War and Security

• One of the central concerns of all foreign policy makers is that of state (or national) security.

• National Security: The ability of a state to protect its interests, secrets, and citizens from both external and internal threats.

• The three components of national security are threat, protection, and capability.

• Focus on Threat: The fact that there is some actor, object, or potential action that can endanger a nation’s interests, secrets, or citizens.

• Focus on Protection: The need of the nation to ensure the safety of the state’s interests, secrets, and citizens from harm by those threats.

• Focus on Capability: The actual ability of the state to provide that protection.

• National Security covers a variety of factors including economic, environmental, and nonphysical threats such as cyberspace.

Military Security and War

• The aftermath of World War 1 included the founding of the League of Nations.

• Of all human values, physical security is first priority

• Physical Security: Security from violence, starvation, and the elements.

• Examples of minimal physical security include good government, economic development, and a healthy environment.

• The frequency and intensity of war began a slow decline after the world wars and Korean war.

• Global Peace Index: Ranks countries according to their level of peacefulness using a variety of indicators.

What is War

• War: An organized and deliberate political act by an established political authority that causes 1,000 or more deaths in a 12-month period and involves at least two actors capable of harming each other.

Interstate War

• Charles Tilly stated “War made the state and the state made war.”

• Interstate Wars: Wars between states

• The 2 most prominent examples of interstate war include WWI and WWII.

Intrastate War

• Intrastate War: (Civil wars) wars that take place within a state.

• Examples of Intrastate War include the Democratic Republic of Congo that included a faction and a government fighting over control of territory; or rival groups fighting to establish a government in a fragile state such as Somalia.

• A cause of intrastate war can include enthonationalist movements fighting for greater autonomy or secession such as Chechens in Russia.

• The stakes of intrastate war include secession, group autonomy, and control of the state.

• States, groups, and individuals from outside the warring country become involved by funding particular groups selling weapons to various factions, and giving diplomatic or military support to one group over another.

• An example of an intrastate war becoming an interstate war is the Syria conflict.

Conventional and Unconventional Wars

• Conventional Wars: Regular armies openly engaged in combat with the objective to win control of the state by defeating the enemy’s military force on the battlefield.

• The tactical objective is to win control of a state by defeating the enemy’s military forces on a territorial battlefield.

• Weapons involved in a conventional war include weapons that are not of mass destruction and combat actions are restricted to military targets.

• Unconventional Wars are characterized by openly disregarding restrictions to focus on military targets alone, the use of weapons of mass destruction, or the use of very different types of tactics such as guerrilla tactics.

• Geneva Protocol outlawed the use of chemical weapons in a war post WWI.

• Guerrilla Warfare: guerrilla groups hide among civilians and use strategies including hit-and-run tactics, ambushes, sabotages, and raids to attack their stronger military opponents.

• In Guerrilla warfare, civilians risk their lives to protect the guerrillas, who hide among them and who cannot be easily distinguished from ordinary civilians when not actually fighting.

• Guerrilla tactics are designed to win control of the state, not by defeating enemy forces outright on the battlefield, but by winning control over the civilian population.

• Asymmetric Conflict: a conflict characterized by an inequality in material strength between the two sides, with one side significantly more well-equipped and technologically advanced than the other.

• Nonviolent Resistance: Resistance to established authority that systematically prevents the use of violence as a tactic.

• Examples of nonviolent resistance are strikes, sit-ins, and protest marches.

Terrorism

• The 3 elements of Terrorism are 1. it is political in nature or intent 2. perpetrators are nonstate actors 3. targets are non-combatants such as ordinary citizens, political figures, or bureaucrats.

• Labeling a group as a terrorist organization is a largely political act.

• The aim of terrorism is to call attention to a cause, while at the same time calling into question the legitimacy of a target government by highlighting its inability to protect its citizens.

• PLO: Palestine Liberation Organization

• Terrorists hope to harness the power of ideas; they invariably justify their violence by using immortality imagery, whether nationalist, Marxist, ethnocentrist, or religious.

• Terrorists also intend their violent acts to preserve the nation, working-class people, a particular race, or the faithful, ensuring its immortality.

• Terrorist groups with roots in the Middle East are: Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestine Islamic Jihad, and Al Qaeda.

• Al Qaeda is motivated by the desire to install strict Islamic regimes in the Middle East, support radical Islamic insurgencies in Southeast Asia, and punish the U.S. for its support of Israel.

• The roots of the IS formed during the 1979 Shiite revolution in Iran and the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

• The IS uses social media to broadcast its terrorist acts including beheadings, mass executions, rape and sexual enslavement of women, and the destruction of cultural antiquities.

• Caliphate: an area under the leadership of an Islamic steward considered to be a religious successor to the prophet Muhammad and the leader of the entire Muslim community.

• Neo-Nazi group example is National Socialist Underground in Germany

• Russian Imperial Movement in Russia is the first far-right movement designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S.

• Terrorist groups use the internet and social media as a recruitment tool, and also use soft power to win support through attraction.

• The measures taken against terrorists include 19 counterterrorism instruments and UN Security Council resolutions.

• Framework includes punishing hijackers and those who protect them, protecting airports, diplomats, nuclear materials in transport, and blocking the flow of financial resources to global terrorist networks.

• The USA Patriot Act enabled: Investigators to gather information when looking into the full range of terrorism-related crimes, including chemical-weapons offenses, the use of weapons of mass destruction, killing Americans abroad, and terrorism financing.

• Cyberspace: the entire spectrum of networked information and communication systems and devices.

• Cyberwarfare: state actions taken to penetrate another state’s computers or networks for the purpose of causing damage or disruption.

• China is thought to operate one of the most extensive cyberattack operations in the world against both government and corporate targets.

• North Korean hackers launched a cyberattack in 2014 against Sony Pictures and in 2017 produced a ransomware attack on 150 countries.

• The U.S. has placed cyberspace as equal in importance to land, air, sea, and space in its strategic doctrine and has established a special U.S. military command dedicated solely to cyberspace.

• The Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization have both taken actions pushing states to pass laws criminalizing certain behaviors in cyberspace and providing police with the authority to enforce these laws.

• GCE: Group of Governmental Experts

• ICT: Information and communications technology

• The purpose of GCE and ICT was to study existing and potential threats to states’ information security and to develop possible cooperative measures to address them.

• CERTs: Computer emergency response teams. A group of nonstate experts designed to manage computer security incidents

• FIRST: Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams

• The goals of FIRST are to promote information sharing among its members, assist in rapid reaction to incidents, and foster cooperation and coordination to help prevent incidents in the first place.

• Offensive realists see war as a way to enhance a state’s reputation by demonstrating its willingness to engage in conflict.

Realist Interpretations of the Causes of War

• John Mearsheimer calls the 911 problem “there is no hotline or central authority to which a threatened state can turn to for help.”

• Power Transition Theory: Posits that it is not only mismatched material power that tempts states to war, but also the anticipation of shifts in the relative balance of power.

• Realists believe that war occurs because states belive that more power eads to expectations of more influence, wealth, and security.

• Two patterns to Power Transition Theory are: 1. a rising power might launch a war to solidify its position. 2. The currently most powerful state(s) might launch a preventative war to keep a rising challenger down.

• An example of Power Transition Theory is U.S. attacking Iraq to prevent them from developing a nuclear weapons program.

Liberal Interpretations of the Causes of War

• Thinkers during the Enlightenment such as Immanuel Kant believed that war was more likely in aristocratic states.

• Perpetual Peace states that three factors help to foster peace: democracy, economic interdependence, and international institutions.

• Democractic Peace Theory: Theory supported by empirical evidence that democratic states do not fight wars against each other, but do fight wars against authoritarian states.

• The 3 theory’s why liberals don’t go to war: 1. democracies offer citizens a chance to deal with complaints/grievences by nonviolent means. 2. Theorists argue that institutional constraints exist in democracies that help to prevent them from going to war. 3. Commerical Peace Theory

• Commerical Peace Theory: States that are more interdependent, particularly through trade and investment, are less likely to go to war.

• International Institutions may influence the outbreak of conflict by: 1. international institutions help build positive connections between states, and economic institutions to foster interdependence. 2. States that are left out of institutions might feel threatened by the connections forged between states, potentially adding to the possibility of conflict.

• An example of international institutions influencing the outbreak of conflict is the Ukraine wishing to join NATO and sign an association agreement with the EU.

• Reservation Point: The worst outcome they would be willing to accept.

• Zone of agreement: Acceptable outcomes for both states overlap

Constructivist Interpretations of the Causes of War

• Constructivists believe that identities can influence whether a state is likely to be more aggressive or more restrained in how it pursues its foreign policy.

• Self-Determination: The right of a people to determine its own future political status. It contributes to the formation of common and conflicting identities and the outbreak of war.

• An example of Self-Determination is the wars to end colonial rule in the mid-twentieth century such as the Indonesian struggle fo independence from the Netherlands and the Vietnamese war against France in 1945

• An example of using Nationalism as a war motivator is Adolf Hitler’s actions in WWII for Germany.

• The 3 causes of war for a Constructivist include: Aggressive state identities, divergent identities, and possession of belligerent ideas.

Realist Approaches to Preventing War

• Realism imagines war as an enduring feature of international politics

• Realists believe that we can decrease the frequency and intensity of war by power balancing and deterrence.

Power Balancing

• A Balance of Power can also be referenced as an equilibrium between any two parties

• Balancing of Power can also describe an approach to managing power and state security.

• Balance of Power theorists posit that states make rational and calculated evaluations of the costs and benefits of particular policies that determine the state’s role in a balance of power.

• Alliances are the most important institutional tool for enhancing one’s own security and balancing the perceived power potential of one’s opponent.

• An example of power balancing is the U.S. and United Kingdom allied with Russia to balance against Germany in WWII.

• In the Cold War, the U.S. allied with western European states and others through NATO and this alliance largely balanced against the Soviet Union’s alliance with the Eastern European states and others through the Warsaw Pact.

• A major limitation of the balance of power approach is its requirement that states view established friendships with allies as expendable in times of change.

Deterrence

• The mechanism that enables a balance of power to sustain peace is deterrence.

• Knowing that a damaging reaction will counter an aggressive action, the opponent will decide not to resort to force and thereby destroy its own society.

• Deterrence theory is based on several key assumptions. 1. the theory assumes that rational decision-makers want to avoid resorting to war in situations in which the anticipated cost of aggression is greater than the expected gain. 2. assumes that nuclear weapons pose an unacceptable risk of mutual destruction and decision makers will not initiate armed aggression against a nuclear state. 4. assumes that alternatives to war are available to decision-makers irrespective of the issue of contention.

• Terrorism appears to decrease the possibility that deterrence will work.

• Suicide terrorism appears to render deterrence meaningless.

Liberal Approaches to Preventing War

• “Good” States: Democratic and economically open

• “Bad” States: Authoritarian and economically closed

• The Liberal believes that over time, the rewards that accrue to good states will create pressures and incentives on more and more bad states to become responsible partners in the international system.

• Liberals also believe in order to prevent war, the international community or international institutions (both organizations and treaties) to coordinate actions to reduce the likelihood and destructiveness of war.

• The two Liberal strategies to prevent war are: collective security and arms control agreements.

Collective Security Ideal

• Collective Security (one for all and all for one): In an effort to stop the aggressive and unlawful use of force by one state against another, unlawful aggression will be met by united action. All or many states will unite against the aggressor.

• Moral Clarity: The aggressor is morally wrong because all aggressors are morally wrong, and all those who are right must act in unison to meet the aggression.

• Collective Security assumes that the benefit of peace outweighs the benefits of war, aggressors must be stopped, and also moral clarity.

• In order for collective security to work, the threat must be credible and all potential enforcers must agree.

• An example of collective security failing is Italy overran Ethiopia.

Arms Control and Disarmament

• Arms Control: Regulating arms research, manufacturing, deployment, and rapid increase of weapons systems.

• Disarmament: Reducing the amount of arms and the types of weapons employed by a state.

• Liberals hope that the practice of Arms Control and Disarmament should logically reduce the security dilemma.

• An example of arms control and disarmament is the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War era.

• BWC: Biological Weapons Convention

• JCPOA: Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Iran denuclearization)

• START: Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Treaty signed between U.S. and Russia to limit their nuclear weapons arsenals.

• The Chemical Weapons Convention bans the development, production, and stockpiling of chemical weapons.

Constructivist Approaches to Preventing War

• Cooperative institutions like the EU can create and regulate certain types of interactions that can influence states’ perceptions of their identities and their understandings of self and others over time.

• Another way Constructivits see to reduce conflict is by socialization to certain norms against various aspects of military conflict

• An example of constructivists prevent of war is the campaign to ban the use of antipersonnel land mines and cluster munitions so that many states became socialized to banning such military weapons

• Nuclear Proliferation: The spread of nuclear weapons, fissionable material, and technology related to nuclear weapons.

• For war to be legitimate, it must be either an act of self-defense or authorized by the UN Security Council.

Laws of War

• Jus Ad Bellum: Laws that deal with when it is just/legal to go to war.

• Jus In Bello: Laws that define what acts are considered legal and illegal when fighting a war

Jus Ad Bellum

• Just War Tradition: The idea that wars must be judged according to two categories of justice. 1. Jus Ad Bellum, the justness of war itself 2. Jus In Bello, the justness of each actor’s conduct in war.

• Just war theory is a western and Christian doctrine dating from medieval times, and it draws on ancient Greek philosophy and precepts found in the Koran.

• Just war theory was developed by Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Hugo Grotius

• Criteria for war to be just: 1. Must be a just cause, self-defense or the defense of others and a delcation of intent by a competent authority. 2. Leaders need to have the correct intentions, desiring to end abuses and establish a just peace. 3. All other methods to have been exhausted for ending the abuse, going to war as a last resort. 4. Forces must be removed rapidly after the objectives have been secured.

• Using force against another sovereign state is not legal under international law (UN Charter).

Jus In Bello

• Noncombatant Immunity: A core principle of international humanitarian law that holds that people not bearing arms in a conflict may not be deliberately targeted or systematically harmed; includes unarmed civilians, surrendered soldiers, and soldiers who are too severely injured to defend themselves.

• Violence must be proportionate to the ends to be achieved.

• Unnecessary human suffering should be avoided at all costs.

• ICBL: International Campaign to Ban Landmines

Cyberwarfare and Just War

• Instrument Based Approach: A cyber attack can only count as an armed attack if it uses traditional military weapons.

• Effects Based Approach: A cyber attack as an armed attack based on the gravity of its effects.