Summaries Free

7–36

War and International Politics

John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago

With the end of unipolarity, security competition among the great powers—China, Russia, and the United States—is back with a vengeance. Given the possibility of war between rival great powers, the purpose of this article is to analyze great power war. My central claim is that war is the dominant feature of life in the international system, mainly because of the nature of politics. In particular, politics is a fundamentally conflictual enterprise with the ever-present possibility of violence in the background. This argument, which differs from Carl von Clausewitz's famous claim that war is an extension of politics by other means, is rarely made in the international relations literature. I examine how the interplay between politics and war affects how states both initiate and conduct armed conflict. What are the limits on states starting wars, and how do political and military factors contribute to their escalation? I argue that it is almost impossible to put meaningful limits on when states can start wars, and that there is a powerful tendency for wars to escape political control and escalate.

37–70

Hedging on Hegemony: The Realist Debate over How to Respond to China

Stephen M. Walt, Harvard Kennedy School

Regional hegemony is a realist concept explaining how great powers deal with each other and with their immediate surroundings. Realism's competing strands disagree on whether regional hegemony is a feasible objective, and on whether states should actively pursue this goal. For offensive realists, the international system's anarchic structure and the impossibility of gauging others' intentions compel states to maximize relative power and try to become the only great power in their region. They predict that a great power war is more likely because China will try to establish hegemony in Asia and the United States will try to prevent it from doing so. By contrast, defensive realists maintain that bids for hegemony are usually thwarted by powerful balancing coalitions. Defensive realists have the stronger case: In modern times, the United States is the only great power whose bid for hegemony was not thwarted by a powerful balancing coalition. The United States succeeded because conditions in North America were unusually favorable; China does not enjoy similar advantages. A Chinese bid for hegemony in Asia is likely to fail and Beijing would be unwise to attempt it. U.S. leaders can therefore adopt a measured approach to this danger, facilitating balancing behavior by the United States' Asian partners while working with China to create a more stable regional order.

71–118

The U.S.-China Military Balance in Space: Implications for Future Warfare in the Pacific

Zachary Burdette, RAND

How will the U.S. military's growing use of space to support its operations and the growing counterspace capabilities available to its rivals shape the balance of power? This article develops a framework to assess the U.S.-China military balance in space and applies that framework to a Taiwan scenario. It evaluates trends in both the U.S. military's dependence on space to defend Taiwan and the resilience of U.S. satellite constellations against a Chinese counterspace campaign. The findings highlight some of the challenges that China's military modernization and expansion have created for the U.S. military, but they caution against overstating the magnitude of the threat. The findings also support qualified optimism about the future: Encouraging trends in resilience will enable space to remain a major asset rather than a major liability for the U.S. military. But the Chinese military will also benefit from these positive trends in resilience, which will create new challenges for the United States in countering China's use of space to support its own military operations.

119–159

Monks Behaving Badly: Explaining Buddhist Violence in Asia

Nilay Saiya and Stuti Manchanda, both at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

The dramatic rise in religious violence across the globe since the end of the Cold War has motivated scholars to try to explain violent religion-related extremism. Much of the attention to religious violence in the modern world focuses on Islam. Of the world's major faith traditions, Buddhism is most commonly and widely associated with peace, tolerance, and compassion. Yet Buddhism, like every other great religion, has a violent side. While scholars acknowledge violence within Buddhism, few have explored why Buddhism becomes violent in some places but not others. We develop a structural explanation for Buddhist violence. Our central claim is that Buddhist violence tends to occur in countries where Buddhism and the state are closely intertwined. We test this theory using both a statistical analysis of Buddhist violence in Buddhist-majority and Buddhist-plural countries and case studies of Buddhist violence (or lack thereof) in Myanmar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Our findings show that religion-state integration emboldens Buddhist vigilantes to attack religious minorities. Our analysis suggests that states can take specific actions to mitigate the risk of violent religious extremism.

160–201

Lost in Transmission: Bureaucracy, Noise, and Communication in International Politics

Don Casler, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Tyler Jost, Brown University

Effective communications are often the difference between whether states go to war or remain at peace. Yet decision-makers in one state frequently fail to understand what decision-makers in another are trying to say. Under what conditions do international communications fail? We argue that division of labor within government can degrade international communication by introducing transmission noise, which occurs when bureaucracies dispatch signals to foreign countries that deviate from the leader's intended meaning. The structure of bureaucratic institutions—the formal and informal rules and procedures defining how leaders and bureaucrats interact—affects the severity of transmission noise. Open institutions reduce transmission noise by improving information-sharing between leaders and bureaucrats; closed institutions increase transmission noise by impeding information-sharing and bureaucratic oversight. In short, patterns of communication within states shape communication effectiveness between states. We evaluate the theory by analyzing bureaucratic signaling processes before and after institutional reforms in India in the mid-1960s. For the cases on India's negotiations with China in 1962 and with Pakistan in 1965, we leverage sources from six countries to illustrate how sender-side institutions can degrade communication. The theory and findings emphasize the important but relatively overlooked roles that transmission noise and bureaucracy play in international communication.