Nuno P. Monteiro

Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity Is Not Peaceful

The United States has been at war for thirteen of the twenty-two years since the Cold War ended and the world became unipolar. Still, the consensual view among international relations theorists is that unipolarity is peaceful. They base this view on two assumptions: first, the unipole will guarantee the global status quo and, second, no state will balance against it. Both assumptions are problematic. First, the unipole may disengage from a particular region, thus removing constraints on regional conflicts. Second, if the unipole remains engaged in the world, those minor powers that decide not to accommodate it will be unable to find a great power sponsor. Placed in this situation of extreme self-help, they will try to revise the status quo in their favor, a dynamic that is likely to trigger conflict with the unipole. Therefore, neither the structure of a unipolar world nor U.S. strategic choices clearly benefit the overall prospects for peace. For the world as a whole, unipolarity makes conflict likely. For the unipole, it presents a difficult choice between disengagement and frequent conflict. In neither case will the unipole be able to easily convert its power into favorable outcomes peacefully.

Known Unknowns: Power Shifts, Uncertainty, and War

Large and rapid power shifts resulting from exogenous economic growth are considered sufficient to cause preventive wars. Yet most large and rapid shifts result from endogenous military investments. We show that when the investment decision is perfectly transparent, peace prevails. Large and rapid power shifts are deterred through the threat of a preventive war. When investments remain undetected, however, states may be tempted to introduce power shifts as a fait accompli. Knowing this, their adversaries may strike preventively even without conclusive evidence of militarization. In fact, the more effective preventive wars are, the more likely they will be launched against states that are not militarizing. Our argument emphasizes the role of imperfect information as a cause of war. It also explains why powerful states may attack weaker targets even with ambiguous evidence of their militarization. We illustrate our theory through an account of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

The promise of foundational prudence: a response to our critics

In our article ‘International Relations (IR) and the False Promise of Philosophical Foundations’ (Monteiro and Ruby, 2009; henceforth, ‘False Promise’), we argued that the search for a single foundation for a ‘scientific’ IR is both misguided and counterproductive. Misguided, because in the search for secure foundations, IR looks to the Philosophy of Science (PoS) for answers that it cannot definitively give. There are at least three well-supported foundational positions – Instrumentalism (INS), Social Constructivism (SC), and Scientific Realism (SR) – and none of them has produced consensus among philosophers. Counterproductive, because importing competing positions from the PoS as if they are supported by a philosophical consensus divides IR along foundational lines. Indeed, the ‘great debates’ spawned in IR by foundational questions have no philosophical basis for resolution. Predictably, the fissures exposed and created by such foundational debates remain open long after the heat of debate has dissipated. The contributors to this symposium broadly agree with our diagnosis of the problem – that the foundational debate in IR is stuck and counterproductive – and, like us, share a motivation to move beyond the foundational debate while retaining IR’s status as a scientific discipline capable of making meaningful claims about the course and conduct of international politics. Where we disagree is on the best way to accomplish this goal. In ‘False Promise’, we proposed that the discipline abandon the quest for secure foundations and instead adopt a prudent attitude toward foundational arguments, acknowledging their strengths and limitations.

Lines of Demarcation: Causation, Design-Based Inference, and Historical Research

Qualitative historical knowledge is essential for validating natural experiments. Specifically, the validity of a natural experiment depends on the historical processes of treatment assignment and administration, including broader macro-historical dynamics. But if validating a natural experiment requires trust in the ability of qualitative evidence to establish the causal processes through which the data were generated, there is no good reason for natural experiments to be considered epistemically superior to historical research. To the contrary, the epistemic status of natural experiments is on a par with that of the historical research on which their validation depends. They are two modes of social-scientific explanation, each with its own pros and cons; neither is privileged. We illustrate this argument by re-examining an important recent contribution to the literature on violent conflict: Ferwerda and Miller’s 2014 natural experiment estimating the causal effect of the German decision to devolve authority to the Vichy French government on violent resistance during World War II.

Cascading Chaos in Nuclear Northeast Asia

The election of Donald J. Trump challenged some long-held core tenets of U.S. foreign policy. For decades, U.S. administrations have valued the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons among their most important foreign policy goals. At the same time, Washington has expanded its global influence by extending robust security guarantees to numerous countries around the globe. Finally, the United States has established strategic stability vis-à-vis its nuclear adversaries by relying heavily on the doctrine of deterrence. These three policies, as the analysis below will show, are deeply connected. Security assurances to allies, combined with a focus on deterring—rather than rolling back—adversary regimes, have long been among the most effective tools in Washington’s nuclear nonproliferation toolkit. The limited spread of nuclear weapons that resulted from these policies, in turn, has made it possible for the United States to expand its global influence and achieve its broader strategic goals at relatively low cost, avoiding major wars against nuclear adversaries and exercising a great deal of influence over its protégés. Intent on breaking with past practice, the Trump administration has questioned the wisdom of U.S. security commitments to allies around the world, all the while escalating its rhetoric with nuclear adversaries. Both these moves undermine longstanding policies aimed at avoiding nuclear proliferation toward U.S. allies. If fully implemented, a U.S. strategy that would decrease the level of U.S. commitment to the security of its allies while increasing the aggressiveness of U.S. goals vis-à-vis

What's in a Line? Natural Experiments and the Line of Demarcation in WWII Occupied France

In “Political Devolution and Resistance to Foreign Rule,” Ferwerda and Miller (FM) use a natural experiment during WWII France to argue that devolution of authority to local elites mitigates resistance to foreign rule. We dispute FM’s claims on four levels. First, the Line of Demarcation dividing France was delineated with the goal of keeping strategic railways under direct German control, invalidating FM’s natural experiment research design. Second, the higher level of resistance they observe in directly occupied France results from the Resistance’s efforts to target these strategic railways. Third, FM’s argument is not supported by the overall pattern of resistance in metropolitan France between 1940-44. Finally, FM’s data is unsuitable for testing theories connecting the location of an attack with its perpetrators’ precise geographic origins. These problems lead us to argue for the epistemic priority of treatment-assignment causal process observations over balance checks on pretreatment covariates when validating natural experiments.