Deterrence in the age of Democracy
The old adage is that Democracies do not go to war with each other. This is because democracies are slow and stupid – I mean it is because they value what they have and are reluctant to risk their hard fought gains. I don’t believe that is true, I believe that Democracies will go to war with each other, but WHAT they will fight over will be different from what monarchies went to war over. In any case, the democratic or quasi-democratic governments do not easily engage in direct action. Similarly, small states with inadequate militaries will not engage in direct action since they will be easily defeated.
But tensions still exist, and as another person here pointed out, if you squeeze a balloon it just bulges elsewhere. Since states won’t act or won’t act directly, others will. The result is that conflict moves from the realm of direct state-on-state engagement to state surrogates and non-state actors. Where a state surrogate exists it may still be possible to threaten direct action against the state, but probably not because of the collateral effect on the state’s population may make any direct threat counterproductive. The tools of deterrence therefore start to move away from direct military action (although never far away) to attacking the root causes of the tensions. You must preempt you’re enemy by directly addressing their issues, taking away their power over the people.
That is a F*&#ing tall order, particularly if your enemy is an ideological zealot. I don’t claim to have the answer to it. I think the Theater Security Cooperation Programs the COCOMs have is a start, but it needs to be more focused and tied into not only USAID but other international players. The farther you separate the population from the ideology of the zealot the more likely you are to remove the power base the zealot gains his resources from. In effect, you are cutting his supply lines, either by traditional deterrance targeted at the state sponsor or by removing the support of the local population. The latter requires an understanding of the indigenous population in a fashion probably only traditional SF forces are capable of. Therefore, you would have to have a two pronged approach, a carrot and a stick. (Guess which one is the stick)
All this seems a lot more like statecraft than military actions. Maybe it is. Maybe it is just recognition that we are part of Clausewitz’s trilogy just as our potential adversary is.
Anyway, thought I would throw in my 2-cents. All this may seem very basic, but sometimes I think the basics get lost in the minutia.
In case you were wondering, I am not a peacenik. I cringe every time I get a Christmas card that reads “Peace on Earth” as that would put me out of a job.:D
That's a good article, Slap. Read it some time ago
and just reread it.
Interesting thing is I had many of the same thoughts he expresses some 30 or more years before he wrote that. He was a Retired Colonel, so he wrote his thoughts down and got 'em published. About the time a lot of that stuff gelled for me, I was a Platoon Sergeant and, had I written it, no one would've paid an ounce of attention.
Warden and I have one other thing in common -- neither of our thoughts on that line are going to happen because to do those things would upset the system. The 'system' hates risk and innovation...
More questions than answers...
Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace had some interesting things to say about dollar diplomacy. Boot classified America as a commercial power during 1801-1899, a great power during 1900-1941, and a superpower thereafter. It's an interesting book and helped to bring back some echo's from my 'enriched' history classes back when.
My copy of the May 2009 edition of The Atlantic had an article that is still reverberating as well. It gives some insights into how things are changing. The Quiet Coup by Simon Johnson.
Quote:
One thing you learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card.
The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in telling its clients what they don’t want to hear. I should know; I pressed painful changes on many foreign officials during my time there as chief economist in 2007 and 2008. And I felt the effects of IMF pressure, at least indirectly, when I worked with governments in Eastern Europe as they struggled after 1989, and with the private sector in Asia and Latin America during the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over that time, from every vantage point, I saw firsthand the steady flow of officials—from Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and elsewhere—trudging to the fund when circumstances were dire and all else had failed.
Quote:
Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.
Quote:
In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.
But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.