CIAO DATE: 01/2013
Volume: 37, Issue: 3
Winter 2012
The Long and Short of It: Cognitive Constraints on Leaders' Assessments of 'Postwar' Iraq (PDF)
Aaron Rapport
The George W. Bush administration’s assessments of challenges that might come after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq were wide of the mark, but it is unclear why this was the case. An established psychological theory that describes how peoplementally represent distant future actions—as opposed to those that are seen as impending—explains the nature of strategic assessment in the Iraq case. As individuals think about actions at the end of a sequence of events, the desirability of their goals becomes increasingly salient relative to the feasibility of achieving them. This makes decisionmakers more prone to underestimate the costs and risks of future actions.
Nuclear Disarmament and Nonproliferation: Examining the Linkage Argument (PDF)
Jeffrey W. Knopf
Comparative assessment of the arguments on both sides suggests that signs of commitment to nuclear disarmament by the nuclear weapon states will tend to enhance support for nonproliferation. Because of the multitude of other factors that affect state decisionmaking, however, progress on disarmament will not by itself address all of the challenges to making the nonproliferation regime effective.
Is a Nuclear Deal with Iran Possible? An Analytical Framework for the Iran Nuclear Negotiations (PDF)
James K. Sebenius, Michael K. Singh
Varied diplomatic approaches by multiple negotiators over the past several years have failed to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran. Mutual hostility, misperception, and flawed diplomacy may be responsible. Yet, more fundamentally, no mutually acceptable deal may exist. To assess this possibility, a “negotiation analytic” framework conceptually disentangles two issues: (1) whether a feasible deal exists; and (2) how to design the most promising process to achieve one.
Don't Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment (PDF)
G. John Ikenberry, William C. Wohlforth, Stephen G. Brooks
After sixty-five years of pursuing a grand strategy of global leadership—nearly a third of which transpired without a peer great power rival—has the time come for the United States to switch to a strategy of retrenchment? This analysis shows that advocates of retrenchment radically overestimate the costs of deep engagement and underestimate its benefits. We conclude that the fundamental choice to retain a grand strategy of deep engagement after the Cold War is just what the preponderance of international relations scholarship would expect a rational, self-interested leading power in America’s position to do.
Debating China's Rise and U.S. Decline (PDF)
Michael Beckley, Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson
Michael Beckley’s article deserves attention for challenging the view that the United States is declining because China is rising. Its ambiguous definition of decline, however, sends the wrong impression about the distribution of economic and military power between the United States and China. Without being explicit, Beckley implies that the United States is not declining because the absolute difference of economic, military, and technological capabilities between the United States and China is growing. In contrast, both theory and history suggest that it is more important that the relative distribution of economic and military capabilities between the United States and China is falling: as I propose below, decline is best deªned as a decrease in the ratio of economic and military capabilities between two great powers. As a result, even if the United States maintains a large advantage in absolute capabilities, the fact that U.S. capabilities are decreasing relative to China’s means that (1) China will ªnd it easier to advance its interests where U.S. and Chinese goals diverge, while (2) the United States’ ability to pursue its own interests in world affairs will be increasingly constrained by Chinese power.