Fellow foreign policy zealot Marian’s post about the addition of Turkey to the European Union overlapped with an article by Robert A. Pape in the Summer 2005 issue of International Security that I read this morning. Pape is a proponent of the “soft balancing” theory of international relations. In his words, “States balance when they take action intended to make it hard for strong states to use their military advantage against others. . . . Mechanisms of soft balancing include territorial denial, entangling diplomacy, economic strengthening, and signaling of resolve to participate in a balancing coalition.” (International Security 30:1, p. 36).

As an example of soft balancing against the US, Pape cites Turkey’s January 2003 refusal to allow the US to stage ground troops in Turkey in preparation for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Perhaps Turkey joining the EU would be a further example of soft balancing– Europe wants to insulate itself against future economic shocks that could occur as a result of, for example, the US invading Iran, or Syria, or whomever British intelligence next erroneously identifies as hiding WMD (Australia, anyone? Bunch of criminals! How about Canada? Alcan found to be manufacturing 7075 T6 aluminum tubes?)

I mostly agree with Pape’s theory, but I think he ascribes too much control to national governments. In January 2003, if I recall correctly, there were riots in Turkey over the possibility of American troops being stationed there. The Turkish government may not have been strategically balancing against the US so much as attempting to ensure political stability for the ruling party.

Other interesting information from Pape’s article:

1. What Bush II calls a war in which the US would “act preemptively” in The National Security Strategy of the United States has traditionally been called in international relations “preventive war.” A “preemptive” attack typically refers to an attack which occurs in immediate response to observed battle preparations (troop deployments, for example).
2. In a footnote, Pape says that “In the standard list of preventive wars over the past two centuries, all were started by authoritarian states: Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), Austro-Prussian War (1866), Franco-Prussian War (1870), Russo-Japanese War (1904), World War I (1914), Germany-Soviet Union (1941), and Japan-United States (1941).” Pape cites as a source Randall L. Schweller, World Politics 44:2, pp. 235-269.

I’ve just been reading a book by George Packer about the war in Iraq called “The Assassins’ Gate.” This is a terrible name for the book, but after the first three chapters, which are dry but important background, the book is quite good. The penultimate chapter is one of the best descriptions of the war that I’ve read. One paragraph particularly struck me:

In the media, Iraq generated words as bitter as any event in modern American history. But most Americans didn’t turn against other citizens, any more than they joined together in a common cause. Iraq was a strangely distant war. It was always hard to picture the place; the war didn’t enter the popular imagination in songs that everyone soon knew by heart, in the manner of previous wars. The one slender American novel that the war has inspired so far, “Checkpoint,” by Nicholson Baker—a dialogue over lunch in a Washington hotel room between two old friends, one of whom is preparing to assassinate President Bush—has nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with the ugliness of politics in this country. Michael Moore, the left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh, made a hugely successful movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” in which Saddam’s Iraq was portrayed in a crudely fantastical light—a happy place where children flew kites. Iraq provided a blank screen onto which Americans projected anything they wanted, in part because so few Americans had anything directly at stake there. The war’s proponents and detractors spoke of the conflict largely in theoretical terms: imperialism, democracy, unilateralism, weapons of mass destruction, preëmption, terrorism, totalitarianism, neoconservatism, appeasement. The exceptions were the soldiers and their families, who carried almost the entire weight of the war.

I was both excited and slightly disappointed to learn that the chapter originally appeared in the New Yorker last summer.

I think that the core of the problem is described very well by the sentence, “Iraq provided a blank screen onto which Americans projected anything they wanted, in part because so few Americans had anything directly at stake there.”

I think that’s why the US is so divided over the war– we mostly don’t know what is happening there, so we pull together scraps that support our instincts.

What a mess.