John M. Owen

How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace

democracies seldom if ever go to war against one another has nearly become a truism. The ”democratic peace” has attracted attention for a number of reasons. It is “the closest thing we have to an empirical law in the study of international relations,” reports one scholar.’ It poses an apparent anomaly to realism, the dominant school of security studies. And it has become an axiom of U.S. foreign policy. ”Democracies don’t attack each other,” President Clinton declared in his 1994 State of the Union address, meaning that ”ultimately the best strategy to insure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere.” Clinton has called democratization the ”third pillar” of his foreign policy.2 The democratic peace proposition is vulnerable in at least three ways, however. First, it contains two inherent ambiguities: How does one define democracy? What counts as a war? The slipperiness of these terms provides a temptation to tautology: to define them so as to safeguard the proposition. Indeed, some challengers to the proposition claim that democracies have been at war with each other several times.3 A second challenge is that the

Transnational Liberalism and U.S. Primacy

The longer U.S. global military primacy endures, the more puzzling it becomes. If, as balance-ofpower theory asserts, the international system abhors imbalances of power, why is it tolerating this particular one? How can it be that the unipolar moment is now in its second decade, with few if any concrete signs of decay? A arst step toward understanding the singularity and the causes of U.S. primacy is to note that the United States enjoys being both the only pole in the international system and on the heavy end of an imbalance of world power. In principle, a unipolar international system need not be imbalanced. Neorealism, the school of thought most concerned with power, implies that a system is unipolar when the second most powerful state cannot by itself counterbalance the most powerful state. For neorealism, only states, not alliances, may be poles. But in theory a pole may be counterbalanced by an alliance of nonpolar states. Thus U.S. primacy presents two puzzles: the endurance of unipolarity and the endurance of the imbalance of power. William Wohlforth adequately explains why unipolarity is so durable. The lead of the United States over potential challengers is so great that, barring an unlikely abrupt American collapse, it will take decades for any power to gain polar status. The scale of the imbalance is a product of a number of crucial his-

When Does America Drop Dictators

The Obama administration’s initial ambivalence toward democratic revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 points to a central puzzle in US foreign policy. In some countries, during some periods, America promotes liberal democracy; in other countries and periods, it tolerates or even supports authoritarianism. Why the variation? We focus on discrete decisions by a US President to retain a dictator or instead press for democracy in a client state S. Two conditions must be satisfied for a President to do the latter. (1) An exogenous domestic crisis must threaten S’s authoritarian regime. (2) The US domestic model of free-market liberal democracy must face no credible alternative in S’s region as a route to national development and security. A credible alternative model (e.g. communism or Islamism) threatens US interests by making dissenting elites in S more hostile to US hegemony and more accepting of the hegemony of America’s security rivals; that in turn makes free elections in S riskier for Washington. But when conditions (1) and (2) coincide, a new bargain emerges: S’s elites, now assenting to the US model, pledge to participate in the US-sponsored regional order, and Washington presses S’s regime into democratizing. We test our argument against two cases involving relations between the US and the Philippines, an authoritarian client until 1986. In a 1978 crisis, communism’s high credibility in Southeast Asia forced Jimmy Carter to continue supporting the Marcos dictatorship. In a 1985–86 crisis, communism’s lack of credibility allowed Ronald Reagan to drop Marcos and permit democracy.

The Canon and the Cannon: A Review Essay

International relations is one of the last academic disciplines still to take seriously the Western canon, that body of philosophical and literary work that has shaped the Western world. The natural sciences and most social sciences, when bothering to notice the Aristotles and Descartes, do so to remind themselves of just how far they have come. The humanities have for years been engaged in a project of deposing “dead white males” and enthroning in their place critical theorists (many of whom are also white, male, and dead). But many international relations scholars believe that the classics more or less got it right, particularly about politico-military affairs. Other international relations scholars would prefer it if there were one less discipline that still paid attention to the dead white males. They might be disinclined to read Michael W. Doyle‘s big book, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism.’ Also disinclined might be many scholars who do value the philosophical canon, because such scholars tend to be realists, and Doyle is a liberal. Both of these groups should overcome their disinclinations. Doyle has written one of the most important books on international politicomilitary theory since Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics.2 Doyle has made many important contributions to the field, but is best known as an early and profound expositor of the liberal (or democratic) peace, the proposition that liberal democracies do not fight wars against one another. In

Anti-liberalism Pushes Back

Europe is besieged from within and without by anti-liberal threats. The rise within Europe of populist-nationalist parties and renewed jihadist attacks interact with pressure from Putins Russia, Erdogans Turkey, and actual and aspiring despotisms in Muslim-majority countries. To varying degrees these threats are reactions to the effects of 21st-century liberalism on societies. Liberalism always has been chiefly concerned to safeguard individual autonomy or self-legislation, but the content of autonomy has shifted over two centuries. First-stage liberalism saw the chief threat to autonomy as the state; second-stage, as capital; the third-stage version now ascendant sees traditional norms and institutions as the main menace. Third-stage liberalism in Europe (and elsewhere) distributes power towards ‘symbolic analysts’ and away from those adept at services or manual labour. Thus the anti-liberal backlash: within Europe large numbers of people find themselves less autonomous, in the older senses of the word, and ambivalent about the newer notion of autonomy; while on Europes periphery many find certain features of liberal societies unappealing and threatening. Defending liberalism will require not only devoting more resources to national security and mitigating the disruptions of economic openness, but revisiting what individual autonomy ought to mean in the 21st-century world.

Correspondence: Can Great Powers Discern Intentions?

Over the past four decades, scholars and policymakers have learned a great deal about the conditions under which states can assess others’ intentions and the implications for states’ foreign and security policies.1 In “The Inscrutable Intentions of Great Powers,” however, Sebastian Rosato argues that there has never been much to learn, because states cannot acquire useful information about others’ intentions and therefore pay them little attention.2 In this letter, we argue that Rosato’s argument is deeply oawed, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, and should not be used as a guide for policy. Owing to space limitations, we restrict our response to three points—the mismatch between Rosato’s argument and the real world, the analytically misleading benchmark on which he rests his entire analysis, and his overstated claims about states’ inability to learn about intentions from others’ actions.

Security Studies, Security Studies, and Recent Developments in Qualitative and Multi-Method Research

Research traditions are essential to social science. While individuals make findings, scholarly communities make progress. When researchers use common methods and shared data to answer mutual questions, the whole is very much more than the sum of the parts. Notwithstanding these indispensable synergies, however, the very stability that makes meaningful intersubjective discourse possible can also cause scholars to focus inward on their own tradition and miss opportunities arising in other subfields and disciplines. Deliberate engagement between otherwise distinct networks can help overcome this tendency and allow scholars to notice useful developments occurring in other strands of social science. It was with this possibility in mind that we, the Forum editors, decided to convene a workshop to connect two different and only partially overlapping networks: the qualitative strand of the security subfield and scholars associated with the qualitative and multi-method research project. The qualitative strand of the security subfield, most notably in the pages of this journal and in International Security, typically follows traditional forms of historical analysis. Scholars usually collect qualitative data, engage in small-n comparisons and/or within-case analyses, and make descriptive and causal inferences based on that combination of evidence and analysis. With some minor updating in citations aside, this tradition has remained unchanged for twenty or more years. By way of illustration, the issues of Security Studies from 2012, 2013, and 2014 contained seventy-three articles, of which thirty could be characterized as offering evidence-based analysis, with a (sometimes implicit) research design, data, and conclusions. Of these

The Canon and the Cannon: A Review Essay@@@Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism and Socialism.

He explores their enduring theories, and recommends that they be applied to todays fundamental international dilemmas. Although no one school has all the answers, this analysis maintains that history has provided the theoretical tools to meet modern challenges, and that great political minds of the past can still guide modern politicians through the confusion of current events.

Ikenberry, international relations theory, and the rise of China

In this essay, I make two points. The first concerns the no longer fashionable, but still important, ‘isms’ of international relations (IR) theory. Over the course of his career, particularly in his 2001 book After Victory, John Ikenberry has answered better than anyone else a challenge put to liberals by realists, particularly E. H. Carr (2001). My second point is on the decidedly fashionable and important topic of the rise of China. I fear that Ikenberry is too sanguine about China’s effects on the liberal international order (LIO), and indeed, his theory’s own emphasis on liberal hegemons gives us one reason why.1

Back to Realistic Realism: Tripolarity and World War II

Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitlerx0027;s Strategy of World Conquest, Randall L. Schweller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 256 pp., cloth (ISBN: 0-231-11072-3),