Rosecrance, Richard. ‘Overextension, vulnerability, and conflict: the ‘Goldilocks problem’ in international strategy.’ International Security 19(4) (1995): 145+.
Nation-states face resource commitments — alliances, economic production and military power — to restrain competitors and challengers. Rosencrance examines the contributions of Barry Posen on military doctrine, Jack Snyder on domestic grand strategy, and Charles Kupchan on elite leadership. Cartel politics and overextension shaped the British Empire’s expansion into the Baltic states during the Crimean War and later into Africa. All three suggest that government officials and self-created myths drive policy, which underpin a strategic culture that elites use to justify their politico-military decisions. For Kupchan, strategic vulnerability — issues of decision stress — is an intervening variable which shapes how they formulate strategic culture.
Kupchan’s distinction between rising and declining states helps to explain several historical analogies made after September 11. In the immediate aftermath of this “high vulnerability” incident, the United States was compared to historical Rome and to Thucydidean war-fighting, given its percived overextension in Afghanistan and Iraq (and with a parallel renewal of interest in Clausewitz and Thucydides amongst classicists). Attention also focussed on the US-Israel and US-Saudi Arabia dyads. In contrast, China and India focused on macroeconomic expansion, and nonmilitary levers such as diplomacy and economic strategies. Snyder and Kupchan’s discussion of decision-making under such circumstances also may help to explain the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War’s role in Al Qaeda’s genesis. It may also explain why Canada as a middle power has promoted human security in contrast to the US emphasis on ‘balance of power’ neo-realism.
Rosencrance’s discussion of interwar Germany and Japan as “low vulnerability” countries that pursued war emphasises the role of strategic intention. An intervening variable my be propaganda as a shaper of domestic contexts and decision-makers. This is discussed in Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit’s Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (Penguin Books, New York, 2005), in which domestic elites and strategic culture become a driver of military war-fighting capabilities. In turn, this period influenced Reagan and Bush administration era neoconservatives, and how Salafi jihadist thinkers were initially perceived as strategists.
Interestingly, Snyder’s book Myths of Empire (1991) used the term ‘blowback’ to describe how an elite can become deluded by its own myths, a process that Chalmers Johnson later popularised after the 2003 Iraq War to describe Al Qaeda’s portrayal of the US as the “far enemy”. This suggests that the immediate post-Cold War debate about strategic culture may have foreshadowed later deveopments, and that this period is overlooked in the ‘three generations’ framework popularised by Harvard’s Alastair Johnston.