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| 1 |
ID:
153271
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| Summary/Abstract |
Although denial has been at the centre of Australian strategic thought for decades, it has frequently been used as a broad catch-all term. This article shows, however, that there are two distinct denial traditions in Australian strategic thought: anti-access denial and area denial. Despite the different denial strategies having significantly different implications for defence budgets, procurement and force structure, official strategic guidance and defence scholars themselves have rarely specified which variant they are referring to. This article first maps the conceptual genealogy of anti-access denial and area denial within Australian strategic thought, before showing why acknowledging the specific type of denial is critical for policy and operational considerations. In addition to the two traditional approaches to denial, this article introduces a third approach—‘dissuasion by denial’—which, notwithstanding its growing influence in deterrence research and high relevance to twenty-first-century Asia-Pacific security dynamics, has yet to be introduced into Australian denial debates. The article finally addresses the conditions under which each denial strategy would be the most appropriate for Australia.
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| 2 |
ID:
157851
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Does nuclear weapon development embolden national leaders to engage in more assertive foreign policies? Despite the importance of this question to international security studies, the nuclear emboldenment hypothesis has received little attention. This article develops a theoretical explanation of emboldenment grounded in social psychology and uses translated archival sources and secondary studies to test it on the cases of Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong. The results suggest that the dangers of nuclear emboldenment, while real, are substantially less than usually assumed. Biases associated with the availability heuristic cause leaders of new nuclear powers to authorize dangerous coercive policies in the short-term. However, the fear they experience at the nuclear brink causes them and their successors to authorize moderate policies in the longer-run. Findings achieved through case study analysis lead to the conclusion that nuclear proliferation is dangerous when leaders believe that nuclear coercion is safe, but becomes safe when they learn that nuclear coercion is dangerous.
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| 3 |
ID:
152067
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| Summary/Abstract |
The claim that the spread of nuclear weapons leads to interstate conflict and nuclear war has become very influential. However, proliferation pessimists have failed to specify how and when nuclear proliferation precipitates conflict. I make four arguments for an optimistic pessimism. (1) The few preventive strikes against nuclear facilities that have occurred would have occurred absent of the target's nuclear program, and these rare strikes did not lead to conflict escalation. (2) The problem of nonsurvivable arsenals is, properly understood, a problem of preventive-war motivations where subjective uncertainty reduces the dangers of arsenal survivability. (3) Claims that bias within nuclear organizations may lead to accidental nuclear detonations suffer from omitted variable bias: leaders' decisions to revise the status quo after developing nuclear weapons tend to give rise to the most dangerous nuclear accidents. Accidents that have not occurred during a nuclear crisis pose substantially less risk of nuclear escalation. (4) Leaders of nuclear states have tended to engage in conventional aggression, but experience with nuclear weapons moderates their conflict propensity. Ultimately, I argue that while nuclear weapons have led to conflict through one causal mechanism and for a limited time, the dangers are substantially weaker than usually assumed.
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| 4 |
ID:
127124
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Conventional wisdom states that the stability-instability paradox does not explain the effect of nuclear proliferation on the conflict propensity of South Asia, and that nuclear weapons have had a different and more dangerous impact in South Asia than Cold War Europe. I argue that the paradox explains nuclear South Asia; that the similarities between nuclear South Asia and Cold War Europe are strong; and that conventional instability does not cause revisionist challenges in the long run. I develop and probe a psychological causal mechanism that explains the impact of nuclear weapons on Cold War Europe and South Asia. Following the ten-month mobilized crisis in 2002, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf may have adopted a more moderate foreign policy toward India after experiencing fear of imminent nuclear war, as Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev did forty years earlier. I argue that the stability-instability paradox explains Cold War Europe and nuclear South Asia and will, conditional on Iranian and North Korean revisionism, predict the impact of nuclear weapon development on these states' conflict propensities.
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| 5 |
ID:
159575
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| Summary/Abstract |
Do leaders learn more about military force from firsthand experience with the armed forces or their nation’s last war? Despite a resurgence of interest in the effects of leaders and their beliefs on international conflict and war, we still know little about which mechanisms cause what beliefs. I theorize that although personal experiences in the military may provide less normatively probative lessons for a leader contemplating the initiation of armed conflict than the nation’s last war, personal military experiences will have a greater impact on beliefs because they are directly experienced, cognitively accessible, and vivid. I argue that this availability bias should make leaders who have experience in the military but not combat operations develop beliefs that make them more likely to use force than leaders with combat experience. I test this hypothesis on the beliefs of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson with archival evidence and secondary studies. These cases control for the nation’s last war because both Kennedy and Johnson experienced the second World War but allow variation in military experience because Kennedy but not Johnson experienced combat. The results suggest that further attention to leaders’ personal military experiences will offer better predictions about their beliefs and foreign policies.
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| 6 |
ID:
174772
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| Summary/Abstract |
What causes variation in the foreign policies of U.S. allies regarding their desired U.S. military role in their region and their troop commitments to U.S. military interventions? This paper addresses this question through documenting and explaining the sources of variation in Australia’s foreign policies regarding these issues over four decades. Treating the two major political parties in Australia and their respective leaders who self-select into them as endogenous, the paper argues that Australian foreign policy, whilst always supportive of the U.S. alliance, has systematically varied. This variation has correlated with the political party in power while the late Cold War and post-Cold War balances of power remained constant. While the Labor party has only been willing to send combat troops to large U.S. military interventions when the latter have a supporting United Nations Security Council Resolution, the conservative Liberal party has been willing to military intervene without this multilateral support. The Labor party, unlike the Liberal party, has also frequently proposed the formation and consolidation of multilateral regional institutions. These preferences render the U.S. to have been necessary for the Labor Party but sufficient for the Liberal party. Future Sino-U.S. armed conflict would provide a harder test of these hypotheses.
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