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The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests
Peter Trubowitz, Emily O. Goldman, and Edward Rhodes (ed.)
1999
1. Explaining American Strategic Adjustment
Peter Trubowitz, University of Texas at Austin
Edward Rhodes, Rutgers University
The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new constitutes a period of transition, which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.
John Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government
There is widespread agreement that America’s strategic interests are changing. The breakup of the Soviet Union, the political transformation of Central Europe, renewed concern about regional conflict around the globe, and reborn hope for a stable, progressive international order have pressured American leaders to rethink the nation’s strategic objectives and reconsider America’s security needs. In recent years, plans for reducing the nation’s costly foreign commitments, “downsizing” the national security establishment, and converting to a peacetime economy have been placed on the table, as have been proposals for increasing the government’s role in promoting America’s overseas economic competitiveness and commercial expansion and for sustained or increased American action to promote democracy and capitalism abroad. 1 Ideas virtually unthinkable only a decade ago are now not only on Americans’ minds but also part of the political agenda. A process of strategic adjustment is underway.
This process, however, is both uncertain and contentious. The post-Cold War international environment has not yet crystallized, making it difficult to assess foreign opportunities and threats and inviting dissension regarding appropriate security preparations. Equally bedeviling, alternative approaches to strategic adjustment engage different domestic interests, empower or imperil different domestic institutions, and invoke different images of security. Defenders of laissez-faire liberalism clash with those who caution against the dangers of military demobilization not simply over projections of future global conditions but also over the goals and objectives of policy and over the evaluation of inevitable tradeoffs. While the choices the nation makes will be shaped by judgments about the country’s strategic imperatives in the new setting, in the final analysis these choices will also necessarily be influenced by political, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual forces within America itself.
The striking lesson that emerges from an examination of other turning points in American history is that strategic choice does not occur in a domestic political vacuum. In the 1890s, the 1920s, and the 1940s, the United States engaged in a process of strategic adjustment, dramatically changing its approach to providing security. Like the 1990s, these periods were marked by great uncertainty over the meaning of international developments for the nation’s security and well-being, as well as by protracted and divisive debate over how the nation’s interests could be most effectively promoted and secured. The key issues then, as now, were questions of grand strategy: What types and levels of military capacity would the nation require? What foreign commitments should be made? What military doctrines and strategies would best preserve national values?
This volume examines a century of American experience to draw lessons about how the United States chooses its security policies. The authors are frankly critical of our understanding of this process. For the last half century in America, analysis of international security has been dominated by “Realists” who explain state behavior from the “outside in,” that is, in terms of international pressures, constraints, and opportunities. In its strongest variant, structural Realism, the competitive nature of international politics defines the objective and policies of all states, even those as powerful as the United States. 2 The anarchic character of the international environment dictates that the fundamental goal of every state is to ensure its security from external threats; this implies all states will seek to pursue opportunities for increasing power and wealth. Thus, the interests and motives of states are fixed; what varies are external constraints. 3 For Realists, therefore, explaining how states choose security policies involves identifying features of the international environment that threaten a state’s security and welfare and the opportunities available for negating these threats.
The Realist approach has strengths and weaknesses. One of its great virtues is that it reminds us of the importance of international constraints and pressures in explaining state behavior. Big changes in a nation’s strategic environment can lead to big changes in its security policies. A major weakness of this approach, however, is that it is profoundly underdetermining. The international situation facing a country may well create incentives for action. But rarely are external imperatives clear and unambiguous; rarely is there no range of alternative responses. 4 Moreover, international pressures or opportunities are not the only sources of innovation in state policy. America has often adopted security policies that cannot be adequately explained by its international position alone. In the late nineteenth century, for example, the United States rapidly expanded its military capabilities despite the absence of a “clear and present danger” to its physical security. Conversely, in the aftermath of World War I, when America was in a position to impose its will on other nations, it declined to act. Instead of offering bold leadership, America retrenched and turned inward. Explanations of such paradoxes cannot be found in the international system itself.
The following chapters show how domestic pressures both drive and direct the process of strategic innovation. While international constraints may limit the range of choice open to statesmen, in the final analysis their decisions about grand strategy are critically shaped by domestic politics and the factors that influence it—political ideologies, state structure, and societal interests. What emerges is a view of how states choose their security policies that is more politically motivated, institutionally constrained, socially constructed, and, ultimately, historically contingent than most Realists would permit. The authors analyze this process from three distinct angles: one stresses the role that ideas, culture, and myth play in shaping how nations deal with their external security environment; a second focuses on the domestic political and socioeconomic setting within which decisions about the national interest are made; and the third centers on the impact of government officials, political institutions, and bureaucratic politics in adjustment decisions. In each case, the authors are primarily concerned with the domestic determinants of policy choice. Accounts differ in terms of which domestic “variables” are privileged in the analysis, and how much weight they assign to external pressures and constraints.
Four interrelated themes run through this volume, and the authors develop and explore variations on these themes in their contributions. The first theme concerns the Janus-faced nature of grand strategy and the dual purposes served by strategic adjustment. A second is the fundamentally political character of the strategic adjustment process. The third is the enabling and constraining impact of domestic institutions in this political process. The fourth and final theme is the role of ideas and beliefs in shaping political discourse and institutions—and, ultimately, in shaping foreign policy choices.
Two Faces of Strategy
In most Realist accounts, the term strategy refers to a state’s response to specific, identifiable foreign threats to its security. Barry Posen, for example, has defined grand strategy as “a state’s theory of how it can best ‘cause’ security for itself” within an anarchic and competitive world. 5 Statesmen are assumed to be primarily attentive to the international environment in defining the nation’s vital interests and in choosing means to secure these goals. To the extent that domestic considerations enter into their thinking, they do so only because political leaders recognize that their ability to succeed abroad depends in part on their ability to control the home front and to mobilize national resources. 6 Elite support must be cultivated, mass opinion must be shaped, and the nation’s industrial potential must be harnessed. This is especially true in nations like the United States, where the power and authority to make important national decisions is fragmented and dispersed. Thus while Realists recognize that the character of a nation’s institutions can affect its ability to act strategically—that weaknesses or peculiarities in domestic institutions may limit the capacity of particular states to translate resources into usable power 7 —Realists still tend to view a nation’s grand strategy from the outside-in, as an instrument for preserving and enhancing the state’s international position. Realist accounts therefore tend to be preoccupied with the first, or outward-looking, face of strategy.
As the authors of this volume note, however, there is also a second, inward-directed face of strategy, which, they argue, goes far in determining the actual character and content of a nation’s grand strategy. 8 When considering how issues are framed and policies are formed, a focus on the second face of strategy directs attention to the domestic realm and the ways grand strategies help manage and solve domestic problems—political, economic, and social. Illuminating the domestic meaning and consequences of grand strategy, an examination of the second face suggests that state policies must be understood as a response to internal imperatives and demands, rather than to purely external ones.
Critiques of Realism’s simplistic primat der aussenpolitik are of course not new: Revisionist historians of the Cold War, for example, have explored the internal pressures and tensions shaping American attitudes and behavior toward the Soviet Union. 9 The contributors to this volume, however, suggest a more complex and nuanced account of this second face. Moving beyond class-centered accounts that focus on national economic contradictions and imperatives, they explore a range of internal conflicts “solved” by strategic change and trace a range of political and cultural mechanisms involved in this process.
This “second-face” theme is most strongly developed in the three chapters on American navalism by Peter Trubowitz, Edward Rhodes, and Mark Shulman. From their examinations of the history of American strategic adjustment in the late nineteenth century each author concludes that the nation’s decision to become a great naval power was shaped more by domestic imperatives than strategic necessity. For Trubowitz these imperatives are largely political in origin. Reversing the Rankean dictum on the primacy of foreign policy, Trubowitz argues that politicians think about foreign policies the same way they think about domestic policies: as instruments or tools for party-building and state-building. For Rhodes and Shulman, by contrast, the second face of strategy reflects the struggle to construct national identity and the search for individual and cultural meaning. What all three accounts share is a societal-centered view of strategic change that brings domestic conflicts and imperatives more directly into the explanation of policy.
In developing this view, Trubowitz stresses the broader political context in which choices about grand strategy are made. His chapter focuses on the connection between navalism, commercial expansion, and party-building during the Populist-Progressive era. He argues that Republican party leaders, who dominated the industrial Northeast, viewed naval expansion as part of a larger political strategy that was designed to stimulate growth in hard-pressed urban-industrial centers and check the spread of agrarian discontent in the trans-Mississippi West. Drawing on strategic arguments popularized by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, the Republicans coupled the promise of foreign markets with the lure of federal largesse to divide the Populist movement and consolidate their control over the machinery of the national government. What distinguishes Trubowitz’s account of strategic change and innovation from traditional Realist views is the emphasis on coalition-building, party competition, and log-rolling. His account suggests that a nation’s willingness to to initiate programmatic strategic change depends on the ability of its politicians to forge a coalition of sectional interests that is large enough to sustain them in office and inclined to regard the policy innovations as something that is in their interest. The likelihood that such a coalition will emerge depends on the ingenuity of politicans and the constellation of preferences expressed by the relevant sectional interests.
The late nineteenth century was not only an era of economic and political upheaval, however. Except for the Civil War, no crisis of the nineteenth century challenged America’s social order—and the cultural myths that helped preserve it—so profoundly as that of the 1890s. For Rhodes the crisis of the late nineteenth century was one of national identity brought on by rapid industrialization and urbanization, immigration, the closing of the national frontier, and the post-Reconstruction integration of the South into the body-politic. These challenges demanded new definitions of “Americanness” and new institutions to bridge class, ethnic, religious, economic, and regional fissures in American society. 10 Creation of a new, socially unifying image of America, however, necessitated a new account of America’s relationship to the world, the role of the state, and the nature of war. Thus Rhodes sees the rise of American navalism as the strategic consequence of cultural change and as part of what Robert Wiebe has called “the search for order”—a search for new organizing principles around which a viable domestic social order could be constructed. 11 Where Realists interpret strategic change as a rational adjustment to shifting international realities, Rhodes suggests it is an unplanned corollary of cultural adaptation to mitigate domestic social tensions. 12
Shulman’s account of American navalism in the late nineteenth century also privileges ideas and culture in explaining strategic change. He draws attention to the role that intellectual entrepreneurs play in this process and argues that these “agents” of change used navalism as a tool for reforming American political culture along Hamiltonian lines. They did this for reasons that were only indirectly connected to the nation’s position in the international system. As members of what was essentially a Progressive, anticommercial cultural movement aimed at reinvigorating American society, navalists like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Alfred Thayer Mahan were motivated by visions of national greatness and destiny, not class or sectional interest. For them, the prevailing “world view,” Jeffersonianism, was ill-suited to a nation of America’s stature and inappropriate in a world where power, not principle, was the coin of the realm. The success of navalists in transforming American political culture led to the strategic innovations of the 1880s and 1890s and the emergence of the United States as a great power. 13 Shulman emphasizes the interplay of ideas and domestic politics, exploring the role of political “entrepreneurship” in the propagation of new ideas and the political process involved in institutionalizing new ideas at the elite and mass levels. Ultimately, however, he shares with Rhodes the view that strategic change is, to large degree, a consequence of domestic cultural transformation.
Politics and Choice
This first theme—that strategic choice is not simply a matter of interstate interaction but has a domestic face—logically suggests the second: that strategic choice is a product of a political process. In Realist accounts, the process by which states select their grand strategies is remarkably bloodless, unencumbered by the political divisions, frictions, and cleavages that plague policymaking on the domestic front. Such a view is too stylized, mechanical, and apolitical. 14 It ignores the real differences of interest that exist within the nation-state, even on foreign policy matters, and the impossibility of deciding strategic questions purely “on their merits” without an appeal to the political power and authority of the domestic interests engaged. As Lynn Eden suggests, Realism “flattens the sense of choice” that characterizes statecraft. 15 In each of the periods examined in this book, the process of strategic adjustment was far more acrimonious and protracted than Realist models would have predicted. Each of these periods was marked by intense domestic struggle over policy.
For example, the decision in the late nineteenth century to build the military forces necessary to compete with the world’s imperial powers was a bitterly contested one, as both Shulman and Trubowitz demonstrate. Shulman’s account analyzes the bitter political struggle for ideological hegemony, between proponents of traditional Jeffersonian notions of defense and the Progressive forces who derided traditionalists as “mollycoddlers and flapdoodle pacifists.” This battle, fought at both the elite and mass level, involved a broad array of “political” tactics—including, inter alia, rewriting American history, reeducating the nation’s youth, popularizing particular images of masculinity, appealing to the cult of technology and technical efficiency, reforming naval institutions to be consistent with new images, and providing public spectacle and entertainment—and ended with the victory of the neo-Hamiltonian ideologues who seized control of the American foreign policy agenda.
As Trubowitz notes, however, the struggle over American policy was not solely an ideological one. Powerful political and economic interests were involved and competing visions of how the nation should define its interests carried with them different prescriptions for using the taxing, spending, and investment powers of the federal government. The decision to build a world-class navy, he observes, served the interests of America’s industrial core; adoption of the new policy was the outcome of political coalition-building between the industrial Northeast and agrarian West, effected at the expense of Southern commercial and agricultural interests. Far from being an obvious or inevitable choice, as Realists presume, America’s entry onto the world’s politico-military stage was, Shulman and Trubowitz demonstrate, the result of a hard-fought political victory by the Progressive elite and Northeastern industrial interests over traditional social groups and the raw-material producing periphery.
To acknowledge the political character of strategic choice in a democratic setting, however, is to recognize the importance of both public opinion and of the institutions that influence, mobilize, and transmit it. Contrary to Realism’s presumption that the “national interest” is self-evident or can be defined by the state in isolation, and that the state will have a free hand in making tradeoffs, the authors stress the susceptibility of the state and its leaders to societal pressure. Arguing that social forces shape national priorities, determine the availability of resources, and establish behavioral norms, Miroslav Nincic, Roger Rose, and Gerard Gorski turn to the 1990s and explore American public opinion and the kinds of constraints it imposes on American strategic adjustment. Their analysis suggests that the freedom of American policymakers to pursue new strategic directions may be limited by the difficulty they will face in predicting public support, by public unwillingness to shoulder significant costs, and by the lack of a clear public consensus on national goals, at least in a form that would yield an overarching grand strategy.
The contributors also highlight the importance of domestic institutions in mobilizing public opinion and translating it into effective political pressure for particular policies. These institutions include both explicitly political ones, such as political parties, and more general social ones, such as literary and journalistic media. The dominance of the Republican party at the national level, Trubowitz notes, facilitated the inter-regional horse-trading that yielded a Northeast-West coalition in favor of navalism in the late nineteenth century; alternative party structures might have yielded different regional coalitions and different policies. In the same time period, as Shulman observes, elite and popular journals played a critical role in facilitating strategic change by both inculcating a pro-military mentality and stimulating explicit support for navalism.
Bartholomew Sparrow, in his study of the press in the 1890s and 1990s, addresses this issue most directly, exploring the impact of the meteroric rise of “yellow journalism” as a new institution in American society. Able to play a critical independent role, undercutting and transforming traditional patterns of political authority and communication and wielding resources not yet available to political parties or the state, the press was able dominate the political agenda and bend the will of other institutions. This account also underscores the contingency of strategic adjustment: in the case Sparrow considers, the emergence of a critical new political institution reflected a congruence of technical, economic, and social factors unrelated to international events. Other political institutions adapted and evolved in response, but at a slower pace, creating an unusual window of political possibility.
What emerges from this analysis is a much richer, more exciting—less dessicated and lifeless—conception of strategic choice than Realism would allow. By reintroducing politics into strategic behavior, the authors transform the flat, dry, mono-institutional, state-centric world of Realism into a textured, fluid reality, in which authority and power are not only constantly contested but also constantly reconstructed as new social institutions and capacities emerge. Choice ceases to be regarded as something that states “do”: it becomes an evanescent reflection of ever-shifting social forces employing a changing variety of institutions to impose demands on political leadership.
Institutions and Strategic Adjustment
This recognition that strategic choice grows out of an inherently political process thus suggests the third theme of this book: the critical impact of institutional structure on strategic adjustment. Obviously, the notion that weak political institutions may pose an obstacle to the state’s rational pursuit of national interest is hardly a novel one. Realist analyses of international politics have long recognized that nation-states differ from each other not only in terms of national resources such as population and economic output but in terms of the ability of the state to impose its will on its domestic society. 16 Sophisticated Realist accounts of balance of power thus routinely take into account the fact that “weak” states are limited in their ability to mobilize and direct individual efforts to collective purpose and that, ceteris paribus, weak states can generate relatively less state power—for example, relatively smaller armed forces—from a given resource base. 17
More problematic from a Realist perspective, however, is that weak states have relatively less freedom in defining the national interest than strong ones. In the case of the United States, constitutional arrangements dictate a fragmentation of authority, separation of powers, and regular elections that guarantee both constituents and special interests access to the policymaking process. 18 In the foreign policy sphere, these constitutional limits mean that a variety of political and parapolitical institutions—among them political parties, the press (the “fourth branch” of government), and economic and ethnic interest groups—possess the capacity to challenge the state’s authority to define national goals and objectives. The inability of the state to isolate itself from societal pressures results in a blurring between state institutions and nonstate ones, as the latter enter into the policy arena and seek to exploit the former’s constitutional weaknesses to accomplish parochial objectives. As suggested above, the weakness of the American state and its vulnerability to societal pressures thus inevitably means that policy can not be divorced from politics. To the extent that their costs and benefits are unequally distributed, national security decisions become a matter of domestic politics. 19
But it is not simply the weakness of the state vis-à-vis the society it rules that prevents a consistent definition of “the national interest” and a rational pursuit of it. The nonunitary and bureaucratic character of state institutions also limits and shapes the state’s ability to react to changing and ambiguous external threats. 20 The nonunitary structure of the state means that its behavior will reflect regularized political competition between parochially self-interested actors within the government: the state is not simply penetrated by societal pressures but is also divided internally among competing fiefdoms with conflicting interests and world-views. Security politics and strategic adjustment reflect, in most instances, compromises among political officials and agencies with distinctive and different agendas and preferences.
At the same time, the bureaucratic character of the modern state means that national security decisionmaking will be highly routinized and that policy change will tend to be incremental and sluggish. The tendency of bureaucratic organizations to factor problems into discrete tasks and these organizations’ reliance on standard operating procedures—the routine procedures they follow to collect information, prepare options, and make decisions—make it difficult for states to respond flexibly and creatively to changes in the external world. 21 The bureaucratic nature of the state thus suggests that strategic adjustment will occur only when organizational predispositions toward stasis can be overcome. The inference is that “in bureaucracies the absence of innovation is the rule, the natural state,” 22 and that
military organizations will seldom innovate autonomously, particularly in matters of doctrine. This should be true because organizations abhor uncertainty, and changes in traditional patterns always involve uncertainty. It should also be true because military organizations are very hierarchical, restricting the flow of ideas from the lower levels to the higher levels. Additionally, those at the top of the hierarchy, who have achieved their rank and position by mastering the old doctrine, have no interest in encouraging their own obsolescence by bringing in a new doctrine. 23
Given this organizational bias toward stability, it has been suggested that innovation like that involved in strategic adjustment is most likely to occur in the wake of a disaster or when individuals outside the organization intervene 24 or, alternatively, when the culture of the organization is transformed through a generational change in leadership. 25
The principal institutional characteristics of the American state—its vulnerability to societal pressures and its nonunitary, bureaucratic organizational structure—thus appear critical to any understanding of strategic adjustment. The contributors to this volume focus on three aspects of the institutional dimension of strategic adjustment.
First, this book offers a critical appraisal of simplistic accounts of institutional behavior that presume bureaucratic organizations face insurmountable obstacles to undertaking self-conscious, intelligent, nonincremental adjustment in response to changed threats. What emerges is a nuanced understanding, recognizing that neither the external determinism of Realism nor the internal determinism of classical bureaucratic politics fully catches the complex nature of institutions and their influence on outcomes.
Emily Goldman’s examination of innovation by the American military services during the interwar years suggests that bureaucratic organizations are indeed able to react to changing or ambiguous external circumstances and can do so without intervention from actors outside the organization. Her study also suggests, however, that the ability of organizations to adjust nonmyopically and nonincrementally to changing threats is limited. First, the ability to learn to behave differently demands some sort of experiential base from which the organization can draw lessons. Second, perceptions of the desirability, possibility, and urgency of learning will be tied not simply to institutional characteristics but to geopolitical circumstances as well.
Edward Smith provides a detailed and historically important case study of the Navy’s institutional response to the end of the Cold War, the decline of the Soviet/Russian threat, and the emergence of a new, ambiguous threat environment. This investigation suggests that, far from being an obstacle to forward-looking strategic adjustment, military organizations may be an active proponent. The transformation of the U.S. Navy in the 1990s was neither the inevitable consequence of changes in international circumstances nor dictated by individuals or groups outside of the naval service. The new ideas that were to shape the Navy were developed within the Navy itself, and the “re-creation” of the Navy reflected the institutionalization of these ideas. The institutional capacity of the Navy to carry out this transformation is thus of note.
In the second place, the volume explores the complex relationship between institutions and technological change. Obviously, in the post-Cold War and post-Desert Storm world, this subject has acquired a heightened salience: as the United States has downsized its forces and tried to learn lessons from its stunning victory in the Gulf, defense planners have wrestled with questions of how best to harness the power of new communications and computer technology, and of whether these new technologies will result in a “revolution in military affairs.” Plainly there is an interaction between technological change and institutional change. On the one hand, new technological possibilities challenge existing institutions and create pressure for new institutional structures that are better designed to exploit the potential inherent in these technologies. On the other hand, institutions shape the realm of the technologically possible, determining which technologies will be tested, if not which technologies will be developed. Ultimately, of course, revolutionary improvements in military capabilities, and the strategic adjustment those improvements permit, require a symbiotic evolutionary development of technology and institutions.
Jan Breemer investigates this relationship between technological change and military institutions. His study of the nineteenth-century revolution in naval technology underscores the power of new technological developments to transform the logic of security and to compel institutions both to engage in strategic adjustment and to adapt themselves to the new realities. As he demonstrates, the application of the fruits of the industrial revolution to naval architecture in the second half of the 1880s resulted in a situation of offense dominance. Warships became “offensive ship killers.” This new technological potential meant that the concentration of firepower in large battleships and the pursuit of decisive, offensive victories made operational and economic sense. Indeed, Breemer argues, this new technological reality was sufficiently powerful that it overrode not only considerations of international amity and enmity but domestic political pressures and cultural traditions as well.
Both Goldman’s work and Smith’s work also shed revealing light on the relationship between institutions and technology. The cases they examine suggest that not all technological imperatives are perfectly clear, and that the capacity of institutions to understand the technological opportunities and threats confronting them, and to engage in appropriate strategic adjustment, is real but limited. The institutional shaping of “revolutions in military affairs” thus moves to center stage.
Third, this volume also explores the relationship between nonstate institutions and state institutions in a weak-state setting like the United States. The studies by Trubowitz, Sparrow, and Nincic, Rose, and Gorski each explore the ability of domestic actors to dominate state institutions, effectively redefining the national interest to suit parochial purposes.
Examining the construction of the modern American Navy in the early 1890s, Trubowitz shows how powerful industrial, commercial, and financial interests worked through the Republican party to win support for a massive federal program that redistributed wealth from the South to the Northeast. Looking at the redefinition of America’s international objectives in the late 1890s, Sparrow demonstrates the inability of state institutions to control this process and the dominant—and self-interested—role played by the press. Turning to the 1990s, Nincic and his colleagues look both at the role of public opinion in shaping state choices and at the power of state institutions to shape public opinion and the freedom of action available to the state despite the pressures of public opinion.
These general insights about the American state’s political institutions—that they are dynamic and institutionally capable, if constrained, participants in the struggle to define visions of war and foreign policy, that they both drive and are driven by technological change, and that they compete with extra-state institutions to control the political agenda—imply the inseparability of ideas, institutions, and interests in an explanation of strategic adjustment.
The Power of Ideas
This, of course, suggests the fourth and final theme of this volume: that, like interests and institutions, ideas matter. At first blush, there is perhaps nothing novel in this observation. In a recent, widely cited volume, for example, Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane credit Max Weber for the key insight that “Ideas help to order the world. By ordering the world, ideas may shape agendas, which can profoundly shape outcomes. Insofar as ideas put blinders on people, reducing the number of conceivable alternatives, they serve as invisible switchmen, not only by turning action onto certain tracks rather than others, as in Weber’s metaphor, but also by obscuring other tracks from the agent’s view.” 26
Nor is there anything novel in the observation that ideas shape states’ foreign policy choices. The incorporation of insights derived from cognitive psychology into the study of international relations has resulted in widespread appreciation of the impact of beliefs on foreign-policy decisionmaking. Because of the tendency to maintain cognitive consistency, the human mind distorts perception, interpretation, and analysis; scholars of international relations have carefully observed the impact of cognitive structures and processes on state behavior, noting, for example, the existence of idiosyncratic national and cultural patterns in decisionmaking and the occurrence of spirals of hostility based on unmotivated biases in mutual perceptions. 27 Both state behavior and patterns of interaction between states are, then, influenced by the particular ideas embedded in decisionmakers’ belief systems. As Michael Shafer has put it, paraphrasing the old bureaucratic-politics adage, in foreign-policymaking “where you stand depends on what you think.” 28
Empirical support for this proposition has come from a wide range of studies examining a wide range of policy areas, from international trade and monetary policy to counterinsurgency policy and high strategy. 29 How states react to changes in their environment—the kind of “strategic adjustment” they undertake in their foreign economic and security policies—appears to depend in important respects on the ideas and beliefs that decisionmakers share. This, in itself, is an important observation. It suggests not only that external events are underdetermining but also that state responses to external stimuli can not be predicted simply on the basis of the societal interests that are engaged, or on the basis of institutional constraints on state action. Belief structures affect reaction to stimuli in at least four respects.
First, whether or not changes in the external environment are recognized and characterized as requiring response will depend on the cognitive blinders being worn. Threats and opportunities must be interpreted as such before they will impact decisionmaking, and this process of interpretation is subject to unmotivated bias.
Second, the types of responses that are conceivable are determined by the dominant ideas of the day. To return to the Weberian metaphor, only a small subset of the real range of possible policy tracks will be apparent to an individual or society. What can be imagined is limited by the intellectual and cultural tools that are available. Policies, choices, and modes of behavior that are obvious to one society in one age will be simply inconceivable in another; as John Ruggie has mused, “fundamental modernist concepts such as market rationality, sovereignty, and personal privacy would not have been comprehensible before the development of appropriate terms of social discourse.” 30
Third, by providing the logical and philosophical structure used by decisionmakers to order and arrange options, the dominant ideas of the day do more than determine which “tracks” are visible and which are concealed: in the event that there are multiple equally attractive tracks, dominant ideas may make certain tracks appear particularly salient and reduce the salience of others. As Geoffrey Garrett and Barry Weingast have argued, “shared beliefs may act as ‘focal points’ around which the behavior of actors converges.” 31 Shared ideas thus have the capacity to facilitate the emergence of cooperation within or between decisionmaking institutions and to dictate the character of the cooperation that emerges: in the absence of a single efficient, Pareto optimal solution to a problem facing a group of decisionmakers, dominant belief structures may permit these decisionmakers to overcome the ambiguity inherent in the situation and to agree on a single policy. In other words, “ideas, social norms, institutions, and shared expectations may influence both the way actors choose to cooperate and the stability of these arrangements over time.” 32
Fourth and possibly most importantly, decisionmakers’ beliefs can shape how they define and appraise “interest”—how they evaluate ends and means, and costs and benefits. What outcomes are desired, what measures are regarded as acceptable, and how the tradeoff between various goals and various costs is evaluated are all a function of decisionmakers’ normative assumptions, embedded in their cognitive framework. Thus the state’s perceived need for strategic adjustment, the options it considers, the options around which expectations converge, and its evaluation of the utility of various options all hinge on the identity of the ideas around which decisionmakers organize their cognitive processes.
From this existing explanation of how ideas impact strategic choice, however, the authors of this volume offer four important theoretical departures. In the first place, this volume suggests that the intellectual construction of reality can not only shape how states respond to changes in their external environment but also yield programmatic changes in state behavior in the absence of external change. That is, this volume explores the independent power of ideas. Second, where the principal focus of most recent work has been on the effects of ideas—that is, on the impact of particular ideas on policy choice 33 —the research in this book is explicitly interested in the cultural and institutional sources of ideas and cognitive change. Regarding ideas as contestable and contested, this volume probes the process by which ideas gain currency and the timing and content of cognitive change. Third, starting from the observation that ideas may become embodied in institutions and consequently influence behavior long after the social forces associated with those ideas have ebbed, 34 this volume explores the active dynamic between ideas and institutions, investigating the real but bounded capacity of Governmental Organizations actively to seek out, or to create, new ideas and to institutionalize them. By doing so, this volume steps away from the assumption that institutions are simply the passive embodiment of ideas, recognizes that organizations are sentient entities continuously and purposefully revising their understanding of their environment, and suggests a connection between the burgeoning literature on institutional learning and the existing literature on the role of ideas. 35 Fourth, this volume demonstrates that ideas not only serve as focal points in elite bargaining, but also play a similarly critical role in domestic politics, helping to determine what domestic political coalitions will or will not form.
The strongest claims about the role played by ideas in the process of strategic adjustment are advanced by Rhodes and Shulman. As noted above, from their examinations of the history of American strategic adjustment in the late nineteenth century, Rhodes and Shulman conclude that strategic adjustment was the logical and inevitable corollary of the transformation that took place in the ideas and images that dominated American political culture. Thus in their analyses ideas play the role not only of “invisible switchmen,” influencing the destination of new policy initiatives being propelled by external forces, but also of locomotives, capable of moving policy even in the absence of new or altered international threats.
Rather than viewing ideas as a static lens, distorting a state’s behavior in an idiosyncratic but essentially constant fashion, Rhodes and Shulman each underscore not only the contestability and changeability of ideas but also the deep-cultural quality of the process by which idea structures are transformed. Beliefs about the nature of the world and about appropriate behavior in that world are neither fixed nor an immediate reflection of material forces. These beliefs serve a critical role in identity formation. The emergence of new threats to identity—like those triggered by industrialization in the 1890s or by the collapse of an ideological adversary and the move to a multicultural post-industrial society in the 1990s—calls into question existing accounts of the nature of war and foreign policy.
While both Rhodes’s and Shulman’s analyses focus on the late nineteenth century, their findings clearly raise intriguing questions about the dynamics underlying post-Cold War strategic adjustment. The strongly idea-centric perspective advanced by Rhodes and Shulman implies that the evolution of American foreign and security policy currently underway may be best understood not as a response to shifting international conditions but as a reflection of a struggle to redefine American political culture. The challenge of constructing a “multicultural” American society at home, for example, has important implications for how external enemies, and hence war and required military capacity, are conceptualized.
Breemer’s analysis of the naval technology revolution of the late 1800s, Goldman’s study of the 1920s, and Smith’s account of the U.S. Navy’s strategic redirection in the 1990s share Rhodes’s and Shulman’s concern with the process by which ideas change. Breemer, Goldman, and Smith, though, shift the spotlight from the cultural and ideational realm to the institutional one. Their research examines the ongoing struggle of state institutions to deal with a dangerous and uncertain world. New understandings of the external environment and new appreciations of possible responses to that environment are, for Breemer, Goldman, and Smith, the product of organizational learning. Breemer’s study shows how compelling the logic of particular technologies can be, at least at times—how technological change can force intellectual change despite political and cultural obstacles and can result in the development of key new intellectual constructs, such as deterrence and crisis instability. Smith’s work documents the ability of state institutions to self-consciously and deliberately generate new ideas about how best to protect vital interests and project power. Goldman’s study investigates the conditions that permit or facilitate intelligent adaptation of belief systems by organizations facing changed or ambiguous environments.
As the studies in this volume suggest, when the field of vision is widened beyond the state itself, it becomes apparent that ideas also play a critical role in constraining options and facilitating compromise in the larger domestic political struggle over foreign policy and strategic adjustment. Perhaps most obviously, as Nincic, Rose, and Gorski observe in their study of changing post-Cold War attitudes toward strategic adjustment, public and elite conceptions of America’s role in the world and of American priorities will shape and bound the highly political choices involved in strategic adjustment. Less obviously but equally interestingly, Trubowitz’s analysis of the regional struggle associated with strategic adjustment in the 1890s reveals the importance of ideas as focal points in facilitating particular transregional political coalitions: the emergence of new politico-economic beliefs and the existence of shared terms of discourse permitted Western farmers and Eastern industrialists to identify common interests in an expansionist foreign policy.
Taken together, then, the contributors to this volume suggest that an awareness of dominant beliefs and intellectual currents is a central element in understanding the process of strategic adjustment. Ideas matter, and not simply because they shape threat perceptions, limit the range of conceivable options, focus attention on particular options, and determine how costs and benefits will be evaluated. Some authors argue that given the central place of external relations and conflict in identity formation, the character of the security policies that are imaginable and imagined is linked to the resolution of basic cultural issues, and strategic adjustment is a reflection of deep cultural conflicts. At the same time, however, state institutions can not be regarded as a blank slate: they are capable of actively participating in the struggle to define and control the intellectual terrain of national strategic choice. By shaping public pressures and by creating particular focal points around which political compromises can emerge, dominant belief structures also influence the domestic political debate over the national interest.
Strategic Adjustment Beyond Realism: Understanding the 1990s
What emerges from this examination is thus a very different conception of strategic adjustment than that suggested in classical Realist accounts. Where Realist analyses have been preoccupied with the external face of strategy—that is, with national security and foreign policy choices as a means of dealing with external threats—the authors of this volume underscore the dual nature of strategy. Strategic choice, they observe, is also a means of addressing internal divisions and contradictions within the body-politic and an opportunity for redistributing the burdens and benefits of national governance. As a consequence, strategic adjustment is a necessarily and deeply political process: it grows out of the polity’s understanding of itself, shapes and is shaped by the character of political interaction and political institutions, and is an effective political tool for allocating costs and rewards, rewarding allies in domestic coalitions, and punishing adversaries. Particular choices must be regarded not as some sort of rational, automatic response to external threats to “the national interest,” but as the outcome of elite debates and mass mobilization in which the external threat and “the national interest” are both ambiguous icons and only a single face of “the problem.”
In this political process, institutions play a key role in determining the possible and the probable: the governmental and societal institutions that happen by historic circumstance to exist at a particular juncture will critically influence the elite alliances that will form or emerge triumphant, the levers that will exist for shaping mass attitudes and the identity of the individuals or organizations that will control those levers, and the channels that will be available for translating public opinion and particularistic interests into political pressure. These institutions are in a constant evolution, driven not only by particular interest groups that seek to modify institutional structures to enhance their political power and by organizations that seek to preserve their own survival and effectiveness, but by changing technological, economic, social, and cultural realities as well. This fluidity, and the historical contingency and contextuality inherent in it, is drained out of Realist accounts.
This recognition that strategic choice represents the outcome of a political process rather than an autonomous, automatic response to external stimuli also focuses our attention on the “constructed” and contested nature of the intellectual terrain on which the strategic adjustment process takes place. The meaning of events, both domestic and external, and the nature of political realities, entities, and processes are not self-evident. What we make of them depends on the presumptions we start with, and these are influenced by a variety of motivated and unmotivated biases. To understand—or to predict—choices, it is necessary to understand not simply their political nature and the existing institutions but also the terms in which decisionmakers understand their predicament and the pressures on them to think in these terms. Again, this is absent from Realist accounts, which presume that all decisionmakers view the world in the same framework that Realist authors do.
Thus where Realists interpret American strategic adjustment in the 1990s in terms of the logic of a unipolar moment, or as a struggle to deal with emerging multipolarity, the authors of this volume offer a strikingly different assessment. It is, they argue, a response to an ambiguous international environment, a response that emerges from profound domestic political struggles over the allocation of resources, that is shaped by particular institutional endowments and by the real but constrained adaptive capacity of those institutions, and that reflects a struggle over ideas and meaning that mirrors political tensions within American society. This is, perhaps, a less simple and parsimonious understanding than one that appeals to hegemonic stability, imperial overstretch, or balance of power. As the following analyses suggest, however, it is an understanding that is more consistent with how America has chosen its security policies in the past.
Endnotes
Note 1: For a review and discussion of some of these options see Barry R. Posen and Andrew L. Ross, “Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy,” International Security 21 (Winter 1996/97), 5&-;53. Back.
Note 2: For a good summary of this perspective see Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert, “Reflections on Strategy in the Present and Future,” in Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 863–71. On Realism more generally see Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 5th ed., rev. (New York: Knopf, 1978); on structural Realism see Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), 80–111. Back.
Note 3: Kenneth Waltz, for instance, writes that Realist balance-of-power theory “is a theory about the results produced by the uncoordinated actions of states. The theory makes assumptions about the interests and motives of states, rather than explaining them. What it does explain are the constraints that confine all nations.” Theory of International Politics, 122. Back.
Note 4: For a fuller discussion of this point see Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See also Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), especially 63–66. Back.
Note 5: Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 13. Back.
Note 6: See John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) or, more recently, Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). For an application of this view to the issue of arms control, see Steven E. Miller, “Politics over Promise: Domestic Impediments to Arms Control,” International Security 8 (Spring 1984), 67–90. Back.
Note 7: See, for example, Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 55–90 and Aaron Friedberg, “Is the United States Capable of Acting Strategically?” Washington Quarterly 14 (Winter 1991), 5–23. Back.
Note 8: For a more extensive discussion of this dimension of grand strategy see Trubowitz, The Second Face of Strategy: Presidential Politics and Foreign Policy (manuscript in preparation). Back.
Note 9: See, for example, Walter Lippmann, The Cold War (New York: Harper, 1947), William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 2d ed. (New York: Dell, 1972), or Lloyd Gardner, Architects of Illusion (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970). For an excellent illustration of the second face of grand strategy—in this case, German naval strategy—see Volker Berghahn, “Navies and Domestic Factors,” in Doing Naval History: Essays Toward Improvement, ed., John B. Hattendorf (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1995), 53–66. Back.
Note 10: See, for example, Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950) for an account of the American cultural transformation of the 1890s. Back.
Note 11: Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). Back.
Note 12: See also Rhodes, “Constructing Peace and War,” Millennium 24 (Spring 1995), 53–85 and Rhodes, “Do Bureaucratic Politics Matter? Some Disconfirming Findings from the Case of the U.S. Navy,” World Politics 47 (October 1994), 1–41. Back.
Note 13: See also Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power, 1882–1893 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995). Back.
Note 14: This argument is developed more thoroughly in Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest. Back.
Note 15: Lynn Eden, “The End of U.S. Cold War History?” International Security 18 (Summer 1993), 195. Back.
Note 16: See, for example, Krasner, Defending the National Interest; David A. Lake, Power, Protection, and Free Trade: International Sources of U.S. Commercial Strategy, 1887–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Back.
Note 17: See, for example, Klaus Knorr, The Power of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 64–65. Back.
Note 18: Robert A. Dahl, Pluralist Democracy in the United States (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967); Edwin Corwin, The President’s Control of Foreign Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1917); Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Nelson W. Polsby, Congress and the Presidency (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971); David B. Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1971). Back.
Note 19: Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest, 15–17. Back.
Note 20: The political science and international relations literature of the 1970s explored these implications extensively. The most widely cited treatments of the causes and consequences of “bureaucratic politics” in American foreign and security policy are Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 144–84 and Morton H. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington: Brookings, 1974). For critical appraisals of this approach see Robert J. Art, “Bureaucratic Politics and American Foreign Policy: A Critique,” Policy Sciences 4 (December 1974), 467–90; Jonathan Bendor and Thomas H. Hammond, “Rethinking Allison’s Models,” American Political Science Review 86 (June 1992), 301–22; Stephen D. Krasner, “Are Bureaucracies Important? (Or Allison Wonderland),” Foreign Policy 7 (Summer 1972), 159–79; Rhodes, “Do Bureaucratic Politics Matter?”; and David A. Welch, “The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms: Retrospect and Prospect,” International Security 17 (Fall 1992), 112–46. Back.
Note 21: Key works on organizational decisionmaking include Allison, Essence of Decision, 67–100 and John Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). Though its intellectual roots are to be found in Weber, this understanding of organizational behavior grows more immediately out of the literature on the organizational theory of the firm produced beginning in the 1930s. See, for example, Richard Cyert and James G. March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963) and James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958). Back.
Note 22: Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 5. Back.
Note 23: Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine, 224. Back.
Note 25: Rosen, Winning the Next War, 105. Back.
Note 26: Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, “Ideas and Foreign Policy: An Analytical Framework,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, eds. Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 12. Back.
Note 27: See, for example, Alexander L. George, “The ‘Operational Code’: A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision-Making,” International Studies Quarterly 13 (June 1969), 190–222; Ole R. Holsti, “The Belief System and National Images: A Case Study,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 6 (September 1962); Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); and Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953). Back.
Note 28: D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 32. Graham Allison attributes the aphorism “Where you stand depends on where you sit” to Don K. Price. Allison, Essence of Decision, 316. Back.
Note 29: A very partial list of this research would include Judith Goldstein, “The Impact of Ideas on Trade Policy,” International Organization 43 (Winter 1989); Peter Hall, ed., The Political Power of Economic Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Deborah Welch Larson, Origins of Containment (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1985); John Odell, U.S. International Monetary Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); and D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms. Back.
Note 30: John G. Ruggie, as cited by Goldstein and Keohane, “Ideas and Foreign Policy,” 8. Back.
Note 31: Geoffrey Garrett and Barry R. Weingast, “Ideas, Interests, and Institutions: Constructing the European Community’s Internal Market,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy, eds. Goldstein and Keohane, 176. Back.
Note 33: See, for example, Goldstein and Keohane, “Ideas and Foreign Policy,” 7. Back.
Note 34: See, for example, ibid., “Ideas and Foreign Policy,” 20–24. Back.
Note 35: See, for example, Jack S. Levy, “Learning and Foreign Policy: Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield,” International Organization 48 (Spring 1994), 279–312; Rosen, Winning the Next War; or George Breslauer, “Ideology and Learning in Soviet Third World Policy,” World Politics 39 (April 1987), 429–48. Back.
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