Summaries Free

7–49

Putin's Preventive War: The 2022 Invasion of Ukraine

Barry R. Posen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is consistent with the logic of preventive war. States often initiate wars because they fear the consequences of a shifting balance of military power and thus strike to forestall it. They fear that, once the balance changes, the rising power may either attempt to coerce them, or initiate war later under much more favorable circumstances. The tendency to consider preventive war is exacerbated if the declining state also sees itself as having a special, and fleeting, window of opportunity to prevent the shift. This essay reviews a range of evidence to argue that Vladimir Putin likely viewed Russia's strategic situation through a preventive war frame. NATO membership for Ukraine would shift the balance of power against Russia, and U.S. and NATO military cooperation with Ukraine intensified during the Joe Biden administration. These developments likely convinced Putin that he did not have much time to forestall Ukraine's NATO membership.

50–83

Quo Vadis, Russian Deterrence? Strategic Culture and Coercion Innovations

Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky, Reichman University, Israel

This article traces the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian War on the evolution of the Russian approach to coercion strategy. The article argues that strategic thinking evolves differently in various ideational realms, and that deterrence is not a universal concept. Cultural factors condition how a state approaches coercion strategy and account for differences across cases. The article offers a framework for examining the strategy of coercion and military innovations outside the Western intellectual tradition. Building on evidence from Russian primary sources and the traits of Russian strategic culture, it hypothesizes about the major trends in Russian deterrence strategy for the next decade and shows how the Russian establishment analyzes the failures and successes of Russia's intra-war coercion. The main lesson that the Russian expert community has learned is that its pre-2022 deterrence strategy and the posture supporting it are obsolete. Russia's main priorities are to restore its coercive credibility, to refine nuclear coercion for conventional scenarios that threaten Russia's vital interests, and to develop a coercion strategy for a non-nuclear near-peer competitor.

84–121

Why Great Powers Compete to Control International Institutions

John M. Owen IV, University of Virginia

The world's two great powers, China and the United States, are competing over international order—that is, the rules, norms, and institutions that regulate relations among states and societies. China's ruling party is discontented with several features of the liberal international order that the United States and its allies constructed after World War II. Sino-American struggles over the content of institutions suggest that great powers compete to control international institutions. Such competition is especially intense when great powers have different domestic regimes, such as democracy and autocracy. Power and security are at stake because different types of international orders can grant material and social advantages to different types of states. My ecological theory of competition over international institutions makes three claims: (1) international institutions select for one regime type over alternatives; (2) the typical government believes that it is in its core interest to preserve its regime type; and (3) great powers can shape international institutions to select for their own regime type. I demonstrate these dynamics in great power relations in the interwar period (1919–1939).

122–163

Security without Exclusivity: Hybrid Alignment under U.S.-China Competition

Sheena Chestnut Greitens, University of Texas at Austin, and Isaac B. Kardon, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

This article explores an emerging dynamic in the international system: Countries across the world are engaged in simultaneous security cooperation with both China and the United States. China and the United States, however, do not provide the same types of security goods. The United States primarily offers regional security—assistance that improves partners’ capabilities to deter or deny external threats to their territory. China primarily offers regime security—assistance that builds partners’ capabilities to control their territory and populations, and often, to prevent threats to a regime's hold on power. Many countries benefit from both types of assistance, and neither China nor the United States is in a strong position to demand exclusivity from third countries. As a result, a growing number of countries are developing nonexclusive, differentiated security relationships with both great powers. We call this phenomenon “security hybridization” and demonstrate that it is theoretically and empirically distinct from traditional balancing and omnibalancing. We illustrate this dynamic with two case studies—Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates. Each country engages in defense cooperation with the United States and, simultaneously, pursues increasingly robust internal security cooperation with China. Security hybridization distinguishes today's great power competition from Cold War rivalry and will likely shape patterns of domestic and global security in the years ahead.

164–204

Boom, Bling, Backbone, or Blip? The Signaling Inherent in Arms Transfers

Jennifer Spindel, University of New Hampshire

Why do states send and seek conventional weapons? Though it may seem obvious that the balance of power motivates states to do so, numerous conventional arms transfers do not conform to the balance of power logic. This article argues that states seek weapons because arms transfers send signals about political alignments. Misunderstanding this signaling dynamic is part of the reason why the arms trade literature reaches divergent findings about the causes and consequences of arms sales. To explain how signaling dynamics operate alongside balance of power considerations, this article proposes a theory of arms transfers as symbolic signals. The article presents a typology of conventional weapons based on the weapons’ military utility and prestige and shows that different types of conventional weapons transfers send different signals about the political closeness or distance between the sender and receiver. I examine the case of arms sales to the Middle East before the 1967 Six-Day War to show the signaling function of arms transfers.