surfing the TLDR sea

Almost 370 years ago a coalition of over 100 representatives arrived in northwestern Germany and penned the treaties that would become the fundamental framework for our political world, the Peace of Westphalia. As a result of the labor of these parties, now-forsaken concepts like sovereignty, borders, self-determination, and independent statehood are bedrocks for our idea of what makes a nation real.

In the interim time the premise of Westphalia has become fundamental to western political thought and as a result, the modern world order. Alliances have been forged and dissolved, suns set on empires, and throughout nation-states have dictated the direction of resources and trade coming into or leaving their borders.

However, since Bretton Woods post World War II, a new school of disruptive actors has emerged and quietly subverted the very premise of Westphalia and called into question its premise. It took little time for the modern MNC to bring itself from small domestic purveyors to being globalized influencers of politics, economics, and our shared environment. 

The MNC, an individual in name only, exists within the amorphous realms of economics, trade, and finance that allowed it to have the ear of domestic leaders as pressure foreign countries to oblige their expansive wishes. In the 1990s Bill Clinton observed that globalization is the inexorable recognition of interconnectedness. More famously he found that “[what matters] is the economy, stupid.” Individually these two statements comport with the Westphalian model as we have observed. , however, it speaks to the state of global governance that took root when the president was a mere college student.

Unlike most every other resource in history, MNCs have for the most part dodged regulation. From the conclusion of WW2, MNCs were seen as a sort of economic interconnectedness that would prevent the atrocities of the previous war from recurring with the added benefit of profiting the victors of said war. Thus politicians and presidents kowtowed to the requests and propositions of MNCs whether deregulating an industry, adjusting sanctions, or discouraging foreign competition. It was this MNC-State interdependence that transformed our global economy into a giant beast laden with tax havens, exploitative labor, and dubious math that allowed the MNCs to profit and the nation-state to see added economic allure and therefore greater political prestige. 

In the past decade or so this sort of free-market approach has itself come under scrutiny just as Westphalia has been skewed under the MNC itself. Russian oligopolies are effectively slush funds for Vladimir Putin and his ilk to obfuscate their wealth and use economic influence as a private arm of the Russian state. China, under an authoritarian-capitalist model, has state-run MNCs that increasingly exert themselves globally while serving the state-ends for intelligence, propaganda, or otherwise. Recently, North Korea as well has begun to come from out of its shell and can be found in parts of Africa and Russia operating wholly-state run enterprises whose labor and profits benefit only the nation-state.

And the MNC isn’t only putting free markets into question, since the findings of Citizens United in the United States and the advent of social media, MNCs are able to funnel their wealth and resources into astroturf and/or grassroots campaigns towards whatever ends they are seeking. Social media companies, MNCs in and of themselves, are not only profiting from surveillance of whole countries but also putting a thumb to the scale of elections across the world. 

In the United States, just in the past weeks, President Donald Trump announced in spite of the extradition request to Canada that he would singularly drop all charges against Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou if China (NOT Huawei) would capitulate to trade deals with his administration. Make no mistake, by framing profit and economic growth as the end all be all of the success, MNCs have subverted the Westphalian model and become the Iago to the Othello of whoever welcomed them inside.

When those hundreds of royals and statesmen coalesced in Germany to end the war they created borders as a result. The MNC dissolved those borders and advanced an idea of non-state actors into the world politics in all the messy, violent complication that followed. To stifle foreign influence and defend national security perhaps, governments should reexamine the core premises of what Westphalian sovereignty means in a globalized world. Otherwise, we’re liable to regress to what preceded that peace.

Some four decades after Joseph Nye’s Foreign Affairs article on MNCs, “‘Multinationals: The Games and the Rules: Multinational Corporations in World Politics” his article finds continued relevance in our almost entirely globalized world. Early in the article, Nye frames how countries, in pursuit of economic growth and greater relevance, acquiesce to MNCs and celebrate their military-like occupation of sovereign states. On re-reading, Nye’s article first published in 1974 reads as prophetic for what lay ahead through the 80s, 90s, as it does for the present day. While his framing of this rise of super-MNCs and the “Coca-colonization” did not prove entirely right, the MNC and globalized business have found more covert means through which to influence nation states and IGOs alike.

In the 1970s American industry was dominated by the Automotive sector. In the midst of a significant financial slump the adage that “What is good for GM is good for America” proved true when the US government eventually interceded and rescued the car manufactures from bankruptcy. This event, which saw no major change to the tactics, techniques, and procedures for the automotive industrial bailout parallels with the similar events of 2008 in the automotive industry again  which was followed by the-2009 recession. On this occasion, the adage was generalized that the organizations who were saved were simply “too big to fail.”

This speaks to the stark contrast between MNCs and nation states. While the economy of a nation state can collapse, can be vulnerable, even exploitable the economy will continue to stand. Look no further than the economies of Ireland and Greece who, despite suspicious financial behavior and numerous austerity measures continue to operate. MNCs on the other hand, as exemplified by GM in the past and JP Morgan more recently cannot survive in the economies they influence without some sort of state support. I would posit, and reserve elaboration for a later blog post, that this framing of government being a sort of static regulatory body stands in contrast to MNCs being portrayed as a dynamic, energetic benefactor. I would further hold that this framing is one informed entirely by the dominance of economic and business majors in the literature of MNCs. Time and again we’ve seen the public sector being the momentum that facilitates private innovation. 

Whether or not this framing or my counter-framing are 100% accurate is moot. The dynamic, so employed because it is precisely that, is shifting and changing at a constant. No longer bound to a binary of high and low-state-ness, the MNC-State relationship is more faceted now than a simple jockeying for global influence. Whether regulating tax havens abroad and encouraging greater domestic production, where one facet of the relationship waxes the other wanes. Yet another further complication in a developing complicated and globalized world.

The pursuit of security and cooperation between states towards such an end continually shape world orders and international partnerships. K.J. Holsti qualified international relations as “organized relations between established entities.” In the current Westphalian model, defense departments are similarly structured and organized operations that inform inter-state relations not just between national militaries but their governments and administrations as well. With this in mind, security operations are a distinct subset of international relations as outlined by Holsti. State security, especially within the purview of interstate alliances, serve to bridge states as partners and provide wrote expectations of behavior. In a period of global turmoil, increasingly hostile rhetoric, nationalist zeal at historic highs, and otherwise global norms turning into a raging garbage fire it is incumbent on policymakers and scholars alike to find best practices for theory. It is more critical now than ever that we find new facets of state behavior for applied international relations theory for more informed decisions and ensuring continuity for defense alliances. 

This essay holds that security alliances are an unappreciated and unexplored facet for contemporary international relations theory. In this capacity, it will show how these treaties and alliances increasingly shape international norms more so than any rising or current superpower. A brief review of constructivist, liberal, and realist schools of international relations thought and what each respective school prescribes for inter-state activity. We will conclude by framing that each of these schools of thought should be employed by policy-makers and strategists to mitigate redundancy, create a diversity of thought, and better assure stability in inter-state alliances. International relations theory is more relevant than every towards our understanding of global stability, and the entirety of the IR toolkit lenses should be employed to yield better results in behavior between nation-states.
The first and foremost school of international relations that ties to security is Realism and its associated digressions. Since first entering the IR discourse in the 1940s under the tutelage of Hans Morgenthau, John Mearsheimer, and Kenneth Waltz. The Realist school has been the dominant influence over American foreign policy since World War II, most especially concerning nuclear proliferation and deterrence. Realists, broadly speaking, see nation-states as the principal actors within a frame of world politics which is perpetually anarchical. John Hall and T.V. Paul frame this anarchical status as being “one which lacks [a] central governing authority familiar to us in the domestic [capacity].” While this anarchy does not correlate to a state of chaos, it does in the Westphalian model that there is no higher authority for a sovereign state than itself and therein, nobody in place to create order on the state system. This absence of a “super authority” over sovereign states creates the bedrock from which Realist theorists ascribe states to act only to the ends which maximize their own benefit and pursue their own agendas globally. Realist theory is such that cooperation amongst states is an aberration from the norm, anarchy, and that any such cooperation is just as likely to evaporate “given the inevitability of changes in the national interest.” Alexander Wendt describes this as states working to “bandwagon” towards a common interest or otherwise compete amongst one another until a new balance relative to nation states is found. Whether by bandwagon or competitive balance, the path a state takes is shaped by its perceived own benefit and hedged against any probability of failure. This, according to Hedley Bull et al., is the procedure for a state as no higher system exists to contain its behavior.

This perception, whether academic or strategic, of a Hobbesian zero-sum game yields a binary approach, best personified as “carrot and stick” foreign policy. Such approaches with only incentives towards collaboration or penalization when interacting with other states are how realists theorize that actors establish themselves. A single state gathers power and influence through shrewd bargaining, and other parties seek to bandwagon to that state or otherwise counter-balance the ascension of power. Regardless, proponents of realism provide myriad case studies towards retroactively affirming their validity through geopolitical history, strategic military posturing, or otherwise. To this end, realist scholars seek to advise and encourage black and white policy decisions towards maximizing any political gain in the “zero sum game.”

While theorists of Constructivism also concede that anarchic conditions are prevalent in the international arena similar to realists, for the most part, they do not subscribe to any notion that there is a total lack of order in the international system. Pioneer of Constructivism Alexander Wendt explicated that the power politics endemic to neorealist though cannot arise from a state of anarchy. This “self-help” being another term for power politics is due to “process, not structure.” 

Intuitively, processes are more amenable to change than an institutionalized structure, most especially, as is the case on the international stage, no single state has complete control. As an abstract this may be difficult to formalize, more concretely, a blackjack player can improve one’s odds of success by playing with skill though that player cannot do so much as to alter the structure of the game entirely barring the player owning the casino outright. This is what constructivists are contrasting when speaking to “brute facts” independent to human behavior, and “social facts” which are contingent on established conventions. As such international norms are social constructs, which by their very nature can be altered, changed, or modified.

While constructivists are divided on the consequences of anarchy on inter-state actions and the ability to transform anarchic conditions socially, this premise of “social facts” are of prime interest to security strategists. In that constructivists can see a world amenable to social “adjustments” to norms, the binary of realist prescriptions is nullified, and a broader field of potential policy routes are available. This altered international environment allows nation-states to self-define and self-determine their role and their values through behavior and actions amongst peer states. For a security analyst, this value-based behavior theory is also of supreme value. A country with a norm of profilable behavior allows for a prediction for policy avenues, further still well-established norms would render some state behavior as either improbable if not outright unlikely. Some prescriptions of constructivist theory hold that a collective of norms currently regulates inter-state actions and that the maintenance of such a collective must be the focus of foreign affairs and defense departments.

Norms like the above can also be codified as law. This is the bedrock for the liberal school which is the philosophical predecessor for both realism and constructivism. The liberal school is one of the only schools which predates a model of individual secular states. Grotius held that all activity between states were bound by laws, whether the laws of nature or nations. In contrast to realist outlooks, liberals such as Immanuel Kant subscribe to a belief of “Perpetual Peace” wherein states cooperate towards peaceful means while maintaining their own authority. Kant’s theory has been rendered into a core tenet of democracy creating peace through shared security regimes. While liberal theory defines power broadly and subjective to a nation-state’s identity globalization has flattened the world and altered the identities of every nation and their associated partnerships alike. In Nye and Keohane’s Power and Independence, the two concede that states in this globalist structure have cause for cooperation as they continue seeking their utmost benefit and as a result cooperation is commonplace not outlier. Nye, Keohane and other liberal institutionalists subscribe to game theory disciplines of international relations which argue that cooperation amongst nation-states is in their own interest. It is this application of game theory that bears useful fruit for defense commanders, as game theory can be modeled and provide a matrix of predictable behavior.

 To best explicate how these three schools of international relations theory can forge best practices across institutions; first, we must isolate those responsible for policy making in government. For purposes of ease to the writer and frame of reference, herein the titles and offices for the United States Government will be used in the analysis. Due to the separation of powers, prescribed mission statements, and responsibilities three specific offices serve as sufficient bedrock to forecast and amend security operations at a national level. The Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the National Security Advisor are the three most important offices for overseeing strategic decision making and security operations.

The office of paramount importance for security policy is, intuitively, the Secretary of Defense and their associated office. The US Constitution charges the secretary of defense with the conduction of security operations on its own, as it serves as the office serves as the intergovernmental lead for the US military and US government security operations. The Secretary of Defense authority stems from Title 10 of the US code specifying the scope of the Department of Defense (herein DOD) programs and missions. Additionally Title 10 affixes the Secretary of Defense as authority figure second only to the US President. Per the Title 10 the Secretary of Defense can delegate authority for national defense programs to other offices.

Research into the DOD National Defense Strategy revealed that while codified laws, military instructions, and institutional directives are in place for international military alliances, neither every program has a specific instruction nor every program a specific office charged with overseeing it. Within DOD these inter-state military conferences, exercises, and exchanges are performed on the back of informal memoranda at various echelons of leadership and funded by discretionary budget allotments. A related RAND think tank report found that while there is no holistic analysis of the efficacy of said activities, that ultimately the Secretary of Defense remains the standard bearer for security alliances amongst foreign nations.

It is this unique position as having the institutional authority and delegatory power that the Secretary of Defense can best apply approaches from a liberal institutional lean. Not dissimilar to Kant or Grotius consensus of law and order the Secretary of Defense can better define inter-state alliances with a legal authority associated to such an office. As military alliances serve to assure security and partnership between states better, these alliances require negotiated and ratified treaties. Similarly, these sort of codified legal agreements and regimes for enforcement are the facilitating power behind weapons sales and similar technological exchanges amongst foreign states. The multinational agreement and joint development of something like the Lockheed Martin F-35 would be impossible without institutional rules agreed upon by all parties in all participating states. This sort of peaceful transaction serves to underscore a win-win situation for all parties involved that is preeminent to liberal institutionalism.

The second preeminent actor involved in policy-making towards national defense is the Secretary of State. Not dissimilar to the Secretary of Defense and DOD, the Secretary of State is charged by law to oversee all foreign affairs beyond defense issues though, per Title 22 of the US Code, a number of foreign relations that relate to foreign aid, arms trade, and some security issues fall under the purview of the State Department as well. The corps of ambassadors and diplomats serving under the Secretary of State are the personal representatives both for the President of the United States as well as the Secretary of State. This corps for the Secretary of State interface on behalf of the US government when dealing with foreign governments. In matters of security alliances typically the point of contact for a host country and the United States government is an ambassador or in some circumstance a diplomat or attache from the Department of Defense. Regardless of the rank or grade, in the capacity of representing the US government abroad, a diplomat must be literate in model behavior for the United States as well as their associated host country. These expectations to exemplify, build, and galvanize relations between two countries invoke the very disciplines of the constructivist school of international relations.

 Constructivist theories focus on political discourse in an attempt to quantify the behavior of states and how discourse can be better deployed to influence said behavior. Beyond official correspondence with regimented language and structured aims, diplomats et al. interface with host nations in more quotidian means. No other cadre of individuals could better be deployed to employ constructivist aims most directly towards international ends as both parties would be direct observers to how discourse shapes and informs relations between the two.

On the occasion that interpersonal relationships of diplomats prove insufficient for broader policy creation a more extended and detailed profile may yield more positive results. The Director of National Intelligence keeps a repository of pan-disciplinary intelligence reports for any facet of another nation. An intelligence report may estimate the likelihood of a nation’s future behavior in times of turmoil based on prior and contemporary assessments. As the DNI is responsible for the product of a number of agencies, some of which fall within both the Departments State and Defense, there is no single US code of law that specifies intelligence activities. Broadly speaking, intelligence operations and alliances are at the whim of the executive office and directives solely from the President. The nature of intelligence operations, a sort of life-or-death priority on ensuring the ongoing safety of the country safely falls within the realm of realist theory. Realist models provide the most difficult metrics by which to predict efficacy because the success of a realist prescription can only be found in retrospect. The strict criteria of realism, pursuit of state-interest for instance, are the structure and indicators necessary for intelligence analysts.

Each of these three cabinet parties participates in, and shape security operations and alliances. Integrating a diversity of international relations lenses throughout the triad of offices would serve to optimize decision-making processes and encourage positive cooperation between foreign partners. Each agency should represent an approach with a suitable theory to best inform their behavior and approaches. Tasking entire agencies and departments to embody a school of international relations is neither an easy task nor one for the faint of heart, an institutional doctrine could bring a whole host of hazards for those in power and risks of hierarchical biases such as groupthink. However, the gain to be rendered from this is a shorthand for institutional relationships and associated obligations.

Most importantly, all three offices should continue to cooperate in lest a single doctrine preoccupy foreign policy or the situation rooms for the President. As no one office can monopolize a program as international cooperation falls, to some extent, amongst all of the above no mistakes can be made moving forward due to myopic views. As the world continues to grow more complicated and formerly stable regimes are coming into question, pan-spectrum analysis of policy will become not just valuable but necessary. A more balanced approach to security operations is necessary for the offices of government, rather than personality driven changes a re-approach from a philosophical lean is the better guarantee for ongoing stability at present and into the future.

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As the common refrain of our course states, International Relations is a discipline which has privileged many births. During the fourth week the assigned reading includes The Continuity of Classic Tradition within which Holsti muddles the origins of IR as an area of “social inquiry.” From the anachronistic-realist Thucydides to the positivists of U of M, Holsti makes the case for proto-IR being a fusion of philosophy and game theory. While unintentional, this Eurocentric framing of IR comes as no surprise to any novice poli-sci student. IR at its bedrock is an elitist enterprise—I don’t feel thats a value judgement but merely an observation of the reality. Whether anchored by the triumvirate of Hobbes, Kant, and Rousseau, the diplomatic corps of pre-World War 1, or the American privitzation post-World War 2, IR has and continues to be a profession and study for those not prone to manual labor. That being said, whether Pelopennesian, Thirty Years, or Global, the motivation throughout human history for IR has been singular: war. 

The maturation of this singular focus reflects the growing complexity of both the academic field and, in this author’s view, the state of the world. Holsti walks the audience through Kantian individualist models of human frailty to Rousseaun game theory as tabled theories for why states pursue war. This historical framing prime the reader not just philosophically, but also give insight into the kind of individuals that were crafting IR, not exactly salt of the earth types. Not to belabor the point, it is merely my own rude awakening that beyond the rarified professional corps, I’m disappointed to find IR even as an academic discipline is one predicated on Eurocentric ivory towers. And this is where Holsti’s history of IR succeeds, it did what all advocates are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by buying-in. 

I’m a veteran. I wore a uniform and supported war efforts—albeit from behind displays and desks, ASCII and analysis. Like many before me who have let loose by crys of havoc, I want badly to mitigate what I would otherwise call “world suck.” International Relations for want of a windmill to tilt is my chosen study. But even in this I am hilariously and hopelessly outgunned. Holsti, in his concluding unit of the reading, holds that IR is an amalgamous field, one with the trappings of classical philosophy and postivist research, one trapped for want of an agreed unit of measure, and one which only seeks to resolve questions like the bedrock motives for war and reliable pathways to peace.

So—did Holsti help me better understand IR as a Modern Academic Discipline?

Yes, in that the historic wellspring is one as mired in fugue as the discipline is currently. The added benefit is that at least now I can better appreciate how the discipline found itself in the fugue it is at present.

I can only hope that the next generation of IR academics might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-realists, true-blue observers who dare to invest themselves in what they observe, a cadre with the naive gall to endorse and pursue peace for peace sake while galvanizing themselves for the potentials of conflict. Who treat of the myriad unsexy and unappealing human difficulties both a duty towards and a reverence for amicable solution. A group that defies ironic hand-washing as being “the way it is.” These sincere pragmatists would seem ancient before even being deputized into authority. Ineffectual, bad for ratings, soft, clearly provincial, apologists. And maybe that’s the whole point of this human endeavor. To defy the stag hunt, protect the commons, and bootstrap everyone equitably. Insurgents against ideologues and rhetoric, risking bankruptcy in a gamed global economy, irrelevance within a flatter global narrative, exploitation via exponentially complex interconnectivity, the opposition party to overkill and detatchment. One can only hope.

My reasons for taking the course was primarily as a counter balance to policy analysis and other “applied” courses in the Poli Sci/IR spectrum. IR theories, for me at least, are lens in a toolkit for an aspiring wonk. Previously I was an analyst in the military and know first hand that the myriad disciplines of intelligence, HUMINT, GEOINT, MASINT, SIGINT, etc have their own vocabulary, leans, focuses, biases, and margins for error, likewise IR theory has disciplines. To that end, just as the synergy of intelligence operations can give a more robust holistic view on an isolated event, I believe that IR can similarly synergize to provide a greater insight together than a myopic analysis in one lens.

To do that to any level of success requires more than arms length knowledge and this brings me to the course. Beyond just a rote memorization of what an IR theory is and its vocal point, 367B seeks to better inform by outlining the limits of those theories. 

That’s the whole appeal for my being here. IR is a host of lenses through which we can learn disciplines, practice them, apply them, and garner deeper insight into global affairs. I hope to explore that selection of lenses more so that I can synergize disciplines of IR going forward. Not unlike what Professor Crawford tabled, being in the medium is where I prefer to be. The world is amorphous and making sense of it is difficult. Rather than limit oneself to a singular discipline, a myopic interpretation of events, having several to choose from or blend is the sensible approach in my viewpoint.

A recently posted article by Alex Ward on VOX[1] applies IR theory to extrapolating Trump’s China policy and its deeper meaning and motives. This, while not academic or overtly IR Theory, is the kind of toolbox approach I aspire to reach. One through which a case study can be taken and the lenses set to it. The conclusions from each lens can then be fused in some manner to garner a greater understanding of contemporary world politics but also bi-lateral relations between the US and PRC. 

IR is, at least from my perspective, not just a fusion of multiple academic disciplines but more a philosophy than a science. Seeking to interpret and explicate motives but difficult to ground in metrics and facts. We need philosophy to balance the science, the thorough accounting and analysis in tandem with the conceptual and theoretical. I recognize that need in my perspective and its for that reason I took this course.

[1]https://www.vox.com/world/2018/9/18/17790600/us-china-trade-war-trump-tariffs-taiwan