Entendiendo los 6 de China

BY WILL INBODEN

JUNE 26, 2012 - 10:15 AM

In concluding his elegant book On China, Henry Kissinger describes an

ongoing debate within Chinese leadership circles. Some of its ruling class
believes China should maintain its "peaceful development" strategy in
accordance with a rules-based international order, while others demand that
China now adopt a more aggressive posture that directly challenges
American primacy. Ive just returned from a month in China and experienced
some of this debate firsthand. Visits to several cities, and meetings and
conversations with Chinese officials, scholars, foreign business leaders,
American officials and, yes, taxi drivers produce an amalgam of impressions.
The best way to make sense of the current state of affairs in China is to
think of not one but several "Chinas" each is real, but none by itself is the
full reality. The following are six of the "Chinas" that exist today; the
question is which of these will command the future.
Rising Power: Chinese leaders are obsessed with their nations rise, and
see it reclaiming its historic position as a dominant world power. Many
Chinese strategists also believe the U.S. is in decline. But their opinion splits
on what this means. Those who see the U.S. primarily as an adversary (see
below) welcome Americas declension, while those who see the U.S. more as
a partner in Chinas rise worry about the consequences of a diminished U.S.
Several Chinese thinkers expressed their frustration with what they see as
erratic American policy under the Obama administration, which has veered
from the "G-2" embrace of 2009 to the now perceived hostility of the
"pivot." Some Chinese interlocutors also pointed out the same fact that
troubles many Americans: A White House pursuing massive defense cuts
cannot adequately resource a bolstered posture in Asia.
Security Threat: The debate within the U.S. over whether or not China
poses a threat often misses the Chinese perspective: many (though
certainly not all) Chinese strategists see America as their principle
adversary. The Peoples Liberation Army is operationalizing this attitude in
its development of weapons platforms designed to counter the U.S.
As I pointed out in a discussion with some Chinese scholars and officials, the
standard American talking point demanding more "transparency" from China
about its military modernization and expansion may be diplomatically
requisite, but it elides the real issue. The U.S. does not merely want
"transparency" from China; we want China to stop developing weapons
directly targeted against American force projection capabilities if it
doesnt intend to become our adversary.

Economic Dynamo: While Chinas growth is slowing and some of its

numbers may be contrived, its economic strength is real and its long-term
trajectory still looks promising. Virtually all Chinese speak with tremendous
pride about their nations economic boom, which they have experienced
firsthand in materially-improved lives. Many Chinese believe that their
nation weathered the global economic crisis relatively unscathed, which in
their minds vindicates their model and equips them to meet future
challenges such as the transition from export reliance to domestic
consumption. Massive infrastructure projects such as the many new airports
and high speed rail may excessively dazzle some Western visitors, but this
should not diminish the genuine accomplishment they represent. Nor have
corruption, bureaucracy and stacked decks dissuaded many international
investors from still hungering to grow their stakes in the China market.
Fragile Kleptocracy: My own Tom Friedman-esque moment of analysis-viataxi-drivers came one evening when all of the Beijing taxi drivers in the
central part of the city had turned off their meters and were charging rates
five times the metered rate for a ride back to our hotel. After some
customary evasions, one of them admitted that this was their version of a
work slowdown. Strikes are illegal, but the frustrations of Beijing taxi drivers,
whose rates havent been increased in ten years amidst surging expenses
despite many pleas to the government, boiled over into illicit protest. Such
resentments are multiplied across the country, crossing industries and rural
and urban lines, resulting in tens of thousands of protests annually. Then
there is the Bo Xilai case, which continues to reverberate, especially as Bos
fate is negotiated amidst maneuverings for the upcoming Party Congress
and leadership transition. The Bo case is only exceptional in that it became
public. Otherwise it is all too familiar in China, where corruption is pervasive,
governance is brittle and a senior Party post commonly also includes control
of a favored industry or company.
Reforming Autocracy: Yes, China remains a repressive autocracy, but
nevertheless ongoing reforms and liberalizations are taking place, many
enabled by communications technology that the government cannot entirely
suppress. A major news story during my visit was the heinous forced
abortion on a Chinese woman seven months pregnant in Shaanxi province.
Social networks in China erupted with popular outrage, as heartbreaking
photos of the mother next to her dead baby circulated widely, and an
embarrassed Chinese government responded by suspending the local
officials responsible. This is a woefully deficient punishment, and the
manifestly unjust one-child policy remains in force, despite Chinas looming
demographic nightmare. But even a few years ago this crime would have

never been disclosed at all, let alone prompted public protest and an official
response.
Insecure Bully: Some revealing yet head-scratching moments came when
Chinese interlocutors expressed their consternation at the U.S. Embassy
Beijings Twitter feed reporting on air quality in Beijing, while in the next
breath they defended Chinas provocations such as its anti-satellite missile
test, bellicose territorial claims on the South China Sea and support for
North Korea. These are not the actions of a confident, responsible
stakeholder, but of an insecure bully, obsessing over its international image
while engaging in obnoxious behavior that does much more damage to its
image than any American report on human rights or environmental quality.
This insecurity also prevents China from coming to terms with its own
history. While the Cultural Revolution is widely lamented, the Tiananmen
Square massacre (whose 23rd anniversary passed with censorship even of
the Shanghai Stock Exchange) cannot be mentioned, and Mao remains
valorized. Chinas insecurities also help explain its foreign policies to shield
the Syrian regime and Iranian nuclear program, and prop up the Kim
dictatorship in North Korea all of these are short-sighted decisions, but
short-term thinking is a hallmark of an insecure government obsessed with
maintaining its hold on power.
Some of the "Chinas" above are positive, others are negative. Yet in
understanding China all of these variations must be taken into account. The
U.S. has a major stake in encouraging political reform and economic growth
while discouraging the internal repression and truculent behavior towards its
neighbors. Mistakes in China policy come from privileging one scenario over
all the others for example the "China Fantasists" who believe the growing
economy will inevitably lead to a democratic, peaceful China, or the
offensive realists who focus on the Chinese military threat while ignoring the
economic benefits the U.S. receives in the relationship, let alone Chinas
internal fragilities.
This is also why China policy is such a challenge. Taken together, the
multiple realities of China today defy any simple historical analogies about
the management of rising powers, and demand an unprecedented
wholeness of vision from the United States.

Welcome back, international relations students

BY DANIEL W. DREZNER

SEPTEMBER 5, 2011

With the passing of APSA and the dawning of Labor Day, its time for people
to go back to school and Think Deep Thoughts. In the realm of international
relations theory, Thanassis Cambanis essay in the Sunday Boston Globe
Ideas section is a great starter course for thinking about the way the world
works. His basic thesis:
Instead of a flurry of new thinking at the highest echelons of the foreign
policy establishment, the major decisions of the past two administrations
have been generated from the same tool kit of foreign policy ideas that
have dominated the world for decades. Washingtons strategic debates
between neoconservatives and liberals, between interventionists and
realists are essentially struggles among ideas and strategies held over
from the era when nation-states were the only significant actors on the
world stage. As ideas, none of them were designed to deal effectively with a
world in which states are grappling with powerful entities that operate
beyond their control.
As yet, no major new theory has taken root in the most influential policy
circles to explain how America should act in this kind of world, in which
Wikileaks has made a mockery of the diplomatic pouch and Silicon Valley
rivals Washington for cultural influence. But there are at least some signs
that people in power are starting to try in earnest. Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton has openly integrated the search for a new paradigm into
her policy making. In universities, think tanks, and the government, thinkers
trying to grapple with this fluid world structure are finally getting attention
in the circles where their ideas could shape policy.

Read the whole, provocative thing if you agree with Cambanis

arguments, then it certainly represents a data point in favor of Anne-Marie
Slauighters vision of how world politics operates. My only tweak of
Cambanis essay is that he repeatedly stresses the need for a new
generation of strategic concepts and international relations theories to guide
U.S. grand strategy, and then lists as examples the following:
Joseph Nye, a Harvard political scientist who served in the Carter and
Clinton administrations and has advised Secretary of State Clinton, was one
of the pioneers. In the 1990s, he coined the term soft power, arguing that
sometimes the most effective way for America to promote its interests
would be through influencing global health and the environment, or culture
and education. His latest book, The Future of Power, counsels that
America can preserve its influence if it reconceives its institutions and
priorities to deal with a world where the energy is shifting from the West to
the East, as well as from states to non-state actors.

Michael Doyle at Columbia University, a seminal theorist whose idea of a

democratic peace in the 1990s crucially inflected policy with the belief
that democracies dont fight each other, now talks about the notion of an
age of the empowered individual, where lone actors can alter the
trajectory of states and of history as never before. Stephen Walt, also at
Harvard, argues that in the new era America simply needs to start by
acknowledging its limits: that with less muscle and less extra money, the
first step will be to streamline its goals in a way that so far politicians have
been loath to do.
No offense to Joseph Nye, Michael Doyle, and Steve Walt these are Great
Men of interntional relaions thought. The notions that Cambanis lists here,
however, are not "new" in any sense. Which leads me to wonder whether
Cambanis has defined the problem correctly. Is it that international relations
theory has gone stale or is it simply that the wrong set of existing theories
are in vogue today?
What do you think?

Students to professors: drop dead!!

BY DANIEL W. DREZNER

DECEMBER 17, 2002

David Brooks seems to publish a State of the Student essay every year or
so. His latest is in the Weekly Standard. Its a good, rambling read, although
many of the mating rituals he describes were in place when I was an
undergraduate twelve years ago, so I dont know how much has changed
there. The more disturbing passage is as follows:
There is, one must always remember, a large cultural gap between the
students and the faculty. I met few studentsalarmingly few studentswho
seriously contemplated a career in the academy. They thought of becoming
high school teachers or reporters or even soldiers. Academia just never
came up. And if you focused their attention on the professorial life, they
would talk about what they saw as the pedantic specialization of academic
research, the jargon and the impenetrable prose, the professors cloistered
remove from the real world. Academia seems stale to many of them, not a
place that allows for exciting inquiry.
Sigh. Brooks is right about the lack of student interest in academia. Its
always depressing when my best students ask for letters of
recommendation for admission into law school or B-school not that
theres anything wrong with those choices, but there are more than two
flavors of career in the world. Even as someone in the ideological minority, I

love my job. I get paid to sit around, read, and think deep and not-so-deep
thoughts all day. On regular occasions Im asked to impart my thoughts to
some students, who actually write down a lot of what I say. Im something of
a specialist in what I write, but Im certainly not a specialist in what I read.
The hours are flexible, the dress code is minimal. Its a good life. On the
other hand, perhaps its best if fewer students enter the world of academia,
because the job market can be brutal for newly-minted Ph.D.s.

The power of simulation

BY DANIEL W. DREZNER

FEBRUARY 6, 2003

Robert Shapiro has a good story in Slate on what economists can learn
about the functioning of markets from studying online fantasy games.
(Click here for California State Fullerton economics professor Edward
Castronovas paper that inspired Shapiro). However, its worth pointing out
that the use of gaming simulation data has also occurred in political science.
Douglas Van Belle published a 1998 paper in Political Research
Quarterly that used results from online games of Diplomacy to test certain
realist propositions about order in world politics. (If youre at a university,
click here to peek at the actual article). Van Belle wrote another
article about the merits of studying simulated environments
for International Studies Notes.
The punchline is a bit depressing for my career choice of explaining world
politics, but still provocative: The somewhat disturbing answer suggested
by running this simulation over the Internet is that the international system
may be fundamentally unpredictable. It is not a question of insight, method
or skill, it is a question of the fundamentally unpredictable nature of
innovation by creative, problem-solving human beings. The extreme

complexity of the swiftly fluctuating international political arena, which in

the real world is complicated by the feed-back between international and
domestic politics may be creating a chaotic environment, a system that is
mathematically determinant but fundamentally unpredictable. This is
exactly the type of environment that is more likely to produce unpredictable
behavior, including innovation, and in such an environment even the
smallest of changes can produce huge differences over time.

A Medieval Sociology of International Relations

(author unknown)
The plethora of different camps and schools in international relations can be
intimidating to the beginning student. What with realists, liberals,
constructivists, quantitative analysts, formal theorists, etc. it is often difficult
to keep straight who is who, what they do, and what their relations to each
other are. Careful analysis reveals, however, certain patterns within the
discipline that resemble other social milieus in earlier historical eras. In
particular, the social structure of medieval Europe offers a compelling
template for comprehending the state of the discipline. The social groups of
the period and the relations between them are almost identically replicated
in the modern study of international relations. Let us examine the three
orders of medieval society, the nobility or bellatores, the peasantry or
laboratores, and the priesthood or oratores, and see what parallels we can
find.
The Nobility
The nobles in international relations are the elite scholars at the top
universities, typically on the East Coast, but with some outliers such as

Chicago and Berkeley. Like their medieval counterparts, the nobles of the IR
field have few useful skills and do very little that can be characterized as
work. Much of their life is spent in social activity. As the medieval nobles
could spend entire weeks at jousting tournaments, today's nobles spend
inordinate amounts of time going to seminars, workshops, conferences,
invited lectures, not to mention lunches, sherry hours, honorary dinners, and
buffets. They organize edited volumes, participate in edited volumes
organized by their friends, and review edited volumes for presses. The life of
the nobility is a constant round of intense social interaction, and they train
for it from early graduate school by attending parties on a regular basis.
The most important function of the nobility, however, is paradigmatic war.
As the nobles of old viewed armed combat as their central raison d'tre, the
nobles of international relations view inter-paradigmatic conflict as their
main calling. These modern bellatores group together in feudally organized
camps, called paradigms, which typically are led by a charismatic elder peer
of the realm. This Duke or Earl possesses many fiefs to distribute to loyal
followers for services they render in battle, and maintains households of
graduate student retainers in the castle keep that perform the necessary
services needed to keep the house running.
These lucky pages also learn the use of the essential tools they will need to
succeed in combat, including the Polemic, the Diatribe, the Magisterial
Pronouncement, the Tendentious Case Study, the Testy Reply, the
Condescending Retort, and the Sweeping Unfalsifiable Claim. The pages also
learn the social graces and decencies of chivalrous conduct, including the
proper use of the pipe in gesturing, and the correct color for suede elbow
patches on tweed jackets.
Two of the oldest paradigms are Realism and Liberalism. These groups have
done battle since time immemorial and typically focus on material factors,
fighting over office space, funding, post-docs etc. While Realists emphasize
the role of anarchy in preventing cooperation and leading to conflict,
Liberals argue that it is possible to cooperate under anarchy, especially over
the issue of fighting Realists.
A more recently formed paradigm, Constructivism, emphasizes the nonmaterial or spiritual side of combat, much as the chivalric knightly orders
such as the Templars and Hospitalers rejected worldly ties to focus on
fighting the Saracens.
The nobles, then, form the peak of society. Their dominance of the field is
almost unchallenged. The other strata of society can only look on and envy
them.
The Peasants
The peasants of the international relations world are the quantitative
methods scholars. Like the laboratores of old, the life of the quantitative
scholar consists of much work and little reward. Grubbing about in the fields

gathering data under the hot sun, painstakingly assembling data-sets in the
barn, and then going through all the tedious work involved in grinding the
data into flour and baking it into something edible, these scholars are
familiar with toil. Tied as they are to the land, they lack vision and typically
eke out their subsistence livelihoods at lesser ranked universities, publishing
their paltry findings in non-prestigious journals that no one but other
peasants reads.
Given their slender means, they are constantly in danger of famine at
tenure time, and even if they manage to acquire a modest holding they can
be wiped out by floods of better methods or sudden shifts in market
demands from journal editors. One of the few sources of pleasure for the
peasants are the annual folk festivals, or conferences that specialize in
quantitative IR. Here the quantitative scholar can relax among his own kind,
quaff a tankard of mead, and temporarily forget the existence of nobles and
their overweening privilege.
A ray of hope for the peasant is the possibility of revolution. Usually these
peasant revolts are met by the nobility with merciless and successful
repression, but in one corner of the map a rebellion seems to have achieved
some limited success. The democratic peace literature arose in the peasant
community, and matured as a folk wisdom, but was later turned into a
means of mobilizing in solidarity against aristocratic oppression. The nobles
fought back of course, but for once their heavy cavalry was repulsed by the
Swiss pike bearing democratic peace researchers. It is still too early to tell
whether this is a temporary aberration, or whether this heralds a new era
when the life of the peasant will improve at the expense of the ancient
feudal nobility.
The Priests
Like medieval priests, or oratores, the formal theorists in international
relations claim special access to divine knowledge, available not through
observation of the corrupt and impure world but though revelation and
contemplation of the perfection of the divinity. Highly respectful of learning
and abstract debate, the high formal theorists do no work whatsoever, other
than to study the sacred dogma and refine ever more minutely the laws and
teachings of the Holy Theory. Their debates on such arcane questions as,
"How many angels can dance on the head of a subgame perfect
equilibrium?" can get quite heated, but remain largely incomprehensible
and irrelevant to the laity. Their function is to reveal the will of God to the
lesser mortals, and to guide them in walking the correct path towards
rational choice.
The oratores maintain and add to the sacred body of scripture and like their
medieval counterparts, employ a rarefied language unavailable to the laity,
Latin in the old days, formal theory today. This conveniently makes it
difficult for the laity to question the guidance given or interpret the sacred
texts for themselves. Also like their priestly forebears, today's oratores.

depend on the patronage of the nobility for their livelihood and in turn lend
legitimation to their order. While the priests justified social stratification as
the will of God, rational choice scholars lend support to the nobles by taking
the vague self-serving verbal utterances that pass for theory among the
aristocrats and formalizing them in game theoretic terms, lending them the
sanction of Holy Theory.
In exchange for this service, selected priests and monastic orders are
endowed with sumptuous abbeys and bishoprics at the elite universities. Of
course not every man of God is so lucky, many a wandering mendicant friar
ekes out a sad existence selling clumsily faked fragments of the true
Theorem to credulous peasants. While there is a mutual relation of support
between the bellatores and oratores, there is also some rivalry and mutual
contempt.
Indeed the reluctance of the formal theorists to fight wholeheartedly for any
of the paradigms only confirms the nobility in their belief that the formal
theorists are cowardly and lacking in virility. For their part, the priests look
on the nobility as undereducated and deficient in proper piety towards
Rational Choice Theory and his ministers on earth, as well as being
excessively rude and belligerent.
As these examples indicate, the medieval world is a rich source of insight
into the social structure of modern international relations scholarship. The
medieval bellatores, laboratores, and oratores find their counterparts in the
discipline as we know it today. It will be interesting to see if the forces of
change in the medieval world, fairs and the increase of trade, improvements
in navigation, etc. will have a corrosive effect on the social hierarchy of IR,
as they did in the medieval period. This question must be left for future
research.

Thomas Schelling gets his due from Sweden but

not from Slate

BY DANIEL W. DREZNER

OCTOBER 12, 2005

My favorite class to teach in recent years has been Classics in International

Relations Theory. This is a great books course, starting with
Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War and ending with Thomas
Schellings Strategy of Conflict. The reason this is my favorite course is the
effect it has on the grad students, who consume a very steady diet of
literature that is supposed to be cutting edge. They are therefore shocked
to discover that the modern version of democratic peace theory bears little
relationship to Kant? original formulation, for example. However, they are
always stunned to learn that whole careers in international relations have
been built out of codifying a few sentences in Schelling. [Oh yeah, and
youre not guilty of this?ed. Ill plead not guilty on Schelling, but nolo
contender with regard to another Nobel-worthy economist.]
So its wonderful news to read that Schelling has co-won (with Robert
Aumann) the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of
Alfred Nobel for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and
cooperation through game-theory analysis. Kieran Healy has a good
post up detailing the relative contributions of Schelling and Aumann. Tyler
Cowen has a lovely post up(one of many) about his old Ph.D. advisor. In
Slate, Fred Kaplan tries to throw some cold water on Schellings Nobel,
pointing out:
Todays papers note his ingenious applications of game theory to labor
negotiations, business transactions, and arms-control agreements. But what
they dont note? What is little-known in general? is the crucial role he
played in formulating the strategies of controlled escalation and punitive
bombing that plunged our country into the war in Vietnam. This dark side
of Tom Schelling is also the dark side of social science? the brash
assumption that neat theories not only reflect the real world but can change
it as well, and in ways that can be precisely measured. And its a legacy that
can be detected all too clearly in our current imbroglio in Iraq.
Alas, Kaplan commits the very sin he accuses Schelling of making
providing an overly neat theory of how Schelling contributed to U.S. policy in
Vietnam. Kaplans own description of Schellings role in Vietnam contradicts
his claim:
[Assistant Secretary of Defense John] McNaughton came to see [Schelling].
He outlined the administrations interest in escalating the conflict in order to
intimidate the North Vietnamese. Air power seemed the logical instrument,

but what sort of bombing campaign did Schelling think would best ensure
that the North would pick up on the signals and respond accordingly? More
broadly, what should the United States want the North to do or stop doing;
how would bombing convince them to obey; how would we know that they
had obeyed; and how could we ensure that they wouldnt simply resume
after the bombing had ceased? Schelling and McNaughton pondered the
problem for more than an hour. In the end, they failed to come up with a
single plausible answer to these most basic questions.
So assured when writing about sending signals with force and inflicting pain
to make an opponent behave, Tom Schelling, when faced with a real-life
war, was stumped. He did leave McNaughton with one piece of advice:
Whatever kind of bombing campaign you end up launching, it shouldnt last
more than three weeks. It will either succeed by then? or it will never
succeed. The bombing campaign? called Operation Rolling Thunder?
Commenced on March 2, 1965. It didnt alter the behavior of the North
Vietnamese or Viet Cong in the slightest. Either they didnt read the signals?
or the signals had no effect.
In this description, theres not a whole hell of a lot of brashness indeed,
Schellings recommendation was not to escalate Rolling Thunder if the initial
bombing didnt work. In Kaplans passage, Schelling appears to be acutely
aware of the difficulties of measurement in applying his theory of
compellence to Vietnam. He made a recommendation, but with none of the
hubris Kaplan associates with social science (Kaplan also elides Schellings
leadership in a subsequent attempt to convince then-NSC adviser Henry
Kissinger to withdraw from Vietnam in the early days of the Nixon
administration). Kaplans essay contains a grain of truth about the dangers
of social science.
Too often, theorists come up with great models of the world by assuming
away petty inconveniences like bureaucratic politics, implementation with
incomplete information, or the effects of rhetorical blowback. But before he
throws out the baby with the bathwater, Kaplan might want to ask himself
the following question: if policymakers choose not to rely on social science
theories to wend their way through a complex world, what navigational aid
would Kaplan suggest in its stead? Policymakers across the political
spectrum always like to poke fun at explicit theorizing about international
relations. The problem is that they usually rely on historical analogies
instead which are, in every way, worse than the use of explicit theories.
UPDATE: Tyler Cowen quotes Business Weeks Michael Mandel on the
drawbacks of game theory:
Game theory is no doubt wonderful for telling stories. However, it flunks the
main test of any scientific theory: The ability to make empirically testable
predictions. In most real-life situations, many different outcomes from full
cooperation to near-disastrous conflict are consistent with the gametheory version of rationality. To put it a different way: If the world had been
blown up during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, game theorists could have

explained that as an unfortunate outcome but one that was just as

rational as what actually happened. Similarly, an industry that collapses into
run-amok competition, like the airlines, can be explained rationally by game
theorists as easily as one where cooperation is the norm.
Tyler has a number of responses (to which Mandel responds) but mine is
simple: game theory has the wrong name. It is a theoretical tool rather than
a theory in and of itself. Because of this, Mandel is correct that it is possible
to devise game-theoretic models that lead to contrasting predictions.
However, the virtue of game theory is that the differences made in starting
assumptions, institutional rules, and causal processes are laid bare. One can
then argue about how realistic the assumptions, rules, and processes are.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Mark Kleiman points out and explains why the
blogosphere is united in its high regard for Schelling.

How IR theory becomes OBE

BY DANIEL W. DREZNER

MARCH 7, 2006

There is a constant refrain for IR scholars to study the real world, to

analyze real world problems, generate policy-relevant theory, create work
that speaks to the here and now. And, in truth, although the field can be
faddish, there are ways in which, like many other disciplines, it moves
slowly. I bring this up because of Chris Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler
have an article in the Winter 2005/2006 issue of International Security
entitled Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq. The nut
of their argument:
In this article, we argue that the public will tolerate sign? Can t numbers of
U.S. combat casualties under certain circumstances. To be sure, the public is
not indifferent to the human costs of American foreign policy, but casualties
have not by themselves driven public attitudes toward the Iraq war, and
mounting casualties have not always produced a reduction in public
support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public
will continue to support military operations even when they come with a
relatively high human cost.
Our core argument is that the U.S. public?s tolerance for the human costs of
war is primarily shaped by the intersection of two crucial attitudes: beliefs
about the rightness or wrongness of the war, and beliefs about a war?s likely
success. The impact of each attitude depends upon the other. Ultimately,
however, we find that beliefs about the likelihood of success matter most in
determining the public?s willingness to tolerate U.S. military deaths in
combat. Our findings imply that the U.S. public makes reasoned and

reasonable judgments about an issue as emotionally charged and politically

polarizing as fighting a war. Indeed, the public forms its attitudes regarding
support for the war in Iraq in exactly the way one should hope they would:
weighing the costs and benefits. U.S. military casualties stand as a cost of
war, but they are a cost that the public is willing to pay if it thinks the initial
decision to launch the war was correct, and if it thinks that the United States
will prevail.
This thesis caused quite a sir a few months back, when Bush was outlining
the National Strategy for Victory In Iraq. I wrote then:
The assumption underlying Feaver and Gelpis hypothesis is so simple that
its never stated in the article if a sufficiently large majority opposes an
ongoing military intervention, any administration will have to withdraw
regardless of the strategic wisdom of such a move. This is why, I suspect,
the administration reacts so badly whenever it deals with domestic criticism
about the war it recognizes that flagging domestic support will translate
into a strategic straitjacket. The Feaver/Gelpi solution to this conundrum is
to have the President spell out a clear definition for victory. And my
suspicion is that theyre right so long as that definition contains criteria
that can be verifiable by non-governmental sources.

Three months ago, the Feaver/Gelpi thesis was politically controversial. Now
its OBE overtaken by events. Given the current state of affairs in Iraq,
public opinion has already rendered its judgment on whats happening
there. I dont think the administration will succeed in translating those
peceptions into any definition of victory that Im familiar with. So, In
between the new story on this article, and the widespread availability of the
article itself, the real world has moved on. This does not mean, by the way,
that thesis contained in the paper is wrong. Its just that its no longer
politically salient.