Staying the Top Dog:
Great Powers and the Suppression of Future Challenges (new book project)
Building on themes in my first book and research into U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War, a new, major research project asks: when, why, and how do existing great powers attempt to suppress the emergence of future security challenges - often well before a plausible threat is even present? Initial empirical results have appeared with the Journal of Strategic Studies, showcasing the United States' push to suppress the European Union as a security competitor by enlarging NATO. Likewise, I recently received a large grant from the Koch Foundation to support the research.
The Theoretical and Historical Puzzle
Across time and space, great powers have worked to address both near-term security challenges - think of threats from other great powers - as well to shape their future security environments. Yet, while research on the former issue is extensive, scholarship on existing powers' efforts to influence their future operating environments is underdeveloped. Of course, scholars have found that existing great powers (what I call "incumbent powers") may risk preventive war against relatively rising peer competitors, just as recent work on time horizons suggests incumbents often cooperate with rising states when they stand to profit. Nevertheless, this work assumes incumbents’ behavior is simplified by the presence of a rising state with which to cooperate or compete. Missing, in short, is robust theorizing on incumbents' behavior when security challenges - especially from other states which may eventually become great powers - are still indeterminate.
This absence is even more surprising given historical variation in incumbents’ efforts to suppress prospective challenges. After the American War of Independence, for instance, Britain tried to contain the newly-formed United States along the Eastern seaboard through economic competition, as well as by building up Native American tribes to hinder the United States’ westward march, only to give up on this effort in the early 1800s. More dramatically, France and Austria worked diligently after the Napoleonic Wars to prevent the emergence of a unified German state utilizing a combination of domestic subversion, threats of war, and diplomatic leverage. By the 1860s, however, French and Austrian policy shifted, allowing Prussia to forcibly unify Germany – indeed, it was Otto von Bismarck’s success in doing so given long-standing French and Austrian opposition that contributed to the shock of German unification. More recently, the post-Cold War United States officially embrace a policy aiming to forestall (as the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance put it) the re-emergence of peer competitors. Yet, we now know that the United States sought (potentially needlessly) to prevent the emergence of the European Union as a security competitor in Europe, while nevertheless abetting China’s rise. What, then, explains this variation?
Overview of Argument (Preliminary)
Research remains ongoing. Overall, though, I argue that the competitive nature of international relations, combined with uncertainty over the future, creates strong incentives for incumbent powers to consider suppressing states which may – even far in the future – become security challenges. Counter-acting this incentive, however, is an equally stark risk: incumbents that try but fail at suppression can give the targeted state reasons to work ever-harder to expand and survive in a hostile world, as well as generate long-term animosities towards the incumbent. Attempting to suppress a future challenger, in other words, may paradoxically create the very threat incumbents seek to avoid.
Given these offsetting risks, incumbents’ willingness and ability to pursue suppression is informed by two factors. The first is the permissiveness of an incumbent’s security environment, that is, whether an incumbent faces proximate security threats that demand most of their attention and resources. After all, even powerful states faced with a Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union have reasons to ignore future security concerns to deal with near-term threats. If incumbents are to suppress future challenges, they therefore first need the opportunity to do so – they need a permissive near-term environment.
The second factor is the cohesiveness of the targeted state. Potential challengers can be hard targets to disrupt. Unless a state is highly dependent on external resources for its livelihood, once it acquires a large economy and national identity, an incumbent’s ability to influence its eventual emergence as a challenger is limited; short of war, affecting a state’s growth from the outside can be difficult. Instead, suppression is more likely when a potential great power has yet to cohere as a single polity – as, for instance, may be the case if several sovereign states merge into a single unit – or faces large socio-political divisions that can be exploited. At such times, incumbents can reasonably calculate that they may be able to prevent future challenges from emerging by either depriving the target the latent power to become a threat, or keeping it focused inward.
All things being equal, therefore, the more permissive an incumbent’s security environment and the less cohesive a potential challenger, the more likely incumbents are to pursue suppression. They can do so in a variety of ways including exacerbating intra-societal divisions to slow a state's growth; undermining a target to stop it from striking the domestic bargains needed to play a large international role; or inhibiting a state from acquiring the military tools to compete as a great power. The net effect allows an incumbent to take actions in the near-term to influence the composition of its future security environment.
Empirics and Implications
I am testing and revising this preliminary argument through extended case studies on the British attempt to suppress the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; the efforts by France and Austria to forestall a united Germany, and variation in American steps after the Cold War to prevent the emergence of a unified Europe while facilitating China’s rise. Once completed, however, it promises to carry large implications for theory and policy.
For one thing, the work helps fills a hole in much of IR theory - especially realist arguments - by examining the policies states can proactively pursue in security affairs. Especially as states sometimes roll the iron dice and wage preventive war against rising competitors, one might reasonably expect them to pursue similarly bullish strategies to block threats from emerging; whether and when they do so, however, remains under-theorized. At the same time, it raises the possibility that the great powers present at any point in time are partly a reflection of prior powers' decision to suppress (or not): if successful, suppression can select prospective great powers out of international contention! Needless to say, it also promises insight into efforts by today's great powers to structure their future environments.
Again, work remains ongoing, so please feel free to reach out with questions on this new project!
The Theoretical and Historical Puzzle
Across time and space, great powers have worked to address both near-term security challenges - think of threats from other great powers - as well to shape their future security environments. Yet, while research on the former issue is extensive, scholarship on existing powers' efforts to influence their future operating environments is underdeveloped. Of course, scholars have found that existing great powers (what I call "incumbent powers") may risk preventive war against relatively rising peer competitors, just as recent work on time horizons suggests incumbents often cooperate with rising states when they stand to profit. Nevertheless, this work assumes incumbents’ behavior is simplified by the presence of a rising state with which to cooperate or compete. Missing, in short, is robust theorizing on incumbents' behavior when security challenges - especially from other states which may eventually become great powers - are still indeterminate.
This absence is even more surprising given historical variation in incumbents’ efforts to suppress prospective challenges. After the American War of Independence, for instance, Britain tried to contain the newly-formed United States along the Eastern seaboard through economic competition, as well as by building up Native American tribes to hinder the United States’ westward march, only to give up on this effort in the early 1800s. More dramatically, France and Austria worked diligently after the Napoleonic Wars to prevent the emergence of a unified German state utilizing a combination of domestic subversion, threats of war, and diplomatic leverage. By the 1860s, however, French and Austrian policy shifted, allowing Prussia to forcibly unify Germany – indeed, it was Otto von Bismarck’s success in doing so given long-standing French and Austrian opposition that contributed to the shock of German unification. More recently, the post-Cold War United States officially embrace a policy aiming to forestall (as the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance put it) the re-emergence of peer competitors. Yet, we now know that the United States sought (potentially needlessly) to prevent the emergence of the European Union as a security competitor in Europe, while nevertheless abetting China’s rise. What, then, explains this variation?
Overview of Argument (Preliminary)
Research remains ongoing. Overall, though, I argue that the competitive nature of international relations, combined with uncertainty over the future, creates strong incentives for incumbent powers to consider suppressing states which may – even far in the future – become security challenges. Counter-acting this incentive, however, is an equally stark risk: incumbents that try but fail at suppression can give the targeted state reasons to work ever-harder to expand and survive in a hostile world, as well as generate long-term animosities towards the incumbent. Attempting to suppress a future challenger, in other words, may paradoxically create the very threat incumbents seek to avoid.
Given these offsetting risks, incumbents’ willingness and ability to pursue suppression is informed by two factors. The first is the permissiveness of an incumbent’s security environment, that is, whether an incumbent faces proximate security threats that demand most of their attention and resources. After all, even powerful states faced with a Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union have reasons to ignore future security concerns to deal with near-term threats. If incumbents are to suppress future challenges, they therefore first need the opportunity to do so – they need a permissive near-term environment.
The second factor is the cohesiveness of the targeted state. Potential challengers can be hard targets to disrupt. Unless a state is highly dependent on external resources for its livelihood, once it acquires a large economy and national identity, an incumbent’s ability to influence its eventual emergence as a challenger is limited; short of war, affecting a state’s growth from the outside can be difficult. Instead, suppression is more likely when a potential great power has yet to cohere as a single polity – as, for instance, may be the case if several sovereign states merge into a single unit – or faces large socio-political divisions that can be exploited. At such times, incumbents can reasonably calculate that they may be able to prevent future challenges from emerging by either depriving the target the latent power to become a threat, or keeping it focused inward.
All things being equal, therefore, the more permissive an incumbent’s security environment and the less cohesive a potential challenger, the more likely incumbents are to pursue suppression. They can do so in a variety of ways including exacerbating intra-societal divisions to slow a state's growth; undermining a target to stop it from striking the domestic bargains needed to play a large international role; or inhibiting a state from acquiring the military tools to compete as a great power. The net effect allows an incumbent to take actions in the near-term to influence the composition of its future security environment.
Empirics and Implications
I am testing and revising this preliminary argument through extended case studies on the British attempt to suppress the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; the efforts by France and Austria to forestall a united Germany, and variation in American steps after the Cold War to prevent the emergence of a unified Europe while facilitating China’s rise. Once completed, however, it promises to carry large implications for theory and policy.
For one thing, the work helps fills a hole in much of IR theory - especially realist arguments - by examining the policies states can proactively pursue in security affairs. Especially as states sometimes roll the iron dice and wage preventive war against rising competitors, one might reasonably expect them to pursue similarly bullish strategies to block threats from emerging; whether and when they do so, however, remains under-theorized. At the same time, it raises the possibility that the great powers present at any point in time are partly a reflection of prior powers' decision to suppress (or not): if successful, suppression can select prospective great powers out of international contention! Needless to say, it also promises insight into efforts by today's great powers to structure their future environments.
Again, work remains ongoing, so please feel free to reach out with questions on this new project!
