In October 1962, the Soviet Union began to install long-range, nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba – an unprecedented expansion of Soviet reach.[1] President Kennedy, seeking a firm yet measured response, decided shortly thereafter to impose a naval blockade on the region, demanding a swift withdrawal of Soviet forces.[2] With neither country willing to capitulate to the other, tensions mounted, pushing both parties to the brink of internecine nuclear warfare, an inadmissible outcome facilitating a consequent joint de-escalation effort.[3] This international game of chicken is formalized in game theory as “brinkmanship:” a strategy whereby two opposing parties continuously heighten the stakes of conflict in order to gain the upper hand while pre-empting potentially calamitous outcomes – or as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained in 1956, “the ability to get to the verge without getting into the war.”[4],[5] Around half a century after the Missile Scare of 1962, the Trump Administration is employing an analogous tactic of brinkmanship to the war against climate change, establishing a Presidential Committee on Climate Security to “keep challenging the Pentagon . . . until it gets an answer it likes,” withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, and otherwise gutting Obama-era climate policies in an obstinate game of climatic gambling – delaying concrete action until the need for de-escalation (or in this case, decarbonization) can simply no longer be ignored.[6] However, this approach is fundamentally flawed.

Though environmental crises have often proven effective in bringing to light the adverse impacts of – and catalyzing subsequent action on – anthropogenic climate change, such crises were typically of a highly visible nature: the Santa Barbara oil-spill of 1969 led to the first Earth-Day protests, and the pesticide epidemic of the 1960s contributed to the establishment of the EPA.[7],[8]  In contrast, climate change is a somewhat less obvious phenomenon than oil in oceans or pesticides in produce, and it is often difficult for a mainstream audience to internalize the implications of a warming climate as spelled out in academic publications employing complex scientific techniques. Moreover, the climate changes in a non-linear fashion – e.g. warming global conditions facilitate permafrost thawing, which may contribute to an abrupt, widespread release of CO2 into the atmosphere – meaning that environmental harm can increase at a sudden and exponential rate after certain thresholds are exceeded.[9] In other words, these elements of non-linearity and (in)visibility obscure the true magnitude of climate crises and problematize the application of brinkmanship tactics to climate policy, as it is difficult to “get to the verge” if the cliff cannot be seen and objects are, in reality, much closer than they appear.

Furthermore, climate crises are different than missile crises as the latter can be resolved with few residual ramifications: missiles can be dismantled, blockades can be dismissed, and diplomacy can be restored. However, climate crises strain the environment in adverse and enduring ways. For instance, the chlorofluorocarbon crisis of the 1970s resulted in a nearly irreversible void in the ozone layer,^[10] and the recent increase in the incidence of weather extremes have resulted in the destruction of millions of habitats, eliminated carbon sinks, and contributed to consistently elevated levels of greenhouse gas emissions.^[11] As Naomi Oreskes summarizes in Merchants of Doubt, “Climate change is happening. It’s under way, and it’s not reversible.”[12] This element of permanence – of lasting effects – renders climate change a difficult issue to push to the brink, as it may not be feasible to walk back from the edge.

To tackle climate change with the frame of brinkmanship is to recklessly assume an enormous amount of risk: as Michael Klare writes in The Nation, rising global temperatures are “expected to diminish crop yields . . . adding to the desperation of farmers and very likely resulting in widespread ethnic strife and population displacement” and “as food and water supplies dwindle and governments come under ever-increasing pressure to meet the vital needs of their populations, disputes over critical resources are likely to become more heated and violent.”[13] Developments of this nature – Alfred McCoy predicts in “What Does it Take to Destroy a World Order” – are poised to destabilize communities on a national scale, which could further cause “the international cooperation that lay at the heart of Washington’s world order for the past 90 years [to] simply wither.”[14] However, the assumption of these risks is wholly unnecessary and avoidable. At a recent global security conference in Munich, top European and United Nations officials expressed concern over climate change’s role as a “threat multiplier” that could exacerbate geopolitical conflicts abroad – one of many indications that there exists tangible support for proactive, rather than reactive, coordinated global climate action.[15] Moreover, the 26 corporations comprising the U.S. Climate Action Partnership’s 2007-2010 lobbying effort for a federal cap and trade system, and the 58 senior military leaders citing climate change as a significant threat to national security in a recent open letter, suggests similar sentiments of support amongst both the public and private sectors.[16]

Still, mainstream politics eschews the realities of climate change, kicking the can down the road and in some instances, dismissing outright the prevailing scientific consensus of a warming climate. However, pushing the Earth to the brink of its planetary boundaries – holding out for absolute consensus (a virtual impossibility in science) or the manifestation of regular, worsening environmental crises – is negligence on an unfathomable scale and a dangerous game of brinkmanship that could well backfire.

Bibliography

Gilbert, Emily. “The militarization of climate change.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 11.1 (2012): 1-14.

Keller, Jared. “The White House Will Keep Challenging the Pentagon on the Threat of Climate Change Until It Gets an Answer It Likes,” Task & Purpose, February 20, 2019. https://taskandpurpose.com/trump-climate-change-national-security-panel.

Klare, Michael. “How Rising Temperatures Increase the Likelihood of Nuclear War,” The Nation (January 13, 2020), https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-defense-climate-change/.

Kozloff, Max. “American painting during the Cold War.” Artforum 11.9 (1973): 43-54.

Lewis, Jack. “The birth of EPA.” EPA J. 11 (1985): 6.

Lobel, Nathan. “Unraveling the U.S. Climate Action Plan: Explaining Corporate Participation in a Pro-Regulatory Advocacy Coalition,” Senior Essay, Yale Department of Political Science, December 9, 2016.

McCoy, Alfred. “What Does It Take to Destroy a World Order,” Salon (March 3, 2019), https://www.salon.com/2019/03/03/what-does-it-take-to-destroy-a-world-order_partner/

McNeill, John Robert, and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration. Harvard University Press, 2016.

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2011.

Paul Newman et al, “2018 Ozone Hole is a Reminder of what Almost was,” NASA: November 2, 2018. https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13103.

Powell, Robert. “Nuclear brinkmanship with two-sided incomplete information.” American Political Science Review82.1 (1988): 155-178.

Rial, José A., et al. “Nonlinearities, feedbacks and critical thresholds within the Earth’s climate system.” Climatic change65.1-2 (2004): 11-38.

Weldes, Jutta. Constructing national interests: The United States and the Cuban missile crisis. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Wheeling, Kate and Max Ufberg, “‘The Ocean is Boiling:’ The Complete Oral History of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill,” Pacific Standard, November 7, 2018. https://psmag.com/news/the-ocean-is-boiling-the-complete-oral-history-of-the-1969-santa-barbara-oil-spill.

Endnotes

[1] Weldes, Jutta. Constructing national interests: The United States and the Cuban missile crisis. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

[2] Weldes, 1999.

[3] Weldes, 1999.

[4] Powell, Robert. “Nuclear brinkmanship with two-sided incomplete information.” American Political Science Review 82.1 (1988): 155-178.

[5] Kozloff, Max. “American painting during the Cold War.” Artforum 11.9 (1973): 43-54.

[6] Jared Keller, “The White House Will Keep Challenging the Pentagon on the Threat of Climate Change Until It Gets an Answer It Likes,” Task & Purpose, February 20, 2019. https://taskandpurpose.com/trump-climate-change-national-security-panel

[7] Wheeling, Kate and Max Ufberg, “‘The Ocean is Boiling:’ The Complete Oral History of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill,” Pacific Standard, November 7, 2018. https://psmag.com/news/the-ocean-is-boiling-the-complete-oral-history-of-the-1969-santa-barbara-oil-spill.

[8] Lewis, Jack. “The birth of EPA.” EPA J. 11 (1985): 6.

[9] Rial, José A., et al. “Nonlinearities, feedbacks and critical thresholds within the Earth’s climate system.” Climatic change 65.1-2 (2004): 11-38.

[10] Paul Newman et al, “2018 Ozone Hole is a Reminder of what Almost was,” NASA: November 2, 2018. https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13103

[11] McNeill, John Robert, and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration. Harvard University Press, 2016.

[12] Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2011.

[13] Michael Klare, “How Rising Temperatures Increase the Likelihood of Nuclear War,” The Nation (January 13, 2020), https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-defense-climate-change/.

[14] Alfred W. McCoy, “What Does It Take to Destroy a World Order,” Salon (March 3, 2019), https://www.salon.com/2019/03/03/what-does-it-take-to-destroy-a-world-order_partner/

[15] Gilbert, Emily. “The militarization of climate change.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 11.1 (2012): 1-14.

[16] Nathan Lobel, “Unraveling the U.S. Climate Action Plan: Explaining Corporate Participation in a Pro-Regulatory Advocacy Coalition,” Senior Essay, Yale Department of Political Science, December 9, 2016.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland addresses the House of Commons on June 6, 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

Written by: Justin J. Lee, Trinity College, University of Toronto

The parallels between Louis St. Laurent’s 1947 speech on “The Foundations of Canadian Policy in World Affairs” (often known as the Gray Lecture) and Chrystia Freeland’s 2017 address in the House of Commons on the priorities of Global Affairs Canada make it seem that history repeats itself. St. Laurent, who at the time served as Secretary of State for External Affairs and later as Prime Minister, used the Gray Lecture to codify the principles that would guide Canada’s international relations through the post-war international order. Presently, at a time when countries like the United States are retreating from their international commitments, Freeland, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, calls for the renewal and strengthening of the post-war multilateral order. In fact, the minister signalled that Canada would take a greater role in the world by identifying the fight against climate change and the promotion of the rights of women and girls among the “new shared human imperatives.” Later in 2018, during her acceptance speech for the Washington-based Foreign Policy magazine’s diplomat of the year award, the minister focused on defending the idea of the rules-based international order. The justification and expansion of Canada’s international priorities in Freeland’s speeches indicate that the government recognizes that major geopolitical changes have occurred since 1947. Given such changes, it is interesting to consider whether Freeland’s parliamentary address and Washington speech are useful guides for present day foreign relations in the same way that the Gray Lecture was during the “golden era” of Canadian foreign relations. While the minister’s speeches contain a familiar message that Canadians have long supported, they demonstrate an unawareness of how to manage a strained relationship with the United States and deal with the changes that took place in the rest of the world.

The Gray Lecture came at a time of significant international change. The reordering of the world order in the period following the end of the Second World War neatly divided the East and the West by geography and ideology. It was, in retrospect, a predictable world in which there was a broad consensus at home and abroad that an international system of rules was required to avoid the conditions that led to war. St. Laurent did not propose any radical departures from the direction that the world was already headed towards. Instead, he formally committed Canada to upholding the rule of law in international affairs and declared the country’s “willingness to accept international responsibilities.” The Canadian government had the ability to act on its responsibilities because its ideological position aligned with that of the hegemonic United States. At the time, the US was willing to enforce a rules-based international order and has for decades been a reliable political, economic, and military ally. Despite occasional disagreements that arose between successive Canadian and American governments, the two countries maintained cooperation and served as a model for neighbor states. It is perhaps because of the long history of the strong Canada-US alliance that it was easy to forget the importance of having a partner in the White House. Today, Canadians are reminded of the importance of having a friendly, or at the very least, functional relationship with the US. In the past, the strategic, geographical, and economic interests the two countries shared made it necessary and possible to resolve matters despite differences in foreign policy. For example, although Canada refused to officially support US efforts in wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the neighboring countries maintained a robust relationship. This was in part because the conditions that allowed for the Gray Lecture to be effective remained in place for much of the latter half of the twentieth century. However, in just the past few years, the world has experienced major geopolitical changes. To that end, it is worth considering if the principles introduced by St. Laurent 70 years ago are still relevant today. With the world currently divided along complex axes, and with the American abandonment of the established international order, the minister’s idyllic message on the upholding of the rules-based international order seems outdated.

In an alternative universe, if perhaps anyone other than Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Freeland’s message would have likely been useful in guiding relations with the US. However, a speech heralding integrity, facts, and the rule of law is at odds with a president who is known to be impulsive and unreliable. The absence of a cooperative partner in the White House particularly jeopardizes the all-important economic relationship that Canada has with the United States. Trump’s infamous jab toward Freeland during the long and tense NAFTA re-negotiation worried Canadians as it indicated that the traditionally strong relationship between the countries appeared to be at serious risk. It is worth noting that disagreements between Ottawa and Washington are not new and that tensions have risen to a boiling point in the past. The Nixon shock in 1971 that dismantled the Bretton Woods system alarmed Canadians and led to the idea of the Third Option, which were a set of policies meant to lessen the US economic and cultural influence on Canada. Despite the initial reaction, the Third Option did not materialize as designed and relations between the two countries normalized. The skilled foreign service officials of both Canada and the US have been recognized for steering the countries through contentious times and maintaining continental unity. It is therefore especially worrying that the US State Department has been commandeered and significantly downsized by Trump. Though it is true that previous American administrations have had intermittent relationships with the foreign service bureaucracy, they have not been liable for events like Trump’s exodus of officials that are vital to the preservation of the Canada-US alliance. But though it is clear that the relationship between the two countries has deteriorated, the NAFTA renegotiations eventually produced the USMCA. Canadians were relieved to know that an agreement that did not fundamentally compromise Canadian interests was reached. That said, future outcomes for Canada in the face of the current US administration remain uncertain. Petitions made by Freeland in her speeches have clearly been ignored. Therefore, the inclusion of practical approaches to dealing with the strained relationship with the US would have made the minister’s speeches more effective.

Louis St. Laurent inspired generations of Canadians to take greater responsibility in world affairs. Since 1947, Canada has been an active and influential member of the international institutions it has helped to create and regularly identifies with. It got what it wanted—a seat at the table—but can it bear the burden of defending decades-old international principles when the rest of the world does not share its views? In the years after the end of WWII, once Western Europe had rebuilt itself, and the world was being shaped by the powerful effects of globalization, the saliency of the Gray Lecture diminished. There is a recognition of this fact in Chrystia Freeland’s 2018 speech in Washington. The references to the assaults on liberal democracies, due on one hand to the hollowed middle class and stagnating wages, and authoritarianism on the other, make it clear that it is increasingly difficult to fervently stand for a rules-based international order. Still, repeating the plea from almost exactly one year prior, the minister doubles down on the insistence that the United States and Canada must “reform and renew the rules-based international order” that the countries have built together. However noble Canada’s intentions are, it is difficult to preach on the rule of law when it remains involved, without remorse, in a 15 billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia—a country denounced for its record on human rights by Freeland herself, Canadian legislators, and human rights groups. Canada’s desire to expand its foreign policy has entangled the country in a web of competing interests that has required it to compromise on its stances. When Freeland rebuked Saudi Arabia for the jailing of dissidents in August 2018, Canada’s ambassador, Dennis Horak, was declared persona non grata—a status shared by Freeland in Russia. As explained by Lawrence Herman in The Globe and Mail, the severed relationship with Saudi Arabia presents a serious issue for Canadian foreign policy, because since Canada has had no political relationship with Iran since 2012, it is now “frozen out of the two most influential nations in the Middle East, seriously weakening its entire regional policy.” Even more concerning is its recently damaged relationship with China following its decision to detain the Chinese tech executive, Meng Wanzhou at the request of the US government for violating sanctions against Iran. Canada has found itself playing a dangerous game of diplomatic chicken with a hostile China without the support of the United States. Quoted in the National Post, Robert Bothwell highlights the tough reality of being a middle power by noting that Canada, having no “serious allies” has “never been this alone.” Canada contradicts its rule of law rhetoric as it remains involved in the Saudi arms deal and contradicts itself again as it applies US laws in Canada by carrying out an extradition request on the basis of sanctions violations though it has no sanctions of its own against Iran. The government’s recent actions show that it is not following its own guide to foreign relations.

So, in this unfamiliar world, what is Canada to do? The country’s relations with the US and the world were also imperfect after 1947. Can it therefore hope that things will get better over time? Sitting idly by however, seems naïve and hazardous as the challenges the country face are ones it has never encountered before. The framers of the new playbook for Canadian foreign relations need to balance the country’s national and international interests like St. Laurent had done so when he was mindful of the domestic concern of national unity while declaring a new role for Canada in the world. In 2019, the international concern of an unstable world order should be front of mind. The noticeable differences in the two speeches made by Freeland are evidence of the Canadian government’s recognition of today’s grim reality. Absent from the Washington speech are mentions of the environment and the rights of women. Instead, the speech returns focus to the familiar message of defending the rules-based international order. In comparing the two statements made by Freeland, it can be concluded that each one is not a guide to Canadian foreign relations per se, but rather iterations of the government’s developing ideas on how to position itself in today’s world.

When asked to describe what the average Jamaican looks like, most Americans will respond with a depiction of a person somewhat reminiscent of a member of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics Jamaican Bobsled team. When asked why their description of the typical Jamaican might resemble a gold, green, and black spandex-clad figure who walks around Kingston chanting “feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme,” there is only one culprit: Cool Runnings.

For those who are unaware, Cool Runnings is a 1993 US-produced Disney comedic sports film that grossed over 150 million dollars in box office sales. If this still does not ring any bells, do the names Usain Bolt and Bob Marley conjure any images of Jamaica?

The global perception of Jamaica is solidified in its cultural facets, through feats of track and field or beats of Reggae music.These cultural exports, however, obscure the true composition of the island’s contemporary society. Behind a fog of Rastafarian colors and tangles of dreadlocks lies the true diversity of Jamaican society.

For example, an estimated 2.5 million Jamaicans live outside of the 2.6 million strong island. Aptly referred to as the “Jamaican Diaspora,” these Jamaicans separated at birth from their island-dwelling cousins represent a more accurate expanse of Jamaica’s cultural borders, tracing back colonial lines ingrained into the island by the British. For the past century or so, there has been a tremendous exodus of Jamaicans across the globe, spanning from the United States to the United Kingdom and wrapping all the way around to Australia. 

Also present in its colonial DNA, non-typified Jamaican society is more diverse than what is normally portrayed about the island. Roughly one quarter of the island nation’s population is not of African descent, with representative groups such as Afro-European, East Indian and Afro-East Indian, Caucasian, Chinese, among others. Furthermore, that statistic is based solely on the island dwelling population and not the immense diversity present in the Diaspora. To contextualize, a mere 1.1 percent of Jamaican are Rastafarians compared to 1.9 percent identifying as Jehova’s Witnesses on the island.

These distinctions about the geographic extent, racial, and religious diversity of Jamaicans have significant implications within the global community. Of such is the island nation’s ability to ship its cultural exports worldwide. This is ascribed to Jamaica’s experience and interactions with an eclectic collection of diasporic influences and racial/cultural diversity on its homefront. For example, Bob Marley was fathered by a white private in the British royal marines, named Norval Sinclair, and produced quintessential Reggae music in Jamaica, the UK, and the US while touring across the globe. 

Despite doctored stereotypes of bobsled teams and Rastafarians, the true face of Jamaica is a nation with a global demographic and cultural presence built upon an island society of an incredible diversity of people, backgrounds, and thoughts. 

Bibliography

Cool Runnings. WALT DISNEY PICTURES, 1993. https://movies.disney.com/cool-runnings.

“Jamaicans Overseas.” Jamaicans Overseas. Jamaicans.com, 2003. https://jamaicans.com/jamaicansoverseas/index.htm.

“Norval Marley, Capt.” geni_family_tree. Geni, May 23, 2018. https://www.geni.com/people/Norval-Marley-Capt/6000000008744444790.

“STATIN.” STATIN. Statistical Institute of Jamaica, 2016. https://statinja.gov.jm/.

The pressing issue at hand in the Middle East is the growing tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran.  The conflict between these two nations has its roots in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 when the anti-west Ayatollah Khomeini replaced the pro-Western monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. This transition marked a turning point for the Middle East, particularly in regards to alliances and security. Hostility has since engulfed the two nations.

The Saudi-Iran conflict reached new levels on September 14 of this year. Advanced drone technology was used to target the Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia, causing a major scare in the global oil supply. Houthi rebels later claimed responsibility, but many U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, say all signs point toward Iran. In an interview on “Face the Nation,”-Pompeo stated the alleged Iranian involvement in the strike was an “act of war.”

The implications of Iran’s involvement could provoke major hostility in an already fragile region, and the escalating dispute between the U.S. and Iran places America in a potentially compromising position. The U.S. has already deployed troops to Saudi Arabia to assist the country in the defense against future attacks, the Pentagon confirmed this week.[i]

The major victim of this attack, however, is neither Saudi Arabia nor its allies, but the people of Yemen.

Yemen has seen little reprieve from violence since the outbreak of civil war in 2015 between the Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi-led government and the Houthi-rebel faction. The Saudi-led bombing campaign on Yemen to combat Houthi rebels and Iranian influence in the area has led to staggering numbers of casualties: an estimated 17,729 civilians have been killed or injured since March 2019. Just this past week, 16 people, including seven children, were killed in the Sawd District of Northwestern Yemen by a Saudi-led airstrike. This attack came in response to the Saudi oil field bombings just a few days earlier.

Perhaps most concerning, Yemen is home to the worst humanitarian crisis in the world according to the United Nations. The country currently suffers from a widespread food shortage with 13 million Yemeni civilians facing starvation in what is being referred to as “the worst famine in 100 years.”[ii] The Saudi-led intervention in Yemen resulted in a complete blockade of medicine and food from the country in 2015, leaving the country susceptible to starvation and disease outbreaks. In fact, the number of cholera incidents in Yemen has risen dramatically since 2015: 109,000 cases of suspected cholera have been reported from the beginning of 2019 to March 2019, and almost 2,000 new cases are added each day according to the World Health Organization. Experts are certain the cholera endemic coincided with the outbreak of war between Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led coalition in March 2015.[iii]

In addition to this, UNICEF confirms over 2 million children are out of school in Yemen, with an estimated 3.7 million more at risk. Since the outbreak of civil war, almost a fourth of children have dropped out of school.

What this all means for Yemen’s future remains unclear, though one thing is certain: the crisis in Yemen will continue to deteriorate as long as the Saudi-Iran proxy war calls Yemen home. Expect additional U.S. military personnel to deploy to the region in the weeks to come.

Endnotes

[i] Gibbons-neff, Thomas. “New U.S. Aid to Saudi Arabia Will Include 200 Troops.” The New York Times. The New York Times, September 26, 2019.

[ii] “Humanitarian Crisis in Yemen Remains the Worst in the World, Warns UN | UN News.” United Nations. United Nations. Accessed September 28, 2019. https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/02/1032811.

[iii] Gladstone, Rick. “Cholera, Lurking Symptom of Yemen’s War, Appears to Make Roaring Comeback.” The New York Times. The New York Times, March 28, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/world/middleeast/cholera-yemen.html.

Written by: Katerina Kaganovich, Bergen County Technical High School (NJ)

The Office of the President of the United States is often associated with the unofficial titles of “Chief Diplomat” and “Chief Economist”. By the nature of their position, the President of the United States is one of the most visible members of the United States government and is often looked at for leadership on issues regarding the economy.^[1]According to Professor Dan B. Wood and his associates Chris T. Owens and Brandy M. Durham of Texas A&M University, the people of the United States expect the government, and especially the president, to monitor the economy and promote economic growth. A major fixture of economic activity is international commerce and trade. In that regard, the president has the power to formulate trade agreements and conduct negotiations with other countries on behalf of the United States. Through the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, the president has the power to set tariffs and negotiate trade agreements with foreign states.^[2]The United States is robustly linked to the global economy with foreign trade equivalent to 25% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1992. According to Stephen W. Bosworth, President of the United States-Japan Foundation and a former U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines and Tunisia, seven million jobs are created thanks to American exports globally.^[3]As a result, the president is a major player in the economic foreign policy of the United States. In combination with the expectation that the president has responsibility over the market economy, economic success, while manifested differently for each president, is a critical fixture of this political office necessary for reelection and the success of the political party. 

Growing Influence of East Asia 

The world and international relations has been rapidly changing over the past thirty years. The 1990s brought a great deal of change to the world, especially East Asia, due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. East Asia fell at the crossroads between the United States and the Soviet Union, offering developing markets in East Asian countries access to the United States in exchange for a security alliance. Called the “San Francisco Peace Treaty”, this 1951 bilateral alliance allowed the United States to station troops in Japan, South Korea, Philippines, South Vietnam, and Guam, part of their “hub-and-spokes” plan to contain the spread of the Soviet Union.^[4]Ultimately, after the fall of the Soviet Union, American interests grew to favor economy policy. In reference to East Asian countries, Bernard K. Gordon, Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, states that a fifth of the global export market in 2003 was controlled by countries who had little to no international significance a century earlier.^[5]In the 1960s, Asian economies produced less than 5% of the world’s output, but by the 1990s their share of the world’s Gross National Product (GNP) had grown to over 25%.^[6]In that same time period, the region’s share of global trade with the United States rose from 7.1% to 10.5%. By 1990, East Asia’s trade with North America and Western Europe was greater than the two with each other.^[7]Two nations dominated the East Asian economy: China and Japan. Historically, these two nations have been at the forefront of economic development and change in the region. Bosworth claims that China and Japan, above all other nations in East Asia, have the greatest capacity to potentially affect the rest of the world—including the United States.^[8]Individually, both nations have seen great rates of growth within their own economies. He concluded that China’s projected growth over the next decade, from 2003 onwards, has the potential to exert great influence in the region and the United States. Japan as well has enormous power in the region which has continuously grown in the 20th century, causing tensions with the United States stemming from Americans facing barriers in accessing Japanese markets.^[9]As the two major economic powers in East Asia, China and Japan will be the focus of my research. 

Presidential Signaling

Presidential signaling refers to speeches or remarks made by presidents meant to influence people to act on what the president has said.^[10]Debate has risen over whether a president’s rhetoric—what he says in speeches, debates, State of the Union addresses, among others—can create change in the country. A number of hypotheses concerning the nature of presidential effects on the economy have been advanced by various authors. A review of the literature illustrates that while researchers agree thon connections between the president’s comments to the confidence and actions of the people, Congress, and the media, there is disagreement to the extent to which rhetoric reflects implementation. Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, professor of political science at North Texas University, who states that presidential rhetoric affects the movement and fluctuations of the economic market to a certain extent. This study analyzed the president’s effects on the daily price of oil, the daily yield on the thirty-year Treasury bill, and monthly measures of the money. Eshbaugh-Soha concludes that signaling effects occur in the short term, and the further the time from the initial act goes the less affect the president has, such as in the case when the market must wait for Congress to pass the president’s legislation.^[11]In other research conducted by Eshbaugh-Soha alongside his colleague, Jeffrey S. Peake, a professor at Clemson University, they analyze the connection between what the president says about the economy and its effects on Congress and the media towards that issue. Based on their study of presidential rhetoric on health care, education, and crime, Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake come to the conclusion that presidents typically do not influence the attention given by the media or Congress to domestic economic issues. However, the researchers also concluded that presidents do increase Congressional and media attention to international economic issues. Unlike Eshbaugh-Soha’s research on domestic economic issues, international issues are more likely to be brought to the foreground when advocated for or against by the President of the United States.^[12]

Researchers have raised questions about the how the perceived positive or negative view that the president has towards the state of the economy affects economic performance. Research conducted by Wood, Owens, and Durham directly contrast with that of Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake. They analyze the correlation between presidential rhetoric on the economy to actual economic progress in the county, such as macroeconomic performance of the United States, news being perceived by consumers, and consumer confidence. The researchers found that presidential rhetoric does impact the overall confidence levels of the public: when the president states something positive, there is an increase in the perception that the economy is showing stronger growth and may produce lower unemployment This demonstrates that “more than for any other economic actor, remarks flowing from the presidency command the attention of the media and consumers.” ^[13]

An aspect of the theory of presidential signaling is whether the president can affect foreign policy. While there is dispute over whether presidential signaling can affect the domestic economy, little research has been done to analyze the effects of the president on foreign affairs, and by that extension economic foreign policy. Some of the only literature on how the president affects foreign policy comes in the form of research done by Lydia Andrade and Garry Young, Professor of Government and International Affairs at the University of The Incarnate Word and Associate Research Professor at the George Washington University in Washington DC, respectively. They discuss the reasons for how presidential foreign policy changes and what variables affect it. The conclusion they come to is that national approval ratings are the reason for increase in presidential focus on foreign policy, while approval from one’s political party decreases emphasis on foreign policy, after analyzing the frequency of policy themes in presidential speeches.^[14]In the same vein, research conducted by Peake aiming to discusses whether the president can affect Congress and the media on topics of foreign policy, states that the president is able to substantially influence Congress and the media on topics of foreign affairs, however it varies based on how “salient” or important the topic is at the time and the president.^[15]This demonstrates that while there is literature that analyze the president’s effect on the “economy” and “foreign affairs” as two distinctively different topics, there is no research done to analyze the effect of the president’s sentiments on trade or economic foreign policy exclusively. 

Literature has shown that there are bodies of work that identify the debate of the effect the president’s rhetoric, or presidential signaling, has on the economy and foreign affairs separately. However, there is no work that explores whether what the president says about trade or economic foreign affairs actually influences the economic relations between those countries. I intend to look at what the president says about trade with East Asia, a major economic partner, and see how that impacted imports and exports between China, Japan, and the United States during presidential debates between 1992 and 2000. In 1992, incumbent Republican President George H. W. Bush, Democrat Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and independent Texas businessman Ross Perot ran for president. The winner of this election was Bill Clinton. In 1996, then incumbent president Bill Clinton ran against the former U.S. Senator from Kansas Bob Dole. Therefore, for both debates, I will be looking at what Bill Clinton said because his administration was in power during the 1992-2000 time period. This research will connect presidential rhetoric and economic foreign policy to track whether what the president says affects the import and export patterns for their term.

Methods 

In order to examine if the president’s rhetoric affects the imports/exports to China and Japan from 1992-2000, I will be using a conventional content analysis on presidential debates and then comparing the data through a Chi-Square Test for Independence. In order to gauge what the president says, I will be using the transcripts from presidential debates of the years 1992 and 1996. The presidential candidate who won in both elections was President Bill Clinton. The purpose of using what candidate Bill Clinton said exclusively is because I intend to look if what the president says affects foreign policy and trade between 1992 and 2000, and he won both elections. The idea that presidents adhere to what is said during their presidential debates is discussed by Michael G. Krukones, Associate Professor of Political Science at Bellarmine College. Krukones gathers his information through media statements on policy proposals and compares it to statements on policy proposals and the actual policies that were put into place by the presidential administration. He comes to the conclusion that presidents give the electorate an “indication of the direction of their administrations,” during their campaigns.^[16]What the president claims to do during the campaign gives the voters the impression that the president will enforce what he promises. Similar thoughts are expressed in a 2006 article describing the impact of economic and foreign policy on presidential approval written by professor at the University of North Carolina, Gregory E. McAvoy. He explains how elections are won and lost based on economic performance, and the public keeps economic policy at the forefront of their minds.^[17]The platform for candidates to present their ideological views are, especially after the advent of television, presidential debates. McAvoy describes how the public consistently rewards and punishes presidents for economic performance.^[18]Therefore, I will be analyzing the transcript of the 1992 and 1996 presidential debates provided by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). The CPD sponsors and produces quadrennial presidential debates and sponsored all presidential debates in 1992 and 1996. 

I will be looking at all sentences in which the words “China”, “Japan”, “Chinese”, and “Japanese” are stated to analyze the 1992 and 1996 presidential debates in relation to China and Japan. I chose to use these codes because they are the clearest way to identify sentiments about China and Japan. However, in order to establish context to what the president is saying when he uses the codes, I will be also analyzing the sentence before and after. My purpose of doing this is to look at the overall sentiment that President Clinton has towards China and Japan. This form of analysis –content analysis – was used by Jeff Yates and Andrew Whitford, professors at Binghamton University and the University of Georgia, respectively, in their article “Institutional Foundations of the President’s Issue Agenda.” The researchers used a content analysis to look at instances of criminal justice in the president’s State of the Union address.^[19]A content analysis was also used by David M. Rankin, associate professor of political science at the State University of New York, Fredonia, in order to analyze 1,310 U.S. trade stories for the years 1988-2002 from three major television networks and CNN Headline News. He primed for US-Japan trade, US-China trade, North American Trade, the trade deficit, trade summits, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and trade protests. Similar to my research they intended to look for ideas that the president talks about.  My content analysis phase will be looking for words “China”, “Japan”, “Chinese”, and “Japanese”. The purpose of doing a content analysis versus other ways of looking at text is because it allows me to look for key concepts in an overall body of information. By separating these words and then looking at the sentiment around them, I would be able to separate ideas regarding China and Japan from other policies mentioned during presidential debates. 

The second phase of my research is to look at the polarity—the positive or negative sentiment – of what the president says towards China and Japan. To demonstrate this, I will run each sentence with the words “China”, “Japan”, “Chinese”, or “Japanese” through the Twin Word Sentiment Analysis AI Software. Twin Word is a company that develops software to analyze text and communication for a variety of businesses. This program looks at the tone of a sentence or paragraph and indicates whether the polarity of the statement is positive, negative, or neutral. I will be taking the statement when the Bill Clinton mentions “China,” “Japan,” “Chinese,” and “Japanese,” as well as the sentence before and after it to maintain context. The polarity demonstrates if the president had a more positive or negative outlook toward trade in East Asia. Since what the president says has an impact on legislation and policy during his term, I intend to see whether imports and exports to the East Asian countries of China and Japan grew or fell based on what the president’s attitudes were toward the region. I will be gathering information on imports and exports from the United States Census Bureau which records the exports and imports of goods (in USD) with China and Japan. I will begin looking at the import and export data from 1993 and 1997 respectfully because that is the January following the election rather than looking at the year of the election since they happen in November at the close of the year. Furthermore, I will run import/export values through the Consumer Price Index (CPI) Inflation Calculator in order to adjust for inflation because a comparison of the value of money in 1992 and 2000 would not be accurate since the value of the dollar evolves over time. The CPI is updated every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

My method of comparison will be through a Chi-Square Test for Independence. The purpose of using a Chi-Square Test for Independence is to determine if there is an association between what the polarity of the president’s speech on China and Japan and if there was growth in imports and exports. I will be doing two, two by two chi-square tests with the two columns representing the polarity being “positive and negative” and the two columns representing net imports and exports from China or Japan respectively. This will demonstrate if there is any connection between the polarity of the presidential debates and imports and exports to the target country. 

Findings

As a means to see whether what the president says during presidential debates affects imports and exports, I looked at both the polarity of what President Clinton said during presidential debates about China and Japan, and imports and exports from China and Japan to the United States for the time period of 1992-2000. Then, in order to investigate the relationship between two factors, I analyzed both factors in a Chi-Square Test for Independence. 

Polarity

To test for the polarity of the president’s speech, I looked at what President Clinton said during the 1992 and 1996 Presidential Debates. Although there were three presidential debates in 1992 and two presidential debates in 1996, the analysis was looked at as an election cycle. There were seven mentions of “China” or “Chinese” in the 1992 debate and four mentions of “Japan” or “Japanese.” In 1996, there was one mention of “China” or “Chinese” and seven mention of “Japan” or “Japanese.” I then took the sentence with the key word and the sentence before and after and ran it through a sentiment analysis program, to determine the polarity of the phrase. The results can be seen in Table 1. 

TABLE 1

Polarity of Presidential Rhetoric in the 1992 and 1996 Presidential Elections on China and Japan

Positive polarity demonstrates that what President Clinton was mostly positive, negative polarity demonstrates that what the president says was overall negative, and neutral polarity demonstrates that there was no distinct feeling noted in the analysis. In the 1992 election debate, the words “China” or “Chinese” were mentioned two times with a positive polarity, three times with a negative polarity, and twice neutrally, compared to in 1996 when it was mentioned once with a positive polarity. In the case of Japan, the polarity was positive twice and neutral twice in 1992. However, in 1996, the polarity was quite dispersed with two instances being positive, three being negative, and two being neutral. Over the course of the two debates, President Clinton did not give a clear direction to whether his message was positive or negative towards China or Japan. As seen by the polarity in both the 1992 and 1996 debates, there were examples of negative, positive, or neutral combinations in three out of the four cases tested. Furthermore, the overall polarity shifted for both countries over the two terms. China was primarily negative in the 1992 election but changed to primarily positive in the 1996 election. Similarly, for the Japan codes, the polarity was primarily positive in the 1992 debate and then changed to primarily negative in the 1996 debate. I will be analyzing the connection between imports and exports and the polarity of the president’s speech in the time period in which this shift occurred.

Imports and Exports

To look at imports and exports coming from and to the United States between China and Japan, I looked at the data provided by the United States Department of Commerce and the United States Census Bureau. The data was then adjusted for inflation through the Consumer Price Index (CPI) Inflation Calculator. This data can be seen in Table 2 and Graph 1 for China and Table 3 and Graph 2 for Japan. 

TABLE 2 and GRAPH 1

Exports and Imports from China to the United States Adjusted to January 2019

Note: Imports and Exports are measured in millions of United States dollars. 

Chinese imports steadily increased except for a sharp decline between 1993 and 1994, one year into President Clinton’s first term as president of the United States. In terms of exports, increases were observed unilaterally—with the exception of 1995-1996 (the year of the 1996 presidential election). Another decline was seen in the year between 1998-1999, a year before the 2000 presidential election. Overall out of the eight years analyzed in this study, one instance of import and two instances of export decline were observed.

TABLE 3 and GRAPH 2

Exports and Imports from Japan to the United States Adjusted to January 2019

Note: Imports and Exports are measured in millions of United States dollars.

As seen by the value of exports and imports coming to and from Japan, trade was more established with Japan than with China. Initial comparisons in 1992 indicate that the United States imported around $177.5 billion from Japan as compared to $46.9 billion from China. Imports to a Japan increased consistently from 1992-1995 with a decrease in the 1995-1996 fiscal year. Another dip can be seen in 1997-1998, the year of the 1998 midterm elections. In the export data, a decrease can be seen the year of the 1992 election, between 1992-1993. Similarly, the three years following the 1996 election exports can be seen to consistently decrease until they finally increased between 1999-2000. 

Presidential Rhetoric and the Economy 

As a way to determine if there is an association between the polarity of the president’s rhetoric and imports and exports from China and Japan, I used a Chi-Square Test for Independence. The rows symbolized the years in which the president displayed positive or negative sentiment. Neutral sentiment was not used in the Chi-Square Test because there were no instances in which the amount of imports or exports stayed the same. Since the content analysis indicated that the president shifted polarity over the course of his two terms, that was a way in which I was able to track the correlation between if what the president said during that debate affected the net import or net exports in the years following. The data for net imports and net exports was calculated by taking the difference between the export or import value of the last year of the term from the first year of the term. The first year of the term was 1993 and 1997, because presidential debates are in the November of 1992 and 1996 and that is not enough time to observe economic change. The null hypothesis that is being tested is that there is no association between the overall sentiment displayed by a president during a presidential debate about either China or Japan and the trade, in terms of imports and exports, with that country. 

TABLE 4 

Chi-Square Test for Independence for Japanese Imports and Exports 

Note: Net imports and exports are calculated in millions of USD. 

The Chi-Square Test for Independence for Japan indicated that there is a statistical significance and that there is an association between the polarity of the president’s speech and the imports and exports from that country. The p-value, or the chance that this data can be replicated by chance, is zero, meaning that there is a very low chance that this result can be created randomly. Therefore, there appears to be an association between the overall sentiment of the president during a presidential debate about Japan and the imports and exports with Japan. 

TABLE 5

Chi-Square Test for Independence for Chinese Imports and Exports

Note: Net imports and exports are calculated in millions of USD. 

The Chi-Square Test for Independence for China also indicated that there is a statistical significance that there is a strong positive correlation between the polarity of the president’s speech and the imports and exports to and from that country. Similarly, the p-value is zero, suggesting that there is an association between the overall sentiment of the president during a presidential debate about Japan and the imports and exports with China. 

Discussion and Conclusion

To address the question of whether what a president—in this study President Bill Clinton—says is correlated to an increase or decrease in imports and exports as a way to measure the economy, I looked at an analysis of the sentiments of presidential debates against the net import and export values of China and Japan. Overall, I intended to analyze whether the polarity of the president’s speech has an effect on the economy, a theory called presidential signaling. According to Nielsen, a prominent global data analytics firm, 199.2 million people watched the three American presidential debates in 1992 and 72.4 million viewers tuned in for the 1996 presidential debates.^[20]What the winning presidential candidate says reaches a large audience, and researchers were able to show that a president’s comments have the power to inspire confidence in consumers.^[21]

President Clinton was elected to his first term in 1992, defeating incumbent president George H. W. Bush. In 1994, a year following Clinton’s election, Congress switched parties from a Democratic majority-Clinton’s party-to a Republican majority. According to Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, although the Clinton Administration did not clearly articulate a foreign policy agenda in the beginning of his term, in 1994 he was able to work with both Democrats and Republicans in Congress to rescue Mexico’s economy, broker a peace in Bosnia, and work on encouraging a democratic government in Russia.^[22]However, the Clinton administration did not maintain a strong position on China and Japan until the 1996 election and subsequent term. The president’s sentiment towards China and Japan shifted between the two elections: in 1992 China was portrayed in a negative light and Japan in a positive light, and in 1996, China was portrayed in a positive light and Japan in a negative light.

The Chi-Square Tests for Independence, Tables 4 and 5, demonstrate that there is a strong correlation between the positive/increase and negative/decrease patterns in speech sentiment and trade. The p-value of zero for both tests indicate that there is no chance that these two factors-speech sentiment polarity and fluctuations in the economy-can happen by random chance alone. What this data demonstrates is that the tone in which the president presents a situation can be correlated to international events, in this case trade and the economy. When the president had an overall positive sentiment, imports and exports went up and when he had overall negative sentiment, imports and exports went down. However, what this test does not take into account are external political factors. One of these factors is Congress, the lawmaking branch of the federal government. Foreign policy is split between the executive and legislative branches, often leading to conflict over who is to have more power. Congress is granted power over the military and foreign affairs such as peace treaties and declarations of war by the Constitution while at the same time making the President Commander in Chief and the face of foreign policy in the United States.^[23]According to Philip R. Trimble, Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Senator Fulbright, and assistant legal adviser for Economic and Business Affairs in the Department of State in the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations confirms that the president is the dominant force in foreign affairs. However, Congress plays an incredibly important role in foreign policy because it has control over the funds needed to carry out plans, coordinates agencies and institutions, and puts pressure to get priorities done.^[24]The President of the United States has the power to enforce laws made by Congress. Called the completion power, the president has the discretion to execute decisions made by Congress, which gives him the final say in the extent to which congressional policy will be effective.^[25]  The president also has other channels to exert his power in Congress. As explained by Stephen H. Wirls, professor of American politics and political thought at Rhodes College, the president has used broad power in foreign affairs over the last 50 years and has been expanded over time. While this varies from president to president, Wirls explains that Congress is inclined to go along with what the president says on foreign policy issues or face contradicting the president and risking losing credibility on future foreign policy issues.^[26]Therefore, not only does the president have an institutional role in foreign policy, but based off the results that I have gathered, the president has another outlet for influence: what he says. This demonstrates that in a larger sense, the words and meaning that the president puts behind his words is reflected in actual action taken by the United States as a whole. Therefore, by listening to the president, one can understand the direction in which United States economic foreign policy will take. By understanding the correlation between presidential rhetoric and foreign trade researchers, as well as the public and politicians, could factor presidential speech into calculations on presidential actions.

This presents another layer of influence that the President of the United States has. Limitations that I encountered that could be adjusted for future research would be that I analyzed only the correlation between the polarity of the president’s speech and imports and exports. The data collected only demonstrated a correlation rather than a causal relationship. Other factors such as congressional influence, trade agreements, and changes in international politics could have an affect on the imports and exports with China and Japan. This study was also conducted by looking at the presidential administration of Bill Clinton. By looking at other presidents, there could be more understanding if what the president says carries the same influence unilaterally or if the Clinton Administration was an outlier. Furthermore, my research did not take into account other external political factors such as midterm elections and the composition of Congress and the House of Representatives during the time, as well as what was happening inside the governments of China and Japan. For example, if the party of the president is in power it would be easier for him to pass legislation and conduct plans that support his directives. Future research would need to examine how external factors like Congress, the Media, and the public have on the president carrying out promises. Although my research focused on the 1992-2000 time period, research should be conducted on a more current time period in order to observe if similar trends can be observed into the twenty first century. Taking into account more factors would establish a holistic understanding of how foreign policy is controlled in the United States. As shown by my research, the polarity with which the president can be correlated with trade, therefore they are influential tools. This raises the responsibility for presidents to speak with purpose and with intention-as their sentiment is directly correlated with the global trade. 

Bibliography 

Andrade, Lydia, and Garry Young. “Presidential Agenda Setting: Influences on the Emphasis of Foreign Policy.” Political Research Quarterly49, no. 3 (1996): 591-605. doi:10.2307/449099.

Bosworth, Stephen W. “The U.S. and Asia in 1992: A New Balance.” Asian Survey33, no. 1 (1993): 103-13. doi:10.2307/2645292.

Epstein, Richard A., and Mario Loyola. “The Mutual Dependency of Force and Law in American Foreign Policy.” The University of Chicago Law Review83, no. 1 (2016): 89-115. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43741593.

Eshbaugh-Soha, Matthew. “Presidential Signaling in a Market Economy.” Presidential Studies Quarterly35, no. 4 (2005): 718-35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27552725.

Eshbaugh-Soha, Matthew, and Jeffrey S. Peake. “Presidents and the Economic Agenda.” Political Research Quarterly58, no. 1 (2005): 127-38. doi:10.2307/3595602.

Goldsmith, Jack, and John F. Manning. “The President’s Completion Power.” The Yale Law Journal115, no. 9 (2006): 2280-312. doi:10.2307/20455697.

Gordon, Bernard K. “A High-Risk Trade Policy.” Foreign Affairs82, no. 4 (2003): 105-18. doi:10.2307/20033652.

Haass, Richard N. “Fatal Distraction: Bill Clinton’s Foreign Policy.” Foreign Policy, no. 108 (1997): 112-23. doi:10.2307/1149093.

“Highest Rated Presidential Debates 1960 To Present.” What People Watch, Listen To and Buy. Accessed March 23, 2019. https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2008/top-ten-presidential-debates-1960-to-present.html.

Koo, Min Gyo. “US Approaches to the Trade-Security Nexus in East Asia: From Securitization to Resecuritization.” Asian Perspective35, no. 1 (2011): 37-57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42705322.

Krukones, Michael G. “Predicting Presidential Performance through Political Campaigns.” Presidential Studies Quarterly10, no. 4 (1980): 527-43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27547621.

Lee, Chia-yi, and Su-Hyun Lee. THE TRUMP ERA AND THE TRADE ARCHITECTURE IN THE ASIA PACIFIC. Report. S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, 2017. 2-4. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep05943.1.

McAvoy, Gregory E. “Stability and Change: The Time Varying Impact of Economic and Foreign Policy Evaluations on Presidential Approval.” Political Research Quarterly59, no. 1 (2006): 71-83. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148076.

Peake, Jeffrey S. “Presidential Agenda Setting in Foreign Policy.” Political Research Quarterly54, no. 1 (2001): 69-86. doi:10.2307/449208.

Trimble, Phillip R. “The President’s Foreign Affairs Power.” The American Journal of International Law83, no. 4 (1989): 750-57. doi:10.2307/2203363.

Wirls, Stephen H. “The President, Foreign Policy, and Constitutional Government.” OAH Magazine of History11, no. 4 (1997): 16-20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25163165.

Wood, B. Dan, Chris T. Owens, and Brandy M. Durham. “Presidential Rhetoric and the Economy.”The Journal of Politics67, no. 3 (2005): 627-45. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2508.2005.00332.x.

Yates, Jeff, and Andrew Whitford. “Institutional Foundations of the President’s Issue Agenda.” Political Research Quarterly58, no. 4 (2005): 577-85. doi:10.2307/3595643.

Endnotes

^[1]Dan B. Wood and Chris T. Owens, eds., “Presidential Rhetoric and the Economy,” The Journal of Politics67, no. 3 (2005): 628. 

^[2]Chia-yi Lee and Su-Hyun Lee, THE TRUMP ERA AND THE TRADE ARCHITECTURE IN THE ASIA PACIFIC (Singapore: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, 2017), 10. 

^[3]Stephen W. Bosworth, “The U.S. and Asia in 1992: A New Balance,”Asian Survey33, no. 1 (1993): 104. 

^[4]Min Gyo Koo, “US Approaches to the Trade-Security Nexus in East Asia: From Securitization to Resecuritization,” Asian Perspective35, no. 1 (2011): 43. 

^[5]Bernard K. Gordon, “A High-Risk Trade Policy,” Foreign Affairs 82, no. 4 (2003): 116. 

^[6]Bosworth, “The U.S. and Asia in 1992,” 104. 

^[7]Bosworth, “The U.S. and Asia in 1992,” 105. 

^[8]  Bosworth, “The U.S. and Asia in 1992,” 110.  

^[9]Gordon, “A High-Risk Trade Policy,” 118. 

^[10]Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, “Presidential Signaling in a Market Economy,” Presidential Studies Quarterly35, no. 4 (2005): 720. 

^[11]Eshbaugh-Soha, “Presidential Signaling,” 732. 

^[12]Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha and Jeffrey S. Peake, “Presidents and the Economic Agenda,” Political Research Quarterly58, no. 1 (2005): 131. 

^[13]Wood, “Presidential Rhetoric and the Economy,” 642. 

^[14]Lydia Andrade and Garry Young, “Presidential Agenda Setting: Influences on the Emphasis of Foreign Policy,” Political Research Quarterly49, no. 3 (1996): 601-602. 

^[15]Jeffrey S. Peake, “Presidential Agenda Setting in Foreign Policy,” Political Research Quarterly54, no. 1 (2001): 72. 

^[16]Michael G. Krukones, “Predicting Presidential Performance through Political Campaigns,” Presidential Studies Quarterly10, no. 4 (1980): 541-542. 

^[17]Gregory E. McAvoy, “Stability and Change: The Time Varying Impact of Economic and Foreign Policy Evaluations on Presidential Approval,” Political Research Quarterly59, no. 1 (2006): 81.

^[18]McAvoy, “Stability and Change,” 81.

^[19]Jeff Yates and Andrew Whitford, “Institutional Foundations of the President’s Issue Agenda,” Political Research Quarterly58, no. 4 (2005): 579. 

^[20]“Highest Rated Presidential Debates 1960 To Present”, Nielsen, accessed 23 March, 2019, https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2008/top-ten-presidential-debates-1960-to-present.html.

^[21]Wood, “Presidential Rhetoric and the Economy,” 642. 

^[22]Richard N. Haass, “Fatal Distraction: Bill Clinton’s Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy, no. 108 (1997): 114. 

^[23]Richard A. Epstein and Mario Loyola, “The Mutual Dependency of Force and Law in American Foreign Policy,” The University of Chicago Law Review83, no. 1 (2016): 106-107. 

^[24]Phillip R. Trimble, “The President’s Foreign Affairs Power,” The American Journal of International Law83, no. 4 (1989): 751-752. 

^[25]Jack Goldsmith and John F. Manning, “The President’s Completion Power,” The Yale Law Journal115, no. 9 (2006): 2282. 

^[26]Stephen H. Wirls, “The President, Foreign Policy, and Constitutional Government,” OAH Magazine of History11, no. 4 (1997): 18-19. 

Written by Coco Chai

On June 24th, 2018, Recep Tayyip Erdogan from the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was elected President of Turkey. This presidential election marked the end of the parliamentary system of the Turkish government as it removed the office of Prime Minister and replaced it with an executive presidency. Through this election, the AKP achieved its longtime goal of turning the Turkish governmental system into a presidential system.

The Turkish presidential election had a majoritarian electoral system, in which one candidate must obtain more than 50% of the popular vote in order to be elected. If no candidate obtains the majority of the votes in the first round, the election will advance to a second round with the two candidates who received the two highest amounts of votes in the first round.¹ Six candidates ran for the office of President in this election. They were Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the incumbent president at the time and the elected president, from the AKP, Muharrem Ince from the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Selahattin Demirtas from the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), Meral Aksener from the IYi Party, Temel Karamollaoglu from the Felicity Party, and Dogu Perincek from the Patriotic Party. Erdogan received 52.59% of the vote, earning an outright victory without having the election advance to the second round. Erdogan’s main opposition came from Ince, who won 30.64% of the vote. Coming in third place was Demirtas with 8.4% of the vote.²

Erdogan was most popular in the northeastern part of the country. In Bayburt, for example, Erdogan won 82.1% of the vote.³ This was largely due to his championing of the conservative Islam cause. In 2013, for instance, Erdogan’s government repealed a law that had banned female civil servants from wearing hijabs for decades. The conservative and religious side of Turkey deeply resonated with Erdogan’s campaign, and Erdogan was seen among his supporters as “one of the people,” as opposed to the old secular elite.⁴ Ince’s votes were mostly generated from western Turkey, where the population supported a more westernized and secular ideology — one that Erdogan’s supporters abhorred.⁵ The southeastern region of Turkey leaned heavily towards the HDP candidate Demirtas since the Kurdish population strongly identified with the HDP’s pro-minority politics.⁶

The Grand National Assembly of Turkey also held a parliamentary election on the same day as the presidential election, and the electoral rules followed the proportional representation system. Turkey had a total of 87 electoral districts, each electing a certain number of Members of Parliament proportional to the size of its population, and the percentage of votes a party received converted to a certain amount of seats in Parliament. The total number of seats in Parliament was increased from 550 to 600 according to constitutional amendments approved in 2017. Previously, the ruling party AKP firmly controlled Parliament by holding 316 seats.⁷ During this election, however, the AKP won 295 seats, falling short of the 301 seats needed for a majority. Nevertheless, the AKP formed an alliance with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) — the People’s Alliance, and they together hold 344 seats, controlling the majority of Parliament. The second biggest alliance in Parliament, the Nation Alliance, consisting of the CHP, the IYi Party, and the Felicity Party, won a total of 189 seats.⁸

The major implication of this presidential election is that it gave the president sweeping new powers and replaced the parliamentary system of the Turkish government with a presidential system. In 2017, the AKP and its ally, the MHP, proposed a constitutional referendum, which aimed to abolish the office of Prime Minister, give the president more executive power, and reduce the power of Parliament. The “Yes” vote eventually won the majority, setting an initial presidential election date for November 3rd, 2019.⁹ However, in April 2018, the AKP called for the election to be held early on June 24th, 2018 — a strategic move intended to reduce the effects of Turkey’s economic and political instabilities on the electoral outcome and to also catch an increasingly cohesive opposition off-guard.The AKP’s heavy crackdown on media also greatly contributed to Erdogan’s victory.¹⁰  After the election, Erdogan’s new executive powers include the power to declare a state of emergency, which used to conducted by the cabinet, the power to issue presidential decrees, and the power to directly prepare the annual budget. Already a dictator, and with even greater power now, Erdogan is likely to establish an autocracy, marking the end of democracy in Turkey.

Bibliography

Cupolo, Diego. “The Fate of Turkey’s Democracy Lies with the Kurds”. The Atlantic. Published June 23, 2018. Last Accessed April 19, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/turkey-erdogan-kurds-vote-hdp-akp/563573/

Isikara, Guney. “Six Take Aways From the Turkish Elections”. Jacobin. Published June 29, 2018. Last accessed April 19, 2019. https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/six-takeaways-from-the-turkish-elections

Lowen, Mark. “Erdogan’s Turkey”. BBC. Published 13 April 2017. Last accessed April 19, 2019 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/Erdogans_Turkey

Pavey, Safak. “The Man Who Could Topple Erdogan”. The New York Times. Published June 19, 2018. Last accessed April 19, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/opinion/ince-erdogan-turkey-election.html

“Preliminary results in the Turkish presidential election of 2018”. Statitia. Published June 24, 2018. Last accessed April 19, 2019 https://www.statista.com/statistics/873950/turkish-presidential-election-results/

Uras, Umut. “Turkey election: All you need to know about the June 24 polls”. Al Jazeera. Published June 24, 2018. Last accessed April 18, 2019 https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2018/06/turkey-elections-june-24-polls-180611104841735.html

“Who won Turkey? Implications from Erdogan’s snap elections”. The Brookings Institution. Published June 27, 2018. Last accessed April 19, 2019. https://www.brookings.edu/events/who-won-turkey-implications-from-erdogans-snap-elections/

Endnotes

1. Umut Uras, “Turkey election: All you need to know about the June 24 polls,” Al Jazeera, published June 24, 2018, last accessed April 18, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2018/06/turkey-elections-june-24-polls-180611104841735.html
2. “Preliminary results in the Turkish presidential election of 2018,” Statitia, published June 24, 2018, last accessed April 19, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/873950/turkish-presidential-election-results/
3. Ibid.
4. Mark Lowen, “Erdogan’s Turkey,” BBC, published April 13, 2017, last accessed April 19, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/Erdogans_Turkey
5. Safak Pavey, “The Man Who Could Topple Erdogan,” The New York Times, published June 19, 2018, last accessed April 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/opinion/ince-erdogan-turkey-election.html
6. Diego Cupolo, “The Fate of Turkey’s Democracy Lies with the Kurds,” The Atlantic, published June 23, 2018, last accessed April 19, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/turkey-erdogan-kurds-vote-hdp-akp/563573/
7. Uras 2018.
8. Guney Isikara, “Six Take Aways From the Turkish Elections,” Jacobin, published June 29, 2018, last accessed April 19, 2019, https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/six-takeaways-from-the-turkish-elections
9. Lowen 2017.
10. “Who won Turkey? Implications from Erdogan’s snap elections,” The Brookings Institution, published June 27, 2018, last accessed April 19, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/events/who-won-turkey-implications-from-erdogans-snap-elections/

Written by Zhou Xizhuang Michael

Introduction

Interpreting history is both an important and powerful process. It allows us to breathe life into dull, lifeless archives and records. With a stroke of a pen, historical dots are connected to create meanings. This is consequential. By interpreting history, historians, scholars or politicians wield power to shape people’s views on their forebears. Narratives are constructed, and complexions of the past are painted in ways that may seem familiar or peculiar to contemporaries. However, such interpretations are not without issues for they are not always linear. Instead, the process of historical understanding is fraught with twists and turns. One historical event that generates great interest and attention among generations but also creates continual debates and opposing views is the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The Paris Peace Conference was the meeting of the victorious Allied leaders[1] following the end the First World War to negotiate on peace settlements for the defeated Central Powers as well as to redraft a new world system for international peace. 

When understanding why the conference failed to usher in a new chapter of international relations and make lasting peace, historians, scholars and politicians are quick to point their fingers at the decisions made during the conference. There is little disagreement that those fateful decisions which culminated in the Treaty of Versailles were consequential to the upheavals and havoc that wrecked Europe in the immediate post-WWI years. But much of the academic discourse has focused itself on decisions that led to the demise and disintegration of old empires, and the redrawing of boundaries and unequal treatments of the vanquished Central Powers. In addition, the historical literature has acquired a predictable taste for associating the terms of German reparations and territorial concessions to socio-political upheavals prevalent in Europe during the inter-war years.

However, little attention has been accorded to the political and social events happening beyond the European borders. Decisions made during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 led to more than just socio-political or geographical transformations in Europe. Its consequences rippled far across the seas and reached the shores of many countries, of which most played little to no role in the conference’s decision-making process. For China, the conference marked a key turning point in its own revolutionary history. It lifted a new wave of political movements and revolutions that were responsible for the shake-up of the Chinese population, ideology, and foreign policy. Among these, the decision to transfer the rights of Shandong to Japan, also known as Shandong Decision, was monumental in its effects to the Chinese society- particularly the rise of Chinese communism. But despite its effects, the Shandong Decision and its relation to China gained little traction in the modern historical imagination. This essay intends to illuminate these much forgotten and little-known links and interactions between the conference and communist developments in China. Arguments will be directed under two approaches, namely how the Shandong Decision led to Chinese disillusionment over the West and triggered the May Fourth Movement. At the same time, this essay will recognize possible counter-vailing views on the perspectives brought forth and attempts to address the much discussed “Soviet Factor” and its role in Chinese communism.

The Big Disillusionment

The denial of Chinese territorial rights to Shandong in the Treaty of Versailles had accentuated a deep sense of betrayal and disappointment among Chinese people, notably the intellectuals. Corollary to this was the Chinese loss of faith in Western institutions and values. Prior to the conference, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson promised China the support of the American government on its territorial disputes with Japan.[2] As such, buoyant by American promises and support, when Chinese diplomats arrived at Paris, widespread optimism and euphoria reigned in the minds of the Chinese population.

However, when the news of the Conference’s decision to put Shandong in Japan’s custody broke out in China, a profound sense of disillusionment kicked in and provided material for Soviet propaganda.[3] With the Chinese elites and intellectuals left in disenchantment, Western ideologies began to lose its appeal and credibility in the eyes of the Chinese public. This set the stage for the penetration of Soviet propaganda into a more porous and vulnerable Chinese society.[4] Soviet ideologies, notably its own brand of socialist revolution, gained ground quickly. This essay argues that it was utter disappointment over perceived Western betrayal and loss of confidence in the ability of Western institutions and ideas to bring about peace and justice that prompted the Chinese to reorient their interest eastwards and see the Soviet socialist model as a viable political alternative. This two-pronged process – first disillusionment with the West and second the acceptance of socialism and Marxist ideologies – subsequently converged into a political sensation that marked the beginning of China’s long [communist] revolution.”[5] Thus, disappointment over the conference’s decision on Shandong had prepared the ground for ideological and political revolutions in China and increased Chinese demands for Soviet’s ideological and political exports. Unsurprisingly, when Soviet propaganda and ideologies reached China, they fell on fertile ground and grew rapidly.

Students and Workers – A Rising Force

The Shandong Decision triggered more than just intense emotions among the Chinese people and represented an ephemeral juncture where Chinese intellectuals and political leaders abandoned one ideology or set of ideas and principles for the other. What proved most significant about this fateful decision was that it became the “intellectual catalyst” that triggered off the May Fourth Movement in 1919. [6] Years of administrative ineptness and political failures of the Chinese republican government had convinced the Chinese people that a new political alternative with fresh ideas and systems was necessary to save China from its political poverty. [7] Thus, when the May Fourth Movement, triggered by Chinese indignation and anger over the Shandong Decision, broke out, it awakened this incipient political consciousness for political and social change. This section will elaborate on how the Movement fed momentum to communist developments in China and led to the rise of Soviet socialist ideas as a major political thought. This essay will also bring focus to the Movement’s ability to reach out and recruit support from the masses to establish a strong united front for the eventual socialist/communist revolution.

When the Shandong debacle caught the public eye, more than twenty-five thousand students and teachers joined hands[8] in a nation-wide protest historically known as the May Fourth Movement. As Schurmann and Schell posit, the Movement became the “well-spring of Chinese Communism” and was characterized by its demand for political change and promotion of socialist ideas.[9]  Leaders of the Movement, such as Chen Duxiu  (陈独秀) and Li Dazhao（李大钊）, were ardent proponents of Marxist ideologies and called for a socialist uprising in China. Both Chen and Li, including many other leaders of the Movement, became fond of Soviet ideologies due to disappointment over the Shandong Decision.[10]

The movement struck a strong chord among students as well. Numerous student organizations and societies aimed at studying Marxist ideologies and socialism sprang to life during the movement. For example, in the fall of 1919, socialist study groups such as the Society for the Study of Socialism was established in the famous Peking University.[11] Similarly, the Movement helped create the Socialist Youth league and gained sympathies from the Chinese Southern governments and warlords.[12] Thus, prompted by the presumed betrayal at the conference and the loss of Shandong to Japan, the May Fourth Movement created the necessary momentum to shove Chinese intellectuals and leaders onto the socialist locomotive. Furthermore, it led them to hold the conviction that a socialist revolution was their remaining hope to save China from its foundering state.

However, the May Fourth Movement was not just about students and intellectuals. It brought together a divided society into one political piece. The Movement not only encouraged active participation from the “core” of the society, but it also unleashed the masses from the “periphery” to become a potent political force in Chinese politics.[13] This essay argues that it was this inclusion of the masses into the Chinese political equation that acted as the decisive epoch during the Movement, which proved consequential for the course of Chinese history and developments thereafter. From here, the Movement was no longer limited to the Chinese intelligentsia. It had essentially “turned into a nationwide revolutionary movement with the participation of the working class.”[14] With the proletariat class emerging as a “conscious independent political force” from the Movement,[15] new energy and ideas were added to the political mix and became a powerful combination for socialist and communist leaders. With the emergence of a mass popular base, subsequent socialist revolutions were able to take hold in China. In view of the above, the Shandong Decision not only discounted the credibility of Western democracy and institutions in the eyes of the Chinese people, but it was also responsible for triggering intense political and intellectual ferment that culminated in the May Fourth Movement. With its success in furthering the socialist agenda and the creation of a strong proletariat class, the Movement was to become a major influence in Chinese politics and history up till 1949.[16]

The Soviet Factor

Following the discussion on the importance of the “Shandong Decision factor”, this essay finds it important to address possible counter-arguments by proponents of the “Soviet factor”. While the Shandong Decision played a role in turning the Chinese away from the Western embrace, Elleman mentions that it was Soviet foreign policy designs and political aid that ultimately tilted the balance in the Soviet’s favor. For example, the Karakhan Declaration issued by the Soviet government in July 1919 denounced extra-territoriality and claimed that all unequal treaties signed with China “played [the] conspicuous role in enlisting Chinese sympathies and paving the road for Communism.”[17] Additionally, this essay does acknowledge that despite the growing political and socialist sensation, the Chinese communist infrastructure remained rudimentary even after the May Fourth Movement. It was only after years of political and ideological training that a more vigorous Chinese communist organization emerged.[18] In fact, the Chinese Communist Party was only established in 1921 after the arrival of Communist International (Comintern) officials such as Gregory Votinsky.[19] Thus, it seems that Soviet assistance and its reorientation to China were important factors in determining the fate of Chinese communism.

However, notwithstanding the importance and relevance of Soviet help, this essay continues to lay its emphasis on the fact that it was the Shandong Decision and the loss of Chinese trust over the Western democratic model that first opened China’s political door to the entrance of Soviet socialist propaganda and ideas. It is also important to recognize that Soviet ideologies and its brand of revolutionary ideas and Marxism received little attention from Chinese intellectuals prior to the conference. For years, despite sporadic socialist intrigues among intellectuals and workers, socialism and communism remained well at the political and social periphery.[20] In fact, it was the western model with its brand of democracy and liberalism that first caught the imagination of the Chinese people. Hou, in his book A Short History of Chinese Communism, reveals that leading Chinese intellectuals during that time saw the “Western democratic thought and institutions as a remedy for the socio-political ills of modern China.”[21]

As such, this essay contends that had it not been for the Shandong Decision and the disillusionment and ignominy it generated among the Chinese people, it is difficult to see why and how China might have been receptive towards the Soviet socialist model to then take the revolutionary path. In fact, the new generation of Chinese intellectuals and political leaders preceding the movement was predominantly educated and trained in American and European institutions and well versed with western culture and ideologies.[22] Additionally, Soviet assistance came only after the May Fourth Movement and by that time, the communist foundation was already established. In the absence of a nation-wide protest in China in June 1919, there is little incentive for the Soviet government to promptly send its resources and manpower over to China in July to only to oversee its communist development. Without the Shandong Decision and the Movement, there might not have been any window of opportunity for Soviet leaders, and the history of Chinese communist and even China itself could have walked down a different path.

Conclusion

This essay has argued that the Shandong Decision was pivotal in promoting Chinese communism by reshaping the country’s political and social landscape. Essentially, the decision provided the key impetus that led to the intellectual awakening of the Chinese people. It lifted the ideological floodgate and “set in motion the exorable march of events” that ultimately opened the communist chapter in China. Ultimately, the Shandong Decision led to the Chinese people becoming more conscious of their political path.[23] The disappointment and indignation over the conference shattered Chinese dreams for hopes of Western support and democratic peace, and these feelings also created the intellectual environment from which socialism and communist tendencies flourished quickly. Furthermore, this essay has also tackled the limitation of this interpretation by looking at how the Soviet’s pivot towards China may be seen as a more significant factor to the forming of Chinese communism than the Shandong Decision. Nonetheless, this essay explains that it should be put into consideration that Soviet’s friendly gestures and assistance to Chinese sympathizers were largely motivated by a fundamental change to China’s socio-political situation because of the Shandong Decision. Without the movements and intense emotions the Shandong Decision triggered, there would be little openings for soviet propaganda to penetrate and minimal support and materials for the communist infrastructure to take shape in China.

For future research, this essay proposes more detailed and systematic study and assessment of China’s historical developments prior to the Paris Peace conference of 1919 to better grasp the nuances and complexities that reside in the rapid socio-political transformations of China before 1919. It is recommended that this future research be directed towards the study of Chinese developments beginning from the First Opium War (1839-1842) to the failures of the early Republican Government (1912-1916). Past humiliation at the hands of Western imperial powers and anger over domestic incompetence and woes can help us to sketch a clearer picture of the swirling political and intellectual undercurrents that were later to surface in 1919 and years beyond.

Endnotes

[1] Also known as the famous “Big Four” which comprised U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister Lloyd George, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando.

[2] Joseph T. Chen, The may Fourth Movement in Shanghai: The Making of a Social Movement in Modern China, Vol. 9 (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 3.

[3] Robert E. Hannigan, The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914-24. 1st ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 227.

[4] Paul French, Betrayal in Paris: How the Treaty of Versailles Led to China’s Long Revolution. World War One 100th anniversary ed. (Melbourne, Victoria: Penguin Group Australia, 2014), 59.

[5] Paul French, Betrayal in Paris, 75.

[6] Tse -tsung Chou, The may Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China, Vol. 6 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 99.

[7] The Republic of China, or 中华民国 (Zhonghua Minguo) created in 1912 following the abdication of Qing Emperor Xuantong.

[8] Sheng Hu, A Concise History of the Communist Party of China (Seventy Years of the CPC) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), 16.

[9] Herbert Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell, Republican China, 87.

[10] Fu-wu Hou, A Short History of Chinese Communism, Vol. S-166 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 15.

[11] Ibid., 15.

[12] Paul French, Betrayal in Paris, 59.

[13] Joseph T. Chen, The may Fourth Movement in Shanghai, 21. 

[14] Sheng Hu, A Concise History of the Communist Party of China, 17.

[15] Tse -tsung Chou, The may Fourth Movement, 350.

[16] Paul French, Betrayal in Paris, 53.

[17] Bruce A. Elleman, Wilson and China: A Revised History of the Shandong Question (Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 139.

[18] Ibid., 142.

[19] Ibid., 142.

[20] Richard T. Phillips, China since 1911 (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1996), 45.

[21] Fu-wu Hou, A Short History of Chinese Communism, 15.

[22] Wellington Gu, prominent Chinese diplomat and ambassador to the U.S. and part of the Chinese delegation at Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (received his Ph.D. in International Law and Diplomacy from Columbia University); Hu Shi, famous Chinese philosopher and diplomat and pioneer of the New Culture Movement (studied Philosophy at Columbia University); Cai Yuanpei, President of Peiking University and key engineer behind the New Culture and May Fourth Movements (studied Philosophy, Psychology, and Art History at Universität Leipzig of Germany).

[23] Wen-su. Chin, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Vol. no. 2 (Jamaica, N.Y: St. John’s University Press, 1961), 35.

Bibliography

Chen, Joseph T. The may Fourth Movement in Shanghai: The Making of a Social Movement in Modern China. Vol. 9, Leiden: Brill, 1971.

Chin, Wen-su. China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Vol. no. 2. Jamaica, N.Y: St. John’s University Press, 1961,

Chou Tse -tsung. The may Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Vol. 6, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Elleman, Bruce A. Wilson and China: A Revised History of the Shandong Question. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 2002.

French Paul. Betrayal in Paris: How the Treaty of Versailles Led to China’s Long Revolution. World War One 100th anniversary ed. Melbourne, Victoria: Penguin Group Australia, 2014.

Hannigan, Robert E. The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914-24. 1st ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

Hou, Fu-wu. A Short History of Chinese Communism. Vol. S-166. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1967.

Hu, Sheng. A Concise History of the Communist Party of China (Seventy Years of the CPC). Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994.

Phillips, Richard T. China since 1911. Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1996.

Schurmann, Herbert Franz and Orville Schell. Republican China: Nationalism, War and the Rise of Communism 1911-1949. Vol. 2, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Written by Jake Kochanowsky (Wesleyan University)

While all eyes are fixated on the chaotic Brexit negotiations, another major political story is unfolding in Italy. After emerging victorious from a contentious parliamentary election earlier this year, the Italian Five Star Movement (MS5), a far-right populist party, has formed a coalition government with the League, another conservative party. Together, they have attempted to follow through on campaign promises by proposing a radically modified government budget that will increase government spending for the Italian welfare system. Internationally, the budget has been deemed as illogical as a result of Italy’s history of economic struggles and growing debt. The EU’s concerns about the budget are legitimate and even necessary to prevent severe political and economic repercussions, yet the Italian government is resistant to EU conformity and any reduction of its sovereignty over domestic policies. It is a tenuous situation, and Italy’s major role in the Eurozone as its third largest economy lends it additional urgency. In this paper, I will consider why the Five Star Movement insists on its impractical budget and what the economic and political consequences of this budget are as it stands. Despite its commitment to its campaign promises, MS5 and its ministers must consider alternatives to its budget; otherwise, the country will face an economic recession that will harm the world economy. 

Capitalizing on rural frustration with establishment politics and Italy’s large influx of immigrants, the MS5 successfully won control of the Italian Parliament in the 2018 general election. The party promoted itself on the promises that it would deport illegal immigrants and focus its internal policies on creating jobs and lowering the national tax rate.[1]The hope these policies engendered in supporters generated enough momentum to carry the party to power in the Italian government via a coalition with a similar right-wing party, the League. Compelled to follow through on campaign promises, Luigi Di Maio, Matteo Salvini and many MS5 leaders adjusted the Italian budget to cover higher government expenditures. Motivated by the welfare of their constituents, the MS5-led parliament has proposed a new budget that includes allowing retirement as early as the age of 62, instead of 67 years old, and introducing a “citizenship income” or basic welfare level of €780 a month for the poor and unemployed.[2] Most importantly, they plan to cut the income tax which will be split into two brackets, with citizens paying 15% or 20% of their annual income.[3]

The proposed budgetary modifications are unpalatable to the EU since the new budget will raise Italian deficits on its GDP to 2.4%, an increase from 0.8% in the original budget.[4] While this deficit isn’t above the EU’s hard cap of 3%, Italy’s economic woes over the past two decades and stagnant growth have many in the EU Commission worried about the consequences this budget will have on the Italian economy and the EU’s economy as a whole. Furthermore, the EU wants member states to avoid breaching a public debt ceiling of 60% of GDP. Italy, with the second highest debt in the EU, already sits at 131% of its GDP.[5] This staggering debt figure has rattled investor confidence and decreased bank loans, interest rates and the strength of the euro, compelling the EU to intervene.

Accordingly, the EU has responded to this “serious non-compliance” to existing economic regulations by condemning the Italian budget and threatening disciplinary action.[6] Moving forward, the EU Commission has started a process which will create a timetable for the Italians to modify their budget; if they do not comply, they will face fines up to 0.5% of their GDP (roughly €9 billion).[7] It is in both parties’ best interests to avoid this scenario, but the Italian government has not been receptive to EU feedback. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Salvini reflected the opinion of the Italian people when he responded, “the EU should respect the Italian people considering Italy pays the EU €5 billion more than it receives.”[8] This statement is reflective of the Italian attitude towards the EU as 52% of Italian citizens are anti-EU. This sentiment has been driven in recent years by the recent dependence in the EU on its larger nations, such as Italy, to pay a higher portion in taxes while receiving less money back in subsidies and investment. Additionally, the EU’s immigration policies run contrary to the MS5’s platform and has added to the tensions between the current government and their EU counterparts. However, despite the majority Euroscepticism in Italy, don’t expect the Italians to leave the EU just yet. The Italians may remain adamant about their budget and cynical of the EU Commission’s suggestions, yet it is important that the Italians at least consider the feedback in order to maintain their position in the EU and prevent their economy from weakening further.

It is evident Italy is attempting to veil its euro-skeptic attitude, and instead is demonstrating specious optimism regarding the budget by proffering an argument that lacks data and statistical evidence.  EU criticism of the budget has noted that in a situation of extremely high debt, Italy is planning significant additional borrowing rather than fiscal prudence. Commission VP Valdis Dombrovskis stated, “the uncertainty and the rising interest rates are taking their toll on the Italian economy. Also, it hinders the ability of Italian banks to lend to Italian companies and households at affordable cost.”[9] The Italians disagree with this analysis; instead, they suggest that their borrow-and-spend policy would boost economic growth, reduce the debt ratio, and decrease unemployment rates, which currently sits at 10.5% (and is a grotesquely high 32.5% for young professionals).[10] However, the EU Commission’s economic analyses suggest that this strategy will fail to produce the economic returns the Italian government expects and leave Italy with an even larger debt burden.[11] This would lead to further market turbulence, credit downgrades, and will severely restrict credit lines for Italian companies. Consequently, a failure to address these issues would have a widespread economic impact.

The Commission’s concerns are well-founded – decades of economic strain and inefficiency serve as proof that Italy is in poor financial health and ill-prepared to increase government spending. Italy’s €2.3 trillion in national debt is extremely risky, and budgetary issues have contributed in bringing its economy to the brink of recession.[12] The Commission says Italy’s budget plan would increase the structural debt-to-GDP deficit by around 1.2% of GDP, or about €22 billion, and is demanding a deficit reduction instead.[13] That would imply spending cuts far in excess of the roughly €8 billion of savings that Italy’s government currently plans.[14] With its outstanding debt obligations, Italy has many worried that it could default on its debt, triggering a recession and greatly weakening the Eurozone.

As of recent, the European Central Bank and other foreign creditors have ceased purchasing Italian government bonds and debt, because they question Italy’s ability to pay off its debt obligations, especially with concerns that the proposed budget will continue to raise interest rates and lead to the government defaulting on its debt.[15] There is fear that these government bonds, whose yield rates have reached record highs, will become worthless.[16] At the moment, Italian banks, who are the primary holders of these bonds, would also incur tremendous losses on these sunk assets. Devoid of billions of euros in assets, the banks would be forced to open new lines of credit that would make them susceptible to defaulting on their own debt obligations. In this potential scenario, the banks would be dependent on its bankrupt government to bail them out, likely forcing extensive stimulus packages and loans from the EU and thereby weakening the Eurozone. Furthermore, even these last resort stimulus packages are not guaranteed. If the European Central Bank (ECB) and other international creditor refused to lend to Italy’s government to keep its public services running, the political and economic consequences would be incalculable.

The fiscal tension resulting from MS5’s policies has also greatly impacted interest rates, bank loans and growth in the Italian private sector, creating a trickle-down effect of negative repercussions. Interest rates sit at all-time lows; however, the Italian banks are skeptical of a financial downturn and an increase in loan defaults, and have greatly reduced the number of loans available to the public.[17] In Italy, 90% of small and medium sized businesses are dependent on bank loans, but even the safest borrowers have suffered a reduction in the availability of these loans.[18] As a result, Italy’s business activities and entrepreneurial ventures have all been curtailed. The IMF estimates that the credit tightening triggered by Italy’s budget plan has already slowed economic growth and that this decline cannot be reversed by Italian stimulus spending.[19] In addition, an economic tool, the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), indicates that Italian business activity contracted in November, raising the likelihood that Italy is moving towards recession. Italy’s GDP fell by 0.5% in the third quarter, which many attribute to a steep decline in business investments, compounded by hesitant consumer spending.[20] Finally, the PMI predicts that Italy’s economy will contract once more in fourth quarter, meaning the country will enter a technical recession for the first time since 2013.[21] Italy’s GDP has consistently grown at rates lower than the whole of the EU since 2012, but its decline in the last quarter has made it apparent that fears over the new budget are well-founded. The resulting contractionary financial spending by Italian banks has already hurt Italian businesses and under the proposed budget, these issues will only be exacerbated in the private sector.

The growing risk of recession is putting pressure on Italy’s new government to yield to the EU Commission and comply with EU fiscal rules, despite MS5 and the League’s previous protests. As of December 2018, Italian Economic Minister Giovanni Tria has suggested that he is willing to start a dialogue with the Commission to adjust MS5’s proposed budget, yet he also maintains that any such changes should not impede economic growth. If economic growth is Italy’s key priority, then MS5’s course of action is obvious – it must fully comply with the EU Commission. The confidence shock to bond markets, Italian banks and the country’s business sector illustrates the constraints facing financially fragile nations like Italy in the Eurozone. The current economic troubles are felt by everyone from the government to the banks to the Italian workers. In the long-run, to ensure the strength of its currency and access to ECB funds, the Italians are best-served by remaining in the EU. In the interim, to revitalize its economy, its businesses, and create job growth, Italy must cooperate with the EU to prevent the country from encountering the same economic conundrum that Greece currently faces. While it might not serve their political interests, the Italian government must accept EU demands to keep itself from pushing its own economy into a recession.

The uphill battle to fix the Italian economy will require greater political compliance by its ruling government, who may have to sacrifice its campaign promises for the betterment of its country’s financial health. Although it is unrealistic to expect that the Italian economy will recover in the immediate future, heavy changes to MS5’s proposed budget are necessary to keep the economy from sliding into a recession with Eurozone-wide consequences. In any case, it is certain that economists, international investors, and Italian citizens will be closely watching the ongoing dialogue between Italy and the EU Commission. With Italy on the verge of a recession, it is imperative that they heed the EU’s concerns and adjust their budget to prevent the collapse of their economy.  

Endnotes

[1] James Politi, “Populist Beliefs: Where Italy’s League and Five Star Stand,” Financial Times, May 10, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/8ca9a840-543e-11e8-b3ee-41e0209208ec.

[2] The Associated Press, “Italy’s New Populist Leaders Vow to Deliver on Campaign Promises,” The New York Times, June 08, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/03/world/europe/italy-government.html.

[3] The Associated Press, “Italy’s New Populist Leaders Vow to Deliver on Campaign Promises.”

[4] Bjarke Smith-Meyer and Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli, “Commission Calls for Disciplinary Action against Italy over Budget Plans,” POLITICO, November 24, 2018, https://www.politico.eu/pro/commission-calls-for-disciplinary-action-against-italy-over-budget-plans/.

[5] Smith-Meyer and Borrelli, “Commission Calls for Disciplinary Action against Italy over Budget Plans.”

[6] Smith-Meyer and Borrelli, “Commission Calls for Disciplinary Action against Italy over Budget Plans.”

[7] Smith-Meyer and Borrelli, “Commission Calls for Disciplinary Action against Italy over Budget Plans.”

[8] Smith-Meyer and Borrelli, “Commission Calls for Disciplinary Action against Italy over Budget Plans.”

[9] Jan Strupczewski, “EU Moves to Discipline Italy over Budget, Rome Remains Defiant,” Reuters, November 21, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-budget-eu/eu-moves-to-discipline-italy-over-budget-rome-remains-defiant-idUSKCN1NP2MX.

[10] Eric Sylvers, “Italy’s Big Budget, Designed to Help Business, Is Hurting It,” The Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/italys-big-budget-designed-to-help-business-is-hurting-it-1542796201.

[11] Strupczewski, “EU Moves to Discipline Italy over Budget, Rome Remains Defiant.”

[12] Giovanni Legorano and Paul Hannon, “Italy Tries to End Budget Fight With EU as Economy Teeters on Recession,” The Wall Street Journal, December 05, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/italy-tries-to-end-budget-fight-with-eu-as-economy-teeters-on-recession-1544017194.

[13] Strupczewski, “EU Moves to Discipline Italy over Budget, Rome Remains Defiant.”

[14] Strupczewski, “EU Moves to Discipline Italy over Budget, Rome Remains Defiant.”

[15] Sean O’Grady, “Italy Is Pushing Europe to the Brink of Another Economic Crisis,” The Independent, October 03, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/europe-italy-eurozone-debt-crisis-salvini-on-the-brink-economic-crisis-not-new-a8566416.html.

[16] O’Grady, “Italy Is Pushing Europe to the Brink of Another Economic Crisis.”

[17] Jason Horowitz and Steven Erlanger, “E.U. Rejects Italy’s Budget, and Populists Dig In,” The New York Times, October 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/world/europe/italy-budget-eu.html.

[18] Horowitz and Erlanger, “E.U. Rejects Italy’s Budget, and Populists Dig In.”

[19] Legorano and Hannon, “Italy Tries to End Budget Fight With EU as Economy Teeters on Recession.”

[20] Joseph Hayes, “PMI Suggests Italy to Enter Technical Recession in Fourth Quarter,” IHS Markit, December 07, 2018, https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/pmi-suggests-italy-to-enter-technical-recession-in-Q4-071218.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed: MarkitPMIsAndEconomicData.

[21] Hayes, “PMI Suggests Italy to Enter Technical Recession in Fourth Quarter.”

[22] Legorano and Hannon, “Italy Tries to End Budget Fight With EU as Economy Teeters on Recession.”

Written by Tyler Jager

As the Cold War came to a close in the 1990s, global attitudes towards conflict changed. The majority of conflicts during the Cold War were “regional”, involved both intrastate and interstate actors, and were located in the so-called “Third World” (nations not aligned with the United States nor the Soviet Union). These qualities made conflict susceptible to proxy warfare for the two contending blocs on the world stage, and as such, most conflicts were viewed as intractable and even inevitable, since both superpowers had a vested interest in their results. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, the subsequent international order created an environment seemingly fit for conflict resolution at a level previously unthinkable. Civil wars, whether they were in Latin America or Southeast Asia, were no longer zero-sum-games for global power; they were viewed as collective problems that had to be addressed with collective action (Lund 2003). In 1992, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, introduced “An Agenda for Peace”, a response to a Security Council request noting an “unprecedented post-Cold War opportunity”. More broadly, this report became the de facto doctrine of the United Nations after 1991: expanding the idea of peacekeeping to include “preventive diplomacy” and “post-conflict peacebuilding”. Up to this point, UN intervention into conflict zones was limited, due to frequent vetoes of more expansive action by the Security Council. The mandate of a peacekeeping mission during the Cold War was the bare minimum, to monitor compliance with a peace agreement. The new “Agenda for Peace” encouraged a vast expansion of this exercise to recognize and prevent future conflict, to rebuild norms and state institutions post-conflict, and to address the “deepest causes” of conflict (which Boutros-Ghali recognized as “economic despair, social injustice and political oppression”).   

Suddenly, everything from protecting safe zones to rebuilding a sovereign state’s police force to employing its people could qualify as conflict prevention. The definition expanded to include multiple actors, such as states, international bodies, or NGOs. Today, the phenomenon we call “liberal intervention” can be defined as a multilateral outside intervention (under which the UN qualifies) into an intra-state conflict to provide security (Lund). This paper will evaluate the effectiveness of post-Cold War liberal intervention, and analyze why some interventions succeed and others fail, through two prominent case studies. This paper will not examine whether such interventions are legally valid or desirable in principle. Nor will this paper analyze the level of political openness or democracy as a criterion for successful intervention; an intervention is considered successful if and only if it prevents political violence.

The first case study to examine is that of Angola. The Angolan Civil War began in 1975, immediately after Angola’s successful war for independence from Portugal. Faced with a power vacuum, the two major liberation movements, the Marxist-Leninist group MPLA and the conservative group UNITA, aligned with the Soviet and US blocs respectively, turned on one another. The conflict divided Angola along ethnic and tribal lines, with the Mbundu people as the UNITA base of support, and the Ovimbundu as the MPLA base of support. The Angolan Civil War quickly became an archetypal Cold War battleground; UNITA insurgents received covert American aid and arms, in addition to ground support from South Africa, while the ruling MPLA received the same from the Soviets, in addition to ground troops from Cuba. By 1991, however, international aspects of the conflict had faded. Cuba, South Africa, and Angola signed a multilateral ceasefire in 1990, and the leaders of MPLA and UNITA signed the Bicesse Accords in 1991. The Bicesse Accords provided a framework for a Angola’s transition to multiparty democracy, with winner-take-all elections designed to cement the peace.

A UN peacekeeping mission, United Nations Angola Verification Mission (UNAVEM) II, was deployed to monitor the ceasefire, and later the election. This mandate was fairly limited (understandably so, as this was before Boutros-Ghali’s “Agenda for Peace”); the only direct authority of UNAVEM II was election monitoring. UNAVEM II could not enforce demobilization (which was voluntary), monitor the new defense force, and could only monitor other Angolan monitors of the ceasefire. The mission consisted of solely 1100 personnel and a $200 million operating budget – tiny for a UN peacekeeping mission. The 1992 elections were disastrous, neither free nor fair, and provoked further conflict (Paris 2010). The leaders of MPLA and UNITA ran against one another, and the losing candidate (the leader of UNITA, Jonas Savimbi – originally a U.S. ally) contested the results, rallied his forces, and resumed the insurgency. This period of fighting from 1992 to 1994 was the worst yet in the history of independent Angola; 120,000 were killed over eighteen months, nearly half the total amount of casualties in the previous sixteen years (Alker 2001). UNITA embarked on a shockingly successful campaign, striking deep into the heart of MPLA (and ethnically Ovimbundu-dominated) territory. The humanitarian crisis that ensued was one of the worst of the decade. As a result, the United States abandoned UNITA; with the USSR’s collapse the Cold War aspect of the Angolan Civil War was over.

When UNITA’s luck ran out late in 1994, its leaders agreed to another ceasefire with the MPLA government: the Lusaka Protocol. The existence of both the Bicesse Accords and the Lusaka Protocol makes for a useful comparison in analysis of conflict resolution strategies while keeping the variable of the conflict itself constant. The Lusaka Protocol differed from the Bicesse Accords in three major ways. First, it stipulated a power-sharing, coalition government, the Government of National Unity and Reconciliation (GURN), much unlike the winner-take-all elections that took place after Bicesse. Second, it gave the accompanying UN peacekeeping mission, UNAVEM III, a far more comprehensive mandate with far broader resources. Unlike UNAVEM II, UNAVEM III assumed direct responsibility of enforcing the ceasefire, the creation of a joint national defense force, and the demobilization of UNITA. UNAVEM III had 7,000 staff, 6,000 of which were armed peacekeepers, and by the end of its deployment, cost nearly $900 million, more than quadruple the budget of UNAVEM II. Additionally,, the Lusaka Protocol had flexible timetables (Rienner 1998). Military demobilization, reorganization, and the creation of GURN – all these processes were concluded months behind schedule. Despite these differences, Lusaka was not successful either. By 1999, the Angolan military was once again fighting with UNITA militants, and hostilities did not end until the death of Jonas Savimbi, the UNITA leader, in 2002.

While there are many theories as to why the Bicesse Accords failed, the failure of the Lusaka Protocol casts doubt on nearly all of them. Lusaka should have succeeded if judged by scholarly conflict resolution criteria (Kornprobst 2002); and yet, despite six times the manpower, four times the budget, flexible timetables, and a power-sharing government, the outcome of Lusaka was the same as Bicesse. Those theories that do explain the failure of both accords are structural. Some scholars, such as Stephen John Stedman, argue that the conflict in Angola was unsolvable so long as Angolan natural resources – namely oil and diamonds – remained in the hands that they did. The diamond industry gave UNITA nearly bottomless coffers to draw from, and the oil industry remained largely in the hands of MPLA. Neither party was economically dependent on the other, and as such there was no incentive for cooperation. If one party has a monopoly on a valuable, exportable commodity such as diamonds, why would it ever come to the negotiating table? Another point is that Angola, like many postcolonial African states, had no unifying national identity or institutions: Angolans identified themselves as UNITA or Mbundu first, and Angolans second (Sambanis 2000). The lack of a belief in an indivisible public good meant that leaders like Jonas Savimbi would not hesitate to enrich themselves with military action, if they had the power to do so and saw no credible international action to thwart them (Stedman 1995).

The second case study, El Salvador and its twelve-year civil war, is generally considered a success intervention-wise. The horrific Salvadoran Civil War lasted twelve years with 60,000 casualties, and it is a haunting memory in El Salvador and the Americas at large. The conflict began in full force on March 24, 1980, when the Archbishop Óscar Romero, a so-called “voice for the voiceless” and a Mandela-like figure in El Salvador, was assassinated by a lone gunman while conducting mass. Just one month earlier, Romero had written a plea to President Jimmy Carter to prioritize peace in El Salvador, and crucially, to end American military aid to the junta government. Tragically, it was Romero’s assassination, not his letter, that proved more representative of the immediate future of his nation.  The two chief belligerents of the civil war were FMLN, an umbrella Communist guerrilla group, and the right-wing military dictatorship in San Salvador. The war is perhaps most remembered for its infamous “death squads”; militias such as ORDEN, a group famous for torturing civilians and severing ears. Outside the law, allied with the junta government, and with the goal of terrorizing the rural population, from which FMLN drew its main support, the death squads were El Salvador’s national trauma. The underlying causes of the conflict were social and economic divisions in Salvadoran society: unbelievable levels of economic inequality between a tiny landowning elite and a large rural class of agricultural laborers. Similar to Angola, El Salvador was a commodity state, with coffee as the overwhelmingly dominant export. Given the example of Angola as a failed intervention, it would follow that El Salvador, a state with an equally intractable civil war, and a similar economic and social structure, would be a recipe for another failed intervention on the part of the United Nations. And yet, the conclusion to the Salvadoran Civil War in 1992 is widely considered to be one of the most successful transitions from war to peace in the post-Cold War era, remaining in place to this day.

Why did the final peace agreement and accompanying peacekeeping mission (the Chapultepec Accords and ONUSAL, respectively) in El Salvador succeed where two agreements and four peacekeeping missions in Angola failed? It is nearly certain that the peace in El Salvador would have fallen apart if not for the efforts of the United Nations Observer Group in El Salvador (ONUSAL) (Hampson 1996). ONUSAL was the only monitor of compliance in the various political and security reforms that constituted the hundreds of pages in the Chapultepec Accords, and under the leadership of special UN representative Alvaro de Soto, it acted in a way unprecedented for a UN peacekeeping force. ONUSAL bullied and cajoled government ministries and boards; it publicly embarrassed both parties if they did not accept UN recommendations; it took on roles that were nonexistent under its original mandate (Wilkerson 2008). Within a matter of months in 1992, ONUSAL became the chief organizer of El Salvador’s elections, voter registration, land reform, resettlement of former combatants, and creation of a national civilian police force. ONUSAL accomplished the vast majority of these tasks successfully, and with a peak manpower of only 4,948 blue helmets (Dobbins 2005) and a total cost of $107 million (Brown 1999).

Contrast this with UNAVEM III, which included over 7,000 personnel and cost over $900 million—and failed. The success of ONUSAL may be as simple as higher quality and tenacity in its negotiating team, which was willing to be aggressive if necessary. It also differed in a key priority that was missing from the Angola case: human rights. Both sides of the conflict agreed early on that monitoring human rights abuses, documenting past abuses, and providing justice to victims were the first step to sustainable peace (Montgomery 1995). The Chapultepec Accords stipulated the creation of a Truth Commission for El Salvador to “investigate serious acts of violence that have occurred since 1980 and whose impact on society urgently demands that the public should know the truth.” The staff of the Truth Commission traveled the country, collected over 2,000 testimonies, and documented human rights abuses meticulously. ONUSAL and the Commission used these findings to facilitate restorative justice between victims and perpetrators, and to make recommendations for purges in the military and new police force. Conversely, the Lusaka Protocol and Bicesse Accords of Angola did not monitor human rights whatsoever; their mandates were solely concerned with elections, power-sharing in government, and the military. In fact, the UN special representative to Angola covered up human rights violations; in a statement to Human Rights Watch in 1995, a UN official stated that “the situation is too sensitive for serious human rights monitoring. Making public what we know could undermine the peace process and put us back to war” (Vines 1999). Whereas UNAVEM was lacking in monitoring human rights abuses and justice for said abuses, ONUSAL was proficient in both. Finally, the smaller force in El Salvador may have helped ONUSAL avoid the bureaucratic delays that have accompanied most large UN interventions, as well as the usual backlash from local citizens against the blue helmets.

Of course, ONUSAL cannot act as the sole claimant of El Salvador’s success. It was the political climate of El Salvador that allowed for the Chapultepec Accords in the first place. Salvadorans overwhelmingly supported the peace process and ONUSAL regardless of their politics. A 1987 poll showed 83 percent of the national population supporting an end to the war through negotiated settlement (Call 2002). Citizens of El Salvador were extremely conscious about judicial independence and human rights, and by 1995, public figures were no longer afraid of coming to one another’s defense if blackmailed or silenced (Montgomery). Additionally, the military situation on the ground had convinced both parties that outright victory was impossible. In 1989, FMLN surrounded San Salvador for the first time, and appeared close to victory, although they were eventually pushed back due to a lack of civilian support within the capital. This near loss left the military government shaken, and as for FMLN, it was perceived the group would never reach the level of popular uprising it had hoped for (Wilkerson). This is a key and perhaps obvious difference between the beginnings of the peace processes in Angola and El Salvador: both parties in El Salvador genuinely wanted peace, even if that meant an outcome other than outright victory. The ceasefire enacted after Chapultepec was not broken once. By contrast, the parties of the Angolan Civil War had nothing to gain from peace; they already had monopolies over their respective industries. Therefore, they entered agreements to gain short-term advantages but with the understanding that eventually, they would scuttle them (Stedman 2002).

There were other structural factors at play in El Salvador that may have allowed for a successful transition. Unlike Angola, neither belligerent possessed a monopoly over the commodity good in El Salvador. While coffee processing areas and ports for exportation were largely controlled by the government, FMLN had broad control over coffee plantations in rural areas; thus, the nature of the industry ensured economic dependency between the parties. Secondly, El Salvador had a previous tradition – a rocky tradition, but tradition nonetheless – of parliamentary democracy and democratic institutions, and had a long history as an independent nation. Angola had no time between independence and civil war to foster a national or democratic tradition. 

Yet the contrast of Angola and El Salvador still implies several conclusions about how and why interventions succeed or fail. It appears that the success of an intervention depends on multiple factors, none of which are sufficient on their own to ensure peace, and that the failure of an intervention can be due to just one factor. There are several conditions that are necessary, but not sufficient, for peace to occur.

First, both parties must have a genuine desire for peace. This may seem an obvious conclusion, but it provides the corollary that to attempt intervention into a civil war between two parties who have no real interest in peace will always be futile, regardless of the resources committed to said intervention by the UN or any other body.

Second, the intervention force in question must be efficient and its leaders must be first-rate and assertive. Quite counterintuitively, the experiences of the UN in Angola and El Salvador suggest that peacekeeping missions with fewer personnel will be more successful, as this incentivizes logistical efficiency and minimizes waste.

Third, there must be some form of economic interdependence between the belligerents at hand. For example, MPLA and UNITA had their own foreign patrons and then their own resources from which to draw, and therefore could only lose economic power by relinquishing control, not gain it.

Fourth, human rights monitoring must be a part of the mandate of the peacekeeping force at hand, and coming to terms with past abuses and administering justice must always remain a part of the transition post-conflict.

Fifth, security-sector reform measures must take place. These were best implemented in El Salvador and partially so in the Lusaka Protocol: a demilitarization of the police force, integration of former combatants into said police force, and a dissolution of armed organizations that exist outside the law. The latter measure ensures that former combatants fight on the same side, and a clear line between the military in the sphere of external defense and the police in the sphere of internal defense prevents abuses.

With these conditions met, a third-party intervention into an internal conflict can bring peace and stability. Of course, it is entirely possible that all five are met and the intervention is still a failure. However, policymakers should not take such a result as evidence for the ineffectiveness of third-party intervention. It is possible that intervention may have been the best option available, that the situation at hand was unsolvable, and that the absence of intervention would have been even worse. Put simply, it’s hard to end a war. In a study of 124 civil war cases since 1945, 43% were determined to have ended peacefully of their own volition. UN interventions only require a success rate above 43% to be considered more helpful than not.

Bibliography

Dobbins, J. et al. (2005). The UN’s Role in Peacebuilding: from the Congo to Iraq. RAND-Initiated Research.

Hampson, F. (1996). Nurturing Peace: Why Peace Settlements Succeed Or Fail. Washington, D.C.: USIP Press.

Kornprobst, M. (2002). Explaining Success and Failure of War to Peace Transitions: Revisiting the Angolan and Mozambican Experience. The Journal of Conflict Studies,22(2). Retrieved December 13, 2017.

Lund, M. (2003). What Kind of Peace is Being Built? Taking Stock of PostConflict Peacebuilding and Charting Future Directions. Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C.

Maio, J. D. (2006). Managing Civil Wars: An Evaluation of Conflict-prevention Strategies in Africa. World Affairs,168(3), 131-144. doi:10.3200/wafs.168.3.131-144

Montgomery, T. (1995). Getting to Peace in El Salvador: The Roles of the United Nations Secretariat and ONUSAL. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs,37(4), 139-172.

Paris, R. (2010, April). Saving Liberal Peacebuilding. Review of International Studies, 36(2), 337-365.

Sambanis, N., & Doyle, M. (2000). International Peacebuilding: A Quantitative Analysis. American Political Science Review,94(4), 779-801.

Wilkerson, M. (2008). Security and Democracy in El Salvador: An Undeniable Connection. Stanford Journal of International Relations,10(1), 32-41.

Vines, A. (1999). The Rise and Fall of the Lusaka Peace Process. Human Rights Watch.

Written by Henry Suckow-Ziemer

Less than a week after Indian PM Narendra Modi promised a “jaw-breaking” response to a terror attack that killed 40 paramilitary police, tensions between India and Pakistan rapidly escalated. While events continue to rapidly unfold, they have underscored a fundamental dynamic of modern conflict, namely, its persistence. While the marked decline in interstate, and particularly major power wars since 1945 has led many to pronounce that the world has grown less violent in recent years. This claim has drawn adherents from corners as diverse as economics, anthropology and international law. Their findings seek to offer some hope in a news cycle which is often dominated by images of escalating global chaos and humanitarian disaster. These authors remind us that, in spite of what may appear on our news feeds, on the whole the world is a safer place, for states especially and perhaps for individuals as well, than it used to be. Unfortunately, to extrapolate out from these arguments and claim war is in an irreversible decline would be to neglect crucial lessons contemporary conflicts can teach us about the nature of political violence today.

Take the example of India and Pakistan over Kashmir. While historically a flashpoint, violence in that state had declined dramatically leading up to the February 14 bombing by Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Muhammad. While India has historically had a policy of tit-for-tat reciprocal strikes in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, the rhetoric surrounding this particular attack seemed to indicate a desire to assume a more proactive stance. This trend, which may have been motivated by Modi’s own electoral concerns, resulted in India pursuing a much more forceful policy, launching airstrikes against supposed terrorist training camps in Pakistan. At this moment, a turning point could be identified, as Pakistan claimed the strikes were abortive and hit no actual targets, a claim which could be used to de-escalate the brewing conflict. India and Pakistan could pursue limited aims, Modi content with a more muscular show of force and Pakistan able to save face and potentially garner international support for its show of restraint in the face of aggression. The recent downing of an Indian jet has torpedoed this possibility for a rapprochement, raising fears of military escalation between two nuclear powers. As the situation continues to evolve, it is likely that this narrative with change drastically, but events to date have revealed two key themes of modern conflict; increasing hybridization and potential for escalation.

Gray zones? Hybrid war? Unpeace?

The first aspect of war in the modern age, growing hybridization, requires some initial clarification on terminology. Debate continues to rage over how to properly categorize the wars of the modern age. This has given rise to terms such as “hybrid war” which gained popularity following the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. Other classifications include Gray Zone conflicts, battles that occupy the space between war and peace, as well as the more straightforward “unpeace” used by Lucas Kello to describe the deterioration of the international order facilitated by the internet revolution and cyberwar. Just as there exists debate over which term best describes modern conflict, so too do individuals challenge whether new terminology is even necessary in the first place. Traditional descriptions of hybrid war for instance, highlight the use of non-military tactics, economic, diplomatic and cyber, to prosecute a conflict. This has been the case for wars throughout history, as states have frequently employed non-military tools such as embargos, sanctions and propaganda campaigns in wars dating back hundreds of years. Similarly, with Gray Zone conflict, the notion that the dichotomy between war and peace has only recently eroded seems erroneous. By any definition it would be difficult to not view U.S.-Soviet proxy conflicts throughout the Cold War as Gray Zone battles, or even colonial struggles during the 19th century as extensions of this concept. In response to these critiques, proponents of Gray/hybrid/unpeace definitions have argued that recent developments have magnified the effect of these tactics. True, their theories may not represent anything new under the sun, but modern technologies, especially in the digital realm have opened doors previously inaccessible, allowing rogue actors to orchestrate mischief on a far greater scale than before.

This argument is more compelling, but it does not quite strike the heart of how conflict has been transformed by the modern age. Fundamentally, hybridization means the blurring of lines between state and non-state actors. On the one hand, it entails state militaries employing tools and tactics previously reserved for terrorist or criminal groups. On the other, it means insurgencies developing increasingly sophisticated infrastructure to wage more conventional battles. To illustrate this, consider two of the most prominent modern conflicts, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Russia’s occupation of Crimea, and subsequent intervention in the eastern Oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk proved the catalyst for much of current theorizing about hybrid war. Of particular import in this case was the sophisticated media and cyber campaign surrounding the Russian advance. Both within Ukraine and abroad, falsified news articles, cyberattacks on government infrastructure and electoral interference served to generate confusion over what precisely was happening on the ground. Who were the “little green men” that had suddenly appeared to support the separatists? Was the new Ukrainian government a coalition of west-looking reformers or an ultra-nationalist sect of warmongering fascists? Did the inhabitants Crimea or the majority-Russian eastern regions legitimately want to leave Ukrainian control? These questions amplified the fog of war and gave Russia greater freedom of movement at least initially. Combined with the force structure in the east of mixed local separatist and unmarked Russian troops, Russia gained a distinct tactical advantage. While recently scholars such as Lawrence Freedman have critiqued the strategic logic of Russia’s intervention, the hybrid strategy had distinct military benefits. In essence, Russia gained the ability to largely control the level of violence in Ukraine. When local separatists began to lose ground against the Ukrainian military, Russia could step up its material support to turn the tide, otherwise switching back to low-level insurgency to maintain a “frozen” conflict for little cost. Ukraine has resoundingly demonstrated that interstate conflict and territorial conquest remain very much alive today.

The history of the Islamic State presents what seems to be almost a flipped narrative from the previous case. An offshoot of Al Qaeda initially, this terrorist organization successfully capitalized on favorable environmental factors, including chaos in Syria and Iraqi discontent with the Maliki government, to rapidly expand its capabilities, reaching a pinnacle with its capture of Mosul in 2014. While this group has faced dramatic reversals as of late and today maintains but a sliver of its former holdings, it would be improper to forget how rapidly and successfully the Islamic State seized territory. In the process, it demonstrated another element of conflict hybridization, for not only are states increasingly utilizing tools previously thought the purview of insurgents, but non-state actors have been demonstrating a growing propensity for adapting conventional tactics. The Islamic State at different moments fought like an insurgency, a standing army and a terrorist cell, in many cases blending all these together for maximum effect. Furthermore, even as it has suffered the severe degradation of its conventional fighting force and resources, with the underlying political situation in the region still turbulent, IS has taken increasingly to going underground. This underscores yet another unique aspect of the hybridization of modern conflict, that groups can adjust their propensity for conventional or unconventional, state or non-state tactics according to the exigencies of the moment. Just because the Islamic State styled itself as an empire in the making does not mean that the loss of its territory will necessarily lead to its downfall.

This model of organization is not new, yet non-state combatants which can pursue hybrid strategies have consistently proven their efficacy even against better equipped adversaries. This was the case in 2006 with Israel’s war in Lebanon where the use of more conventional formations and technologies such as night-vision goggles and anti-tank missiles by Hezbollah fighter caught the Israeli Defense Forces by surprise. With hybridization among terrorist organizations appearing to be increasingly the norm, one must wonder where the next hybrid threat may come. At the moment, the danger of a mismanaged U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a country whose military is flush with American hardware, appears particularly foreboding.

Running up the escalation ladder

The second aspect of modern conflict, by virtue of its hybrid nature, is the threat of rapid and unpredictable escalation. While this is common to all conflicts where violent emotions are unleashed and tensions run high, the unique character of hybrid conflict means it has greater potential for miscalculations to trigger a dangerous spiral. The case of India and Pakistan today is a particularly visceral example. While long standing tensions persisted in Kashmir, violence in the region was at a ten-year low when the Jaish-e-Muhammad attack transpired. In roughly two weeks, this bombing resulted in a standoff between two nuclear-capable states. Understanding how this came to be reveals the fraught dynamics at play in a hybrid conflict. Hybrid wars are fundamentally limited wars, yet the wide array of tools employed by combatants risks overextension on an unexpected front.

Take for instance Pakistan’s tacit toleration of terrorist groups such as JEM. So long as these organizations remained directed against India, they provided a valuable tool to maintain pressure against that country without Pakistan having to take the incredibly risky gamble of directly intervening. In this way Pakistan too could selectively escalate and de-escalate purely by jailing and releasing a handful of leading figures. While the degree of cooperation between the Pakistani armed forces and JEM and equivalents is hotly debated, at the bare minimum, it is probable that ISI, the Pakistani intelligence organization is privy to more knowledge of their operations than it lets on. Nevertheless, the danger of utilizing any non-state actor as a proxy for national forces remains that these groups can behave in very unpredictable ways at times. The launch of a major suicide bombing against India at a time when Modi, facing parliamentary elections, confronted criticism over being “soft” on Pakistan, likely would not have been the Pakistani government’s ideal outcome. That it did happen proved the catalyst for a situation which, while not out of either party’s control yet, was likely more than either bargained for to begin with.

In a vastly different context, Russian cyber operations hold a similar threat of escalation. In response to a CIA report which found evidence of Russian tampering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama designated voting machines as “critical infrastructure” interference with which would be considered an attack on the United States. While no subsequent attack has been reported, this represents one pathway through which a Russian hybrid campaign could inadvertently lead to escalation. If, in the course of a Russian propaganda effort, say with the aim of distancing Ukraine from its western backers, a hacker were to compromise an aspect of the U.S. voting system, it is unclear what the extent of the American response would, or could, be.

If hybrid conflict is to be seen as a blurring of state and non-state capabilities, it follows that this blurring opens the door to new methods for waging war. Although this grants a military advantage in that it allows hybrid combatants to surprise their opponents by targeting weaknesses they may not have even been aware of, it also increases the risk of crossing an unseen tripwire. This element of modern conflict deserves greater analysis as, if wars are to become increasingly hybridized, a lack of understanding as to what this means risks more and more instances of actors going to the brink over an unforeseen pressure point. Absent a more thorough study, it is reasonable to expect new flare-ups not only in Kashmir, but in Israel, the South China Sea, Latin America and more.

The human dimension

The previous discussion has treated conflict largely at the macroscopic level. However it is vital to realize that wars are deeply personal and individual tragedies no matter how small. To the family fleeing violence in their hometown, the innocent individuals struck dead by an improperly called airstrike and the forcibly conscripted child soldier, the terms used to describe a conflict matter little. Scholars would do well to remind themselves of this when approaching the subject of modern conflict. This is not to say that the nature of a conflict is unimportant, far from it, if hybrid wars appear to be growing in frequency, and if they offer a pathway for actors to fight battles more effectively, then these kinds of wars must be better understood so as to reduce the exposure of innocents to harm.

They myriad forms hybrid wars and gray zone conflicts can assume not only creates macro-level threats of escalation, but also imperils innocents’ livelihoods in new ways. These threats are as diverse as Russian natural gas freezes leaving families without heat in the dead of winter to well-documented episodes of ethnic cleansing by IS to extortion, impressment and violence perpetrated by state-like criminal syndicates in Latin America. Furthermore, just as these types of conflicts blur the line between the state and non-state in terms of tactics employed, so too is the distinction between fighter and civilian similarly cast in grayscale. If one’s objective is to create political chaos in another country for instance, surely terrorising that nation’s citizens can be seen a legitimate military aim. Similarly an often overlooked element of modern hybrid operations is the use of cyber and conventional tools to wreak havoc on a state’s economy, often in order to supplement more kinetic tactics. The damage to citizens’ livelihoods created by this, while not always as dramatic as that produced by hard military attacks, can be profound and widespread. This is to say nothing of the innate risk posed by state-sponsored terrorist groups or disavowed military units who, lacking more direct oversight, can inflict severe human rights violations in the course of their campaigns. Finally, it appears unlikely that these threats will diminish and indeed, as the tools for waging hybrid war increase, so too with the ways in which they may impact the civilians in the middle.

At the front lines, were bullets, propaganda and economics meet, special attention must continue to be paid to those caught in the crosshairs. This is particularly true for more hybrid conflicts as the non-state dimension also frequently entails the discarding of some of the normative frameworks meant to impose restrictions on the horrors of war.