Abstract
The official shift in thinking, away from hostile great powers and towards reckless rogue states, was also mirrored in the work of academics and think-tanks. By and large they had been equally disoriented by the sudden turn of events in 1989, and to some extent this was a blow to their credibility. The point was made, rather gleefully in some cases, that the¬orists of international relations had failed to predict that the cold war would end at this time and in this way.1 In some respects this was unfair. Few theorists claim that politics can ever be so much of a science that confident prediction is ever possible. Theory is best used for explanatory purposes or to provide a framework for thinking through issues. That the Soviet system was in deep crisis was not in doubt. Most scenarios for the outbreak of a World War III depended on the widespread view that the system as currently constituted could not last indefinitely, but they also assumed that the elite would not give up without a fight. This was not an unrealistic assumption. The speed and comparatively graceful nature of communism’s demise could not have been readily predicted and to some extent it would have been irresponsible to base security policy upon such an assumption. By early 1990 the whole process may have acquired a sense of historic inevitability, but this hides the key decisions made first in Moscow and then in Berlin over how to handle the growing discontent in East Germany and elsewhere.
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Notes
John Lewis Gaddis, ‘International Relations Theory and the end of the Cold War’, International Security 17, 3 (Winter 1992/93). A decade later Bruce Jentleson was complaining in the same journal that ‘Overall’, international relations and political science as academic disciplines have limited answers to offer to the questions posed by September 11; ‘The need for praxis’, International Security, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Spring 2002).
Michael Cox, ed., Rethinking the Soviet Collapse (London: Pinter, 1999);
Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
David A. Baldwin, ‘Security studies and the end of the Cold War’, World Politics, 48 (October 1995), 117–41, raised doubts against the continuing value of the subject. For a riposte,
see Richard K. Betts, ‘Should strategic studies survive’, World Politics, 50, 1 (October 1997), 7–33.
See also the competing view of Stephen Walt, ‘The renaissance of security studies’, International Studies Quarterly, 35, 2 (June 1991), 211–39
and Edward Kolodziej, ‘Renaissance of security studies? Caveat lector!’ International Studies Quarterly, 36, 4 (Dec 1991), 421–38.
Richard Price and Nina Tannewald, ‘Norms and deterrence: the nuclear and chemical weapons taboo’, in Peter Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 121–2. T.V. Paul described the taboo as ‘an unwritten and uncodified prohibitionary norm against nuclear use’.
As he notes, Dulles first used the term in 1953 but then with the hope of removing the notion from foreign policy discourse. T.V. Paul, ‘Nuclear taboo and war initiation in regional conflicts’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 39, 4 (December 1995), 701.
Michael Howard, ‘Lessons of the Cold War’, Survival, 36 (Winter 1994–95) 161, 164.
Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 368.
The lack of contemporary case studies is striking. Jonathan Mercer’s Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), which challenges the view that a reputation for resolve is worth fighting for, draws on studies of pre-First World War crises.
Stephen R. Rock’s Appeasement in International Politics (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), which seeks to rehabilitate strategies of appeasement, has three case studies from pre-cold war but at least has two — dealing with Iraq and North Korea — that are more contemporary.
The analytical work in this area has been dominated by two teams. Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Stein’s work can be found in ‘Rational Deterrence Theory: I think, therefore 1 deter’,
World Politics, 41, 2 (January 1988), and most recently in We All Lost the Cold War (op cit.). The book is dominated by case studies of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In 1990 they published a critique of Paul Huth and Bruce Russett in ‘Deterrence: the elusive dependent variable’, World Politics, 42, 3 (April 1990), 336–69. Huth and Russet replied with ‘Testing Deterrence Theory: Rigor makes a difference’, World Politics, 42, 4 (April 1990), 466–501. For other work by Huth and Russett, see ‘What makes deterrence work? Cases from 1900 to 1980’, World Politics, 36, 4 (July 1984), 496–526; ‘Deterrence failure and crisis escalation’, International Studies Quarterly, 32, 1 (March 1988), 29–46.
See also Paul Huth, Extended Deterrence and the Prevention of War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
There is an article summarizing his theory by the same title in American Political Science Review, 82, 2 (June 1988).
John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
See John Lewis Gaddis, Philip H. Gordon, Ernest R. May and Jonathan Rosenberg, Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Matthew Woods, ‘Waltz, Burke and nuclear proliferation’, Review of International Studies, 28, 1 (January 2002), 163–90.
Scott Sagan and Kenneth Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (New York: Norton, 1995).
See also the essays on the Waltz-Sagan debate in Security Studies, 4, 4 (Summer 1995).
See, for example, Christopher Layne, ‘The unipolar illusion: why new great powers will rise’, International Security, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Spring 1993).
For the fullest statement of his views, see John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001).
His 1990 views on Germany were found in J. Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the future: instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International Security, 15 (Summer 1990).
John J. Mearsheimer, ‘The case for a Ukrainian nuclear deterrent’, Foreign Affairs, 72 (Summer 1993), 50–66.
A contrasting view was provided by Steven E. Miller, ‘The case against a Ukrainian nuclear deterrent’, Foreign Affairs, 72 (Summer 1993), 67–80. For a critique of Mearsheimer’s view,
see Glenn Chafetz, ‘The end of the Cold War and the future of nuclear proliferation: an alternative to the neorealist perspective’, in Zachary S. Davis and Benjamin Frankel, eds., The Proliferation Puzzle: Why Nuclear Weapons Spread (and What Results), special issue of Security Studies, Vol. 2, Nos 3/4 (Spring/Summer 1993).
John Mueller, ‘The escalating irrelevance of nuclear weapons’, in T.Y. Paul, Richard J. Harknett and James J. Wirtz, eds., The Absolute Weapon Revisited. Nuclear Arms and the Emerging International Order (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
Fred Charles Iklé, ‘The second coming of the nuclear age’, Foreign Affairs, 75, 1 (January–February 1996).
Colin S. Gray, ‘The second nuclear age: insecurity, proliferation, and the control of arms’, in Williamson Murray, ed., Brassey’s Mershon American Defense Annual, 1995–96 (Washington, DC, Brassey’s, 1997);
Keith B. Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age (Lexington, MA: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
Note also A. S. Krass, ‘The second nuclear era: nuclear weapons in a transformed world’, in M. T. Klare and D. C. Thomas, eds., World Security: Challenges for a New Century (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 85–105.
Etel Solingen, The Domestic Sources of Nuclear Postures: Influencing ‘Fence-Sitters’ in the Post-Cold War Era (San Diego, CA: IGCC, University of California, 1994), pp. 51–2.
Leon Sigal, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001);
Michael Mazarr, North Korea and the Bomb: A Case Study in Proliferation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997).
George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb (1999);
Hilary Synnott, The Causes and Consequences of South Asia’s Nuclear Tests, Adelphi Paper 332 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for IISS, 1999).
Deepa Ollapally and Raja Ramanna, ‘US-India tensions: misperceptions on nuclear proliferation’, Foreign Affairs, 74 (January–February 1995), 13–18, argue that India had demonstrated caution in past wars with regard to civilian areas.
Bruce Riedel, American Diplomacy and the 1999 Kargil Summit at Balir House (Philadelphia, PA: Center for the Advanced Study of India, 2002).
Colin Powell with Joseph Perisco, My American Journey: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1995), pp. 452, 486.
Statement by Robert Gates, in Frontline, ‘The Gulf War, Parts 1 and II’ (9 and 10 January 1996), background materials available via http://www.wgbh.org.
According to Baker, T purposely left the impression that the use of chemical or biological agents by Iraq could invite tactical nuclear retaliation’, James Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1995), p. 359.
The threats in the relevant transcripts, however, put the regime at risk. See Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict: 1990–91 (London: Faber, 1993).
Scott Sagan, ‘The commitment trap: why the United States should not use nuclear threats to deter biological and chemical weapons attacks’, International Security, Vol. 24 No. 4 (Spring 2000), 85–115;
William Arkin, ‘Calculated ambiguity: nuclear weapons and the Gulf War’, Washington Quarterly, 19, 4 (Autumn 1996);
Norman Cigar, ‘Iraq’s strategic mindset and the Gulf War: blueprint for defeat’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 15, 1 (March 1992), 1–29.
Daniel Byman, Kenneth Poliak and Matthew Waxman, ‘Coercing Saddam Hussein: lessons from the past’, Survival, 40, 3 (Fall 1998);
Barry R. Posen, ‘U.S. security policy in a nuclear-armed world, or: what if Iraq had had nuclear weapons?’, Security Studies, 6, 3 (Spring 1997), 1–31;
Janice Gross Stein, ‘Deterrence and compellance in the Gulf, 1990–91: a failed or impossible task?’, International Security, Vol. 17 No. 2 (1992), 147–79.
The thesis that this did have an impact on Bush’s calculations is not convincing. It is not required to explain the conclusion of the ground war. Avigdor Haselkorn, The Continuing Storm: Iraq, Poisonous Weapons and Deterrence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
Richard Butler, Saddam Defiant: The Threat of Mass Destruction and the Crisis of Global Security (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000).
Brian M. Jenkins, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1975); see also Ehud Sprinzak, ‘Rational fanatics’, Foreign Policy (September/October 2000).
Bruce Hoffman, ‘America and the new terrorism: an exchange’, Survival, 42 (Summer 2000), 163–4.
Richard K. Betts, ‘The new threat of weapons of mass destruction’, Foreign Affairs, 77, 1 (January/February 1998), 41. The al-Qaeda cell that organized the 11 September attacks appear to have explored the possibility of using crop-spraying aircraft to release biological weapons and decided that the outcome was too uncertain.
The most convincing presentation of this argument was found in Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002).
Robert Litwak, ‘The new calculus of pre-emption’, Survival, 4 (Winter 2002).
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© 2003 Lawrence Freedman
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Freedman, L. (2003). The Second Nuclear Age. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379435_28
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