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Coercion,
Survival, and War Why Weak States Resist the United States
Phil Haun
Stanford
Security Studies Stanford: University
Press, 2015 Hardcover.
xii+271 pages. ISBN 978-08044792837. $65
Reviewed by Ted R. Bromund The Heritage Foundation, Washington
The United States is the greatest
power in the world. Why, therefore, doesn’t it simply threaten its enemies
until they give it what it wants? After all, provided that what the U.S.
demands is less costly for its adversary than fighting, and likely losing, a
war, the U.S.’s adversaries should always, if they are rational, submit rather
than fight. But yet, on occasion, U.S. demands are indeed resisted, sometimes
successfully. That failure of coercion is the paradox that Phil Haun, adjunct
Professor of Aerospace Studies at Yale University, and a former A-10 pilot for
the U.S. Air Force, sets out to explain. Haun recognizes that the conventional
explanations for the failure of asymmetric coercion (which encompasses both
coercive diplomacy and the limited use of force) do have value [174-75].
Misperceptions, and other failures of rationality, lead to miscalculations, and
even rational opponents often – or invariably – suffer from uncertainty.
Moreover, since they each know different things, and may define even seemingly
clear concepts like “victory” and “defeat” very differently, they may have good
reasons to escalate past coercion to war. Finally, Haun argues, there is the
logic of the “commitment problem”: if a weak state gives in to the U.S., it is
showing it can be pushed around, which should logically incentivize the U.S. to
keep on asking for more. In order to avoid this, Haun concludes, the U.S. needs
to find ways to commit to a settlement of the crisis that will assuage the
anxieties of the weaker state. But Haun points out that neither the
rational nor the irrational explanations are helpful in predicting the outcome
of a crisis. Nor do they explain a crisis that results in war, except insofar
as the outbreak of war demonstrates that coercion has evidently failed and
that, by definition, one or more of the rational or irrational explanations
must have been responsible. Haun argues, both theoretically and by examining
the extended crises of U.S. relations with Iraq (1990-2003), Libya (1985-2003),
and the former Yugoslavia (1991-1999), that two additional factors also matter
to the outcome of U.S. efforts to coerce other nations: state survival and
regime survival. According to Haun [37-41, 155], a nation
will resist the U.S. if U.S. demands impinge on its control of its territory or
its ability to conduct its foreign policy (i.e., its sovereignty, in two of the
three senses defined by Stephen Krasner), both of which threaten the survival
of the state. It will also resist if the U.S. seeks regime change, or if
conceding U.S. demands risks weakening the regime so much that it might be
overthrown by internal enemies. Not all failures of asymmetric coercion, he
argues [45-47], are caused by the conventional explanations or by the logic of
his model: at times, he asserts, the U.S. intentionally makes excessive demands
in order to give itself time to mobilize and to pave the way, diplomatically
and militarily, for war. But when U.S. genuinely tries and fails to coerce, he concludes
that it is often because the U.S. has made demands that very few states, or
regimes, are willing to concede. The argument that regime survival
matters to the people at the top of the regime is not likely to surprise many
historians, or any one possessed of common sense. But in the context of
international relations theory, recognizing that regimes are not necessarily
the same thing as states (in other words, weakening the assumption that national
actors are unitary) and acknowledging that a state is after all a territorial
entity that is defined in part by lines on a map does result in better theory –
better, at least, in the sense that it offers a greater hope that will be able
to do what theory is supposed to do: predict, not merely explain. As Haun
reasonably points out [184], if the U.S. wants to coerce a regime, things like
criminal indictments may sound impressive, but since they threaten the regime’s
survival, they may well be counter-productive: by raising the stakes, they may perversely
reduce the other side’s incentives to give in. But there are also a number of reasons
to approach Haun’s study, and his theory, with caution. At the level of raw
numbers, it is by no means clear that there is much to explain. If we accept
Haun’s own selection and coding of the relevant crises [6],, of the thirty
cases since 1945 in which the U.S. has tried to use asymmetric coercion or
brute force (the latter has only seven cases), the U.S. was ultimately
successful in twenty. Even in the more limited – and arguably more relevant –
data-set of coercive diplomacy, the U.S. succeeded 6 times and failed 13 times,
with three of those failures later being redeemed by the successful use of
force. In other words, the U.S. succeeds at
least as often as it fails when it employs a strategy based on a creditable
threat of the use of force, frequently coupled with its actual use. Given that
by definition these cases are the toughest nuts in the annals of post-1945 U.S.
foreign relations, a batting average of two out of three, or even one out of
three on the narrowest definition, is surprisingly high. In other words, what
Haun is seeking to explain is the exception to the exception: cases in which
the U.S. tried and failed to coerce another state. Given that limited universe
of cases, we may not need a theory to explain the failures of asymmetric
coercion, because there may be no general problem to explain. Then there is the matter of sources.
It is still early days to be writing a history of the Iraq War of 2003 or the
concurrent Libyan negotiations, and many of Haun’s claims inevitably rely on
journalistic sources (such as a claim about the role of Undersecretary of State
for Arms Control John Bolton in the Libya negotiations, which is sourced solely
to an article in Newsweek [167].) But Haun’s treatment of his official
sources is also troubling. For example, Haun claims that by late 2002, Saddam
Hussein had decided to “fully cooperate with inspectors,” that this denied the
U.S. its casus belli [80], that Hussein
willingly “abandon[ed] a policy of ambiguity over WMDs,” and that the U.S.
“refused to recognize Iraq’s concessions” [86]. These claims are sourced to a New York Times article, and to
“Realizing Saddam’s Veiled WMD Intent,” a section of the report from the Iraq
Survey Group Final Report (which Haun repeatedly misidentifies as the “Iraqi”
Survey Group), commonly known as the Duelfer Report. This section of the Report does indeed
state that Hussein ordered his military leaders to “cooperate completely” in
December 2002. But it also immediately goes on to point out that “Iraq’s
cooperation with UN inspectors was typically uneven,” that Hussein also stated that
“These people [i.e. the U.S. and Britain] are playing a game with us – we’ll
play a game with them,” and that “there is an extensive, yet fragmentary and
circumstantial, body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to
maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted by
preserving assets and expertise.” This is not the place to re-fight the
Iraq War, but Haun’s treatment of the Duelfer Report is clearly selective.
Moreover, his selectivity appears to be motivated: it bolsters his argument
that the reason why asymmetric coercion failed in this case was that President
George W. Bush wanted it to fail, because he was determined to fight a war [86]
even though Hussein had clearly abandoned any intention of developing WMD. But
read fairly, the Duelfer Report actually says (to quote the very first of its
key findings), that “Saddam Husayn . . . wanted to end sanctions while
preserving the capability to constitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
when sanctions were lifted.” That is not the conclusion a reader would draw
from Haun’s summary of the Report. It is not for this reviewer to decide whether
the Duelfer Report justifies the Iraq War, or the course the George W. Bush
administration took in arriving at it. But Haun is clearly wrong to cite the Duelfer
Report to clinch his argument that Saddam Hussein had definitely abandoned the
pursuit of WMD in late 2002. Haun’s conclusions about why U.S. coercion failed
in this case are thus, at best, unproven. This point raises a broader one. Haun
is particularly concerned with the “commitment problem,” seeing the power of
the U.S., and thus its ability to break deals, as a major obstacle to resolving
crises. Indeed, he is so troubled by this supposed problem that he makes resolving
it a central part of his recommendations for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy
[185], arguing that the U.S. needs to work through coalitions in order to
reassure dictators about American reliability. But as he acknowledges, it is
hard to find an actual case in which a deal fell apart because the other side
in the crisis feared the U.S. would not keep its word. It is, though, quite
easy to find examples of crises in which an enduring deal could not be reached
because the U.S. reasonably feared the dictator would not keep his word. Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 is one obvious
example. Another is Libya: Haun codes Qaddafi’s supposed decision to abandon
his WMD programs in 2003 as a success for U.S. policy, which in the broader
picture is reasonable. But in 2011, the Libyan National Transition Council,
Qaddafi’s successor, revealed that Qaddafi had not actually disclosed all his
chemical weapons stockpiles or his supplies of yellowcake uranium. It turns out
that it was not the U.S. that had a commitment problem: it was Libya. There are
further examples: Haun codes the outcome of the 1994 nuclear crisis in North
Korea as a success for the U.S., because the agreement supposedly succeeded in
freezing the North Korean nuclear program – except, of course, it didn’t, a
failure that Haun blames in part on the United States [201]. The failure of the
North Korean regime to keep its commitments goes unremarked. Haun’s model, in fact, places the
responsibility for the emergence of every crisis on the United States. As he
puts it, “the United States has the latitude to decide whether to accommodate a
weak target state or to escalate the conflict into a crisis by adopting a
coercive or brute force strategy” [173]. Merely as a statement of fact, this
claim is dubious: it is true, but also ridiculous, to argue that the U.S. could
have accommodated the Taliban when, after 9/11, they decided to protect the
leaders of al-Qaeda. Moreover, merely because the U.S. is a superpower, it is
going to have to take a position – on many occasions, a leading one – in
response to a crisis: it is part of the price of the U.S. position in the
world. But Haun’s approach also weakens his
model: by not making a more realistic assessment of who actually initiated the
crisis, Haun misses the possible significance of the decision to initiate –
which could indicate a decreased willingness to back down in the face of
attempted U.S. coercion later on. Haun treats U.S. coercion as, by definition,
the first move in the formal crisis – but in reality, U.S. coercive efforts
usually come very late in the chronology of crises, which the U.S. initiates
far less often than Haun assumes. It is undoubtedly not easy to decide when a
crisis actually begins, or even who is responsible for starting it, but Haun’s
assumption that it always begins with the U.S. is unrealistic and unhelpful. A final, and particularly interesting,
set of paradoxes run throughout Haun’s study. One relates to his distinction
between state survival and regime survival. On one level, this is reasonable: governments
come and go, but states remain, so clearly, state and regime survival are not
the same. But it is hard, as Haun acknowledges, to find examples in the
post-1945 era of what Tanisha Fazel has called “state death.” Haun examines
[155] whether Qaddafi’s Libya, for example, had reason to fear for the survival
of the Libyan state, but it is unclear whether this is a meaningful question.
At no point between 1985 and 2003 did the U.S., or anyone else, call for the
territorial eradication of Libya – though Libya was throughout much of this
period seeking to territorially eradicate at least one of its neighbors. Nor is it obvious that U.S. demands
that Qaddafi stop supporting terrorism would have constrained Libyan foreign
policy in a generic sense. On the other hand, U.S. demands would certainly have
restrained Qaddafi’s policies. In other words, in highly personalist regimes
like Qaddafi’s, the distinction between state and regime survival may be
meaningless to the one man who matters the most: the dictator at the head of
the system. Haun argues that it is fortunate [34] that state deaths have been
few and far between since 1945 – but if there is no difference between the
state and the man, the lack of state deaths can only incentivize dictators to
believe that they, as the embodiment of the state, will be able to get away
with initiating a crisis and resisting any resulting U.S. efforts at coercion. That leads on to Haun’s argument [145]
that strong, highly personalist regimes are more amenable to being coerced,
because the dictator at the top of the pile has less reason to fear being
overthrown by unhappy subordinates. But yet, the relatively weak and less
personalist regime of Slobodan Milosevic turned out to be easier for the U.S.
to coerce than the highly personalist regimes of Hussein and Qaddafi, to the
extent that Milosevic was ultimately coerced into giving up Kosovo. The logic
that Haun sets out is plausible, but it is contradicted by several of his
cases, which instead suggest that extremely dictatorial regimes resist making
concessions until the last moment and, even then – as illustrated by the cases
of the WMD programs in North Korea, Iraq, and Libya – do their best to wriggle
out of them. And there is a final curiosity. For
all their concern about regime survival – and Haun does effectively make the
case that regime survival is, understandably, a vital consideration for regimes
faced with U.S. efforts at coercion – at least two of the three regimes that
Haun examines closely turned out to be rotten at assessing their actual
prospects. Hussein entirely miscalculated the seriousness with which the George
W. Bush administration, as opposed to the Clinton administration, was treating
him: the result was his defeat and ultimate death. Milosevic died while on
trial in The Hague, as a direct result of the outcome of (and his actions
during) the Kosovo War. Qaddafi alone survived the crises that Haun examines,
only to meet his death at the hands of Libyans protected by NATO airstrikes in
2011. It is hard not to see all of these cases as evidence for the centrality of
misperceptions and miscalculations by personalist regimes in the outcome of coercion
crises. Regime survival does matter.
Unfortunately, the kind of places where it matters the most are the very
regimes that are the worst at understanding reality, and the ones with which
the U.S. is most likely to be involved in coercion crises: personalist,
dictatorial regimes. Haun’s study illuminates the concern that such regimes
have with preserving their own skin, and the challenges this poses for U.S.
foreign policy, but his conclusions that the biggest dictators make the best
negotiating partners, and that [185] a major problem confronting the U.S. is to
find ways to tie its own hands more thoroughly so that these dictators will
find it trustworthy, are supported neither by the evidence nor by common sense.
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