining their subject matter.” Hill complains that political science students are “ignorant of the history of science” and therefore they fail to “appreciate the differences between young and mature scientific disciplines…. If students can appreciate that all sciences were once youthful—as political science still is today—they will have a useful perspective by which to understand why and how the knowledge base of our discipline is limited” (469).