The Logic of Positive Engagement

THE LOGIC

OF POSITIVE

ENGAGEMENT

Miroslav Nincic

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

Preface

1. The Failures of External Coercion

2. A Parallel Bias

3. A Framework for Analysis

4. Foundations of Success and Failure: Libya, Cuba, and Syria

5. The Challenge of North Korea and Iran

6. Final Thoughts

References

Preface

This book examines the promise and pitfalls of positive engagement (the use of diplomacy and material inducements) as a way of influencing the behavior of regimes considered threatening to the United States and the international community. My interest flows from the disappointing record of policies tilted toward threats and sanctions when dealing with such regimes. Military force, although sometimes suitable for undermining the capabilities of refractory adversaries, has (both in the form of threats and in the form of actual military intervention) an unimpressive record of altering policies. At the same time, most of the literature on economic sanctions judges such measures as rather ineffective.

The lackluster record of coercive and punitive policies notwithstanding, the assumptions behind such policies are rarely challenged by political scientists, who with some exceptions have invested little effort in examining alternatives. Academic indifference is all the harder to account for since other social sciences, especially sociology and social psychology, have exhibited roughly equal interest in rewards and punishments as paths to behavior modification. One of my tasks in this book is to account for why policymakers and political scientists are so loath to consider alternatives to generally ineffectual policies. Further, it offers a theoretical framework within which to study the possibilities for positive engagement, a framework that I apply to five instances of U.S. efforts to alter the policies of adversary regimes.

The failure of negative sanctions does not imply the necessary success of positive inducements, as the conditions for a favorable outcome in either case are restrictive. With respect to the latter, our starting point is a closer look at two purposes that positive incentives could serve. The first is to offer an adversary some concession intended to produce a desired counterconcession. The objective is a trade involving policy changes on the target’s side; inducements offered in this spirit play out in the context of what I call the exchange model. Our task is to determine what objectives can most plausibly be attained in this fashion and what conditions bode best for success. The second aim of positive inducements is more ambitious: to change the other side’s basic motivations so that bribes and punishments eventually become less necessary. The purpose is not so much to promote a trade as to catalyze a thorough overhaul of relations by altering the other side’s policy priorities. Inducements offered with this purpose partake of what I call the catalytic model. I examine the logic behind the conceptions of positive inducements associated with these two models and the conditions for success or failure in both.

Success in the exchange model requires, above all, that inducements be of a magnitude sufficient to offset incentives to undesirable behavior on the target’s part. I explain why it is often very difficult in the U.S. political context to offer concessions that are objectively sufficient, and I examine the circumstances within the target country that make it more or less receptive to an exchange of concessions—a condition of latent regime instability boding best for such receptivity.

With regard to the catalytic model, I explain how domestic change could be encouraged by modifying, from outside, the structure of politically relevant interests and preferences within the target state. I survey a few historical instances where such catalysis was a partial purpose of positive engagement, and I explain why regime instability, even more than in an exchange context, is a requirement for successful inducements with a catalytic intent.

I apply this theoretical framework to illuminate the conditions for the successful use of inducements in five countries whose policies have been considered especially objectionable by the United States.

In working on this book, I have benefited from the insights and comments of several scholars including Etel Solingen, Larry Berman, Arthur Stein, Donna Nincic, Robert Litwak, and an anonymous reviewer. I also acknowledge the valuable research assistance of Kali Rubaii.

1

THE FAILURES OF EXTERNAL COERCION

In this book I aim to improve our understanding of the methods by which foreign policy objectives may be pursued, especially those that involve core national interests. I focus, in particular, on the value of positive inducements directed at regimes regarded as adversaries by the United States and as renegades by significant parts of the international community. Positive inducements are not expressions of beneficence, nor are they instruments of soft power, meant to entice others to identify with one’s policies by virtue of the moral authority one enjoys (Nye 2004). Positive inducements are tools of external leverage, designed to advance the nation’s interests, and a grasp of their promise and limitations implies a fuller understanding of the range of foreign policy options.

My interest stems from the disappointing record of a predominantly coercive U.S. approach to dealing with those nations whose interests and values clash with its own. It is deemed appropriate to deal with friends via rewards and engagement; by contrast, we expect to confront foreign adversaries with punitive pressures. When positive incentives, on occasion, do find their way into the mix of policies, they tend to be a weak adjunct to a core coercive thrust; and often they are resorted to both tepidly and late in the game, after the failures of established policy have been extensively absorbed.

The assumption in favor of negative pressures rarely is challenged from within the academic community, and international relations scholars have invested little effort in examining alternative policy strategies. (This academic indifference is hard to account for given that other social science disciplines, especially sociology and social psychology, have exhibited roughly equal interest in rewards and punishments as means of behavior modification.) This theoretical indifference is reflected in empirical research. Extensive datasets of military activities and economic sanctions are readily available, but one searches in vain for anything comparable with regard to rewards and incentives. A dominant lack of interest notwithstanding, isolated instances of positive inducements have occasionally appeared in a few interstices of scholarship.

The psychologists Thomas Milburn and Daniel Christie have observed, with respect to international rivalries, that in contrast to rewards, threats and punishments supply less information about what behavior is desired, lead to a narrower range of performance (involving less innovation between the parties), lead often to the appearance of older, earlier learned, more primitive behavior, and lead to more dislike of each party by the other, thus hindering the development of cooperation (Milburn and Christie 1989, 626). There has been a limited awareness that in interactive situations mutual cooperation can be encouraged by strategies of positive reinforcement. At the height of the cold war, Charles Osgood (1962, chap. 5) argued that such reinforcements would produce de-escalatory Soviet behavior, and he urged limited unilateral initiatives in that spirit. Robert Axelrod (1984) demonstrated that stable cooperation among adversaries linked by a shadow of the future is best promoted by a tit-for-tat strategy: noncooperative moves should evoke a response in kind, but so should cooperative gestures. In this vein, Alexander George has advocated combining rewards and punishments as a way of extracting concessions from outlaw states (George 1993, chap. 4).

The cupboard is not entirely bare, but, for reasons dealt with in the following chapter, recognition of a potential role for positive incentives is rare within both academic and policymaking communities. An entire segment of foreign policy strategies has thus escaped careful scrutiny. Since the incentive to contemplate alternative paths is inversely proportionate to the value of those one is accustomed to tread, we begin by asking how effective have been the traditional tools of negative pressure at achieving their purpose. Do they habitually solve the problems they are meant to address and attain the policy objectives for which they are intended?

Negative pressures can be arrayed along a continuum, ranging from diplomatic criticism to military force and including, between the extremes, subversive intervention and economic sanctions. The effectiveness of a foreign policy tool cannot be clearly assessed in all cases. Diplomatic criticism can be public or not, and it may be couched in terms that muddy its import. Subversion, if successful, is covertly conducted, while failures are more likely to become known than are instances of success. In any case, the two most widely used means of negative pressure against adversaries in U.S. foreign policy, and those on which the highest hopes apparently are placed, are economic and military coercion. It is hard to think of any country challenging core norms or interests to which the United States is committed that has not faced economic retribution of some sort. Sanctions are, quite simply, the premier tool of coercive leverage in the nation’s foreign policy (and are broadly used in the context of multilateral institutions as well). Because of its costs and risks, military force is less often applied, but it serves a purpose—perhaps its main purpose—through the mere possibility that it would be; defense outlays represent the largest single slice of the government’s discretionary spending. If economic sanctions and military power do a creditable job of achieving their purpose, especially if they do so at an acceptable cost, there may be little reason to consider alternative forms of international leverage. The incentive to use alternatives should increase with evidence of their ineffectiveness. What, then, does the record indicate?

Military Force

For many, the use of force and the threat of war are the ultimate tools of leverage in international politics. "The ultima ratio of power in international relations is war, claimed E. H. Carr (1946, 109). In another view, military power is not a last but a pervasive resort. In a balance of power system that still includes a majority of not free countries, military power not only defends national security, it underwrites the stability that a global economy requires and validates a national and international diplomacy without which there could be no international negotiations" (Nau 2002). Armed force is an instrument of foreign policy in which the United States has a commanding lead, a lead arguably greater than that attributable to its global economic position or its moral authority. In any case, it is an instrument of foreign policy on which the country has much relied, leading us to inquire just how effectively military coercion has promoted America’s foreign policy goals. The question of the ends to which military force can be applied must first be addressed.

The Three Functions of Military Force

One useful distinction assigns three major functions to military power. The first is defense, that is, repelling foreign aggression. The second is deterrence, or ensuring through threatened retaliation that acts against the country’s national interest and security are not attempted. The third is compellence,¹ that is, causing an adversary to do something it otherwise would not do by threatening or imposing pain and destruction or by destroying a capacity to do harm.² While lines separating these categories are not always clear-cut, distinctions tend to rest on whether the proximate target of military force is an adversary’s capacity or intent. Intent is usually shaped by threats, capacity by the application of force. From this perspective, defense tends to be all about capacity. The adversary’s intent to commit aggression has not been discouraged (or else defense would be unnecessary); what remains is to deny the adversary the ability to pull it off. Successful defense is about fighting, about destroying enough of the force involved in the aggression to ensure that it fails. By contrast, deterrence is all about intent. Its purpose is to affect the other side’s calculations: conveying that aggression’s costs would be too high, or its likelihood of success too low, to make it worthwhile. Most often, as in the case of nuclear deterrence during the cold war, the threatened cost involves retaliatory damage exceeding any benefits the aggression could provide. If defense is necessary, deterrence has failed: intent could not be discouraged and now capacity must be destroyed.

With compellence the idea is to coerce the other side into doing something it otherwise would not do, meaning that either purpose or capacity, or both, may be targeted, and that threats or applied force could be involved. When compellent threats target intent, the overlap with deterrence is evident. But, while deterrence aims to discourage the adversary from doing something it would otherwise do, compellent threats seek to make it undo, or stop doing, something it already has done (e.g., to force Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait or Slobodan Milosevic to abandon his depredations in Kosovo). Deterrence is employed until the provocation occurs; compellence is activated once it has occurred.³ In the first case, the aim is to avoid employing force; in the second case, the idea is to use it. As Robert Art has explained, deterrence . . . employs force peacefully. It is the threat to resort to force in order to punish that is the essence of deterrence. A deterrent threat is made precisely with the intent that it will not have to be carried out (Art 1980, 6). Compellence can also have a facilitative purpose, to create a shield behind which desirable political objectives (e.g., democratization or nation building) can be conducted. The idea here is to prevent those who oppose the desired goal from blocking its attainment, and facilitation tends to be about capacity. Thus, once military intervention destroyed Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, the residual function of U.S. troops was to deal with local forces opposed to the political order envisaged by the United States.

Given the three purposes for which military force can be employed, how often in U.S. experience have these goals been achieved?

A Mixed Record

Though not abysmal, the record falls short of justifying the nation’s very extensive reliance on this instrument of foreign policy.

DEFENSE

Because the nation, throughout its history, has been exceptionally free of foreign aggression, there is in the U.S. case little basis for gauging the effectiveness of military force for national defense. Its size, power, and quasi-insular position have made the United States a discouraging target for hostile foreign forces, and (discounting skirmishes with British troops during the War of 1812) there has been no need to repel foreign attack.⁴ If political subversion was at times feared during the cold war, an actual Soviet assault with conventional forces was never seriously feared. Nuclear attack was, at times, regarded as possible, but aside from brief conceptual flirtations in the late 1950s and the 1960s with an antiballistic missile system (Chayes and Weisner 1969) and with a space-based antimissile system during the early Reagan years (Drell, Farley, and Holloway 1984) the Soviet nuclear threat was addressed via deterrence, not defense.⁵

One could stretch the concept of defense to include the protection of friends or allies. Twice since World War II, the United States has applied its military power to that end: when North Korean forces stormed into South Koreas in June 1950 and again in January 1991, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Both interventions achieved their immediate goal: North Korean forces soon were repelled beyond the 38th parallel,⁶ and Iraqi troops were expelled from Kuwait. But success must also be measured with reference to ultimate consequences, not merely immediate objectives. In these terms, the record is more debatable. In the Korean case, the decision to intervene plunged the nation into a war whose costs and duration exceeded anything that had initially been expected, and it included an expansion of objectives that were never attained.⁷ The 1991 military action against Iraq did not, from Washington’s perspective, remove the threat from that quarter, and it provided the context for the 2003 decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein, a war with debatable achievements and a great human toll. Though rarely undertaken, extended defense must be evaluated with respect to success or failure with great caution.

Although classifying this as defense plainly involves a semantic stretch, some have taken the concept to include preemptive action against targets that threaten U.S. troops or citizens abroad.⁸ The overlap with compellence is considerable; an example is provided by the attacks, involving both limited troop incursions and missiles, during the summer and fall of 2008 against al-Qaeda targets in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Another instance was the attack by U.S. troops in October 2008 against a target in Syria suspected of involvement in troop flows into Iraq. It is hard to determine what contribution such attacks have made to the overall military goal involved, but their net effect must consider the political and diplomatic costs of civilian casualties and the resentment caused by violations of foreign territory (see, e.g., New York Times 2008a). As the BBC observed regarding both the Pakistan and Syrian incursions, whether or not the mission is successful, the actual effect in both cases has been to shore up local and regional animosity against America and the West (BBC World News 2008a).

The verdict on defense rests on a very limited empirical foundation. In the clear case of territorial defense, no alternative to military force exists, but the kinds of threats involved are threats that the United States has not seriously faced. In cases involving a semantic extension of the concept of defense, the record regarding the value of military force is murky. Judgments depend on whether one focuses on immediate attainments or longer-term consequences. In some cases at least, the goals involved might have been accomplished, at lower ultimate cost, by using other policy instruments that could have obviated the need to engage in a variant of expanded defense by foreign policy strategies that precluded the development of the threats against which the military intervention was directed.

DETERRENCE

Judgments as to the effectiveness of deterrence are problematic for very different reasons. Because defense has generally been unnecessary in the U.S. case, a record of success cannot easily be established on the basis of historical experience. With deterrence, the problem is of a logical rather than empirical nature. While it would be easy to demonstrate a failure of deterrence (an assault has occurred), it is much more difficult to establish its success. The absence of failure does not necessarily imply success, since the fact that no assault has occurred may or may not be due to the deterrent threat. Here we are dealing with counterfactual (what if) propositions, and statements that deterrence has worked are only as believable as the antecedent plausibility that that an assault would have occurred absent the retaliatory threat. Unless this plausibility is compellingly argued, no fully credible claim on behalf of deterrence can be made, yet such arguments rarely are encountered. Byman and Waxman observe that recent, apparent U.S. failures to coerce mask a great deal of unobservable but nevertheless successful coercion—often in the form of deterrence of provocation in general or of particular military action during the course of disputes (Byman and Waxman 2002, 230). While this may be true, the statement rests on no developed argument that such provocations would otherwise have occurred. Counterfactual statements can, of course, be useful. In small-n studies (i.e., those with a small number of cases) involving negative degrees of freedom, counterfactual statements can take the place of empirical comparisons of cases with varying values on predictor and outcome variables (Fearon 1991). Absent factual data, however, reliance on counterfactuals does not remove the obligation to marshal a strong argument based on empirical or logical inference to stand in for the missing factual evidence. Any claim about the success of deterrence depends, therefore, on the credibility of the counterfactual claim. Because such arguments have very rarely been advanced in any systematic fashion, the possibility that deterrence works is not sufficient grounds for assuming its effectiveness, or for neglecting other paths to similar policy ends.

COMPELLENCE

Because the success of deterrence cannot generally be proven, the argument for the effectiveness of U.S. military force must rest on the record of compellence. The primary purpose of compellence is to alter, by force, an existing state of affairs in pursuit of a policy objective. During the cold war, its usual intent was to keep a country in some geostrategically important part of the world from being absorbed into the Communist camp, which included removing from power those regimes whose apparent (even if not certain) leftist sympathies made them, from Washington’s point of view, potential Soviet friends or allies. At times, as in Guatemala in 1954 or Iran in 1953, that aim was pursued through subversion. Occasionally, as in Lebanon in 1958 and the Dominican Republic in 1965, military means were employed. In the post–cold war period, however, armed force has served a broader array of purposes: from humanitarian intervention (Somalia 1992–93) to pursuing a global war on terror (Afghanistan 2001). Compellent threats also have been used, for example, against the Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia in 1998 and 1999, and with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, both in 1990 and prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

How effective has military compellence been? Where threats are concerned, a firm answer would require that all instances be publicly known, whereas it is unlikely that they are. On the basis of what we do know, the verdict on threats is not encouraging. Overt threats of U.S. military action did not cause Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait after the 1990 invasion or, more than a decade later, to provide arms inspectors unfettered access to Iraqi territory. Milosevic, was unmoved when told that his Kosovo policies would, unless reversed, lead to a Western military response.⁹ Tehran has shown no inclination to abandon its nuclear program despite U.S. insistence that all options, including military force, were on the table (New York Times 2008b). Although the United States, exercising its rights under the Panama Canal Treaty, mounted a show of force in Panama in the summer and fall of 1988 intended to intimidate Manuel Noriega into changing his behavior, this produced no effect on that leader who, several months later, was dealt with by direct military intervention.

Two circumstances explain why many threats fail. The first is that they are not always taken seriously. When Saddam Hussein was threatened with military action after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, he seems not to have believed that the Unites States and its allies considered their interests deeply enough involved to warrant their resort to armed force (Mazaar 1993, 39–40). Similarly, when Richard Holbrooke and Gen. Michael Short threatened imminent military action, Milosevic commented, I’m sure the bombing will be very polite. When the general disagreed, the Yugoslav leader insisted, Yes, I understand, but I’m sure the Americans will bomb with great politeness. (Sell 2002, 203). Second, even when threats are made credible, the political costs of yielding to U.S. military pressure may be too great—especially for regimes that base their legitimacy on a readiness to stand up to the international powers-that-be, and for leaders whose charisma often stems from their brash defiance of foreign threats.

If threats alone often are unsuccessful, what happens when the United States actually employs armed force for compellent ends? There are various ways of determining the thresholds at which military intervention actually begins, but if operational use of military force abroad for a duration of at least twenty-four hours and/or during which shots are fired is accepted as a reasonable criterion, and if it is further appreciated that the purpose of an intervention may change over the course of the operation, then table 1.1 provides a list of relevant instances of military intervention associated with a defined policy purpose.

As noted, some U.S. interventions witnessed a change in their aims. The goal of repelling the North Korean invasion of South Korea of June 1950 was achieved by September of that year. The remaining war period was associated with an escalation of U.S. policy objectives, which included the defeat of Communism in North Korea and even in China, and with difficulties in settling on ceasefire terms (e.g., Rees 1964). The 1965 decision to engage in active military operations in Vietnam was justified by the goal of defeating the Vietcong-led insurgency and providing South Vietnam with a democratic future (Berman 1982, chap. 1). By 1973 the much weaker goal of peace with honor replaced these ambitious political objectives (Los Angeles Times 1973). Similarly, the Multinational Force in Lebanon, created under the Reagan administration in 1982 to oversee the withdrawal of Palestinian forces from Beirut, did just that. But the assassination of President Bashir Gemayel and the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps created additional exigencies, and a new Multinational Force was dispatched to Beirut. The U.S. objective of eliminating Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was, after discovery that there were none, transformed into the goal of bringing stable democracy to Iraq. It could be argued that there were other instances of transformed purposes, and, while acknowledging that policy objectives often evolve, these examples provide instances of an unanticipated escalation of an intervention’s initial purpose.¹⁰

Table 1.1 U.S. Military Interventions since World War II

Based on this list of interventions, what judgment can be made about the effectiveness of U.S. military compellence? In the second column of table 1.1, I indicate whether an intervention’s stated objective was achieved (S), not achieved (F), or whether the outcome must be regarded as ambiguous (A). Thus, for example, there is no question that the 1983 intervention in Grenada, meant to depose the leftist Maurice Bishop government and rid the island of Cuban and Soviet influence, fully achieved its aim. By contrast, U.S. troops withdrew from Beirut before their political objectives involving the stability of the Beirut government had been attained. The impact of the 1986 attacks against Libya, designed to punish it for its involvement in the bombing of the Berlin discotheque and to deter further support of terrorism was less clear:¹¹ they did not produce a short-term effect on Qaddafi’s behavior but