Political Violence Final

Sageman Leaderless Jihad

- In terms of the new al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb, little "al Qaedas" have sprung up everywhere in the world. They are just al Qaeda in name, trying to acquire the reputation of al Qaeda by using its name. There is strong evidence that the acquisition of the name by some leaders of the old Algerian GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat) has generated a lot of debate in jihadi chat rooms, with many of the traditional leaders rejecting this move -- The growth of al Qaeda propaganda operations is real enough. If there is one major improvement for al Qaeda since 2004, it is its use of the Internet. Its production arm As Sahab is of very high quality. The evidence that came out of the Tsouli trial also showed the sophistication of the communication between al Qaeda and some of its trusted followers online. Communication between al Qaeda Central and some of its peripheral members has improved since 2005. This is potentially dangerous, especially in the context of regrouping of al Qaeda leaders -- The general trends about al Qaeda Central simply do not support the resurgence theory -- The informal groups forming the post-9/11 and post-Iraq third wave of global Islamist terrorism are still being self-generated as described above, but with few exceptions can no longer establish any physical link to al Qaeda Central. Disconnected from one another, each of these existing or newly formed networks is basically on its own. Because of the greater scrutiny at borders, members of these networks hesitate to travel to another country and have begun to conduct operations within their own borders. This "new" phenomenon was labeled the homegrown terrorist. -- 'The concept of homegrown indicates that the members of these mainly Muslim diaspora groups in the West were born and radicalized in the host country. In the second wave, host Western governments did not appreciate that these groups radicalized locally because their ideology was foreign, imported from the Middle East -- The comfortable belief that there was no internal problem in Western countries was shattered when third-wave terrorists no longer had any significant physical link to al Qaeda Central. In the third wave, the threat was recognized for what it is, namely endogenous to host countries, coming from within. -- After the invasion of Iraq, the types of terrorist attacks that the third wave perpetrated had no or very faint connection to al Qaeda Central. Beginning in 2004, the clear operational links (command, control, training, personnel, or financing) of the second-wave operations gradually disappeared. The Madrid bombings of March 2004; the Asparagus 18 case in Belgium of March 2004; the Yanbu raid in Saudi Arabia in May 2004 -- The major impact of not being able to link up with al Qaeda Central is lack of access to technical expertise. By default, most of the third-wave terrorist groups are self-trained. This explains the deterioration in the quality of operations and tradecrafi in the past few years, which allows many potential terrorists to be detected and arrested before they come close to carrying out an operation -- For the third wave, the instructions for building bombs are on the Internet. However, it takes a courageous person to mix the chemicals to make bombs, because any small mistake can result in death. Even experienced bomb makers have mishaps and many are missing a finger or two. Most of the bombs manufactured from Internet tutorials, -- The informality of these local networks makes it difficult to identify who is a terrorist and who is simply a sympathizer-or a potential terrorist who did not yet have the opportunity to carry out an operation. There is no clear boundary to the networks, which often include loose acquaintances, distant relatives, as well as much closer friends and family who actively encourage violence -- The process of radicalization that generates small, local, self-organized groups in a hostile habitat but linked through the Internet also leads to a disconnected global network, the leaderless jihad. This is the natural outcome of a bottom-up mechanism of group formation in a specific environment shaped by top-down counterterrorist strategy. - These networks operate independently and are protected from detection if members of another group are questioned. Its leaderless and disconnected structure constitutes at the same time its strength (in terms of survivability and adaptability) and its weakness (lack of clear direction and political goals). -- The leaderless social movement has other limitations. To survive, it requires a constant stream of new violent actions to hold the interest ofpotential newcomers to the movement, create the impression of visible progress toward a goal, and give potential recruits a vicarious experience before they take the initiative to engage in their own terrorist activities

Mead The Return of Geopolitics

- So far, the year 2014 has been a tumultuous one, as geopolitical rivalries have stormed back to center stage. Whether it is Russian forces seizing Crimea, China making aggressive claims in its coastal waters, Japan responding with an increasingly assertive strategy of its own, or Iran trying to use its alliances with Syria and Hezbollah to dominate the Middle East, old-fashioned power plays are back in international relations. -- But Westerners should never have expected old-fashioned geopolitics to go away. They did so only because they fundamentally misread what the collapse of the Soviet Union meant: the ideological triumph of liberal capitalist democracy over communism, not the obsolescence of hard power. China, Iran, and Russia never bought into the geopolitical settlement that followed the Cold War, and they are making increasingly forceful attempts to overturn it. That process will not be peaceful, and whether or not the revisionists succeed, their efforts have already shaken the balance of power and changed the dynamics of international politics. -- This settlement reflected the power realities of the day, and it was only as stable as the relationships that held it up. Unfortunately, many observers conflated the temporary geopolitical conditions of the post-Cold War world with the presumably more final outcome of the ideological struggle between liberal democracy and Soviet communism. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama's famous formulation that the end of the Cold War meant "the end of history" was a statement about ideology. But for many people, the collapse of the Soviet Union didn't just mean that humanity's ideological struggle was over for good; they thought geopolitics itself had also come to a permanent end. -- At first, it all seemed to work. With history over, the focus shifted from geopolitics to development economics and nonproliferation, and the bulk of foreign policy came to center on questions such as climate change and trade. -- The relationships among those three revisionist powers are complex. In the long run, Russia fears the rise of China. Tehran's worldview has little in common with that of either Beijing or Moscow. Iran and Russia are oil-exporting countries and like the price of oil to be high; China is a net consumer and wants prices low. Political instability in the Middle East can work to Iran's and Russia's advantage but poses large risks for China. One should not speak of a strategic alliance among them, and over time, particularly if they succeed in undermining U.S. influence in Eurasia, the tensions among them are more likely to grow than shrink. - What binds these powers together, however, is their agreement that the status quo must be revised. Russia wants to reassemble as much of the Soviet Union as it can. China has no intention of contenting itself with a secondary role in global affairs, nor will it accept the current degree of U.S. influence in Asia and the territorial status quo there. Iran wishes to replace the current order in the Middle East -- led by Saudi Arabia and dominated by Sunni Arab states -- with one centered on Tehran. - Leaders in all three countries also agree that U.S. power is the chief obstacle to achieving their revisionist goals. Their hostility toward Washington and its order is both offensive and defensive: not only do they hope that the decline of U.S. power will make it easier to reorder their regions, but they also worry that Washington might try to overthrow them should discord within their countries grow. Yet the revisionists want to avoid direct confrontations with the United States, except in rare circumstances when the odds are strongly in their favor - The tide of history may be flowing inexorably in the direction of liberal capitalist democracy, and the sun of history may indeed be sinking behind the hills. But even as the shadows lengthen and the first of the stars appears, such figures as Putin still stride the world stage. They will not go gentle into that good night, and they will rage, rage against the dying of the light.

War Against the Jews Chapter 5

-"Th e programmatic principle of our party is its position on the racial problem, on pacifism and internationalism. Foreign policy is only a means to an end. In matters of foreign policy, I shall not permit myself to be bound." 1 Thi s was a cardinal principle in his outlook. In Mein Kampf he argued that since the goal of a state's diplomacy was to preserve its people, "every road that leads to this is then expedient. . . ." Here were embodied the two integral elements of policies he would pursue—unwavering commitment to National Socialist ideology, and a strategy combining opportunism, expediency, and improvisation. --T he first stage of German foreign policy, Germany's internal restoration, was to accomplish two ends. Germany first had to purge itself of its internal enemies, and second, make itself strong. "Whoever wants to act in the name of German honor today must first launch a merciless war against the infernal defilers of German honor," he wrote in his second book. He used the language of war often in speaking of the Jews. --T he second means of restoring German virility was remilitarization. T he German people, now racially purified, would have the will to war, but it needed the means to make war, which the hated Versailles Treaty had denied them. In his second book, Hitler declared that "the first task of German domestic policy ought to be that of giving the German people a military organization suitable to its national strength." --In his scheme, war was inevitable. "War is life," Hitler said in 1932. "War is the origin of all things." 2 War would be the means to realize his quest for Lebensraum, a word that incorporated Hitler's ideas of racial supremacy into a pretentious geopolitical scheme. War, invasion, expansion, in National Socialist ideology, were not merely the expression of an imperialist drive for natural resources, exploitable markets in underdeveloped countries, or power over vast territories and numerous peoples (though they were that also); primarily they were instruments to serve national/racial survival. --Hitler's concepts about the basis of a state's physical existence and about population growth in relation to available agricultural land and food supply were derived from geopolitical ideas with which he became familiar in Landsberg. The basic idea was that of population pressure. While population grows, the amount of soil remains constant. Increasing soil productivity is not a satisfactory or long-range solution to relieve the pressure of population growth, --Where would the soil come from? There were, in Hitler's plan, two sources—-the "lost territories" and "new soil." The "lost territories" were the lands that would soon become part of Greater Germany—Austria and western Czechoslovakia—and which would have to be won back by war, "back to the bosom of a common Reich, not by flaming protests, but by a mighty sword." But these territories would not solve Germany's problems. Only new soil would give Germany "a path to life." T he new soil that would give Germany its Lebensraum could be "only in the East." -T he Four Year Plan also provided for the expropriation of all Jews when Germany went to war. The Reichstag was to pass a law "making the whole of Jewry liable for all damage inflicted by individual specimens of this community of criminals upon the German economy, and thus upon the German people." With this authority, Goring, as Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan, would, after the Kristallnacht, levy a billion-mark contribution on the Jews --On January 21, 1939, Hitler told the Czech Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky: "We are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did on November 9, 1918. The day of reckoning has come." 35 That was confidential, but on January 30, 1939, Hitler dilated on this theme when he addressed the Reichstag on the anniversary of his accession to power. The most salient passage of that long speech was two paragraphs to which Hitler himself would refer often during the war. They constituted his declaration of war against the Jew

Mueller Retreat from Doomsday

-- It is the central burden of this book that war is merely an idea-an institution, like dueling or slavery, that has been grafted onto human existence. Unlike breathing, eating, or sex, war is not something that is somehow required by the human condition or by the forces of history. -- Insofar as it is discussed at all, there appear to be two schools of thought to explain what John Lewis Gaddis has called the "long peace. One school concludes that we have simply been lucky. They believe we live perpetually on the brink, teetering on a fragile balance; if our luck turns a bit sour, we are likely at any moment to topple helplessly into cataclysmic war.* As time goes by, however, this point of view begins to lose some of its persuasiveness. -- The other school stresses paradox: It is the very existence of unprecedentedly destructive weapons that has worked, so far, to our benefit-in Winston Churchill's memorable phrase, safety has been the "sturdy child of [nuclear] terror -- This book develops a third explanation: The long peace since World War II is less a product of recent weaponry than the culmination of a substantial historical process. For the last two or three centuries major war-war among developed countries-has gradually moved toward terminal disrepute because of its perceived repulsiveness and futility. -- - The book also concludes that nuclear weapons have not had an important impact on this remarkable trend-they have not crucially defined postwar stability, and they do not threaten to disturb it severely. They have affected rhetoric (we live, we are continually assured, in the atomic age, the nuclear epoch), and they certainly have influenced defense budgets and planning. However, they do not seem to have been necessary to deter major war, to cause the leaders of major countries to behave cautiously, or to determine the alliances that have been formed. Rather, it seems that things would have turned out much the same had nuclear weapons never been invented -- Consequently, if the revulsion toward war has grown in the developed world, this development cannot be due entirely to a supposed rise in its physical costs. Also needed is an appreciation for war's increased psychic costs. Over the last century or two, war in the developed world has come widely to be regarded as repulsive, immoral, and uncivilized -- Dueling and slavery no longer exist as effective institutions and have faded from human experience except as something one reads about in books. Although their reestablishment is not impossible, they show after a century of neglect no signs of revival. Other once-popular, even once-admirable, institutions in the developed world have been, or are being, eliminated because at some point they began to seem repulsive, immoral, and uncivilized

Wyman The abandonment of the Jew

-During the spring of 1941, while planning the invasion of Russia, the Nazis made the decision to annihilate the Jews in the territories to be taken from the USSR. --Until the Nazis blocked the exits in the fall of 1941, the oppressed Jews of Europe might have fled to safety. But relatively few got out, mainly because the rest of the world would not take them in. The United States, which had lowered its barriers a little in early 1938, began raising them again in autumn 1939 --But the United States did not take rescue action until January 1944, and even then the attempt was limited. Nor were America's nearly closed doors opened. Immigration was held to about 10 percent of the already small quota limits.* Thus the second—and last—chance to help the Jews of Europe came and went -Although Congress and the Roosevelt administration had shaped this policy, it grew out of three important aspects of American society in the 1930s: unemployment, nativistic restrictionism, and anti-Semitism --In addition, the mass media's failure to draw attention to Holocaust developments undercut efforts to create public pressure for government rescue action. But the deeper causes for the lateness and weakness of America's attempts at rescue, and for its unwillingness to take in more than a tiny trickle of fleeing Jews, were essentially the same ones that had determined the nation's reaction to the refugee crisis before Pearl Harbor. --While it is obvious that many who opposed refugee immigration felt no antipathy against Jews, much restrictionist and anti-refugee sentiment was closely linked to anti-Semitism. The plain truth is that many Americans were prejudiced against Jews and were unlikely to support measures to help them. -Late in April, two escapees from Auschwitz revealed full details of the mass murder taking place there, thus laying bare the fate awaiting the Hungarian Jews. And by May the American Fifteenth Air Force, which had been operating from southern Italy since December 1943, reached full strength and started pounding Axis industrial complexes in Central and East Central Europe. For the first time, Allied bombers could strike Auschwitz, located in the southwestern corner of Poland. The rail lines to Auschwitz from Hungary were also within range. -The War Department fully appreciates the humanitarian importance of the suggested operation. However, after due consideration of the problem, it is considered that the most effective relief to victims of enemy persecution is the early defeat of the Axis, an undertaking to which we must devote every resource at our disposal.17 --In sum, the only real obstacle to precision bombing of the death machinery would have been flak. Auschwitz had little flak defense until after the August raid. Only then were heavy guns added. In any case, the most likely operation would have combined a strike on the gas chambers with a regular attack on the industries. In that situation, the German guns would have concentrated on the aircraft over the factory area, five miles away from the planes assigned to the death installations --is evident that the diversion explanation was no more than an excuse. The real reason the proposals were refused was the War Department's prior decision that rescue was not part of its mission—the President's order establishing the War Refugee Board notwithstanding. To the American military, Europe's Jews represented an extraneous problem and an unwanted burden. -additional lives numbering in the hundreds of thousands might have been saved.

Counter-Enlightenment Ideologies and Nationalism

-Of course, it all went horribly wrong. The French Revolution and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars caused as many as 4 million deaths, earning the sequence a spot in the twenty-one worst things people have ever done to each other --Luard designates 1789 as the start of the Age of Nationalism. The players in the preceding Age of Sovereignty had been sprawling dynastic empires that were not pinned to a "nation" in the sense of a group of people sharing a homeland, a language, and a culture. This new age was populated by states that were better aligned with nations and that competed with other nationstates for preeminence --World War I, in this scheme, was a culmination of these nationalist longings. It was ignited by Serbian nationalism against the Habsburg Empire, inflamed by nationalist loyalties that pitted Germanic peoples against Slavic ones -A better way to make sense of the past two centuries, Michael Howard has argued, is to see them as a battle for influence among four forces—Enlightenment humanism, conservatism, nationalism, and Utopian ideologies—which sometimes joined up in temporary coalitions.106 Napoleonic France, because it emerged from the French Revolution, became associated in Europe with the French Enlightenment. In fact it is better classified as the first implementation of fascism. -Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, Bell has shown, were consumed by a combination of French nationalism and Utopian ideology.107 The ideology, like the versions of Christianity that came before it and the fascism and communism that would follow it, was messianic, apocalyptic, expansionist, and certain of its own rectitude. And it viewed its opponents as irredeemably evil: as existential threats that had to be eliminated in pursuit of a holy cause. Bell notes that the militant utopianism was a disfigurement of the Enlightenment ideal of humanitarian progress. To the revolutionaries, Kant's "goal of perpetual peace had value not because it conformed to a fundamental moral law but because it conformed to the historical progress of civilization.... And so they opened the door to the idea that in the name of future peace, any and all means might be justified—including even exterminatory war."1 --Another development of the 19th century that would undo Europe's long interval of peace was romantic militarism: the doctrine that war itself was a salubrious activity, quite apart from its strategic goals. Among liberals and conservatives alike, the notion took hold that war called forth spiritual qualities of heroism, self-sacrifice, and manliness and was needed as a cleansing and invigorating therapy for the effeminacy and materialism of bourgeois society

David Catastrophic Consequences

-The United States should recognize a vital and sobering truth: that civil wars can pose deadly threats to America --What does the United States worry about if not an attack by another great power? It worries about central governments weakening and collapsing, with weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorist groups or detonated by accident or without government authorization. America worries about internal wars destroying the ability of countries to export critical natural resources or purchase American treasury bonds and goods necessary to keep the American economy functioning --What these threats have in common is that they are largely unintended by the leaders of the countries from which they originate. Being unintended, the spillover effects of instability are not easily deterred. American policymakers have traditionally influenced foreign leaders through a simple formula: make the costs of defying America greater than the benefits. --For the first time in its history, the principal threats to the United States do not stem from the decisions of other governments --First, for civil war to erupt there needs to be an intense grievance held by a substantial portion of the population. If you are not fighting mad about something, you are not likely to fight. -Second, people need to believe they have the right to engage in violence. This right may stem from the belief that the government is illegitimate, or that other groups in the state are not part of the broader community whether they are formally citizens or not. 20 -Finally, people need to believe they will gain from violence before initiating civil strife. The belief that you can win through armed struggle goes a long way toward ensuring that armed struggle will commence. --Dire threats to the United States, therefore, stem not from the deliberate decisions of heads of state to attack American interests. Rather, the greatest dangers faced by the United States in the twenty-first century occur when leaders in certain countries lose control of what goes on within their borders. -Of the many dangers to the United States that would be unleashed by civil conflict, several stand out. The greatest is the use of weapons of mass destruction against American allies or the United States itself. -. Aside from natural resources, civil wars endanger the American economy when they threaten countries whose investment and trade policies are vital to America's economic well-being. Over one-quarter of America's national debt is held by foreigners, with Japan and China two of the principal creditors. If either country stopped buying American treasury notes, the United States would find it exceedingly difficult to finance its growing budget deficit, plunging the American economy into recession or even depression. --American dependence on imported natural resources is another development that makes the prospect of civil wars in some countries so dangerous. Civil wars can destroy resources the United States needs to maintain its way of life. While the United States imports a wide range of raw materials necessary to keep its economy functioning, oil stands alone in its importance. The United States and most of the rest of the world are dependent on imported oil. --Each of these threats is made worse by the prospect of outside great powers meddling in civil conflicts to the detriment of the United States. While the era of great power war may well be over, great power competition lives on. -Washington has a vital interest in protecting its frontiers. Civil strife threatens this interest when it occurs in countries located close to the United States, where the effects of violence are not confined to the country where it takes place, but spill over to affect America as well. --Only four places, in fact, meet the criteria of engaging critical American interests where the outbreak of civil war or major domestic disorder is a realistic possibility: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, and Mexico.

Russia's Perpetual Geopolitics

-These high-water marks aside (Peter the Great, Stalin in WWII), however, Russia has almost always been a relatively weak great power. It lost the Crimean War of 1853-56, a defeat that ended the post-Napoleonic glow and forced a belated emancipation of the serfs. It lost the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the first defeat of a European country by an Asian one in the modern era. It lost World War I, -Russians have always had an abiding sense of living in a providential country with a special mission—an attitude often traced to Byzantium, which Russia claims as an inheritance. It has been expressed differently over time— the Third Rome, the pan-Slavic kingdom, the world headquarters of the Communist International. Today's version involves Eurasianism, a movement launched among Russian émigrés in 1921 that imagined Russia as neither European nor Asian but a sui generis fusion. --Throughout, the country has been haunted by its relative backwardness, particularly in the military and industrial spheres. This has led to repeated frenzies of government activity designed to help the country catch up, with a familiar cycle of coercive state-led industrial growth followed by stagnation --Yet another factor that has shaped Russia's role in the world has been the country's unique geography. It has no natural borders, except the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic Ocean (the latter of which is now becoming a contested space, too). Buffeted throughout its history by often turbulent developments in East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, Russia has felt perennially vulnerable and has often displayed a kind of defensive aggressiveness. --Today, too, smaller countries on Russia's borders are viewed less as potential friends than as potential beachheads for enemies. In fact, this sentiment was strengthened by the Soviet collapse. --A final driver of Russian foreign policy has been the country's perennial quest for a strong state. In a dangerous world with few natural defenses, the thinking runs, the only guarantor of Russia's security is a powerful state willing and able to act aggressively in its own interests. A strong state has also been seen as the guarantor of domestic order, --What precluded post-Soviet Russia from joining Europe as just another country or forming an (inevitably) unequal partnership with the United States was the country's abiding great-power pride and sense of special mission. Until Russia brings its aspirations into line with its actual capabilities, it cannot become a "normal" country, no matter what the rise in its per capita gdp or other quantitative indicators is. --Russia today is not a revolutionary power threatening to overthrow the international order. Moscow operates within a familiar great-power school of international relations, one that prioritizes room for maneuver over morality and assumes the inevitability of conflict, the supremacy of hard power, and the cynicism of others' motives. -The real challenge today boils down to Moscow's desire for Western recognition of a Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet space (with the exception of the Baltic states). This is the price for reaching accommodation with Putin—something advocates of such accommodation do not always acknowledge frankly. It remains a concession the West should never grant. Neither, however, is the West really able to protect the territorial integrity of the states inside Moscow's desired sphere of influence. And bluffing will not work. So what should be done?

Triesman Why Putin Took Crimea

-Three plausible interpretations of Putin's move have emerged. The first— call it "Putin as defender"—is that the Crimean operation was a response to the threat of nato's further expansion along Russia's western border. By this logic, Putin seized the peninsula to prevent two dangerous possibilities: first, that Ukraine's new government might join nato, and second, that Kiev might evict Russia's Black Sea Fleet from its longstanding base in Sevastopol. --A second interpretation—call it "Putin as imperialist"—casts the annexation of Crimea as part of a Russian project to gradually recapture the former territories of the Soviet Union. Putin never accepted the loss of Russian prestige that followed the end of the Cold War, this argument suggests, and he is determined to restore it, in part by expanding Russia's borders --A third explanation—"Putin as improviser"—rejects such broader designs and presents the annexation as a hastily conceived response to the unforeseen fall of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. The occupation and annexation of Crimea, in this view, was an impulsive decision that Putin stumbled into rather than the careful move of a strategist with geopolitical ambitions --Nevertheless, information that has surfaced over the past two years and insights from recent interviews in Moscow suggest some important conclusions: Putin's seizure of Crimea appears to have been an improvised gambit, developed under pressure, that was triggered by the fear of losing Russia's strategically important naval base in Sevastopol. -If Putin's goal was to prevent Russia's military encirclement, his aggression in Ukraine has been a tremendous failure, since it has produced exactly the opposite outcome. Largely to deter what it perceives as an increased Russian threat, nato has deepened its presence in eastern Europe since Moscow's intervention, creating a rapid-reaction force of 4,000 troops that will rotate among Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania and stationing four warships in the Black Sea --"They weren't afraid of Ukraine joining nato," the source replied. "But they were definitely worried that the Ukrainians would cancel the [Russian] lease on [the naval base in] Sevastopol and kick out the Black Sea Fleet." --Why did Putin raise the referendum's stakes from autonomy to annexation? One reason was pressure from pro-Russian Crimean leaders, including Konstantinov, who feared ending up in a semi-recognized statelet like Abkhazia or South Ossetia, shunned by Ukraine and the West and too small to thrive economically. More important, having deployed Russian forces throughout the peninsula, Putin found himself trapped. To simply withdraw, allowing Ukrainian troops to retake Crimea and prosecute Moscow's supporters there, would have made him look intolerably weak, and after the return of Ukrainian control, Kiev might well have canceled Russia's lease on the naval base in Sevastopol. --Next, it suggests that Putin has become willing in recent years to take major strategic risks to counter seemingly limited and manageable threats to Russian interests. By deploying special forces in Crimea without planning for the region's political future, Putin showed that he is not just an improviser but also a gambler. --Putin's recent penchant for highstakes wagers may prove even harder for Western leaders to handle than a policy of consistent expansionism. A rational imperialist can be contained, but the appropriate response to a gambler who makes snap decisions based on short-term factors is less clear. In both Crimea and Syria, Putin has sought to exploit surprise, moving fast to change facts on the ground before the West could stop him. By reacting boldly to crises, he creates new ones for Russia and the world

Why Drones Work Byman

-drones have done their jobs remarkably well, by killing key leaders and denying terrorists sanctuaries in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, devastating Al Qaeda and associated anti-American militant groups at little financial cost, at no risk to US forces and with fewer civilian casualties than many other methods --critics claim that drones kill thousands of innocent civilians, alienate allied governments, anger foreign publics, illegally target Americans and set a dangerous precedent that irresponsible will abuse. --critics of drone strikes often fail to take into account the fact that the alternatives are either too risky or unrealistic, militants often can't be captured alive, raids and arrests are used a lot but sometimes they can't be done in war zones or unstable countries. --although a drone strike may violate the local state's sovereignty, it does so to a lesser degree than would putting U.S. boots on the ground or conducting a large scale air campaign. Drones also are more precise. --using drones is also less bloody than asking allies to hunt down terrorists, as countries like Pakistan and Yemen often torture and execute detainees, and bomb civilian areas. --the level of local anger about drones is actually lower than commonly portrayed --The program came under especially heavy criticism domestically in 2011, when Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen born in New Mexico, was killed by a drone strike in Yemen. The administration contends that the discussions held within the executive branch and the extensive vetting of evidence constitute a form of due process --The Obama administration claims that Awlaki was actively involved in plots against the United States and that the strike against him was legal under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (aumf), which Congress passed three days after 9/11 and which gives the president broad authority to use force against terrorist groups linked to the 9/11 attacks -The U.S. government also needs to guard against another kind of danger: that the relative ease of using drones will make U.S. intervention abroad too common.

Nye Detterance in Cyberspace

- There are three main vectors of cyberattack: via networks, via supply chains, and by human insiders who may be malicious or just careless. Disconnecting from the network is costly, and the "air gaps" it creates do not guarantee security. A high-ranking official of U.S. Cyber Command has told the author that almost every serious intrusion into American military networks has involved human error - Attribution is a matter of degree. Despite the problems of proxies and false flags and the difficulty of obtaining prompt, high-quality attribution that would stand up in a court of law, there is often enough attribution to enable deterrence. Three major audiences are relevant. A defending government will want relatively high assurance from its intelligence agencies in order to avoid escalation and catalytic entrapment by a malicious third party, but it can rely on all-source intelligence in addition to network forensics. Second, the attacking government or nonstate actor knows what its role was, but it cannot be sure how good the opposing forensics and intelligence are. It can deny involvement, but it will never know how credible its deception was - The third audience is the domestic and international publics that may need to be convinced of the justice of retaliation. How much information to disclose to this audience is a political as much as a technical question. Punishment Detterance: As has been shown, retaliatory threats of punishment are less likely to be effective in the cybersphere, where the identity of the attacker is uncertain; there are many unknown adversaries; and knowing what assets can be held at risk and for how long is unclear. In that narrow use of the concept, deterrence based on threats of punishment will not play as large a role in strategies for cyberweapons as it does for nuclear weapons Denial: In the cyber era, deterrence by denial (which is indifferent to attribution) has regained some of its importance. As noted above, the early Pentagon strategy focused more on defense than on punishment. Cyber defenses are notoriously porous, and the conventional wisdom holds that offense dominates defense.41 Good cyber defenses, however, can build resilience or the capacity to recover, which is worthy in itself; they can also reduce the incentive for some attacks by making them look futile - Deterrence by denial also works by adjusting the work factor of offense and defense. By chewing up the attacker's resources and time, a potential target disrupts the cost-benefit model that creates an incentive for attack.. Entanglement: Along with punishment and denial, entanglement is an important means of making an actor perceive that the costs of an action will exceed the benefits. Entanglement refers to the existence of various interdependences that make a successful attack simultaneously impose serious costs on the attacker as well as the victim. -Precision targeting of minor economic targets might not produce much direct blowback in the absence of retaliation, but the rising importance of the Internet to economic growth described earlier may increase general incentives for self-restraint. The legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party depends heavily upon economic growth, and Chinese economic growth increasingly depends upon the Internet - In addition, some interdependence is systemic, in which a state has a general interest in not upsetting the status quo or seeing too much fragmentation of the Internet. To the extent that a state's economic growth (and political regime) becomes more dependent upon the Internet, the state may develop interests in systemic stability Norms: A fourth mechanism by which dissuasion works is norms and taboos. Normative considerations can deter actions by imposing reputational costs that can damage an actor's soft power beyond the value gained from a given attack. Like entanglement, norms can impose costs on an attacker even if the attack is not denied by defense and there is no retaliation. Unlike entanglement, however, some degree of attribution is necessary for norms to work. - A more fruitful approach to arms control in the cyber world would develop a taboo not against types of weapons but against certain types of targets. The United States has promoted the view that the internationally recognized laws of armed conflict (LOAC), which prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians, apply in cyberspace. Accordingly, the United States has proposed a ban on targeting certain civilian facilities in peacetime - Nonstate actors create another problem for deterrence in the cyber realm as they are more plentiful than states and often difficult to identify - Of course, some cases are harder than others. As in the kinetic world, deterrence is always difficult for truly suicidal actors such as terrorists who seek religious martyrdom, but thus far terrorists have used cyber more for recruitment and coordination than for destruction. This usage may change in the future as criminals sell ever more destructive hacking tools on the black market where terrorists can easily purchase them. At the same time, even terrorists and criminals are susceptible to deterrence by denial. -A U.S. threat of economic sanctions seems to have changed the declaratory policy of Chinese leaders at the time of the September 2015 summit between President Obama and President Xi. The U.S. indictment in May 2014 of five officers from China's People's Liberation Army for cyber theft of intellectual property initially seemed counterproductive when China responded by boycotting a previously agreed bilateral cyber committee. The costs of naming and shaming, however, plus the threat of further U.S. sanctions that was floated during the summer of 2015, seem to have changed Chinese behavior. - As for the future, the speed of innovation in the cyber realm is greater than it was in the nuclear realm. Over time, better attribution forensics may enhance the role of punishment; and better defenses through encryption or machine learning may increase the role of denial. The current advantage of offense over defense may change over time. Cyber learning is also important. As states and organizations come to understand better the limitations of cyberattacks and the growing importance of the Internet to their economic well-being, cost-benefit calculations of the utility of cyberwarfare may change just as nuclear learning altered analysts' understanding of the costs of nuclear warfare

Pinker IS THE LONG PEACE A DEMOCRATIC PEACE

-Democratic government is designed to resolve conflicts among citizens by consensual rule of law, and so democracies should externalize this ethic in dealing with other states. Also, every democracy knows the way every other democracy works, since they're all constructed on the same rational foundations rather than growing out of a cult of personality, a messianic creed, or a chauvinistic mission. The resulting trust among democracies should nip in the bud the Hobbesian cycle in which the fear of a preemptive attack ori each side tempts both into launching a preemptive attack. -Critics of the Democratic Peace theory then point out that if one draws the circle of "democracy" small enough, not that many countries are left in it, so by the laws of probability it's not surprising that we find few wars with a democracy on each side. Other than the great powers, two countries tend to fight only if they share a border, so most of the theoretical matchups are ruled out by geography anyway. We don't need to bring in democracy to explain why New Zealand and Uruguay have never gone to war, or Belgium and Taiwan. If one restricts the database even further by sloughing off early pieces of the time line (restricting it, as some do, to the period after World War II), then a more cynical theory accounts for the Long Peace: since the start of the Cold War, allies of the world's dominant power, the United States, haven't fought each other -Finally, since democratic leaders are accountable to their people, they should be less likely to initiate stupid war s that enhance their glory at the expense of their citizenries' blood and treasure. -If developed countries became democratic after World War II, and if democracies never go to war with one another, then we have an explanation for why developed countries stopped going to war after World War II. As Stewart's skeptical questioning implies, the Democratic Peace theory has come under scrutiny, especially after it provided part of the rationale for Bush and Blair's invasion of Iraq in 2003. -war of 1812, revolutionary wars France and Britain, India and Pakistan war, American Civil War --Finally, since democratic leaders are accountable to their people, they should be less likely to initiate stupid war s that enhance their glory at the expense of their citizenries' blood and treasure. -If developed countries became democratic after World War II, and if democracies never go to war with one another, then we have an explanation for why developed countries stopped going to war after World War II. As Stewart's skeptical questioning implies, the Democratic Peace theory has come under scrutiny, especially after it provided part of the rationale for Bush and Blair's invasion of Iraq in 2003. --A final headache for the Democratic Peace theory, at least as it applies to overall war-proneness, is that democracies often don't behave as nicely as Kant said they should. The idea that democracies externalize their law-governed assignment of power and peaceful resolution of conflicts doesn't sit comfortably with the many wars that Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium fought to acquire and defend their colonial empires—at least thirty-three between 1838 and 1920, and a few more extending into the 1950s and even 1960s -¬Equally disconcerting for Democratic Peaceniks are the American interventions during the Cold War, when the CIA helped overthrow more-or-less democratic governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and Chile (1973) which had tilted too far leftward for its liking.

Ward Ethics of Assasssination

-It is clear that there exists, as one commentator puts it, "an internationally recognized rule prohibiting assassination."5 Although this rule is well-established in international law, its significance in international politics arguably has less to do with technical legal proscriptions than with a more general and visceral aversion to assassination as an instrument of foreign policy, particularly when the intended victims are national leaders. --In the United States the issue came to prominence during the 1 975-7 6 Church committee and Pike committee congressional investigations into U.S. intelligence abuses, which included involvement in plots to assassinate foreign heads of state in the 1950s and 1960s. In response to these embarrassing revelations, and to preempt legislation pending in Congress, in 1977 President Gerald Ford issued Executive Orde r 11905 prohibiting U.S. involvement in assassination --although the norm is grounded in fundamental moral principles its development was decisively influenced by the structure of the international system. In effect, by limiting legitimate modes of violence between states to war or large-scale intervention, the prohibition on assassination reinforces the position of great powers relative to other states and nonstate actors, thereby serving a power-maintenance function in the international system. -So prevalent was assassination in Europe that the practice gained acceptance in the treatises that would serve as the foundation for the nascent field of international law. " In 151 6 Thoma s More extolled the use of assassination both as a useful tool of statecraft and as a means of sparing ordinary citizens the hardships of wars for which their leaders were responsible -The ideational phenomenon that accompanied the rise of sovereign states was what Martin van Creveld describes as "the fiction that wars are waged by states, not men. Th e fiction has it that the member s of the government have no personal interest in the matter and are merely acting on behalf of their states."66 Rousseau offered this explication of the idea: "Individual combats, duels, encounters are not acts that constitute a state... . War is not, therefore, a relation between man and man -Legitimate targets assumed the use of legitimate means, however; using treachery crossed the line from war to assassination. Moreover, this aspect of the ideational structure of sovereign statehood interacted synergistically with mass armies: it reinforced the normative idea that clashes between large masses of men—rathe r than intrigue— was the proper way for conflicts to be settled. -- In the early seventeenth century, attitudes toward assassination began to change dramatically. Historians and political philosophers began to condemn assassination, even of tyrants and religious enemies.40 Moreover, this change was reflected in both the rhetoric and actions of the era's political and military leaders, leading to a marked decline in the number of assassinations and a distaste for the act that bordered on contempt. -- In the early 1600s, however, a second strand was added: the association of assassination with disorder and systemic chaos. Specifically, conditions emerged that contributed to the idea that national leaders should be insulated from political violence -An effective norm against assassination further increased the already formidable advantage of large states by placing their leaders effectively off-limits from personal attack, thereby dictating that the use of force in international relations be conducted on terms most favorable to them -- A crucial role in the development of the norm against assassination was played by early international lawyers, who in the late 1500s and early 1600s sought for the first time to systematically define the rights and responsibilities of nations in their dealings with one another Balthazar Ayala, writing half a century later, was the first prominent jurist to condemn the use of assassination in foreign policy, arguing that moral considerations of honor , valor, and good faith should take precedence over expediency and self-interest. -- T h e first structural change is the increasing prevalence of nontraditional modes of violence such as guerrilla warfare and terrorism, particularly by nonstate actors. The rise of terrorism in a sense represents the explicit rejection of norms that seek to prohibit certain means of violence as illegitimate. Terrorist groups refuse to play by the rules of international politics partly because they are unable to. As a result, threatened states may feel pressured to respond with similar tactics. -- Despite its continuing influence, evidence has mounted in recent decades that the norm against assassinating foreign leaders may be waning. On e sign is the increasing frequency of calls by lawmakers and commentators to consider assassination as a foreign policy option. - In 1998, allegations surfaced in Britain that Her Majesty's Secret Service plotted to kill Moammar Qaddafi in 1996, 12. Press reports also raised the possibility of French government complicity in the plane crash that killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in 1994, triggering horrific ethnic violence

Political Violence What Terrorists Really Want

-The strategic model—the dominant paradigm in terrorism studies—posits that terrorists are rational actors who attack civilians for political ends. According to this view, terrorists are political utility maximizers; people use terrorism when the expected political gains minus the expected costs outweigh the net expected beneªts of alternative forms of protest --The strategic model—the dominant paradigm in terrorism studies—posits that terrorists are rational actors who attack civilians for political ends. According to this view, terrorists are political utility maximizers; people use terrorism when the expected political gains minus the expected costs outweigh the net expected beneªts of alternative forms of protest -Seven empirical puzzles vitiate the strategic model's premise that terrorists are rational people who are motivated mainly to achieve their organization's stated political goals. The seven puzzles contradicting the strategic model are (1) terrorist organizations do not achieve their stated political goals by attacking civilians; (2) terrorist organizations never use terrorism as a last resort and seldom seize opportunities to become productive nonviolent political parties; (3) terrorist organizations reºexively reject compromise proposals offering signiªcant policy concessions by the target government; -(4) terrorist organizations have protean political platforms; (5) terrorist organizations generally carry out anonymous attacks, precluding target countries from making policy concessions; (6) terrorist organizations with identical political platforms routinely attack each other more than their mutually professed enemy; and (7) terrorist organizations resist disbanding when they consistently fail to achieve their political platforms or when their stated political grievances have been resolved and hence are moot. -, I found that in a sample of twenty-eight well-known terrorist campaigns, the terrorist organizations accomplished their stated policy goals zero percent of the time by attacking civilians -The strategic model assumes that terrorist organizations disband or renounce terrorism when it continuously fails to advance their political platforms.81 To act otherwise, Pape says, is "deeply irrational" because "that would not constitute learning."82 Yet terrorist organizations survive for decades -This section demonstrates, however, that an alternative incentive structure has superior explanatory power. There is comparatively strong theoretical and empirical evidence that people become terrorists not to achieve their organization's declared political agenda, but to develop strong affective ties with other terrorist members. In other words, the preponderance of evidence is that people participate in terrorist organizations for the social solidarity, not for their political return -True to the model, terrorist organizations (1) prolong their existence by relying on a strategy that hardens target governments from making policy concessions; (2) ensure their continued viability by resisting opportunities to peacefully participate in the democratic process; (3) avoid disbanding by reºexively rejecting negotiated settlements that offer signiªcant policy concessions; (4) guarantee their survival by espousing a litany of protean political goals that can never be fully satisªed -0 (5) avert organization-threatening reprisals by conducting anonymous attacks, even though they preclude the possibility of coercing policy concessions; (6) annihilate ideologically identical terrorist organizations that compete for members, despite the adverse effect on their stated political cause; and (7) refuse to split up after the armed struggle has proven politically unsuccessful for decades or its political rationale has become moot.

Clinton Hard Choices

-When I met with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, he urged the United States to support international military intervention to stop Qaddafi's advance toward the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in eastern Libya. I was sympathetic, but not convinced. The United States had spent the previous decade bogged down in long and difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and before we joined yet another conflict, I wanted to be sure we had thought through the implications. --Qaddafi turned loose foreign mercenaries and thugs to attack demonstrators. There were reports of indiscriminate killings, arbitrary arrests, and torture. Soldiers were executed for refusing to fire on their fellow citizens. In response to this violent crackdown, protests morphed into armed rebellion, especially in parts of the country that had long chafed at Qaddafi's quixotic rule. --Just a few days earlier, on March 9,1 had joined the rest of President Obama's national security team in the White House Situation Room to discuss the crisis in Libya. There was little appetite for direct U.S. intervention. Defense Secretary Robert Gates believed that the United States did not have core national interests at stake in Libya. The Pentagon told us that the most talked-about military option, a no-fly zone like the one we had maintained in Iraq during the 1990s, was unlikely to be enough to tip the balance toward the rebels. Qaddafi's ground forces were just too strong -The very next day a development in Cairo began to change the calculus. After more than five hours of deliberation and debate, the Arab League, representing twenty-one Middle Eastern nations, voted to request that the UN Security Council impose a no-fly zone in Libya. If the Arabs were willing to take the lead, perhaps an international intervention was not impossible after all. Certainly it would put pressure on Russia and China, who might otherwise be expected to veto any Westernbacked action at the UN Security Council --Qaddafi made our job easier when he went on television on March 17 and warned the citizens of Benghazi, "We are coming tonight, and there will be no mercy." He pledged to go house by house looking for "traitors" and told Libyans to "capture the rats -"America has unique capabilities and we will bring them to bear to help our European and Canadian allies and Arab partners stop further violence against civilians, including through the effective implementation of a no-fly zone." A few hours later U.S. Navy warships in the Mediterranean fired more than a hundred cruise missiles, targeting air defense systems inside Libya and at a large column of armored vehicles approaching Benghazi. -If the new government could consolidate its authority, provide security, use oil revenues to rebuild, disarm the militias, and keep extremists out, then Libya would have a fighting chance at building a stable democracy. If not, then the country would face very difficult challenges translating the hopes of a revolution into a free, secure, and prosperous future. And, as we soon learned, not only Libyans would suffer if they failed.

The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

Five Principle Findings: At its core, suicide terrorism is a strategy of coercion, a means to compel a target government to change policy. The central logic of this strategy is simple: Sui-cide terrorism attempts to inflict enough pain on the opposing society to overwhelm their interest in resist- ing the terrorists demands and, so, to cause either the government to concede or the population to revolt against the government. The common feature of all suicide terrorist campaigns is that they inflict punish- ment on the opposing society, either directly by killing civilians or indirectly by killing military personnel in cir- cumstances that cannot lead to meaningful battlefield victory First: Suicide Terrorism is strategic, vast majority of attacks are not isolated or random acts but occur in clusters as part of a broader campaign. Groups announce goals and stop when those goals have been completely or partially achieved. Second: the logic of suicide terorirsm is specially designed to coerce modern democracies to make significant concession to national self determination. Third: During the past 20 years, suicide terrorism is on the rise because terrorists have learned that it pays. American and French forces left Lebanon in 1983 after a terror campaign. Israel quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995 Second, the strategic logic of suicide terrorism is specifically designed to coerce modern democra-cies to make significant concessions to national self-determination. In general, suicide terrorist campaigns seek to achieve specific territorial goals, most often the withdrawal of the target state's military forces from what the terrorists see as national homeland.. Fourth: although moderate suicide terrorism led to moderate concessions, these more ambitious suicide terrorist campaings are not likely to achieve still greater gains and may fail completely. Suicide terrorism does not change a nation's willingness to trade high interest for high costs, but suicide attacks can overcome a country's efforts to mitigate civilian costs. Fifth: The most promising way to contain suicide terrorism is to reduce terrorists confidence in tehir ability to carry out attacks on the target society. States should invest in border defences and other means of homeland security --Suicide terrorists' willingness to die magnifies the coercive effects of punishment in three ways. First, sui- cide attacks are generally more destructive than other terrorist attacks. An attacker who is willing to die is much more likely to accomplish the mission and to cause maximum damage to the target. Suicide attackers can conceal weapons on their own bodies and make last-minute adjustments more easily than ordinary ter- rorists. They are also better able to infiltrate heavily guarded targets because they do not need escape plans or rescue teams. Suicide attackers are also able to use certain especially destructive tactics such as wearing "suicide vests" and ramming vehicles into targets --suicide attacks are an especially convincing to signal the likelihood of more pain to come, because it shows that the attackers could not have been deterred, and by violating norms in the use of violence.

Obama's Libya Debacle

On March 17, 2011, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973, spearheaded by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama, authorizing military intervention in Libya. The goal, Obama explained, was to save the lives of peaceful, pro-democracy protesters who found themselves the target of a crackdown by Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. -We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi—a city nearly the size of Charlotte—could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world," Obama declared --That verdict, however, turns out to have been premature. In retrospect, Obama's intervention in Libya was an abject failure, judged even by its own standards. Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have increased severalfold. Rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Qaddafi did during his last decade in power, Libya now serves as a safe haven for militias affiliated with both al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (isis). --Despite what defenders of the mission claim, there was a better policy available—not intervening at all, because peaceful Libyan civilians were not actually being targeted. Had the United States and its allies followed that course, they could have spared Libya from the resulting chaos and given it a chance of progress under Qaddafi's chosen successor: his relatively liberal, Western-educated son Saif al-Islam. --As bad as Libya's human rights situation was under Qaddafi, it has gotten worse since nato ousted him. Immediately after taking power, the rebels perpetrated scores of reprisal killings, in addition to torturing, beating, and arbitrarily detaining thousands of suspected Qaddafi supporters. The rebels also expelled 30,000 mostly black residents from the town of Tawergha and burned or looted their homes and shops, on the grounds that some of them supposedly had been mercenaries --The best statistical evidence of that comes from Misurata, Libya's third-largest city, where the initial fighting raged most intensely. Human Rights Watch found that of the 949 people wounded there in the rebellion's first seven weeks, only 30 (just over three percent) were women or children, which indicates that Qaddafi's forces had narrowly targeted combatants, who were virtually all male -=Moreover, by the time nato intervened, Libya's violence was on the verge of ending. Qaddafi's well-armed forces had routed the ragtag rebels, who were retreating home. By mid-March 2011, government forces were poised to recapture the last rebel stronghold of Benghazi, thereby ending the one-month conflict at a total cost of just over 1,000 lives. --In reality, on March 17, Qaddafi pledged to protect the civilians of Benghazi, as he had those of other recaptured cities, adding that his forces had "left the way open" for the rebels to retreat to Egypt. Simply put, the militants were about to lose the war, and so their overseas agents raised the specter of genocide to attract a nato intervention—which worked like a charm -Just then, however, Libyan expatriates in Switzerland affiliated with the rebels issued warnings of an impending "bloodbath" in Benghazi, which Western media duly reported but which in retrospect appear to have been propaganda --he intervention in Libya may also have fostered violence in Syria. In March 2011, Syria's uprising was still largely nonviolent, and the Assad government's response, although criminally disproportionate, was relatively circumscribed, claiming the lives of fewer than 100 Syrians per week. After nato gave Libya's rebels the upper hand, however, Syria's revolutionaries turned to violence in the summer of 2011, perhaps expecting to attract a similar intervention -The real lesson of Libya is that when a state is narrowly targeting rebels, the international community needs to refrain from launching a military campaign on humanitarian grounds to help the militants. Western audiences should also beware cynical rebels who exaggerate not only the state's violence but their own popular support, too. Even where a regime is highly flawed, as Qaddafi's was, chances are that intervention will only fuel civil war—destabilizing the country, endangering civilians, and paving the way for extremists.

Fearon PArtion and World Order

Second, an international order in which major powers carve up lesser powers on an ad hoc basis would make all states less secure. Ad hoc use of partition to solve civil wars would undermine an implicit and relatively stable bargain among the major powers, in place since the 1950s. The bargain rests on the expectation that if any one major power seeks to change interstate borders by force, others may follow, to the detriment of the first. -If the major powers want to start redesigning states, they need a political and legal framework that mitigates these two incentive effects. The best feasible solutions may be: (1) strengthening and making more precise international legal standards on human (and perhaps group) rights; (2) threatening to impose sanctions on states that do not observe these standards in regard to minorities, possibly including support for agents of the oppressed group; and (3) supporting the norm of partition only when it is accepted by mutual consent, In brief, the standard diagnosis is Wilsonianism, the theory that separatist nationalism stems from bad borders and incompatible cultures. Wilsonianism holds that violent separatism arises when state borders are not properly aligned with national groups, which are fixed, preexisting entities. Separatism is due to the injustice of depriving proper nations of proper states. If one accepts this, then the remedy for nationalist wars is obvious. Just redraw the borders. Impose partitions. -First, ad hoc partition applied to one trouble spot may help produce more violent separatist nationalist movements elsewhere, in addition to making existing nationalist wars more difficult to resolve. The world is not composed of a fixed number of true nations, so that peace can be had by properly sorting them into states. Rather, there is literally no end of cultural difference in the world suitable for politicization in the form of nationalist insurgencies. As long as controlling a recognized state apparatus is a desirable thing and nationhood is understood to ground claims to a state, ambitious individuals will try to put together nationalist movements to claim statehood -Second, the incentive effects of imposing partitions on weak states apply not just to relations between insurgents and governments, but also to relations among states. An international order in which coalitions of major powers go around carving up lesser powers on an ad hoc basis would make all states, including the major powers themselves, less secure. Such an order would publicly proclaim that a state's territory is secure only if it is militarily strong enough to be coded as a major power, and even then it must be lucky enough to find itself in the right major power coalitions. Incentives for arms build-ups, nuclear weapons proliferation, and other Realpolitik strategies would increase The question of partition arises in the first place when competing nationalisms seek to mobilize within a common international boundary, and especially when violence ensues. Drawing a new line to separate populations is problematic if any line will leave an unhappy and fearful minority on one or both sides Relatedly, critics have observed that partitions are often accompanied by significant violence, and may simply replace civil conflict with interstate conflict in the form of revanchism. Ireland, India, Palestine, and Cyprus are leading examples, with the world-threatening nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan the most dramatic The best I can do here is this: Condition international support and pressure for a consensual partition on a state's unwillingness to observe some set of internationally agreed standards regarding human and minority rights. The first incentive problem would be mitigated because separatist violence and ethnic civil war would not necessarily gain international support for partition; it would depend on the policies of the state in which the separatists lived. The second incentive problem would be mitigated because wholesale carving up of recognized states would be rejected in favor of inducements, and these in turn would be, in a weak sense, a matter of law. That is, there would be some notion of justifiable and general conditions under which the threats and inducements should be applied.

Collier The Conflict Trap

The problem that is pretty distinctive to the bottom billion is not political conflict but its form. Some of them are stuck in a pattern of violent internal challenges to government. Sometimes the violence is prolonged, a civil war; sometimes it is all over swiftly, a coup d'état. These two forms of political conflict both are costly and can be repetitive. They can trap a country in poverty. --The first link we found was between risk of war and initial level of income. Civil war is much more likely to break out in low-income countries: halve the starting income of the country and you double the risk of civil war. --What else makes a country prone to civil war? Well, slow growth, or worse, stagnation or decline. As an approximation, a typical low-income country faces a risk of civil war of about 14 percent in any five-year period --Dependence upon primary commodity exports—oil, diamonds, and the like—substantially increases the risk of civil war. -ake the repression of political rights. Political scientists have measured this sort of behavior, scoring it year by year, government by government. There is basically no relationship between political repression and the risk of civil war. Take economic or political discrimination against an ethnic minority. Two political scientists at Stanford, Jim Fearon and David Laitin, have measured this for more than two hundred ethnic minorities around the world. They found no relationship between whether a group was politically repressed and the risk of civil war. Ethnic minorities are just as likely to rebel with or without discrimination. -But the sad reality seems to be that grievances are pretty common. Rebels usually have something to complain about, and if they don't they make it up. All too often the really disadvantaged are in no position to rebel; they just suffer quietly --Let's move on to another illusion: that all civil war is based in ethnic strife. This may seem self-evident if you go by newspaper accounts, but I have come to doubt it. Most societies that are at peace have more than one ethnic group. And one of the few low-income countries that is completely ethnically pure, Somalia, had a bloody civil war followed by complete and persistent governmental meltdown --What else makes a country prone to civil war? Geography matters a bit. A huge country with the population dispersed around the edges, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), or one with a lot of mountainous terrain, such as Nepal, is more at risk than flat, densely populated little places, probably because rebel armies find more places to form and to hide. --Let us get back to the costs of conflict. Many of the costs are borne by neighboring countries. Diseases don't respect frontiers, and the economic collapse also spreads. Since most countries are bordered by several others, the overall cost to neighbors can easily exceed the cost to the country itself --Now we reach the aspect of civil war that is crucial for the thesis of this book: it is a trap. Suppose a country starts its independence with the three economic characteristics that globally make a country prone to civil war: low income, slow growth, and dependence upon primary commodity exports. It is playing Russian roulette. That is not just an idle metaphor: the risk that a country in the bottom billion falls into civil war in any five-year period is nearly one in six, the same risk facing a player of Russian roulette. --Once a war has begun, the economic damage undoes the growth achieved during peace. Worse, even aside from this economic damage the risk of further war explodes upward. Civil war leaves a legacy of organized killing that is hard to live down. Violence and extortion have proved profitable for the perpetrators. Killing is the only way they know to earn a living.

Bass Freedom's Battle

These realists see international politics as an amoral and savage struggle for survival and conquest. Sovereign states in the brawl of international anarchy must rely on their own strength to ensure their security. This leaves scant room for moral action. So for realists, humanitarian intervention—if there is such a thing—is a novel and alarming notion. This realist view that humanitarian intervention is new has become utterly conventional --This radical new development is, to many realists, an unambiguously bad one. George Kennan, the realist wise man who came up with the Cold War strategy of containment, argued only for interventions to stop practices "seriously injurious to our interest, rather than just our sensibilities. --Realists—especially ones of the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's stripe—are by no means amoral. Rather, theirs is a morality of prudence and restraint, where the paramount goal is the avoidance of war. The point of a balance of power is a profound moral goal: it keeps the peace. --At best, some realists think that humanitarian intervention might be a kind of luxury item: a frivolity indulged in by a particularly strong country enjoying a rare moment of international dominance—until it gets its inevitable comeuppance from some new challenger and turns back to the serious business of forging a balance of power. --More often, realists worry that any injection of morality into warfare will lead to unlimited crusades. Realists have long worried about a dangerously immature Utopian impulse in democratic foreign policy. They particularly distrust feckless public opinion --More profoundly, realists doubt that states' motives are really humanitarian. The British realist scholar E. H. Carr saw no moral absolutes, only ideological justifications -In 1817, Britain insisted on a treaty that called for the abolition of Spain's slave trade by 1820. To the horror of Cuban plantation owners, and in violation of Spanish sovereignty, Britain sent abolitionist officials to look out for the slaves—and even made a dramatic show of military force, dispatching a ship to Havana, with black British soldiers aboard to take freed Africans to British colonies. -In short, realism cannot explain away the humanitarian interventions of the nineteenth century. Britain repeatedly went against its own realpolitik interests, including the core security concern of checking Russian expansionism, in the name of humanity. There really is such a thing as humanitarianism; it is not just veiled imperialism; governments can sometimes be made to send troops not because of self-interest but because of a genuine sense of humanity. --Realists draw the line at the border. They extol only the community of citizens within a country and ignore foreigners. George Orwell, trying to understand why Germans were bombing him in World War II, argued, "One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognises the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty." Realists are patriotic— loyal to the state—and nothing but patriotic. Narrow patriotism, for realists, trumps broad humanitarianism --The radical premise of human rights is that human lives are human lives, near or far. As Immanuel Kant argued, "Because a . . . community widely prevails among the Earth's peoples, a transgression of rights in one place in the world is felt everywhere." Edmund Burke, denouncing British corruption in India, declared, "The laws of morality are the same every where." -¬For liberals, there is something obnoxious about nationalist discrimination. When patriots or nationalists arbitrarily value one group of people over another, they are, to some liberals, little better than racists.3 Thus one of the harshest indictments against bystanders to genocide is that they are lulled by their own bigotry. Would Americans have stood by if the Rwandans were white, or if the Bosnians were overwhelmingly Christian? --The crucial point is that, in liberal states—today and in the nineteenth century—the ambit of solidarity is potentially unlimited. Everyone's lives count. Pan-Arabism and pan-Slavism are limited to lands where Arabs and Slavs live; the same is true for even the biggest world religions and nationalisms. And in despotic countries, the apparatus of state power demands fealty to the state, not to other communities; dictators are jealous rulers. But liberal political leaders, while jealous, too, confront a unique problem in trying to keep their populations loyal to themselves alone. Their state ideology has no natural end point. It encompasses the entire human race.

Menon The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention

Well- meaning leaders and political thinkers have struggled to develop rules and norms of humanitarian intervention that would beckon world powers to end mass atrocities and inform their efforts to do so. Yet these attempts fail when one moves from general sentiments to operational particulars. --This book presents a critique of the prevailing interventionist view. I am not morally disinterested when it comes to the slaughter of innocent people. Nor do I reject the conviction that it would be good, in principle, to have a universal consensus on when and how to respond to mass atrocities. I do not claim that nothing can or should ever be done in response to mass atrocities. --The difficulty arises in trying to find an all- purpose solution that rests on a global moral and legal consensus and that, in Evans's words, can stop mass killings "once and for all." Another challenge is to anticipate and to deal with the unintended consequences. The moral fervor of humanitarian interventionists is admirable, but it produces in them unwarranted confidence, even hubris. --They seem to believe that if the objective is good, the outcome will be as well, and that their critics either lack ethical commitment or represent states that want the freedom to engage in repression without outside interference. One does not, alas, follow from the other: criticism of humanitarian intervention does not necessarily stem from cold- heartedness; not all of its opponents are brutal despots or apologists for them. --Their reasons for entering some conflicts and not others do not simply reflect the facts or scale of the atrocity— consider Rwanda, the horrors of which would have compelled any principled intervener— but their own interests. -Worse, liberal democracies have dealt with— and, indeed, actively supported— any number of brutal regimes guilty of killing their own people by the tens of thousands. Democracies may not go to war with other democracies, but their complicity in the massive violence perpetrated by nondemocratic states is undeniable. So is their willingness to exempt themselves from the universal values and legal principles they espouse and propagate -The Consensus: They assume that the end of the Cold War transformed international politics in ways that have made a universal approach to humanitarian intervention feasible. In the nineteenth century, the European powers intervened in support of Christian peoples persecuted by the rickety Ottoman Empire. Today any state may, in principle, intercede on behalf of any people. This transformation, we are told, owes to the spread of democratic ideals and human rights norms, the activity of transnational human rights organizations and "global civil society" more generally, and the emerging international consensus surrounding universal human rights. --I reject each of the propositions underlying the consensus. The end of the Cold War has been consequential, but the claim that it has fundamentally transformed the ways in which states think and act amounts, as E. H. Carr observed, to an instance of the wish fathering the thought. It is not that states are incapable of embracing altruistic and ethical precepts. It is that they rarely move from words to deeds when circumstances lead them to conclude that acting in the service of overarching moral principles, as opposed to concrete interests, will be costly in terms of blood, treasure, and strategic goals. -Yet the contention that the world is tending toward a convergence of norms and, in consequence, cohering as a community bound by common values is far-fetched. Despite the interconnections I have mentioned, the world—​ by virtue of power disparities among states, their varied historical experiences, and the strength and diversity of nationalism, culture, and religion—​ is pluralistic. The extent of the pluralism makes it hard to discern an international community united by a common morality or even universal mores and norms. -The proposition that armed intervention is legitimate when a state fails to fulfill these sovereign responsibilities likewise lacks the wide support that proponents of humanitarian intervention pretend it enjoys. --The central claim of intervention proponents— the worldwide spread of universal norms and their acceptance by the international community— therefore amounts to little more than a conceit. Much of the world fears and suspects that the effort to legitimate humanitarian intervention by means of supposedly universal norms is designed to camouflage the pursuit of power by the powerful. This sentiment is especially strong in non- European, ex- colonial countries, which are understandably cynical about the true motives underlying such ethical principles. -The claim that there is now a new level of great power consensus is hard to take seriously, especially when it comes to humanitarian intervention. It was not a commonality of values that enabled the Balkan interventions: both Russia and China opposed them as violations of sovereignty, and they were not the only countries to do so. What mattered was the West's massive advantage in power— the "unipolar moment," as columnist Charles Krauthammer famously put it. -If context and national interests matter, so do power ratios. Powerful states such as Russia and China, to take but two of the most obvious examples, will be immune from armed intervention no matter what they do in their rebellious regions, whether the North Caucasus, Tibet, or Xinjiang. That's as it should be. It would be foolish— indeed, dangerous— to insist on a doctrine of humanitarian intervention that is absolutely consistent in its application. --Ordinary citizens seem to understand this better than do influential proponents of intervention. When Western citizens sense that intervention does not defend or extend vital interests and could even end in bloody and costly quagmires, they reject it or offer tepid approval. Despite the much- vaunted "CNN effect," whereby viewers who are exposed to visceral televised images of atrocities demand that their leaders stop the butchery, no convincing evidence suggests that people are willing to undergo major hardships, spend a lot of money, or see many of their soldiers die in order to save strangers. --Interventions can also have more immediate malign effects on the intended beneficiaries and their neighbors. Nowhere is this more evident than in Libya, where, since the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi, there is no functioning state to speak of. The resulting vacuum has been filled by militias that defy the central government and by armed Islamist groups that pursue a millenarian agenda

Rwanda in Retrospect Kuperman

- Among Washington policymakers and pundits, only two basic principles have achieved some consensus. First, U.S. ground troops generally should not be used in humanitarian interventions during ongoing civil wars. Second, an exception should be made for cases of genocide, especially where intervention can succeed at low cost. Support for intervention to stop genocide is voiced across most of the political spectrum -A close examination of what a realistic U.S. military intervention could have achieved in the last clear case of genocide this decade, Rwanda, finds insupportable the oft-repeated claim that 5,000 troops deployed at the outset of the killing in April 1994 could have prevented the genocide -Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the genocide was its speed. According to survivor testimonies gathered by African Rights and Human Rights Watch, the majority of Tutsi gathering sites were attacked and destroyed before April 21, only 14 days into the genocide. Given that half or more of the ultimate Tutsi victims died at these sites, the unavoidable conclusion is that a large portion of Rwanda's Tutsi had been killed by April 21, perhaps 250,000 in just over two weeks. That would be the fastest genocide rate in recorded history -Second, the violence was reported to be waning when it actually was accelerating. Just four days in, on April 11, The New York Times reported that fighting had "diminished in intensity" and Le Monde wrote three days later that "a strange calm reigns in downtown" Kigali. --Maximum intervention would have used all feasible force to halt large-scale killing and military conflict throughout Rwanda. Moderate intervention would have sought to halt some large-scale killing without deploying troops to areas of ongoing civil war, in order to reduce U.S. casualties. Minimal intervention would have relied on air power alone -More likely, the announcement of Western intervention would have accelerated the killing as extremists tried to finish the job and eliminate witnesses while they had a chance, such was the trend ahead of the RPA advance. During the genocide, the ringleaders even trumpeted false reports of an impending Western intervention to help motivate Hutu to complete the killings. Although the Hutu generally held back from mass killing at sites guarded by foreigners to avoid provoking Western intervention, they would have lost this incentive for restraint had such an intervention been announced. -Depending on the search method, large-scale genocide could have been stopped during the fourth or fifth week after the deployment order, by May 15 to May 25. Interestingly enough, this would have been before the task force s airlift had been completed. Based on the genocide s progression, such an intervention would have saved about 275,000 Tutsi, instead of the 150,000 who actually survived. Maximum credible intervention thus could not have prevented the genocide, as is sometimes claimed, but it could have spared about 125,000 Tutsi from death, some 25% of the ultimate toll. -The sixth claim is most realistic: Had UNAMIR been reinforced several months prior to the outbreak of violence, as Belgium urged at the time, genocide might have been averted. More troops with the proper equipment, a broad mandate, and robust rules of engagement could have deterred the outbreak of killing or at least snuffed it out early. Such reinforcement would have required about 3,500 additional high-quality troops in Kigali, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, adequate logistics, and the authorization to use force to seize weapons and ensure security without consulting Rwandan police. This would have been the 5,000-troop force that Dallaire envisioned?but one deployed prior to the genocide -Indeed, such early reinforcement of UNAMIR is the only proposed action that would have had a good chance of averting the genocide.

Collier The Bottom Billion

-By 2015, however, it will be apparent that this way of conceptualizing development has become outdated. Most of the five billion, about 80 percent, live in countries that are indeed developing, often at amazing speed. The real challenge of development is that there is a group of countries at the bottom that are falling behind, and often falling apart. --The countries at the bottom coexist with the twenty-first century, but their reality is the fourteenth century: civil war, plague, ignorance. They are concentrated in Africa and Central Asia, with a scattering elsewhere -This problem matters, and not just to the billion people who are living and dying in fourteenth-century conditions. It matters to us. The twentyfirst-century world of material comfort, global travel, and economic interdependence will become increasingly vulnerable to these large islands of chaos. And it matters now. As the bottom billion diverges from an increasingly sophisticated world economy, integration will become harder, not easier. -The concept of a development trap has been around for a long time and is most recently associated with the work of the economist Jeffrey Sachs, who has focused on the consequences of malaria and other health problems. Malaria keeps countries poor, and because they are poor the potential market for a vaccine is not sufficiently valuable to warrant drug companies making the huge investment in research that is necessary --This book is about four traps that have received less attention: the conflict trap, the natural resources trap, the trap of being landlocked with bad neighbors, and the trap of bad governance in a small country -Given the power of compound growth rates, these differences between the bottom billion and the rest of the developing world will rapidly cumulate into two different worlds. Indeed, the divergence has indeed already pushed most of the countries of the bottom billion to the lowest spot in the global pile.

Nuclear Peace Pinker

-Let's hope not. If the Long Peace were a nuclear peace, it would be a fool's paradise, because an accident, a miscommunication, or an air force general obsessed with precious bodily fluids could set off an apocalypse. Thankfully, a closer look suggests that the threat of nuclear annihilation deserves little credit for the Long Peace -Finally, the nuclear peace theory cannot explain why the wars that did take place often had a nonnuclear force provoking (or failing to surrender to) a nuclear one—exactly the matchup that the nuclear threat ought to have deterred.196 North Korea, North Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Panama, and Yugoslavia defied the United States; Afghan and Chechen insurgents defied the Soviet Union; Egypt defied Britain and France; Egypt and Syria defied Israel; Vietnam defied China; and Argentina defied the United Kingdom. -As for the superpowers themselves, Mueller points to a simpler explanation for why they avoided fighting each other: they were deterred plenty by the prospect of a conventional war. World War II showed that assembly lines could mass-produce tanks, artillery, and bombers that were capable of killing tens of millions of people and reducing cities to rubble. This was especially obvious in the Soviet Union, which had suffered the greatest losses in the war. It's unlikely that the marginal difference between the unthinkable damage that would be caused by a nuclear war and the thinkable but still staggering damage that would be caused by a conventional war was the main thing that kept the great powers from fighting. -For one thing, weapons of mass destruction had never braked the march to war before. The benefactor of the Nobel Peace Prize wrote in the 1860s that his invention of dynamite would "sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions, [since] as soon as men will find that in one instant whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they will surely abide in golden peace."192 Similar predictions have been made about submarines, artillery, smokeless powder, and the machine gun -Also, the theory of the nuclear peace cannot explain why countries without nuclear weapons also forbore war—why, for example, the 1995 squabble over fishing rights between Canada and Spain, or the 1997 dispute between Hungary and Slovakia over damming the Danube, never escalated into war, as crises involving European countries had so often done in the past.

Pinker the Trajectory of European War

-Once again we see a decline over the five centuries: the great powers have become less and less likely to fall into wars. During the last quarter of the 20th, only four wars met Levy's criteria: the two wars between China and Vietnam (1979 and 1987), the UN sanctioned war to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait (1991), and NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia to halt its displacement of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo (1999). -The career of organized violence in Europe, then, looks something like this. There wa s a low but steady baseline of conflicts from 1400 to 1600, followed by the bloodbath of the Wars of Religion, a bumpy decline through 1775 lowed by the French troubles, a noticeable lull in the middle and late 19th century, and then, after the 20th-century Hemoclysm, the unprecedented ground-hugging levels of the Long Peace. --The backdrop of European history during most of the past millennium is everpresent warring. Carried over from the knightly raiding and feuding in medieval times, the war s embroiled every kind of political unit that emerged in the ensuing centuries --The backdrop of European history during most of the past millennium is everpresent warring. Carried over from the knightly raiding and feuding in medieval times, the war s embroiled every kind of political unit that emerged in the ensuing centuries. -What were they fighting over? The motives were the "three principal causes of quarrel" identified by Hobbes: predation (primarily of land), preemption of predation by others, and credible deterrence or honor. Conquest and plunder were the principal means of upward mobility in the centuries when wealth resided in land and resources rather than in commerce and innovation. But what the leaders sought was not just material rewards but a spiritual need for dominance, glory, and grandeur—the bliss of contemplating a map and seeing more square inches tinted in the color that represents your dominion than someone else's -dynastic wars

War Against the Jews Chapter 2

-T o begin with, at the simplest and most obvious level, the Germans defined themselves in contrast to the French. What was French was un-German. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860), poet and pamphleteer, wrote of the war winter of 1812 that the German fatherland was located "where every Frenchman is called foe, and every German is called friend."2 Th e great liberal ideas of the time—liberty, equality, fraternity —were French ideas, and Germans of that generation denounced liberal ideas as un-German. Tha t outlook proved to be a durable one. --Called the father of German nationalism, Fichte has also been called the father of modern German anti-Semitism. His celebration of German nationalism was matched by his denigration of Jews. In 1793 he had argued against Jewish emancipation, characterizing the Jews as a state within a state that would undermine the German nation. Jewish ideas were as obnoxious as French ideas. The only way in which he could concede giving rights to Jews, he said, would be "to cut off all their heads in one night, and to set new ones on their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish idea." --Because Jews were loyal to their own "state within the state," Riihs said they could not be loyal to the Christian state. They could, therefore, be only its subjects, but not its citizens --Th e Volkist conception turned these universal qualities into specifically German ones. The peasant, by virtue of his descent from Germanic-Teutonic stock and by virtue of the mysterious qualities of Germanness in the very soil he worked, became the embodiment not merely of natural man, but of Germanic man. The antagonist of Germanic man became the Jew, the embodiment of the urban man, the man of civilization. A money economy, for example, as the product of disintegrative civilization, was associated with Jews, who were buyers, sellers, and lenders --Meanwhile, hostility to the Jews began to emerge from the newly developing socialist movement. Tha t anti-Jewish outlook had two sources: first, the atheist, anti-Christian bias condemning Judaism as the antecedent of Christianity, and second, the anti-capitalist ideology that depicted the Jew as the embodiment of capitalism, the banker, the middleman, the parasitic profiteer. --By mid-1916 the war had begun to go badly. There were no military victories to compensate for the food shortages, the hardships, the wounded and the dead in battle. The Jews became the "explanation" for whatever was going wrong. The Jews, the accusations went, were not fighting for Germany. Those in the army had cushy jobs behind the front; Jews were profiteering out of the war, getting rich from the war corporations. Popular anti-Semitism once again rose to the surface. --It was a world intoxicated with hate, driven by paranoia, enemies everywhere, the Jew lurking behind each one. Th e Germans were in search of a mysterious wholeness that would restore them to primeval happiness, destroying the hostile milieu of urban industrial civilization that the Jewish conspiracy had foisted on them

Internal Wars Causes and Cures Steven David

-The renewed attention to internal war can be explained by the following three reasons. First, the relative importance of internal war as a form of armed conflict has risen noticeably in recent years. With the end of the cold war, major armed conflicts have been almost exclusively domestic. -A third set of reasons for the revitalization of interest in internal war is that with the end of the cold war many scholars who had focused on the Soviet threat were forced to find a new interest. Thus, issues that used to concern students of security affairs such as the NATO-Warsaw Pact balance and the prospect of superpower nuclear war have essen tially disappeared. -Given the importance of internal war, it is critical to determine its causes. It turns out, though, that they point in all directions. At times, in ternal war is the result of individual calculation; at other times group interests are the determining factor. Some internal wars are rational and purposeful, while others are emotional and nihilistic. Large-scale violence against the government comes about because it is seen as weak or because people no longer view its exercise of power as legitimate. Given the importance of internal war, it is critical to determine its causes. It turns out, though, that they point in all directions. At times, in ternal war is the result of individual calculation; at other times group interests are the determining factor. Some internal wars are rational and purposeful, while others are emotional and nihilistic. Large-scale violence against the government comes about because it is seen as weak or because people no longer view its exercise of power as legitimate. --Strong governments promote internal war by encouraging the belief that the time is right to eliminate would-be insurgents. Stable international environments enable regimes to target threatening groups free of fear that outsiders will come to the assistance of those groups. Hostile international environments spur internal con flict as outside states back rebel groups in enemy countries. Adding to the confusion, the causes of internal war are so general that it is unclear how much they really explain. Any internal war can be made understandable after the fact by asserting that people were frustrated, or lost confidence in government, or were carried away by emotion. --Strong governments promote internal war by encouraging the belief that the time is right to eliminate would-be insurgents. Stable international environments enable regimes to target threatening groups free of fear that outsiders will come to the assistance of those groups. Hostile international environments spur internal con flict as outside states back rebel groups in enemy countries. Adding to the confusion, the causes of internal war are so general that it is unclear how much they really explain. Any internal war can be made understandable after the fact by asserting that people were frustrated, or lost confidence in government, or were carried away by emotion. -Strong governments promote internal war by encouraging the belief that the time is right to eliminate would-be insurgents. Stable international environments enable regimes to target threatening groups free of fear that outsiders will come to the assistance of those groups. Hostile international environments spur internal con flict as outside states back rebel groups in enemy countries. Adding to the confusion, the causes of internal war are so general that it is unclear how much they really explain. Any internal war can be made understandable after the fact by asserting that people were frustrated, or lost confidence in government, or were carried away by emotion. --The proposed cures for internal war are similarly contradictory. Out side involvement is seen as necessary to halt wars that belligerents can not stop on their own, but it is also seen as making things worse by relieving the combatants of responsibility for settling their own dis putes. Some proclaim that regional organizations are the key to ending civil strife, while others declare them incapable of producing peace. Cease-fires promote peace by enabling the belligerents to negotiate in an environment free from violence, but they can also prolong war by easing the pain endured by the fighters

Pinker Age of Sovereingty

Historians consider the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 not only to have put out the Wars of Religion but to have established the first version of the modern international order. Europe wa s now partitioned into sovereign states rather than being a crazy quilt of jurisdictions nominally overseen by the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor -This Ag e of Sovereignty saw the ascendancy of states that were still linked to dynasties and religions but that really hung their prestige on their governments, territories, and commercial empires. It was this gradual consolidation of sovereign states (culminating a process that began well before 1648) that set off the two opposing trends that have emerged from every statistical study of war we have seen: wars were getting less frequent but more damaging. --A major reason war s declined in number was that the units that could fight each other declined in number. Recall from chapter 3 that the number of political units in Europe shrank from five hundred around the time of the Thirty Years' War to fewer than thirty in the 1950s. ---The greater lethality of the wars that did take place was the result of a development called the military revolution.100 States got serious about war. This was partly a matter of improved weaponry, especially cannons and guns, but it was more a matter of recruiting greater numbers of people to kill and be killed. -there was a second force (together with the consolidation of states) that drove down the frequency of combat. Many historians have seen the 18th century as a time of respite in the long European history of war. In the preceding chapter I mentioned that imperial powers like Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, and Spain stopped competing in the great power game and redirected their energies from conquest to commerce. . Many wars were lengthy, but the method of fighting was often deliberately restrained and casualties were less heavy than in either the preceding age or subsequent ages. -As we saw in chapter 4, this tranquillity was a part of the Humanitarian Revolution connected with the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, and the dawn of classical liberalism. The calming of religious fervor meant that wars were no longer inflamed with eschatological meaning, so leaders could cut deals rather than fight to the last man. Sovereign states were becoming commercial powers, which tend to favor positive-sum trade over zero-sum conquest. Popular writers were deconstructing honor, equating war with murder, ridiculing Europe's history of violence, and taking the viewpoints of soldiers and conquered peoples.

Pape When Duty Calls

The success in Libya raises two important questions: Will the United States and other members of the international community be compelled to intervene in countless humanitarian crises in the future? If not, which humanitarian crises justify international moral action and which do not? --Although politics surely matter, a signiªcant reason why the international community has consistently failed to stop genocides is the norm itself. In general, by setting the bar for intervention so high—unmistakable evidence of clear intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group—the norm against genocide puts the international community in a catch-22: by the time it is clear that a genocide is occurring, it is often too late to stop the killing. Further, by leaving the acceptable costs of intervention undeªned, the norm does not resolve the inevitable trade-off between the obligation to save lives of a foreign population and the obligation of potential interveners to defend and protect the welfare of their own populations. Yet, the main alternative—the "responsibility to protect" (R2P) standard—is wrong for the opposite reasons. R2P sets the bar for intervention so low that virtually every instance of anarchy and tyranny—or indeed, every potential instance—represents an opportunity for the international community to violate the sovereignty of states -. At the same time, R2P demands ambitious nation building to replace state institutions, which would create virtually unbounded obligations to help foreigners regardless of expense and encourage perceptions of imperialism -To guide future decisions, the international community should consider a new standard for international military humanitarian intervention. This standard, which I call "pragmatic humanitarian intervention," has three requirements: (1) an ongoing campaign of mass homicide sponsored by the local government in which thousands have died and thousands more are likely to die; (2) a viable plan for intervention with reasonable estimates of casualties not signiªcantly higher than in peacetime operations and near zero for the intervening forces during the main phase of the operation; and (3) a workable strategy for creating lasting local security, so that saving lives in the short term does not lead to open-ended chaos in which many more are killed in the long term. --The pragmatic humanitarian intervention standard has four important advantages over the genocide and R2P norms. First, the international community would not need to wait for irrefutable evidence of genocide before intervening. Thus, the new standard would likely do more to stop genocide than the norm against genocide itself. -Second, states would not need to fear that a declaration of a "mass homicide campaign" would necessarily create open-ended obligations for intervention that would come at the expense of the security of their own citizens, encouraging early development of intervention plans. --Third, the international community would violate state sovereignty only to restore sufªcient security to allow self-determination for the target population; removing the offending government from power would not be a mission objective. Accordingly, the new standard would minimize the prospect of humanitarian intervention becoming a pretext for foreign imperialism. --Finally, four cases of reasonably successful humanitarian intervention demonstrate when and how the new standard could be effectively applied: the Kurds in northern Iraq, as well as Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s,6 and Libya today. All of these interventions occurred in response to a government-sponsored mass homicide campaign, and each saved thousands of lives at little cost to the interveners and provided lasting security to the target populations. Importantly, none could become a genocide because intervention stopped the killing at an earlier stage. -First, R2P lacks a clear standard for the level of atrocities necessary to justify humanitarian military intervention. -First, R2P lacks a clear standard for the level of atrocities necessary to justify humanitarian military intervention. -Second, R2P fails to identify the levels of casualties that interveners should accept among their forces or even the principles on which potential interveners should make such calculations. Third, R2P would obligate the international community to engage in ambitious nation building in the aftermath of an intervention. Absent clarity on these central issues of degree of harm, acceptable costs, and lasting security, the international community is unlikely to embrace the R2P movement.

Graeme Woods What ISIS Really Wants

-ISIS requires terrotirory to remain legitimate, and a top-down-structure to rule it. --The Islamic State is Medieval Religious, in contrast to Al Qaeda's corporatist organization that navigated the modern world confidently under Bin Laden. Islamic State supporters refer derisively to "moderns", contrating themselves to this. --The Islamic is way more religiously strict than Al Qaeda, interperate ancient texts extremely literally and obsessively.

Osama Bin Ladin

- I say that the battle isn't between the al-Qaeda organization and the global Crusaders. Rather, the battle is between Muslims—the people of Islam—and the global Crusaders -- I say that the events that happened on Tuesday September 11 in New York and Washington are truly great events by any measure, and their repercussions are not yet over. And if the fall of the twin towers was a huge event, then consider the events that followed it ... let us talk about the economic effects, which are still continuing. According to their own admission, the share of the losses on the Wall Street Market reached 16 per cent.5 They said that this number is a record, which has never happened since the market opened more than 230 years ago. -- But I mention that there are also other events that took place, bigger, greater, and more dangerous than the collapse of the towers. It is that this Western civilization, which is backed by America, has lost its values and appeal. The immense materialistic towers, which preach Freedom, Human Rights, and Equality, were destroyed. These values were revealed as a total mockery, as was made clear when the US government interfered and banned the media outlets from airing our words (which don't exceed a few minutes), because they felt that the truth started to appear to the American people -- It is very strange for Americans and other educated people to talk about the killing of innocent civilians. I mean, who said that our children and civilians are not innocents, and that the shedding of their blood is permissible? Whenever we kill their civilians, the whole world yells at us from east to west, and America starts putting pressure on its allies and puppets. Who said that our blood isn't blood and that their blood is blood? - Because you attacked us and continue to attack us. (a) You attacked us in Palestine: (i) Palestine, which has foundered under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction, and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals.

Hoffman The Myth of Grassroots Terrorism

- Sageman believes that "al Qaeda Central has receded in importance" and goes so far as to assert that it has been "neutralized operationally." Instead, the principal terrorist threat today, Sageman claims, comes from diffuse low-level groups. But this view flies in the face of the two most recent authoritative analyses of terrorist threats to the United States - The publicly released portion of the 2007 NIE, for example, stated unambiguously that al Qaeda "is and will remain the most serious threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities -The unmistakable mes sage is that al Qaeda is a remarkably agile and flexible organization that exercises both top-down and bottom-up planning and operational capabilities. It is not exclusively focused on the grass-roots dimension -al Qaeda members had suc ceeded in embedding themselves in the United Kingdom's Muslim community and drawing support from receptive elements in their new neighborhoods. Al Qaeda could thus identify, indoctrinate, and exploit new recruits who had not previously come under the scrutiny of local or national law enforcement agencies

Pinker The Long Peace

-Hitler exploited the world's war-weariness, repeatedly professing his love of peace and knowing that no one was willing to stop him while he was still stoppable. Mueller reviews biographies of Hitler to defend the idea, also held by many historians, that one man was mostly responsible for the world's greatest cataclysm: --Zero is the number of times that nuclear weapons have been used in conflict. Zero is the number of times that the two Cold War superpowers fought each other on the battlefield. Zero is the number of times that any of the great powers have fought each other since 1953 (or perhaps even 1945, since many political scientists don't admit China to the club of great powers until after the Korean War). Zero is the number of interstate wars that have been fought between countries in Western Europe since the end of World War II. Zero is the number of internationally recognized states since World War II that have gone out of existence through conquest -In the decades after World War II, the world saw a steady reduction in the length of compulsory military service. The United States, Canada, and most European countries have eliminated conscription outright, and in the others it functions more as a citizenship-building exercise than as a training ground for warriors. -Payne has shown that the proportion of the population that a nation puts in uniform is the best indicator of its ideological embrace of militarism. But figure 5-20 shows that the trend since the mid-1950s has been sharply downward. Europe's disinvestment of human capital in the military sector began even earlier -As Luard understates it, "In general, the value placed on human life today is probably higher, and that placed on national prestige (or 'honor') probably lower, than in earlier times."171 Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union during the worst years of the Cold War, captured the new sensibility when he said, "I'm not some czarist officer who has to kill himself if I fart at a masked ball. It's better to back down than to go to war -. Each component of the war-friendly mindset—nationalism, territorial ambition, an international culture of honor, popular acceptance of war, and indifference to its human costs—went out of fashion in developed countries in the second half of the 20th century --One paradoxical contributor to the Long Peace was the freezing of national borders. The United Nations initiated a norm that existing states and their borders were sacrosanct. By demonizing any attempt to change them by force as "aggression," the new understanding took territorial expansion off the table as a legitimate move in the game of international relations.

The War Against the Jews

-Only Hitler's followers took his ideas about the Jews seriously. His opponents found them too preposterous for serious consideration, too irrational and lunatic to merit reasonable analysis and rebuttal. --Serious people, responsible people thought that Hitler's notions about the Jews were, at best, merely political bait for disgruntled masses, no more than ideological window dressing to cloak a naked drive for power. Yet precisely the reverse was true. Racial imperialism and the fanatic plan to destroy the Jews were the dominant passions behind the drive for power. -What he "learned" about Jews in the Vienna period, as recorded in a brief span of ten pages of Mein Kampf ("Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna"), is a mere foreshadowing of the ideas to come. Images of the Jew as unclean predominate: "unclean dress," "physical uncleanness." Jews were at the heart of everything that was diseased. They were to blame for prostitution in Vienna and the white-slave traffic. --During his enforced political inactivity in Landsberg prison, Hitler undertook to put his ideas together in Mein Kampf, which was autobiography, ideological doctrine, and party manual all in one. In Mein Kampf he expounded on race as the central principle of human existence and explicated the relationship, since the start of time, between the two world adversaries—the Aryans and the Jews. "Th e racial question," he wrote, "gives the key not only to world history, but to all human culture," for, he believed, "in the blood alone resides the strength as well as the weakness of man." --During his enforced political inactivity in Landsberg prison, Hitler undertook to put his ideas together in Mein Kampf, which was autobiography, ideological doctrine, and party manual all in one. In Mein Kampf he expounded on race as the central principle of human existence and explicated the relationship, since the start of time, between the two world adversaries—the Aryans and the Jews. "Th e racial question," he wrote, "gives the key not only to world history, but to all human culture," for, he believed, "in the blood alone resides the strength as well as the weakness of man."

Feil Preventing Genoside

-Repeated attempts by the commander of UNAMIR, Major General Romeo Dallaire, and the special representative of the UN secretary-general, Jacques Roger Booh-Booh, to bring the parties back to the peace process met with failure. The situation spun out of control as UNAMIR was repeatedly weakened, first by the withdrawal of the Belgians, who openly advocated a complete withdrawal of UNAMIR,2 and then by the timid response of participating nations. With the notable exception of Ghana, governments instructed their UNAMIR contingents to protect themselves at all costs, even if that meant standing by while lightly armed, drunken thugs hacked women and children to death --In response to the April 1994 crisis in Rwanda, General Dallaire sought unsuccessfully to reverse the defensive orientation of his national contingents, obtain reinforcements, stop the genocide, and bring the parties back to the peace process. --The window of opportunity offering the best chance for success in Rwanda in 1994 was a small one regardless of the employment concept. The conference participants generally agreed that any action after the last week in April 1994 would have required massive amounts of force because the situation had expanded to the countryside. Yet this fleeting opportunity was not seized. Throughout the spring and summer of 1994, there was a notable lack of consensus on just what had to be done in Rwanda and how best to go about it. The rapid introduction of force presupposes some definable end to be achieved and the will to achieve that end in a reasonable amount of time. -The hypothetical force described by General Dallaire--at least 5,000 strong, depending on the method of employment, and armed with the equipment and capabilities to employ and sustain a brigade in combat--could have made a significant difference in Rwanda in 1994. -In Rwanda, a window of opportunity for the employment of such a force extended roughly from about April 7 to April 21, 1994, when the political leaders of the violence were still susceptible to international influence. The rapid introduction of robust combat forces, authorized to seize at one time critical points throughout the country, would have changed the political calculations of the participants. The opportunity existed to prevent the killing, to interpose a force between the conventional combatants and reestablish the DMZ, and to put the negotiations back on track.

A Problem from Hell Power Chapter 10

-Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana's Mystère Falcon jet, a gift from French president François Mitterrand, had just been shot down, with Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira aboard. -Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana's Mystère Falcon jet, a gift from French president François Mitterrand, had just been shot down, with Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira aboard. -g. In 1990 a group of armed exiles, mainly Tutsi, who had been clustered on the Ugandan border, invaded Rwanda. Over the next several years the rebels, known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), gained ground against Hutu government forces. In 1993, with the support of the major Western powers,Tanzania brokered peace talks, which resulted in a power-sharing agreement known as the Arusha accords. -g. In 1990 a group of armed exiles, mainly Tutsi, who had been clustered on the Ugandan border, invaded Rwanda. Over the next several years the rebels, known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), gained ground against Hutu government forces. In 1993, with the support of the major Western powers,Tanzania brokered peace talks, which resulted in a power-sharing agreement known as the Arusha accords. -Under its terms the Rwandan government agreed to govern with Hutu opposition parties and the Tutsi minority. UN peacekeepers would be deployed to patrol a cease-fire and assist in demilitarization and demobilization as well as to help provide a secure environment, so that exiled Tutsi could return.The hope among moderate Rwandans and foreign diplomats was that Hutu and Tutsi would at last be able to coexist in harmony. -Hard-line elements within the Rwandan government and Hutu extremists outside it found the Arusha agreement singularly unattractive. They saw themselves as having everything to lose, everything to fear, and nothing obvious to gain by complying with the terms of the peace deal. The Hutu had dominated the Rwandan political and economic scene for three decades, and they were afraid that the Tutsi, who had long been persecuted, would respond in kind if given the chance again to govern. -The signs of militarization in Rwanda were so widespread that, even though Dallaire lacked much of an intelligence-gathering capacity, he was able to learn of the extremists' sinister intentions. In December high-ranking military officers from within the Hutu government sent Dallaire a letter warning that Hutu militias were planning massacres. Death lists had become so widely known that individuals had begun paying local militias to have their names removed. -Throughout the U.S. government, Africa specialists had the least clout of all regional specialists and the smallest chance of affecting policy outcomes. In contrast, those with the most pull in the bureaucracy had never visited Rwanda or met any Rwandans. -The U.S. demand for a full UN withdrawal had been opposed by some African nations as well as Albright, so the United States lobbied instead for a dramatic drawdown in troop strength. On April 21, amid press reports of some 100,000 dead in Rwanda, the Security Council voted to slash UNAMIRs force size to 270.

FDR and the Jews

-Some scholars have condemned Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president of the United States from 1933 to 1945, for callously standing by while Hitler persecuted German Jewry and then exterminated nearly two-thirds of Europe's Jews. Playwrights, filmmakers, and political figures have replayed this story of ironic betrayal by a famously humane president whom Jews of his time revered --For most of his presidency Roosevelt did little to aid the imperiled Jews of Germany and Europe. He put other policy priorities well ahead of saving Jews and deferred to fears of an anti-Semitic backlash at home. He worried that measures to assist European Jews might endanger his political coalition at home and then a wartime alliance abroad. FDR usually avoided singling out the Jews in public. When he engaged Jewish issues, he maneuvered, often behind the scenes. When he hesitated, other American officials with far less sympathy for Jews set or carried out policies. --Still, at times Roosevelt acted decisively to rescue Jews, often withstanding contrary pressures from the American public, Congress, and his own State Department. Oddly enough, he did more for the Jews than any other world figure, even if his efforts seem deficient in retrospect. He was a far better president for Jews than any of his political adversaries would have been. --Roosevelt went through four different phases on Jewish issues as the conditions of his presidency radically changed. Only during his first term was he a bystander to Nazi persecution. FDR refused to jeopardize his political future or his large agenda in domestic and foreign policy by rubbing raw the wounds of ethnic antagonism in the United States at a time of massive economic suffering -After his reelection had released some political pressure and Hitler grew bolder in his cruelty, a second Roosevelt shifted course and ministered to Jewish concerns. This now-activist Roosevelt used his executive powers to loosen immigration restrictions and to promote his own ambitious plans to resettle the Jews of Europe in other lands. He publicly backed a Jewish homeland in Palestine and pressured the British to keep Palestine open to Jewish immigrants --FDR's activism diminished during 1939, especially after Hitler provoked the European war by invading Poland in September. A third Roosevelt put internal security, foreign policy, and military concerns well above Jewish issues. FDR sought to insulate the homeland from foreign spies and saboteurs and overcome domestic resistance to revising America's restrictive Neutrality Acts and aiding nations resisting Hitler's aggression by all means short of war.-He feared that undue attention to the "Jewish Question would benefit his isolationist adversaries and stymie his foreign policies. -In late 1943, a fourth Roosevelt changed direction again and addressed Jewish issues with revived interest. He established a War Refugee Board to help rescue the surviving Jews of Europe and pursued plans for the postwar resettlement of refugees. Shortly before his death, a gravely ill president met personally with the influential king of Saudi Arabia in an effort to secure a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Roosevelt also denounced organized antiSemitism as an integral part of Hitler's brutal attempt to rule Europe and the Western world. --They understood, however, that he was the first president to intervene part of the time on behalf of their oppressed brethren abroad—and during world crises of unparalleled scope and gravity. They also knew that without his leadership, the resistance to Nazi aggression would have been much weaker than it was, perhaps even fatally so.

Menon Libya

-Still, at first Gaddafi beat back the rebellions that had erupted along Libya's central and eastern coast. Had he stopped there, he might well have escaped Western intervention. But he soon ordered his forces to storm the eastern city of Benghazi— a longtime antiGaddafi bastion, the second-largest municipality in the country, and the first to raise the banner of rebellion --American and European officials feared a looming slaughter. Human rights groups, political commentators, and various intellectuals sounded the alarm, the ubiquitous Bernard-Henri Lévy prominent among them.5 --In fact, in the initial counterattack, the government's forces had not targeted civilians purposely or systematically. They directed their firepower at armed insurgents, though civilian casualties certainly resulted. Nor had the regime killed unarmed Libyans en masse --there is no telling what might have happened had Gaddafi's troops stormed Benghazi. Still, his much-cited warning to the city was directed at its armed fighters— not, as is routinely portrayed, the civilian population. He pledged that fighters who laid down their arms would not be punished for their previous violence and ordered his troops not to harm those who fled --By then, however, Benghazi's rebels knew that intervention was already under discussion in Western capitals and that the United States would make the final decision. Accordingly, the rebels, in that city and elsewhere, did their best to tip the balance in favor of the strongest advocates of intervention within the Obama administration --Thus, the rebels falsely claimed that 30,000 people had already been killed.1" This outlandish figure equaled that which the opposition National Transitional Council (NTC) offered at one point after the war as its upper estimate for all deaths (civilian and combatant) during NATO's entire eight-month war against Gaddafi.19 Apparently no American official thought it worth asking how Gaddafi's small and lackluster army, fighting an armed rebellion on multiple, widely separated fronts, could have managed such a feat in only two weeks --With Gaddafi's gruesome murder in October 2011, the interveners again discarded the values they invoked before and during their rescue mission. Gaddafi was fleeing Sirte with an entourage when he was captured, beaten, tortured, and shot to death by rebels.108 His son, Muttasim, and others traveling with him were also killed, as were sixty-six additional Gaddafi loyalists in the vicinity --Particularly in the east, the pandemonium has opened the door to millenarian, violent Islamist groups such as Ansar al-Shari'a, w'hich stormed the American consulate in Benghazi on September n, 2012. They intimidate and attack Libyans w'hose lifestyles, politics, and religious beliefs they reject. --The upheaval that has engulfed post-Gaddafi Libya should surprise no one. The opposition to Gaddafi's regime was divided from the rebellion's outset. American commentaries on Libya's civil war rested on a simplistic viewr of Gaddafi as a reviled, isolated ruler. Yet he could not have fought the w'orld's most powerful alliance for seven months without support from segments of Libyan society. The civil war that erupted following Gaddafi's ouster grew out of the deep tensions that had been kept in check through oppression: between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, among pro- and anti-Gaddafi tribes and cities, and between the Arab-dominated state and the non-Arab Amazigh (Berber) minority. --Libya's civil war is especially dangerous— and not just for Libyans— because there is a cornucopia of weapons with which to wage it. According to a 2014 Rand Corporation study, written before the governmental split, because of the looting of Gaddafi's armories and the arms supplied by outside countries backing the rebellions, "the country is awash in weapons."

Evans Responsibility to Protect

-THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY in the last decade repeatedly made a mess of handling the many demands that were made for "humanitarian intervention": coercive action against a state to protect people within its borders from su-If the international community is to respond to this challenge, the whole debate must be turned on its head. The issue must be reframed not as an argument about the "right to intervene" but about the "responsibility to protect." And it has to be accepted that although this responsibility is owed by all sovereign states to their own citizens in the first instance, it must be picked up by the international community if that first-tier responsibility is abdicated, or if it cannot be exercised.ffering grave harm. There were no agreed rules for handling cases such as Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo at the start of the 1990S, and there remain none now. --Second, this formulation implies that the primary responsibility rests with the state concerned. Only if that state is unable or unwilling to fulfill its responsibility to protect, or is itself the perpetrator, should the international community take the respon sibility to act in its place --Third, the "responsibility to protect" is an umbrella concept, embracing not just the "responsibility to react" but the "responsibility to prevent" and the "responsibility to rebuild" as well. Both of these dimensions have been much neglected in the traditional humanitarian-intervention debate. Bringing them back to center stage should help make the concept of reaction itself more palatable. --Third, the "responsibility to protect" is an umbrella concept, embracing not just the "responsibility to react" but the "responsibility to prevent" and the "responsibility to rebuild" as well. Both of these dimensions have been much neglected in the traditional humanitarian-intervention debate. Bringing them back to center stage should help make the concept of reaction itself more palatable. --As FOR THE "JUST CAUSE" THRESHOLD, our startingpointis that military intervention for human protection purposes is an extraordinary measure. For it to be warranted, civilians must be faced with the threat of serious and irreparable harm in one of just two exceptional ways. The first is large-scale loss of life, actual or anticipated, with genocidal intent or not, which is the product of deliberate state action, state neglect, inability to act, or state failure. The second is large-scale "ethnic cleansing," actual or anticipated, whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror, or rape. --Why does the bar for just cause need to be set so high? There is the conceptual reason that military intervention must be very excep tional. There is also a practical political rationale: if intervention is to happen when it is most necessary, it cannot be called on too often. In the two situations identified as legitimate triggers, we do not quantify what is "large scale" but make clear our belief that military action can be legitimate as an anticipatory measure in response to clear evidence of likely large-scale killing or ethnic cleansing. --OF THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLES needed to justify inter vention, the first is "right intention." The primary purpose of the intervention, whatever other motives intervening states may have, must be to halt or avert human suffering. There are a number of ways of helping ensure that this criterion is satisfied. One is to have military intervention always take place on a collective or multilateral basis. -The second precautionary principle is "last resort": military inter vention can be justified only when every nonmilitary option for the prevention or peaceful resolution of the crisis has been explored --The third principle is "proportional means": the scale, duration, and intensity of the planned military intervention should be the minimum necessary to secure the defined objective of protecting people. --Finally, there is the principle of "reasonable prospects": there must be a reasonable chance of success in halting or averting the suffering that has justified the intervention; the consequences of action should not be worse than the consequences of inaction

Pinker: HUMANISM AND TOTALITARIANISM IN THE AGE OF IDEOLOGY

-The Age of Ideology that began in 1917 was an era in which the course of war was determined by the inevitabilist belief systems of the 19th-century counter-Enlightenment. A romantic, militarized nationalism inspired the expansionist programs of Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, and with an additional dose of racialist pseudoscience, Nazi Germany. The leadership of each of these countries railed against the decadent individualism and universalism of the modern liberal West, and each was driven by the conviction that it was destined to rule over a natural domain, like Asia or Europe --At the same time a romantic, militarized communism inspired the expansionist programs of the Soviet Union and China, who wanted to give a helping hand to the dialectical process by which the proletariat or peasantry would vanquish the bourgeoisie and establish a dictatorship in country after country --But this narrative leaves out a major plot that perhaps had the most lasting impact on the 20th century. Mueller, Howard, Payne, and other political historians remind us that the 19th century was host to yet another movement: a continuation of the Enlightenment critique of war. -But according to Mueller, Angell deserves the last laugh. World War I put an end not just to romantic militarism in the Western mainstream but to the idea that war was in any way desirable or inevitable. "The First World War," notes Luard, "transformed traditional attitudes toward war. For the first time there was an almost universal sense that the deliberate launching of a war could now no longer be justified. World War I has also been called the first "literary war." By the late 1920s, a genre of bitter reflections was making the tragedy and futility of the war common knowledge. Hitler exploited the world's war-weariness, repeatedly professing his love of peace and knowing that no one was willing to stop him while he was still stoppable. Mueller reviews biographies of Hitler to defend the idea, also held by many historians, that one man was mostly responsible for the world's greatest cataclysm:

Power a Problem from Hell Chapter 3 and 4

-The Allies' suppression of the truth about Hitler's Final Solution has been the subject of a great deal of historical scholarship.Intelligence on Hitler's extermination was plentiful in both classified and open sources. The United States maintained embassies in Berlin until December 1941, in Budapest and Bucharest until January 1942, and in Vichy France until late 1942 --But the intelligence was often played down. In June 1942, for instance, the London Daily Telegraph published the Bund report's claim that 700,000 Polish Jews and more than 1 million Jews throughout Europe had been killed. The NeurYork Times picked up the Telegraph's reports but buried them deep inside the paper --Why and how did people live in "a twilight between knowing and not knowing"?1' For starters, the threat Hitler posed to all of civilization helped overshadow his specific targeting of the Jews. Widespread anti-Semitism also contributed. It was not that readers' prejudice against Jews necessarily made them happy to hear reports of Hitler's monstrosity. Rather, their indifference to the fate of Jews likely caused them to skim the stories and to focus on other aspects of the war --The vast majority of people simply did not believe what they read; the notion of getting attacked for being (rather than for doing) was too discomfiting and too foreign to process readily. A plot for outright annihilation had never been seen and therefore could not be imagined. --"So revolting and diabolical are the German atrocities that the minds of civilized people find it difficult to believe that they have actually taken place," the board stated. "But the governments of the United States and other countries have evidence which clearly substantiates the facts."

Pinker the Long Peace

-The long-term trajectory of war, in reality, is likely to be a superimposition of several trends. I will try to persuade you that they are as follows: • No cycles. • A big dose of randomness. • An escalation, recently reversed, in the destructiveness of war. • Declines in every other dimension of war, and thus in interstate war as a whole. --The 20th century, then, was not a permanent plunge into depravity. On the contrary, the enduring moral trend of the century was a violence-averse humanism that originated in the Enlightenment, became overshadowed by counter-Enlightenment ideologies wedded to agents of growing destructive power, and regained momentum in the wake of World War II. --When one corrects for the availability bias and the 20th-century population explosion by rooting around in history books and scaling the death tolls by the world population at the time, one comes across many wars and massacres that could hold their head high among 20th-century atrocities. --Richardson's major discovery about the timing of wars is that they begin at random. Every instant Mars, the god of war, rolls his iron dice, and if they turn up snake eyes he sends a pair of nations to war. The next instant he rolls them again, with no memory of what happened the moment before. That would make the distribution of intervals between war onsets exponential, with lots of short intervals and fewer long ones. --Once again we see a decline over the five centuries: the great powers have become less and less likely to fall into wars. During the last quarter of the 20th, only four wars met Levy's criteria: the two wars between China and Vietnam (1979 and 1987), the UN sanctioned war to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait (1991), and NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia to halt its displacement of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo (1999).

Walzer Just and Unjust Wars

-The principle that states should never intervene in the domestic affairs of other states follows readily from the legalist paradigm and, less readily and more ambiguously, from those conceptions of life and liberty that underlie the paradigm and make it plausible. -The principle that states should never intervene in the domestic affairs of other states follows readily from the legalist paradigm and, less readily and more ambiguously, from those conceptions of life and liberty that underlie the paradigm and make it plausible. --Self-detemination, then, is the right of a people "to become free by their own efforts" if they can, and nonintervention is the principle guaranteeing that their success will not be impeded or their failure prevented by the intrusions of an alien power. It has to be stressed that there is no right to be protected against the consequences of domestic failure, even against a bloody repression --Humanitarian intervention is justified when it is a response (with reasonable expectations of success) to acts "that shock the moral conscience of mankind." The old-fashioned language seems to me exactly right. It is not the conscience of political leaders that one refers to in such cases. They have other things to worry about and may well be required to repress their normal feelings of indignation and outrage. The reference is to the moral convictions of ordinary men and women, acquired in the course of their everyday activities. --Governments and armies engaged in massacres are readily identified as criminal governments and armies (they are guilty, under the Nuremberg code of "crimes against humanity"), Hence humanitarian intervention comes much closer than any other kind of intervention to what we commonly regard, in domestic society, as law enforcement and police work. At the same time, however, it requires the crossing of an international frontier, and such crossings are ruled out by the legalist paradigm-unless they are authorized, I suppose, by, the society of nation

David Causes of Internal War: Neorealism

-Thus, according to neo realism, once central authority collapses, a microcosm of the interna tional system is replicated within the state; this, in turn, causes domestic groups inside a country to behave much as states do in the international system. --key concept of neorealism, the security dilemma, comes into play when the state can no longer protect groups within its borders. The se curity dilemma asserts that efforts to improve ones security in an envi ronment of anarchy makes others feel less secure and thereby lessens security for all.13 In the wake of governmental collapse groups that may have lived in harmony under a strong central government suddenly view each other with suspicion, interpreting every act as a threat. -- Neorealism also offers guidance in the form of two basic solutions on how to stop internal wars. First, since internal wars stem from domes tic anarchy, what is needed is the restoration of a central authority ca pable of imposing order. --Another neorealist approach to ending internal wars is based on the balance of power, which deters interstate warfare and similarly, it is as sumed, can be employed to prevent warfare within states. One means of doing this is to promote the breakup of the state into ethnically ho mogenous independent countries (assuming of course that ethnic ha treds are at the root of the conflict), each of which balances the other. Where balances cannot be achieved internally, outside states can step in and establish alliances to protect weaker powers. --Despite its benefits, neorealism is nevertheless an inadequate approach for explaining internal war -- The key distinction is the role of anarchy. The explanations and predictions that flow from neorealism stem from its assumption that anarchy on the do mestic level is roughly equivalent to anarchy on the international level. That assumption is not correct, however. First, while neorealism cor rectly notes that domestic anarchy can be an underlying or permissive cause for some internal wars, it does not explain how anarchy was cre ated in the first place. More often than not, where anarchy does emerge (for example, in Liberia and Somalia), it is taken as a given. But anar chy cannot simply be assumed in internal wars: rather, most states most of the time can ensure compliance -- Moreover the greatest number of internal wars by far occur where governments continue to exercise some degree of control; that is, they do not take place in the environment of anarchy assumed by neoreal ism. -Finally, neore alism tells us little about the role of legitimacy of government. Clearly the occurrence of internal wars is related to whether the people believe in the government's right to rule. On this subject, neorealism is silent.

Stohl All The President's Drones

-Yet the most basic questions about the program have not been answered: W hat are the goals of the program? Are drones effective in accomplishing those goals? What metric is used to evaluate their effectiveness? -W ithout a clear enunciation of U.S. drone policy, oversight is inhibited. The result is greater ambiguity. This cycle of uncertainty compromises the ability to determine whether current drone use is effective in accom plishing nationalsecurity objectives. --Under U.S. law, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force authorizes lethal force against "those nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, com m itted, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." To date, the administration has interpreted this legislation broadly, saying that it covers the Taliban, A1 Qaeda and their "associated forces." However, it remains unclear who the U.S. government identifies as "associated forces," or how combatant status is determined, or how "participation in hostilities" is defined. --Washington will need to focus on creating clear rules, even for the covert aspects of its drone program, that contain strong accountability measures and a precise determination of the state and nature of the conflict. -W ith drone technology expected to proliferate widely in the next decade, it is increasingly important for the United States to establish a clear policy and responsible standards for use. The lack of clarity risks creating a precedent for use mired in secrecy and ambiguity that other countries will follow. --In the sh o rt term , the O bam a administration should conduct a rigorous strategic review and cost-benefit analysis of lethal drone strikes, particularly in counterterrorism operations. No congressional approval for such a study would be necessary, and the results could help solidify a clear course for U.S. action. -The Obama adm inistration must be clear that drones are not a strategy in and of themselves, but rather a tactic in the service of what should be a larger, more clearly articulated strategy— whether for counterterrorism or for other military aims. A clear and convincing articulation of that strategy would illustrate the ways in which drones could be used to support America's foreign-policy objectives.

Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War Fearon and Laitin

-between 1945 and 1999 about 3.33 million battle deaths occurred in 25 insterstate wars. By contrast, civil wars killed 16.2 million -the main factors that determine civil violence are conditions that favor insurgency, not ethnic or religious differences. Weak central governments, rough terrain, rebels with local knowledge superior to the government, corruption lead to civil war. --rebellion is better explained by opportunity than by grivience -lower per capita income allows young people to be recruited by guerilla groups easier when economic alternatives are worse. -a territorial base separated from the state's center by water or distance helps insurgency -willingness of foreign governments or diasporas to supply weapons, money or training also helps -land that supports the production of high-value low-weight goods like coca, opium, diamonds -a state whose revenues derive primarily from oil exports, tends to have weaker state apparatuses because the rulers have less need for a social intrusive bureaucratic system to raise revenue.

Jervis Theories of War in an Era of Leaidng Power Peace

-leading states now form what Karl Deutsch calls a pluralistic security community, a group among who war is unthinkable, where no member would advocate a policy on the grounds that it would improve the state's position in the event of war with the other members. - US is not menaced by most developed countries. Conflcits with Russia and China are not like previous great power conflict, but are more akin to the concerns of imperial powers than to sources of conflict between equal major powers. Russia and China are not seeking to replace the US, but conflict might erupt over things like Taiwan or the Baltics. -expectations of peace close off important routes to war. If states believe that a security community will last, they will not feel the need to take measures that would undermine the security of other members. Nevertheless, the community should not be taken for granted. US is not menaced by most developed countries. Conflcits with Russia and China are not like previous great power conflict, but are more akin to the concerns of imperial powers than to sources of conflict between equal major powers. Russia and China are not seeking to replace the US, but conflict might erupt over things like Taiwan or the Baltics. -community produces common norms and values -community members tend to be liberal democracies -high level of economic interdependence in the community --Jervis explanation: conquest is difficult and war is incredibly costly. Developed countries are satisfied with the status quo, peace within the community brings gains, especially economic. War is less glorified, democracies in the community have similar values, less territorial disputes.

Israel's Policy of Targetted Killing

-since the second intifada in 2000, Isarel has openly pursued a policy of targeted killings against alleged Palestinian terrorists with helicopters, fighters, tanks, car bombs and bullets. --approximately 80 militants and about 50 bystanders have been killed through fall 2012. -if it can be directed against military, albeit irregular combatants, instead of political adversaries as determined by a formal open process, targeted killing is acceptable under international law. --There is a concensus that assassination violates international law, but the Israeli policy of targeted killing can be distinguished from assassination. There is general agreement that assassination must involve the killing of someone who is politicall prominent and is targeted because of that prominence, that assassination involves the use of treacherous means to kill someone, and when the countries involved are generally at peace. --targetted killings in Israel is not a secret, extralegal process, it is handled in courts. -targeted killing also acts as a deterrent. Deterrence refers to the ability to persuade someone not to do something they are capable of doing by confronting them with unacceptable punishment. It is distinct from preventing someone from acting by hindering their ability to do so. Seen in this light, it appears virtually impossible to deter people willing and even eager to lose their lives --Killings impede the effectiveness of Palestinian organization where leadership and skills are confined to a few idnviiduals. Targetted killings also keeps potential bombers and bomb makers on the run where they can't do things. It also serves as a detterant, persuading people not ot do something because the punishment is bad. --Israel's policy of targeted killing, stripped of its utilitarian justifications is retribution, plain and simple. Suicide bombers kill innocent Israelis, so targeted killings apply calibrated revenge. --But Israel musts refrain from killing political leaders, since that would violate the norm against assassination. Guidelines already instituted for targeted killing need to be strenghtend and made the subject of open debate. Israel should be open about its policy, because it is not improper

Cronin Why Drones Fail

-the drone program has taken on a life of its own, to the point where tactics drive strategy -drones are not helping defeat Al Qaeda and may be creating sworn enemies out of a sea of local insurgents --catpuring a terrorist leader is better than killing them, by capturing countries can avoid creating a martyr, access intelligence and discredit a popular cause. --catpuring a terrorist leader is better than killing them, by capturing countries can avoid creating a martyr, access intelligence and discredit a popular cause. --but drones do not stop propaganda campaigns and may even enhance them. A more effective strategy would be to discredit it with a political strategy aimed at dividing its followers. -Signature Strikes: Washington goes after people whose identity it doesn't know but who appear to be behaving like militants in insurgent controlled areas. This obviously will leading to mistaken, civilian deaths. --The drone campaign has morphed, in effect, into remote-control repression: the direct application of brute force by a state, rather than an attempt to deal a pivotal blow to a movement. -Repression is costly, not just to the victims, and difficult for democracies to sustain over time. It works best in places where group members can be easily separated from the general population, which is not the case for most targets of U.S. drone strikes. Military repression also often results in violence spreading to neighboring countries or regions, which partially explains the expanding al Qaeda footprint in the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the Caucasus. -Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen, tried to bomb Times Square in May 2010 by loading a car with explosives. A married financial analyst, Shahzad was an unlikely terrorist. When he pleaded guilty, however, he cited his anger about U.S. policies toward Muslim countries, especially drone strikes in his native Pakistan --Finally, the drone campaign presents a fundamental challenge to U.S. national security law, as evidenced by the controversial killing of four American citizens in attacks in Yemen and Pakistan. The presi dents authority to protect the United States does not supersede an individual's constitutional protections.

Brown Internal War arguement

Finally, neore alism tells us little about the role of legitimacy of government. Clearly the occurrence of internal wars is related to whether the people believe in the government's right to rule. On this subject, neorealism is silent. --Heads of state make decisions that lead to war because they are more interested in staying in power than in preserving the peace for their citizens -This is an important argument. It says that much of what scholars study is not at the heart of why internal wars occur. Factors such as the level of modernization in countries, the strength of governments, and the prevailing culture are not as important in explaining the outbreak of internal war as are the decisions of individual leaders. Outside forces such as meddling states play a relatively minor role in bringing about civil conflict. -- There are many examples of leaders who provoke internal wars to guarantee their hold on power, for example, those who provoked the ethnic conflict between Hutus and Tutsis that led to genocide in Rwanda. Boris Yeltsin's shift from escalating the war with Chechnya to trying to reach a settlement with the insurgents reflected the changing impact of the conflict on his chances of remaining president. --what assistance can one find in Brown's view that bad lead ers are the cause of most domestic conflicts? Two broad solutions to internal war follow from his argument. The first is to concentrate on coercing the leaders themselves. The second is to make potential fol lowers less susceptible to the blandishments of their wayward rulers. While either approach may work in specific circumstances, neither offers a general guideline for halting internal conflicts --8 Brown mentions in passing the possibility of international military forces seizing bad leaders and placing them before interna tional tribunals, but the tremendous difficulties encountered in at tempting to capture and try war criminals in the Balkans raises questions about the feasibility of this strategy. --Thus, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Van Evera emphasize the need to teach "honest" history in schools, thus dampen ing the flames of hypernationalism.40 Brown talks of launching "inter national information campaigns" and jamming radio and television stations to counteract or block harmful propaganda -Few will object to the goal of providing sources of information apart from that of the leadership. The feasibility and effectiveness of such an approach, however, is questionable. It is difficult to imagine that coun tries threatened by internal war will allow outsiders to come in to revise their textbooks and determine the classroom curriculum

Pape's Method

In the context of humanitarian intervention, the case for sufªcient harm to innocents justiªes violations of sovereignty when a local government manifests intent to commit mass homicide against its own citizens by mobilizing armed forces for a campaign of "mass homicide"—that is, a coordinated, sustained series of attacks against civilians—when waiting would only magnify the risk of future mass homicide.3 --Crossing the mass homicide threshold presents a compelling case to permit the violation of state sovereignty for two reasons. First, a government campaign of mass killing violates the idea that individuals are equally entitled to the most fundamental of all human rights—life—and the underlying principle of sovereignty that governments exist to defend the common life of the people. Second, this scale of mass homicide and concern that tens of thousands will likely be killed in the near future accords with the intuition that only "egregious" harm should justify violations of sovereignty States should undertake humanitarian interventions only if military operations can be effective within the time required to save a signiªcant number of lives. Further, an international coalition involving important states in the region should normally conduct these interventions, both to serve as an international check and balance on the assumptions guiding the intervention and to mitigate the possibility of it producing more regional problems than it solves. -states should engage in humanitarian intervention only when (1) the cost in lives according to reasonable estimates approaches the risks of complex peacetime and training operations and so is effectively near zero, or (2) when the individuals participating in the intervention volunteer (provided they can still intervene effectively without further assistance, which may be possible in only rare circumstances, for example, if they are on scene at the outset) -Finally, international recognition that an established organization such as the UN Security Council should authorize humanitarian interventions in cooperation with states from the region of the proposed intervention would lower the risk that the new standard could become a pretext for the selªsh motives of one or a handful of states.

Power US Calculations in Rwanda

Instead of demanding a UN withdrawal, quibbling over costs, and coming forward (belatedly) with a plan better suited to caring for refugees than to stopping massacres, U.S. officials could have worked to make UNAMIR a force to contend with.They could have urged their Belgian allies to stay and protect Rwandan civilians. If the Belgians insisted on withdrawing, the United States could have done everything within its power to make sure that Dallaire was immediately reinforced. -First, administration officials exaggerated the extremity of the possible responses. Time and again U.S. leaders posed the choice as between staying out of Rwanda and "getting involved everywhere." In addition, they often presented the choice as one between doing nothing and sending in hundreds of thousands of marines -Second, administration policymakers appealed to notions of the greater good.They did not simply frame U.S. policy as one contrived in order to advance the national interest or avoid U.S. casualties. Rather, they often argued against intervention from the standpoint of people committed to protecting human life. They believed that the UN and humanitarianism could not afford another Somalia. -Their chief priority, after the evacuation of the Americans, was looking after UN peacekeepers, and they justified the withdrawal of the peacekeepers on the grounds that it would ensure a future for humanitarian intervention. In other words, Dallaire's peacekeeping mission in Rwanda had to be destroyed so that peacekeeping might be saved for use elsewhere. --Capitol Hill was likewise quiet. Some in Congress were glad to be free of the expense of another flawed UN mission. Senator Dole had introduced the Peace Powers Act in Congress in January and made his opposition to U.S. involvement widely known. Other members of Congress were not hearing from their constituents. On April 30 Representative Patricia Schroeder (D— Colo.) described the relative silence in her district --No group or groups in the United States made Clinton administration decisionmakers feel or fear that they would pay a political price for doing nothing to save Rwandans. Indeed, all the signals told them to steer clear. Only after the genocide would it become possible to identify an American "constituency" for action

Possible and Impossible Solutions

Stable resolutions of ethnic civil wars are possible, but only when the opposing groups are demographically separated into defensible enclaves. Separation reduces both incentives and opportunity for further combat, and largely eliminates both reasons and chances for ethnic cleansing of civilians. While ethnic fighting can be stopped by other means, such as peace enforcement by international forces or by a conquering empire, such peaces last only as long as the enforcers remain -This means that to save lives threatened by genocide, the international community must abandon attempts to restore war-torn multi-ethnic states. Instead, it must facilitate and protect population movements to create true national homelands. Sovereignty is secondary: defensible ethnic enclaves reduce violence with or without independent sovereignty, while partition without separation does nothing to stop mass killing -Ethnic wars, however, have nearly the opposite properties. Individual loyalties are both rigid and transparent, while each side's mobilization base is limited to members of its own group in friendly-controlled territory. The result is that ethnic conflicts are primarily military struggles in which victory depends on physical control over the disputed territory, not on appeals to members of the other group -The second problem that must be overcome by any remedy for severe ethnic conflict is the security dilemma.43 Regardless of the origins of ethnic strife, once violence (or abuse of state power by one group that controls it) reaches the point that ethnic communities cannot rely on the state to protect them, each community must mobilize to take responsibility for its own security. Under conditions of anarchy, each group's mobilization constitutes a real threat to the security of others for two reasons. First, the nationalist rhetoric that accompanies mobilization often seems to and often does indicate offensive intent. Under these conditions, group identity itself can be seen by other groups as a threat to their safety -Interventions should therefore almost always be on behalf of the weaker side; the stronger needs no defense. Moreover, unless the international community can agree on a clear aggressor and a clear victim, there is no moral or political case for intervention. If both sides have behaved so badly that there is little to choose between them, intervention should not and probably will not be undertaken

Pinker Liberal Peace

The Democratic Peace is sometimes considered a special case of a Liberal Peace—"liberal" in the sense of classical liberalism, with its emphasis on political and economic freedom, rather than left-liberalism.233 The theory of the Liberal Peace embraces as well the doctrine of gentle commerce, according to which trade is a form of reciprocal altruism which offers positive-sum benefits for both parties and gives each a selfish stake in the well-being of the other --The vogue word globalization reminds us that in recent decades international trade has mushroomed. Many exogenous developments have made trade easier and cheaper. They include transportation technologies such as the jet airplane and the container ship; electronic communication technologies such as the telex, long-distance telephone, fax, satellite, and Internet; trade agreements that have reduced tariffs and regulations; channels of international finance and currency exchange that make it easier for money to flow across borders; and the increased reliance of modern economies on ideas and information rather than on manual labor and physical stuff. -History suggests many examples in which freer trade correlates with greater peace. The 18th century saw both a lull in war and an embrace of commerce, when royal charters and monopolies began to give way to free markets, and when the beggar-thy-neighbor mindset of mercantilism gave way to the everybody-wins mindset of international trade. Countries that withdrew from the great power game and its attendant wars, such as the Netherlands in the 18th century and Germany and Japan in the second half of the 20th, often channeled their national aspirations into becoming commercial powers instead. -Russett and Oneal found that it was not just the level of bilateral trade between the two nations in a pair that contributed to peace, but the dependence of each country on trade across the board: a country that is open to the global economy is less likely to find itself in a militarized dispute.241 This invites a more expansive version of the theory of gentle commerce. - International trade is just one facet of a country's commercial spirit. Others include an openness to foreign investment, the freedom of citizens to enter into enforceable contracts, and their dependence on voluntary financial exchanges as opposed to self-sufficiency, barter, or extortion

Goldstein Winning the War on War

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of superpower conflict into relative cooperation reverberated around the world and contributed greatly to the reduction of armed conflict. In terms of the twenty years before 1990 compared with the twenty years after, again using the battle-death data described later on, the annual average deaths was about 75,000 annually in 1990-2009 compared with about 215,000 annually in 1970-89. --In sum, after centuries of ups and downs, never as bad as prehistoric times, war peaked in the World Wars. War has decreased since then and stands at perhaps an all-time low. First is the notion that civilization has evolved over the long course of human history in a way that has gradually strengthened norms of behavior that discourage violence. =A second explanation is that the invention of nuclear weapons made great wars impractical and gave political leaders pause when considering the use of force. Nuclear deterrence may in fact help to explain why World War III did not occur during the Cold War—certainly an important accomplishment. But nuclear weapons did not stop the superpowers from participating in destructive wars such as the American war in Vietnam and the Soviet one in Afghanistan -Third, the theory that prosperity makes societies more peaceful does what nuclear weapons cannot, namely explain the reductions of war in recent decades when economic growth has lifted large swaths of humanity out of poverty and given people something to live for. The trouble here is that prosperity in Europe a hundred years ago did not dampen humanity's appetite for war. It just gave the European powers more resources to fight the World Wars with, and they threw every dime they had into the effort -Fourth, the idea that democracies do not fight each other (discussed in Chapter 11) does help to explain the diminishing of interstate wars as more countries have become democratic. But it falls short in explaining why nondemocratic countries such as China have also followed the trend to less war (big-time in China's case), nor why civil wars are also becoming less virulent in recent years -Fifth, the end of the Cold War certainly helps explain the big reductions in war violence after 1989. During the Cold War era, each superpower provided support to governments or rebels in proxy wars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As we shall see in Chapter 11, rebellions do not continue without sources of funding and weapons, be it from control of diamond mining, from sympathetic diaspora communities, or from foreign governments.

Pinker Kantian Peace

World government seems like a straightforward extension of the logic of the Leviathan. If a national government with a monopoly on the use of force is the solution to the problem of homicide among individuals and of private and civil war s among factions, isn't a world government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of military force the solution to the problem of war s among nations? --And the United Nations is unlikely to morph into a government that anyone would want to be governed by. The Security Council is hamstrung by the veto power that the great powers insisted on before ceding it any authority, and the General Assembly is more of a soapbox for despots than a parliament of the world's people. --Many historians believe that these organizations helped keep war out of the collective consciousness of Western Europe. By making national borders porous to people, money, goods, and ideas, they weakened the temptation of nations to fall into militant rivalries, just as the existence of the United States weakens any temptation of, say, Minnesota and Wisconsin to fall into a militant rivalry. By throwing nations into a club whose leaders had to socialize and work together, they enforced certain norms of cooperation. By serving as an impartial judge, they could mediate disputes among member nations.