The Homeland Security Dilemma: Imagination, Failure and the Escalating Costs of Perfecting Security

2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank P. Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Homeland Security ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
War On Terrorism ◽  
Security Dilemma ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
Financial Costs ◽  
Defence Spending ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract. Besieged by insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq and gripped by mounting pressure to enhance security and public safety at home, officials in Washington and Ottawa are now confronted with a serious homeland security dilemma: the greater the financial costs, public sacrifice and political capital invested in security, the higher the public's expectations and corresponding standards for measuring performance, the more significant the public's sense of insecurity after each failure, and, paradoxically, the higher the pressure on governments and citizens to sacrifice even more to achieve perfect security. The paradox of security dilemmas at the international level (Jervis, 1976, 1978) explains why perfectly rational decisions to enhance power actually diminish security by promoting unstable spirals in competitive defence spending—a common account of escalating military budgets throughout much of the Cold War. The homeland security dilemma represents the post-9/11 equivalent for domestic politics in the war on terrorism. The paper's central argument can be summed up by the following counterintuitive thesis: the more security you have, the more security you will need, not because enhancing security makes terrorism more likely (although the incentive for terrorists to attack may increase as extremists feel duty bound to demonstrate their ongoing relevance), but because enormous investments in security inevitably raise public expectations and amplify public outrage after subsequent failures.Résumé. Assaillies par des insurrections en Afghanistan et en Irak et bousculées par la pression de plus en plus grande d'améliorer le système de sécurité publique à l'intérieur du pays, les autorités de Washington et d'Ottawa se trouvent confrontées à un sérieux dilemme en ce qui concerne la sécurité intérieure : plus les coûts financiers, les sacrifices publics et le capital politique investis dans la sécurité sont importants, plus les attentes du public et les standards de mesure du rendement correspondants sont élevés, plus le sentiment général d'insécurité augmente après chaque échec, et, paradoxalement, plus la pression sur les gouvernements et les citoyens de faire des sacrifices encore plus lourds pour parvenir à une parfaite sécurité s'intensifie. Le paradoxe du dilemme sécuritaire au niveau international (Jervis, 1976, 1978) explique pourquoi des décisions parfaitement rationnelles prises pour renforcer le pouvoir réduisent en fait la sécurité en encourageant des spirales instables de dépenses militaires concurrentielles—voir l'escalade des budgets militaires pendant la guerre froide. Le dilemme de la sécurité intérieure en est l'équivalent en politique nationale, depuis le 11 septembre, dans le contexte de la guerre contre le terrorisme. L'argument principal de cet article peut se résumer par la thèse contre-intuitive qui suit : plus on a de sécurité, plus il en faut. Pas parce que le renforcement de la sécurité rend le terrorisme plus probable (bien que la motivation des terroristes risque de s'exaspérer quand les extrémistes se sentent obligés de démontrer que leur pertinence perdure), mais parce que des investissements massifs dans la sécurité augmentent inévitablement les attentes et que l'opinion se scandalise encore davantage de tout échec subséquent.

4. The Middle East since the Cold War: The multi-layered (in)security Dilemma

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bahgat Korany
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Regional Security ◽  
Security Dilemma ◽  
Security Challenges ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Arab Spring

This chapter examines the evolving regional security situation in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War. While longstanding issues like the Arab–Israeli conflict and the nuclearization of Iran still characterize the regional security context, the biggest game changer has been a series of domestic events that came to be known as the Arab Spring. The chapter considers old and new security challenges — economic, political, and social — faced by the Middle East during the period, focusing on the role of ‘intermestics’: the close connection between the international and domestic politics of the region. It also explores other key themes that have come to dominate the contemporary international relations of the region, including oil, globalization, and religio-politics. Finally, it discusses the notion of ‘Arab exceptionalism’ and the winds of change that continue to persist throughout the region.

The Future of Covert Regime Change

2020 ◽  
pp. 203-222
Author(s):  
Michael Poznansky
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
Practical Implications

This chapter summarizes the central argument and empirical findings of the book. It begins by demonstrating that the legal theory developed here outperformed alternative explanations centered on escalation control, domestic politics, and nationalism. It also shows that the argument travels beyond the Cold War and outside of Latin America by exploring America’s various interventions in Iraq from 1991 to 2003 and Obama’s varied responses to civil wars in Libya and Syria during the Arab Spring. The chapter concludes by suggesting avenues for future research and highlighting the book’s scholarly and practical implications.

How Dominant Narratives Rise and Fall: Military Conflict, Politics, and the Cold War Consensus

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 809-845 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald R. Krebs
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Important Case ◽  
Theory Of Change ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cold War Consensus

AbstractContemporaries and historians often blame the errors and tragedies of US policy during the Cold War on a dominant narrative of national security: the “Cold War consensus.” Its usual periodization, according to which it came together in the late 1940s and persisted until the late 1960s when it unraveled amidst the trauma of the Vietnam War, fits well with a common theory of change in ideas and discourse. That theory expects stasis until a substantial unexpected failure (in this domain, military defeat) discredits dominant ideas and unsettles dominant coalitions. However, systematic data reveal the standard history of this important case to be wrong. Based on a large-scale content analysis of newspaper editorials on foreign affairs, this article shows that the Cold War narrative was narrower than conventional accounts suggest, that it did not coalesce until well into the 1950s, and that it began to erode even before the Vietnam War's Americanization in 1965. To make sense of this puzzle, I develop an alternative theory of the rise and fall of the narratives that underpin and structure debate over national security. Rooted in the dynamics of public narrative and the domestic politics of the battlefield, the theory argues that military failure impedes change in the narrative in whose terms government officials had legitimated the mission, whereas victory creates the opportunity for departures from the dominant narrative. Process-tracing reveals causal dynamics consistent with the theory: failure in the Korean War, which might have undermined Cold War globalism, instead facilitated the Cold War narrative's rise to dominance (or consensus); and the triumph of the Cuban Missile Crisis made possible that dominant narrative's breakdown before the upheaval of Vietnam. This hard and important case suggests the need to rethink the relationship between success, failure, and change in dominant narratives of national security—and perhaps in other policy domains as well.

Through a Glass Darkly: Looking at Conflict Prevention, Management, and Termination. By Stephen J. Cimbala. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. 224p. $65.00.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 680-681
Author(s):  
Joseph B. Underhill-Cady
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
World Order ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Conflict Prevention ◽  
American Empire ◽  
War On Terrorism ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
Arms Races ◽  
Post September 11 ◽  
The Cold War

One test of a book is how well it weathers major developments in world events, and, as with the end of the Cold War, the beginning of the new war on terrorism presents recent publications in international or military affairs with the danger of untimely relegation to the trash bin of history. After September 11, as we scramble to adjust and make sense of the “hunt for Osama,” Stephen Cimbala's work, however, remains a useful compendium of lessons from several recent wars, crises, and ongoing military challenges. Although the book is not as suddenly relevant as Samuel Huntington's (1998) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order or Chalmers Johnson's (2001) Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, the wisdom distilled within it is sound enough to apply equally well to the pre- and post-September 11 worlds. It is largely rooted in frameworks developed for studying the Cold War and superpower arms races, but Cimbala's examination of the new realities of military strategy and technology still has much to say about the war being waged in Afghanistan and the campaigns that are likely to follow.

scholarly journals Suits and Uniforms

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-121
Author(s):  
Hasan Kösebalaban
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Turkish Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Policy Elites ◽  
Second World

Philip Robins contends that Turkish foreign policy has faced four challengesin four distinct periods of its history: (1) consolidating the emergentTurkish Republic through external recognition (1930s), (2) remainingneutral during the Second World War (1940s), (3) confronting thechallenge of Soviet expansionism (the cold war era), and (4) respondingto the end of bipolarity (post-cold war era). Robins examines these foreignpolicy issues in the last period.The main thesis of this work is threefold: First, Turkey is a status quopower in the way that its foreign policy elites have fastened their thinkingand practice to the framework of “the sanctity of borders, of states, ofmultilateral institutions and of norms of conduct, even when it becameclear that systemic changes had rendered some of these continuities nolonger tenable” (p. 6). Second, Turkey continues to be firmly orientedwestwards in terms of its foreign relations, which are characterized by itsstrong commitment to NATO as well as its desire to join the EuropeanUnion (EU). Finally, Turkish foreign policy has been characterized moreby “caution than daring,” quoting Malik Mufti. Despite the increase in itspower relative to its neighbors, Turkey has avoided an interventionist foreignpolicy by emphasizing the formation of multilateral frameworks forconflict resolution.Robins defends these arguments by analyzing the international systemicand domestic politics context in which Turkish foreign policy is ...

Argentina-US Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Hoyt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Southern Cone ◽  
World War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Developed Nations

Relations between the United States and Argentina can be best described as a cautious embrace punctuated by moments of intense frustration. Although never the center of U.S.–Latin American relations, Argentina has attempted to create a position of influence in the region. As a result, the United States has worked with Argentina and other nations of the Southern Cone—the region of South America that comprises Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, and southern Brazil—on matters of trade and economic development as well as hemispheric security and leadership. While Argentina has attempted to assert its position as one of Latin America’s most developed nations and therefore a regional leader, the equal partnership sought from the United States never materialized for the Southern Cone nation. Instead, competition for markets and U.S. interventionist and unilateral tendencies kept Argentina from attaining the influence and wealth it so desired. At the same time, the United States saw Argentina as an unreliable ally too sensitive to the pull of its volatile domestic politics. The two nations enjoyed moments of cooperation in World War I, the Cold War, and the 1990s, when Argentine leaders could balance this particular external partnership with internal demands. Yet at these times Argentine leaders found themselves walking a fine line as detractors back home saw cooperation with the United States as a violation of their nation’s sovereignty and autonomy. There has always been potential for a productive partnership, but each side’s intransigence and unique concerns limited this relationship’s accomplishments and led to a historical imbalance of power.

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