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Why Does the U.S. Get All the Tornadoes?
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Thursday, December 22, 2011 - 2:09 PM
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It's time to admit that I'm getting old. I feel the aches and pains from workouts a bit more keenly. I have to Google acronyms I see on Twitter all the time. No matter how hard I try, I just don't feel comfortable wearing an untucked shirt with a blazer. Only now am I discovering Alison Brie, which makes me way behind the curve. Most importantly, however, I find myself reading threat assessments made by junior international relations scholars and shaking my head at these young-security-kids-with-their-having-no-memory-of-the-Cold-War.
To explain where I'm coming from, here's what I wrote a little more than a year ago:
Terrorism and piracy are certainly security concerns -- but they don't compare to the Cold War. A nuclear Iran is a major regional headache, but it's not the Cold War. A generation from now, maybe China poses as serious a threat as the Cold War Soviet Union. Maybe. That's a generation away, however....
I'm about to say something that might be controversial for people under the age of 25, but here goes. You know the threats posed to the United States by a rising China, a nuclear Iran, terrorists and piracy? You could put all of them together and they don't equal the perceived threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
I'll stand by that statement, and I'm not the only one here at FP to believe it. Over the past week, however, I'm seeing some young whippersnappers junior scholars evince a different estimate of threats to U.S. national security.
Over at Shadow Government, Paul Miller has a four-part series -- count 'em, one, two, three, four -- of blog posts arguing that the world is a more dangerous place now than before. He sums up his argument in this concluding section:
Essentially, the United States thus faces two great families of threats today: first, the nuclear-armed authoritarian powers, of which there are at least twice as many as there were during the Cold War; second, the aggregate consequences of state failure and the rise of non-state actors in much of the world, which is a wholly new development since the Cold War. On both counts, the world is more dangerous than it was before 1989. Essentially take the Cold War, add in several more players with nukes, and then throw in radicalized Islam, rampant state failure, and the global economic recession, and you have today.
I recognize that the world doesn't feel as dangerous as it did during the Cold War. During the Cold War we all knew about the threat and lived with a constant awareness-usually shoved to the back of ours minds to preserve our sanity-that we might die an instantaneous firey death at any moment. We no longer feel that way.
Our feelings are wrong. The Cold War engaged our emotions more because it was simple, easily understood, and, as an ideological contest, demanded we take sides and laid claim to our loyalties. Today's environment is more complex and many-sided and so it is harder to feel the threat the same way we used to. Nonetheless, the danger is real.
Meh. Actually, meh squared.
To be fair to Miller, I do think he is getting at something that has changed over time during the post-Cold War era. First, the threat envorinment does seem higher now than twenty years ago, as the Soviet Union was about to collapse. China is more economically powerful, Russia is more revanchist, North, Korea, Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, the barriers to entry for non-state actors to wreak havoc has gone up. The likelihood of a conventional great power war is lower, but the likelihood of a serious attack on American soil seems higher than in late 1991. So in terms of trend, it does feel like the world is less safe.
What's also changed, however, is the tight coupling of the Cold War security environment (ironically, just as the security environment has become more loosely coupled, the global political economy has become more tightly coupled). Because the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were such implacable adversaries and because they knew it, the possibility of a small dispute -- Berlin, Cuba, a downed Korean airliner -- escalating very quickly was ever-present. The possibility of an accident triggering all-out nuclear war was also higher than was realized at the time. The current threat environment is more loosely interconnected, in that a small conflict seems less likely to immediately ramp up into another Cuban Missile Crisis. Indeed, the events of the past year support that point. Saudi Arabia essentially invaded Bahrain, and Iran did.... very little about it. The United States deployed special forces into the heart of Pakistan's military complex. The aftermath of that is undeniably uglier, but it's not we-are-at-DEFCON-ONE kind of ugly. Miller might be more accurate in saying that there is a greater chance of a security dust-up in today's complex threat environment, but there's a much lower likelihood of those dust-ups spiraling out of control.
In Miller's calculations, it seems that any country with a nuclear weapon constitutes an equal level of threat. But that's dubious on multiple grounds. First, none of the emerging nuclear states have anywhere close to a second-strike capability. If they were to use their nukes against the United States, I think they know that there's an excellent chance that they don't survive the counterstrike. Second, the counter Miller provides is that these authoritarian leaders are extra-super-crazy. I'm not going to defend either the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or Kim the Younger, but are these leaders more crazy than either Mao or Stalin or Kim Jong Il? Those are three of the worst leaders in history -- and none of them came close to using nuclear weapons. Finally, the Pakistan case is instructive -- even after getting nukes, and even after getting very cozy with radical terrorist groups, that country has refrained from escalating hostilities with India to the point of another general war.
As for the non-state threats, they are disturbing, but I'd posit that on this front the United States really is safer now than it was a decade ago. The only organization capable of launching a coordinated terrorist strike against the United States is now a husk of its former self. Indeed, I'd wager that Miller's emotions, or his memory of 9/11, are getting in the way of dispassionate analysis.
In essence, Miller conflates the number of possible threats with a greater magnitude of threats. I agree that there are more independent threats to the United States out there at present, but combined, they don't stack up to the Soviet threat. To put it another way, I prefer avoiding a swarm of mosquitoes to one really ravenous bear.
In related exaggerated threat analysis, Matthew Kroenig argues in Foreign Affairs that an airstrike on Iran might be the best of a bad set of options in dealing with Iran. This has set poor Stephen Walt around the bend in response, as op-eds advocating an attack on Iran are wont to do.
I've generally found both sides of the "attack Iran" debate to be equally dyspeptic, but in this case I do find Kroenig's logic to be a bit odd. Here's his arguments for why a nuclear Iran is bad and containment is more problematic than a military attack:
Some states in the region are doubting U.S. resolve to stop the program and are shifting their allegiances to Tehran. Others have begun to discuss launching their own nuclear initiatives to counter a possible Iranian bomb. For those nations and the United States itself, the threat will only continue to grow as Tehran moves closer to its goal. A nuclear-armed Iran would immediately limit U.S. freedom of action in the Middle East. With atomic power behind it, Iran could threaten any U.S. political or military initiative in the Middle East with nuclear war, forcing Washington to think twice before acting in the region. Iran’s regional rivals, such as Saudi Arabia, would likely decide to acquire their own nuclear arsenals, sparking an arms race. To constrain its geopolitical rivals, Iran could choose to spur proliferation by transferring nuclear technology to its allies -- other countries and terrorist groups alike. Having the bomb would give Iran greater cover for conventional aggression and coercive diplomacy, and the battles between its terrorist proxies and Israel, for example, could escalate. And Iran and Israel lack nearly all the safeguards that helped the United States and the Soviet Union avoid a nuclear exchange during the Cold War -- secure second-strike capabilities, clear lines of communication, long flight times for ballistic missiles from one country to the other, and experience managing nuclear arsenals. To be sure, a nuclear-armed Iran would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. But the volatile nuclear balance between Iran and Israel could easily spiral out of control as a crisis unfolds, resulting in a nuclear exchange between the two countries that could draw the United States in, as well.
These security threats would require Washington to contain Tehran. Yet deterrence would come at a heavy price. To keep the Iranian threat at bay, the United States would need to deploy naval and ground units and potentially nuclear weapons across the Middle East, keeping a large force in the area for decades to come. Alongside those troops, the United States would have to permanently deploy significant intelligence assets to monitor any attempts by Iran to transfer its nuclear technology. And it would also need to devote perhaps billions of dollars to improving its allies’ capability to defend themselves. This might include helping Israel construct submarine-launched ballistic missiles and hardened ballistic missile silos to ensure that it can maintain a secure second-strike capability. Most of all, to make containment credible, the United States would need to extend its nuclear umbrella to its partners in the region, pledging to defend them with military force should Iran launch an attack (emphasis added).
OK, first, exactly who is bandwagoning with Iran? Seriously, who? Kroenig provides no evidence, and I'm scratching my head to think of any data points. The SCAF regime in Egypt has been a bit more friendly, but Turkey's distancing is far more significant and debilitating for Tehran's grand strategy. Iran's sole Arab ally is in serious trouble, and its own economy is faltering badly. The notion that time is on Iran 's side seems badly off.
Second, Kroenig presume that a nuclear Iran would be more aggressive in the region and more likely to have a nuclear exchange with Iran. I will again point to India/Pakistan. Despite similar religious divides, and despite the presence of pliable non-state actors, those two countries have successfully kept a nuclear peace. Kroenig might have an argument that Israel/Iran is different, but it's not in this essay. Indeed, the bolded section contradicts Kroenig's own argument -- if Iran is not prepared to use its nuclear weapons, it seems unlikely that it will escalate crises to the point where its bluff is called. If Kroenig's own scholarship suggests that America's nuclear superiority would still be an effective deterrent, then I'm not sure why he portrays the Iran threat in such menacing terms.
There's more, but this post is long enough anyway. Both Kroenig and Miller are correct to highlight current threats. But, to put it gently, until all of these threats, combined, can cause this to happen in under an hour, I'm sleeping soundly.
Am I missing anything?
better bodyscanners than bombshelters
When I was child in the 80s and 90s Denmark we all knew where the nearest bombshelter were, not because we had learned it but because there were so damn many of them, and every wednesday the sirens howled so we knew the sound in case the bombers steered toward west.
today the bombshelters are small parks , youthclubs and so on and the siren only howl once a year. But the flying have become more packed into cotton though
With the Cold War, there was only one threat rather than the multitude we face today. The multitude of threats rather than the magnitude of the single threat is what seems more scary (especially since my generation has been taught that the USSR was always headed for collapse and that the threat was overestimated in the 80s).
some overblown , some never discussed
The threats are massively overblown however, a nuclear Iran isn't anywhere near as scary as the already nuclear India and Pakistan and we continue to help arm them. There's always the risk of a border conflict between Pakistan and India escalating and would effect not only the region but global weather for years leading to starvation that would kill up to a billion people.
We face many complicated threats but the worst are the ones they don't put in the news, they aren't as sexy and don't make as much money for the defence industry.
National Security Threat: Short Term Memory
Though being referred to as a "kid" when your under 30 is always amusing, dan's point is correct. In fact, could people really have forgetten how many false alarms happened because of the Soviet Unions early warning systems malfunctions, and if it wasnt for one guy (Stanislav Petrov), we'd probably been in an all out nuclear war!
an important and difficult issue
OK, first a possible problem. If as Dan asserts that the number of threats is now higher but the intensity is lower then wouldn't Sagan;s logic also apply here? Think of the threat system as numbers of nodes in a complex system. According to normal accident theory the more nodes in a system (more complex) the likelihood of a possible failure rises exponentially. Take Sagan out of nuclear networks and now apply him to global threat networks. The probability of screwing something up is higher now than in the relatively "simple" Cold War.
Anyway to the bigger issue. The real debate here is between highly unlikely but intense threat environment versus likely but lesser intensity threat environment. There is really n.not much to be gained by arguing which one is worse. They are both problems and even if one side claims the other is overreacting (which certainly happens) it begs the question fo how to respond the the threat environment we have. The debate here almost reminds me of the boomer v. millennials on whose protests were more meaningful.
I have some serious reservations about conclusions on the intensity of the Cold War ( and yes I lived through much of it). while Sagan certainly paints a scary picture of disaster barely averted, the fact remains that despite all those accidents nothing serious ever occurred. Is this because we were lucky or because at the end of the day human beings have to decide to escalate to nuclear violence and they are reluctant to do so. This is ladder of escalation and escalation dominance versus the threat that leaves something to chance debate all over. Maybe deterrence really was stable, and maybe bipolarity really was conflictual but stable as well. Note how in each of the Cold War crises one side decided to back down. Just lucky, or part of the system?
Unpredictability is the bane of good planning and strategy and the current system is certainly more unpredictable. Will the failures result in nuclear annihilation. Probably not, but that is not the sole measure of threat.
So Dan says high threats are all about possible outcomes, no matter how small the likelihood. His opponents see high threat in the likelihood of conflict, not in its intensity. It is not clear to me why one is the preferred calculus of threat over the other. I can say that as a strategic analyst I would find one a lot easier to navigate than the other.
Finally I am on Dan's side in his implicit concern that too many analysts suffer from presentism and have insufficient grasp of history against which to judge their thoughts.
Bottom line there is not one right way to analyze threats, but a good sense of history is always a valuable asset.
Perhaps the reason for the perceived difference is the lesser ability to cope. As the cold war ended we had a rise in support for the K Street group of Mr. Norquist which resulted in the US entering two wars for which there were no new revenue streams, while the push of high cost technology upped the cost. At the same time, without the bear Europe/NATO was less willing to go our way and there was less public support for doing so ( already eroded by viertnam). Consider how few collegiate Republic ans are serving, and the mix says we are strategically weaker as a whole. Today if we faced a showdown of the Wuemoy/Marsh type our markers would you e called. We are not far from the K's position when it wasn't sure it could fuel its fleet. Gee, thanks Mr. Norquist!
Sorry,screen problems did not allow corrections. In my post the reference is to a Quemoy/Matsu type facedown, and "K's problem" should be "the U.K.'s problem," referring to the difficulty the Royal Navy faced in getting enough oil to set out for the Falklands. ((The RAF faced similar issues with Libya).
"Today's environment is more complex and many-sided and so it is harder to feel the threat the same way we used to. Nonetheless, the danger is real. "
The first sentence is always true. The more one knows, the more complexity one could find. No real analysis is needed to reach that kind of conclusion. Add to that is the chicken little's view that the sky was falling even if one could not see it or feel it. This is not risk assessment. This is fear mongering.
OK, as Dan suggests, everyone take a deep breath....
I do believe there is far too much fear-mongering these days. "Twice as many" nuclear powers? Sure, but so what? We're at peace with all of them, except one (stipulating North Korea). One active proliferant, with (as Dan mentions) massive internal problems of its own, not to mention a many-decade tradition of conservative foreign policy. A sense of history is indeed a valuable asset, but we must take a sober reading of history, something many on the political right are unable to do -- particularly a leading presidential candidate who is their self-proclaimed historian in chief.
It's true that smaller nations like Pakistan and India seem to have managed to settle into less dangerous proxy wars as opposed to probable nuclear conflict, but I'm worried that eventually both states will be so radicalized by it that they public is willing to risk such a war. If you roll a die three times you aren't likely to roll a one three times. However if you roll the die enough times (or have enough conflicts) sooner or later you'll get three ones.
Although you're right, to me you're also a kid. What you missed in the early days of the Cold War was the ideological threat, the contest of two systems, first for dominance and then for primacy among the Third World. Remember that Mr. Chambers thought he was on the wrong side, that democratic capitalism was going to lose. Khrushchev said we will bury you, and for a while the USSR's progress in heavy industry seemed to support that.
Perhaps more important, we experienced a succession of episodes:the "loss of China", Berlin airlift, Korea, the "bomber gap" in the early 50's, Sputnik, the "missile gap", Cuba missile crisis, many of which undermined our confidence and gave fodder to the scaremongers like McCarthy and MacArthur and the China Lobby and later the Birchers.
So I can say the Cold War I experienced was colder than the Cold War you experienced, which in turn was a lot more threatening than any terrorism or pumped up third rate power.
Drop: If you did'nt live through it; you dont understand it!
Out of how all the annoyingly stupid arguements that are made about analysis, the worst offender is: If you didn't live throught it, then you really dont understand it. Forget the fact that by using this logic you make the study of history obsolete, it's just plain stupid! I did'nt have to live through the black death (bubonic plague) to know it was really really bad time. In fact, some logic would suggest that by living through an event, you've become biased by it. The best historical analysis is always done years after the fact, because in the end, history is are best means of judging society and the growth of civilization. So lets drop this horrible arguement!
Really? Our society certainly seems to be trying its best to forget the Cold War ever happened. I don't see much in fiction about two major powers constantly circling each other, I don't hear as much about 1949 to 1991 in history and political science discussion and when I check bookstores all I can easily find on the Cold War is the Vietnam War* and the Soviet-Afghan War (which will probably disappear once all the interest in Afghanistan does) and the occasional brief history book on Lenin, Stalin, Stalingrad (the battles in WWII) or 1991 and Gorbachev in the Russian section. Going to the rest of the world it's even more sparse. Maybe it's different in some centers of learning but it really does feel like American society is undergoing deliberate amnesia.
*Only mentioning the Americans of course. Because studying the Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodians or Laos in the war (or even mentioning more of the war than South Vietnam) would be silly. It only was fought on their territory and decided who was in their governments.
Yes, Mr D, you're missing something
It's the vanity of junior IR guys who seek to inflate their careers by saying that what they've taken time and effort to study to study is the most important thing in the world, and they're just the boyos to fix it. Viewers of Two and a Half Men will recall Alan Harper, the weevily chiropractor trying to gain national fame by supplying an acronym about women with large breasts. Same thing.
Real life tells us that what you're training for likely has little to do with the job you'll get. Young IR person Condoleeza Rice set out to become a leading expert on the Soviet Union and got into government employment when there was no Soviet Union, and her expertise of Russia was, at best, peripheral to her responsibilities. It did however equip her to ignore CIA warnings about the non-Soviet al Qaida, and later on oath tell the US Senate she'd never received one. And, a few seconds later, acknowledge that untruth. One of the best real-life television moments of that decade.
Iranian Attack: Bad Day, but nowhere near "Day After"
Dan,
Thanks for the perspective here, the posting the "Day After" scene is useful.
Worst case if Iran gets a couple of basic fission weapons, say 10-20kt each onto US cities, that is a terrible, horrible, awful day for America. Tens of thousands dead, most likely. Possibly even over 100,000 if you hit the right target at the right time. Cleanup would be a massive job, the city hit would be in worse shape than NOLA after Katrina.
Full scale WWIII with the Soviets would have resulted in TENS OF MILLIONS dead in the immediate aftermath, and the complete collapse of American society. We'd have been hit in that scenario with several thousand weapons each of a few hundred kilotons to multi-megatons in size. The fallout would have been fatal to anyone in the outdoors over almost the whole country, save few a few rural areas on the West Coast (Brookings, OR to Crescent City, CA would be where you'd have wanted your bunker, maybe Olympic NP, WA). Even w/o nuclear winter effects (which were exaggerated in the 80s but non-zero), massive starvation due to disruption of food production and distribution networks. Over 100M dead very likely.
Bottom line: An Iranian or North Korean attack would be much closer in scale of destruction to 9/11 than to a Cold War style superpower nuclear exchange. Terrible no-good day, but not the end of America or the end of more than 0.1% of Americans. The Cold War turned nuclear-hot would have seen us hit with literally one million times as much destructive energy.
Professor Drezner,
I agree with the general thrust of the post about outrageous threat assessments but find your generational division puzzling.
I for one was born in 1989 and think that anyone who contends that the world is more dangerous than in the Cold War ought to have their head examined as Robert Gates put it so well. Beyond me I think the notion that younger IR scholars are more prone to hyperbole is not necessarily accurate. The non-proliferation field is a great example with younger scholars like Francis Gavin and Phillipp Bleek taking the lead (along with more established folk like John Mueller) in discrediting the never-ending argument that we're on the verge of a nuclear tipping point whereas many veteran scholars (will the real Graham Allison please stand up?) seem to be tripping over themselves in a bid to make the most outlandish claims about the spread of nuclear weapons and imminent threat of nuclear attacks. Same is true in the policy community as evidenced by the Nuclear-Four's campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons and Gen. Scowcroft succumbing in Congressional testimony to claiming something along the lines of "if Iran got nuclear weapons I believe 25-30 nations globally would soon follow suit" without so much as offering up a list of potential proliferators.
In any case, I think a better division of threat assessment would be, on the one hand, the policy insiders who we entrust to run our foreign policy who throw sensible analysis out the window in favor of hysteria (Kroneig being a great example) and the more well-balanced (Realist, I dare say) analysts/scholars who, despite their records of being right about major policy, are relegated to the Ivory Tower or the pages of scholarly and some policy journals. One would think record of success would count for something in appointing officials but then one's faced with a leading Presidential candidate having already named John Bolton as his pick for Secretary of State.
Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
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