Confidence and Crisis: Mania in International Relations

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Kyle David Larson, M. A.

Graduate Program in Political Science

The Ohio State University

2018

Dissertation Committee

Jennifer Mitzen, Advisor

Christopher Gelpi

Alexander Wendt

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Copyrighted by

Kyle David Larson

2018

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Abstract

Why do states sometimes adopt wildly overconfident foreign policy choices – choices that have unreasonable expectations about potential benefits of success and unreasonable expectations about the absence of risks of failure? In this dissertation, I argue that extreme cases of these choices can occur as a consequence of mania: a wave of irrational, excessive optimism. One example of mania in foreign policy was the drive to enlarge

NATO to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine in 2007 and 2008, prior to the Russian invasion of Georgia and later invasion of Ukraine.

Derived ultimately from the work of John Maynard Keynes in economics, I argue that mania in international relations is both expected and inevitable under certain circumstances. Manias primarily occur as part of a three stage process: a sudden, unexpected shock that changes the nature of the international system (“displacement”), followed by new stories that explain both the causes of the shock and explain their consequences for the future (“New Era Thinking”). The new era opens up possibilities for foreign policy success that had not existed before, leading policy elites to “invest” in foreign policies. If those policies do not fail, skepticism about New Era Thinking diminishes and optimism about future success grows. This process produces a feedback loop where New Era Thinking and policy choices interact with each iteration – and with

ii each iteration have higher expectations for gains and lower cognizance of risk. Similar to the psychological dynamics that drive stock market bubbles in economics, the result is a foreign policy process that dismisses both uncertainty and risk, creating the potential for failure. I will show how the end of the Cold War was a displacement that produced New

Era Thinking, and that as NATO enlargement – which was predicated on New Era

Thinking – progressed eastward it became manic.

Mania has its basis in the human need to overcome uncertainty: the inability to know the future. To overcome uncertainty, humans use confidence: a combination of estimating the future based on the weight of the available evidence (generally, the assumption that the future will reflect the present) and animal spirits: a sense of optimism that we can control the future that exists despite the absence of evidence to support it. Confidence can easily become collective overconfidence: a shared feeling of unreasonable assurance about the future. It is from this possibility that the potential for mania derives.

As a consequence, we can expect mania to be a recurrent phenomenon in international relations, of which NATO enlargement is but one recent example.

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For Mom and Dad

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Acknowledgments

I started down this road in 2008, when on a whim I decided to take John Mearsheimer’s

“American Grand Strategy” course. From that moment onwards, I have received critical aid and encouragement from so many people. At the University of Chicago, I was honored to receive encouragement and opportunity from John Mearsheimer, Robert Pape,

Michael Reese, Jonathan Obert, and Lindsey O’Rourke, without whom I would never have found my calling. At Ohio State, I made ruthless use of the faculty; this project owes special debt to Professors Alexander Wendt, Christopher Gelpi, Daniel Verdier,

Alex Thompson, and Rick Herrmann, each of whom contributed in ways that altered its trajectory. Most important was my advisor, Jennifer Mitzen. She was indispensable, an inspiration to the project and quick to offer needed encouragement and criticism in equal parts – even when I failed to hear what she was saying. Daniel Silverman and Drew

Rosenberg gave precious time to help me work through problems with theory and methods. Courtney Sanders, Robb Hagen, and Charles Smith never hesitated to let me ramble when I needed it. And the support of Aisha Bradshaw, Daniel Wollrich, and

Caitlin Clary ensured that Columbus became home and provided the ontological security

I needed to make it through. All errors are my own.

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Vita

2009………………………………………B. A. Philosophy, University of Chicago

2011………………………………………M. A. International Relations, University of

Chicago

2013………………………………………M. A. Political Science, Ohio State University

2014 – 2018 ………....…………………...Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of

Political Science, Ohio State University

Publications

Mitzen, Jennifer and Kyle Larson. “Ontological Security and Foreign Policy.” Oxford

Research Encyclopedia of Politics (2017). politics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-

9780190228637-e-458

Fields of Study

Major Field: Political Science

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgments ...... v Vita ...... vi List of Tables ...... x List of Figures ...... xi Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1 I. Manias and Bubbles ...... 7 II. Explaining NATO Enlargement ...... 9 III. Empirical Strategy ...... 11 IV. Chapter Outline ...... 13 Chapter 2: A Theory of Confidence and Mania in International Relations...... 17 I. The Concept of Confidence ...... 21 Introducing Confidence ...... 21 Why Do Individuals Need Confidence ...... 23 Where Does Confidence Come From ...... 30 Introducing Overconfidence...... 37 II. Collective Confidence and Overconfidence ...... 40 Introducing Collective Confidence ...... 40 Why Does Confidence Spread ...... 42 Collective Overconfidence ...... 47 III. Speculative Mania in Economics and International Relations ...... 49 Introducing Mania ...... 49 The Three Stages of Mania ...... 51 Mania in Foreign Policy...... 57 Chapter 3: New Era Thinking After the End of the Cold War ...... 66 vii

I. Identifying New Era Thinking ...... 71 New Era Thinking: What to Look For ...... 71 When and Where to Look for New Era Thinking? ...... 74 II. The End of the Cold War as Displacement ...... 77 May 25, 1989 – November 9, 1989: Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev ...... 79 November 9, 1989 – December 26, 1991: The Fall of the Berlin Wall ...... 82 After December 26, 1991 ...... 86 III. Democracy will be Characteristic of the New Era ...... 91 1988-1989: Before the Fall of the Berlin Wall ...... 93 1990-1993: The Revolutions in Eastern Europe ...... 96 IV. Economic Integration will be Characteristic of the New Era ...... 101 1988-1989: Demands of Technology ...... 102 1990-1993: Demands of Technology and Moments of Opportunity ...... 105 V. Instability will be Characteristic of the New Era ...... 111 1988-1989: Soviet Uncertainties ...... 113 1990-1991: (In)stability After the Cold War ...... 116 1992-1993: Aftermath of Iraq and Yugoslavia ...... 121 VI. American Leadership should be Characteristic of the New Era ...... 126 1988-1989: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers ...... 128 1990-1991: Krauthammer vs. Buchanan ...... 132 1992-1993: The 1992 Election Cycle and its Aftermath ...... 136 VII. The Narratives of the Post-Cold War Era as New Era Thinking ...... 144 Chapter 4: The New Era and Overconfident American Foreign Policy...... 148 I. Identifying Mania ...... 153 Mania: A Feedback Loop between New Era Thinking and Outcomes ...... 153 Mania in Foreign Policy...... 155 Identifying Foreign Policy Mania ...... 157 II. Overconfidence in Foreign Policy: A Decade of NATO Enlargement ...... 162 Speculation and Opportunity after the Cold War ...... 164 III. Congressional Arguments about Risks and Benefits of NATO Enlargement .. 165 August 6th 1993 – March 12th 1999: The 1st Wave of Post-Cold War Enlargement ...... 167

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March 13th 1999 – March 28th 2004: the 2nd Wave of Post-Cold War Enlargement ...... 177 March 30th 2004 – April 1st 2009: the 3rd Wave of Post-Cold War Enlargement ... 186 IV. The Mania of Post-Cold War NATO Enlargement...... 193 Conclusion: Mania and Beyond ...... 199 I. Additional Examples of Mania...... 200 Financial Crisis of 2008 ...... 203 The End of World War II ...... 205 The End of World War I ...... 207 II. Beyond Mania: Additional Implications of Confidence for IR ...... 211 Distress and Panic in International Relations...... 212 The Benefits of Mania and Idealism ...... 216 Underconfidence and International Relations ...... 219 III. Managing Mania ...... 222 Bibliography ...... 226

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List of Tables

Table 1: Is it a New Era? ...... 78

Table 2: Democracy will be Characteristic of the New Era ...... 91

Table 3: Economic Integration will be Characteristic of the New Era ...... 105

Table 4: Stability will be Characteristic of the New Era ...... 111

Table 5: American Leadership in the New Era ...... 127

Table 6: Congressional Floor Statements about NATO Enlargement (1993-1999) ...... 175

Table 7: Senator Expressions of Support in Committee Hearings about NATO

Enlargement (1993-1999) ...... 176

Table 8: Congressional Floor Statements about NATO Enlargement (1999-2004) ...... 177

Table 9: Senator Expressions of Support in Committee Hearings about NATO

Enlargement (1999-2004) ...... 178

Table 10: Congressional Floor Statements about NATO Enlargement (2004-2009) ..... 187

Table 11: Senator Expressions of Support in Committee Hearings about NATO

Enlargement (2004-2009) ...... 187

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Preliminary Stages of Mania ...... 53

Figure 2: The Three Stages of Mania ...... 55

Figure 3: The Three Stages of Mania in International Relations ...... 63

Figure 4: The Preliminary Stages of Mania, 1989-1993 ...... 70

Figure 5: NATO Enlargement as Foreign Policy Mania ...... 151

Figure 6: The Mania Feedback Loop ...... 154

Figure 7: Measureable Indicators of Mania ...... 160

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Chapter 1. Introduction

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.”1

-Leo Tolstoy

In June 2015, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, or Chatham House, published a report about the dangers presented by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the broader

Western institutional order. Its authors warned that: “the West has an even bigger interest in preserving the post-Cold War environment. If that is dismantled, it is conceivable that

NATO and the EU could collapse too.”2 Nor were they alone: fears of collapse of the

Western institutional order have only proliferated since then, spurred by the combination of the vote by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union and fear of contagion,3

1 Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Cassell Publishing Company, 1894), 21. 2 Keir Giles, Philip Hanson, Roderic Lyne, James Nixey, James Sherr, and Andrew Wood, The Russian Challenge (London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2015), 39. 3 Holger Schmieding, “Brexit’s Contagion Risks: Will the British vote to leave the EU embolden anti-European populists elsewhere in Europe?” The Globalist, July 6, 2016, https://www.theglobalist.com/brexit-contagion-risks-european-union/; Ian Wishart, “Brexit Contagion is Spreading Across the EU, Pew Study Finds,” Bloomberg Business, June 7, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-07/brexit-contagion-is- spreading-across-the-eu-pew-study-finds; Matthew Holehouse, “The Brexit contagion: 1 and victories or near-victories of politicians, especially President Donald Trump, who are skeptical of the benefits of that order. Concerns that NATO in particular is a “hollow alliance” which would fracture the moment pressure is applied have persisted4 despite numerous confidence-building measures.

The post-WWII liberal international order is clearly in a state of distress. But how did we get here? Let us broaden the question. How and when do periods of distress occur in general? What is distress?

A system is distressed when anxiety rather than confidence begins to characterize the individuals that comprise the system. Within the economics literature, a period of distress is the premonition before a potential collapse: people know something is wrong, but the worst hasn’t happened so they go on as they had before, walking on eggshells, trying to hold things together, but fearing that the worst may yet come to pass. In the words of a British banker, describing such a period: “We have no crash at present, only a slight premonitory movement of ground under our feet.”5 Such periods are often described in emotional terms: “uneasiness, apprehension, tension, stringency, pressure, uncertainty, ominous conditions, fragility” or “thundery atmosphere.”6 Distress is a

How France, Italy, and the Netherlands now want their referendum too,” The Telegraph June 23, 2016, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/23/the-brexit-contagion-how- france-italy-and-the-netherlands-now-wa/. 4 Ian Bremmer, “The Hollow Alliance,” Time Magazine, June 16, 2016, http://time.com/4371195/nato-transatlantic-alliance-us-europe/; Bruce Ackerman, “What Happens to NATO Now?” The Atlantic, November 21, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/11/trump-nato-europe- germany/508229/. 5 Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 113-114. 6 Kindleberger and Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, 113. 2 feeling of “presentiment of disaster.”7 Everything we previously took for granted is suddenly no longer as certain as it was before.8

Not all periods of distress result in crashes. Sometimes systems avoid further shocks, which lets them catch their balance and eventually restore confidence. Other times, confidence-building measures reinforce the existing system and shore it up. But all periods of distress have the potential to turn to panic and crisis.

This description of distress, however, does not answer my question: How did we get here? John Mearsheimer ascribes NATO’s current situation to “liberal delusions,”9 but economics presents a more precise and appropriate term: mania. Distress is an intermediate stage that lies prior to panic, but is itself typically preceded by mania: a period of a “loss of connection with rationality, perhaps mass hysteria.”10 This is a time when the rationality assumption falls away, where people go “far beyond the limits of prudence,”11 because the potential gains come to seem endless and the risks (at most) negligible. These periods leave actors unknowingly in precarious positions and when that precariousness is made obvious, distress is the result.

7 Kindleberger and Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, 114. 8 This is inevitably a driver of anxiety. Essentially, a period of distress is a period of uncertainty in ontological security – something has happened that has undermined the “subject sense of who we are” and our means-ends relationship. It has not destroyed that sense – we can go on as we previously had – but we now have this presentiment that what we used to take for granted may not always be available to us in the future. See: Jennifer Mitzen, “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma,” European Journal of International Relations 12, No. 3 (2006): 341-370. 9 John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Foreign Affairs 93, No. 4 (2014): 77-84, 85-89. 10 Kindleberger and Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, 53 11 Kindleberger and Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, 56 3

I will, in this dissertation, argue that the 2008 round of NATO enlargement and associated discussions about enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia were a product of mania: where, as a consequence of the successes of previous rounds, and the absence of failure, skeptical voices faded out of the policy process right at the moment they were most needed. Expectations of benefits increased absent evidence, potential risks that had been recognized in earlier years no longer were, and red flashing warning signs, most especially President Vladimir Putin of Russia’s speech in Munich in 2007, were at best misinterpreted and at worst simply ignored.

But NATO enlargement is just a single element of a larger period of mania.

Manias do not simply happen: they occur when the conditions for mania are present. And through the 1990s and into the 2000s the conditions for mania were ripe. The classic mania happens as part of a three-stage process: first, a “displacement,” or exhaustive shock to the existing system that fatally undermines the existing rules of the game.

Second, in the resulting vacuum forms an understanding that a new era of history has begun, with new rules – and new opportunities that are just waiting to be exploited. This understanding is “New Era Thinking”, and these stories drive the adoption of policies aimed at exploiting those new opportunities.

New Era Thinking is not always manic. Often times, the existing rules of the game really have changed: the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union fundamentally altered international relations by ending bipolarity.12 New Era stories may

12 Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Long Grove: Waveland Press, Inc., 1979). 4 even be true, in part; the degree to which they are true helps drive the mania. Railroads really did offer huge potential for a transportation revolution and the integration of the

North American economy, but that didn’t mean that the investors really understood the costs involved in building a railroad through the northwestern United States and its forests and mountains13; the internet really did (and does) offer huge potential for a communication and economic revolution that could transform the world economy

(among other things), but that didn’t mean that it made sense for Pets.com, an online pet company that earned $619,000 in 1999, to spend $11.8 million on advertising that year.14

As initial opportunities are realized, confidence grows beyond the reasonable and people begin using the lack of past policy failure as proof that there will not be future policy failure – even failing to adequately prepare for known risks and ignoring evidence that the realization of those risks has become more likely. Policy starts reasonable, but it becomes unreasonable. We begin with rational confidence and end with irrational overconfidence. This is mania.

In 1989, when the Soviet empire collapsed, it ended – “absolutely”15 – the Cold

War era. Promptly came the explanations, the projections, and the ideas about what would come next. Out of the first half decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall emerged four distinct narratives about what was and would be: (1) that democracy would inexorably spread globally, (2) that economic integration would widen and deepen, (3)

13 Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 126. 14 Kirk Cheyfitz, Thinking Inside the Box: The 12 Timeless Rules for Managing a Successful Business (New York, N.Y.: Free Press, 2003), 30-32. 15 Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Beyond the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 1 (1989-1990): 1 5 that the end of bipolarity would open space for previously dormant regional, ethnic, and nationalist conflicts, and (4) as a combination of the first three, that the United States needed to lead. These assumptions drove numerous policies, aside from just NATO enlargement: the expansion of the European Union, the adoption of the Euro, the proliferation of global trade agreements – all, at different times, showed signs that they had become manic. This is most emphatically not to say that these policies were unwise from the start; rather as a consequence of initial successes they were subsequently pursued with increasing enthusiasm and vigor, and with increasingly unreasonable expectations.

And so, to answer the initial question – how did we get here, in this current period of distress – the answer is we got here because for about two decades after the Berlin

Wall fell, we experienced a period of mania. This is not to criticize us! Overconfidence is insidious and alarmingly difficult to distinguish from better-calibrated confidence. We possess psychological tendencies that incline us to herd beliefs with other members of our group, to draw broad lessons out of shallow experiences, and to trust authority even when we suspect that those authorities might be wrong. Events like the end of the Cold

War are ideal conditions for overconfidence to find purchase. But because of these and other factors, periods of mania can be expected to be recurrent in international relations.

They have happened before: the Scramble for Africa, post-WWI Idealism, late stages of anti-Communist Containment; and they will happen again.

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I. Manias and Bubbles

The “speculative mania”, or the bubble, has long been the subject of study in economics. Charles Kindleberger first published his Manias, Panics, and Crashes in

1978, where he lays out the basic pattern of mania, then distress, then panic in the market setting. More recently, economists have returned their attention to the bubble phenomenon as a consequence of the crashes of the late 1990s and 2000s, with Robert

Shiller first publishing his Nobel-prize winning Irrational Exuberance in 2000 and the follow-up, Animal Spirits, with George Akerlof in 2009. The possibility that bubbles might apply outside of the market context has also grown in popularity, with Shiller himself presenting the possibility that China’s Great Leap Forward had been a bubble.16

Two economists, Monika Gisler and Didier Sornette, argue that bubbles are an “essential element in societal processes and in the dynamics of society at large.”17

The idea that we can look at government policy as subject to bubbles has also been explored. Moshe Maor takes this and applies it to public policy, defining a “policy bubble,” as a “[policy that imposes real or perceived costs without producing offsetting objective and/or perceived benefits] that is reinforced by positive feedback over a long

16 Robert Shiller, “Bubbles without Markets,” Project Syndicate June 23, 2012, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bubbles-without-markets. 17 Monika Gisler and Didier Sornette, “Bubbles Everywhere in Human Affairs,” Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series No. 10-16 (2010), 2, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1590816. 7 period of time.”18 Bryan Jones, Herschel Thomas and Michelle Wolfe similarly define the occurrence of a policy bubble as: “when government overinvests in a single policy instrument beyond its instrumental value in achieving a policy goal and that overinvestment is sustained over a relatively long period of time.”19 These two definitions articulate three shared key elements: (1) “overinvestment” in policy, or pursuing a policy that does not deliver value commensurate with its costs; (2) an extended duration during which that policy is pursued; and (3) positive feedback: a self- reinforcing process where “an action leads to consequences which themselves reinforce the action and so on”20 until terminated by an endogenous or exogenous change.21

This project applies the concept specifically to International Relations. I aim to demonstrate how and why overinvestment can happen not just in domestic policies like incarceration, school reform, and privatization,22 but also specifically in foreign policy.

To that end, I develop a theory of confidence, of overconfidence, and of mania. Using

Jennifer Mitzen and Randall Schweller’s theory of “misplaced certainty”23 as a springboard, I define confidence, explain its day-to-day necessity as a tool for

18 Moshe Maor, “Policy Bubbles: Policy Overreaction and Positive Feedback,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 27, No. 3 (2014): 468. 19 Bryan D. Jones, Herschel F. Thomas III, and Michelle Wolfe, “Policy Bubbles,” The Policy Studies Journal 42, No. 1 (2014): 146. 20 Didier Sornette and Ryan Woodward, “Financial Bubbles, Real Estate Bubbles, Derivative Bubbles, and the Financial and Economic Crisis”, 22, quoted in Moshe Maor, “Policy Bubbles”, 479. 21 Moshe Maor, “Policy Bubbles,” 479. 22 Jones, Thomas, and Wolfe, “Policy Bubbles.” 23 Jennifer Mitzen and Randall L. Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns: Misplaced Certainty and the Onset of War,” Security Studies 20, No. 1 (2011): 2-35. 8 overcoming uncertainty, and define overconfidence describe how the one becomes the other. I in particular focus on the role of “New Era Thinking”, or the idea that the international system has entered a new period of history, one governed by new rules and laden with new opportunities distinct from past periods, which drives overconfidence.24

Periods of New Era Thinking, which typically follow periods of sudden and dramatic change, increase the potential for the development of manias. I argue that the end of the

Cold War provoked New Era Thinking and created the potential for manic foreign policy in a variety of domains.

II. Explaining NATO Enlargement

The specific foreign policy mania I examine in this project is that of NATO enlargement after the end of the Cold War through the 2008 incorporation of Croatia and

Albania. An enormous corpus of scholarship has been produced on why NATO enlargement went forward coming out of the post-Cold War era. The existing explanations fit into the following broad categories: (1) to address security concerns, both as a consequence of potential Russian resurgence and to address regional instabilities; (2)

NATO was highly institutionalized, with objectives that included maintaining democracy and the conditions for economic prosperity; (3) NATO institutionalization created bureaucratic inertia, with the institution seeking out new roles and objectives in order to

24 George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 54 9 enhance its importance in the absence of the Soviet threat; (4) that NATO was meant to create a security community, not just an alliance, and that enlarging the alliance meant enlarging the community; and (5) domestic politics.25 Echoes of these are heard in

NATO’s 1995 “Study on NATO Enlargement”: “The aim of an improved security architecture is to provide increased stability and security for all in the Euro-Atlantic area, without recreating dividing lines” and “By integrating more countries into the existing community of values and institutions… NATO enlargement will safeguard the freedom and security of all its members in accordance with the principles of the UN Charter.”26

No doubt, each decision to enlarge NATO was the product of elements of all of these theories. But the 2007 and 2008 push to include Georgia and Ukraine into NATO’s

Membership Action Plan demands particular interrogation, if only because it occurred in a strategic environment where Russia’s intransigence on this issue had grown considerably.27 While Ukraine and Georgia ultimately did not receive inclusion in the

Membership Action Plan, they did receive assurances of future membership and

25 Robert W. Rauchhaus, “Marching NATO Eastward: Can International Relations Theory Keep Peace?” in Explaining NATO Enlargement, ed. Robert W. Rauchhaus (Portland: Frank Cass, 2001): 3-22. 26 “Study on NATO Enlargement,” NATO, accessed June 22, 2018, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_24733.htm. 27 Luke Harding, “Bush backs Ukraine and Georgia for NATO Membership,” The Guardian, April 1, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/01/nato.georgia; Steven Erlanger and Steven Lee Myers, “NATO Allies Oppose Bush on Georgia and Ukraine,” The New York Times, April 3, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/europe/03nato.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.co m/2008/04/03/world/europe/03nato.html. 10 commitments for reconsideration of the decision in the future, to Russia’s public fury.28

Multiple members of Congress would subsequently make public statements in support of

Ukrainian and Georgian membership in NATO. I argue that this should not be explained as a consequence of the usual arguments for NATO enlargement, but rather as a product of overconfidence and mania, bred by the prior decade of NATO’s successes in Eastern

Europe and two decades of relative Russian quiescence.

III. Empirical Strategy

One question that must be answered is: “Whose confidence?” In economics, confidence isn’t obviously a mass or elite-driven phenomenon; the two often feed off one another and amplify the process of speculation with investments being made by both large firms and individuals (and sometimes the two in combination).29 In International

Relations, however, the actual process of making foreign policy decisions is more elite- driven, and is observable at the elite level. For the purposes of explaining and demonstrating mania in foreign policy, therefore, I will be emphasizing the role of elites as people who can be captured by New Era Thinking, become overconfident, and produce a manic foreign policy process and manic policy choices. This does not mean

28 Reuters Staff, “Russia army vows steps if Georgia and Ukraine join NATO,” Reuters World News, April 11, 2008, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-nato-steps/russia- army-vows-steps-if-georgia-and-ukraine-join-nato-idUSL1143027920080411. 29 Mitchel Y. Abolafia and Martin Kilduff, “Enacting Market Crisis: The Social Construction of a Speculative Bubble,” Administrative Science Quarterly 33, No. 2 (1988): 177-193. 11 there is no role for masses, as the confidence of the masses can help facilitate the persistence and growth of confidence of foreign policy elites30 (and if mass confidence were to fail, it would likely make the mania unsustainable, giving masses a particular role in crisis moments), but it does mean that elites represent a more convenient window through which to observe confidence at work in the foreign policy domain.31

To examine elites and their beliefs, I examine their stated beliefs and the discussions that comprise that process. To demonstrate the existence of New Era

Thinking, I use elite statements in the form of articles published in three major foreign policy journals, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy from 1988-

1993, looking for indications of New Era Thinking and common, strongly-stated beliefs about how the world had changed and their prevalence. To demonstrate the manic nature of the NATO enlargement process, I argue that mania in foreign policy is most easily demonstrated in an iterated policy (implemented in stages, each one a voluntary expansion on the previous one), where each iteration of the policy featured greater risk, while simultaneously elites become less conscious of that risk. To measure risk awareness, I examine Congressional floor statements and Senate committee hearing transcripts, looking for which arguments were made, with what degree of certainty, and with what frequency.

30 Robert J. Shiller, “Bubbles, Human Judgment, and Expert Opinion,” Financial Analysts Journal 58, No. 3 (2002): 18-26. 31 Jerel A. Rosati, Michael W. Link, and John Creed, “A New Perspective on the Foreign Policy Views of American Opinion Leaders in the Cold War and Post-Cold War Eras,” Political Research Quarterly 51, No. 2 (1998): 461-479. 12

IV. Chapter Outline

The dissertation will proceed with four chapters:

In Chapter Two: “A Theory of Confidence and Mania in International Relations,”

I will develop the theory of mania in International Relations and explain the similarities and differences between how overconfidence operates in the realm of market investments, versus how overconfidence operates in the realm of international politics.

While the basic drivers of uncertainty, confidence, overconfidence, and positive feedback are the same in both domains (and will be addressed in detail), many of the specifics are different: the nature of the actor, the nature of the investment, the nature of the realm, the nature of competition, all vary from one to the other. An “investment” in a stock and an

“investment” in a foreign policy may have useful parallels, and more importantly

“overinvestments” in each have useful parallels, but they’re also very different. I also lay out the three stages of mania: displacement, New Era Thinking, and investment.

In Chapter Three: “New Era Thinking at the End of the Cold War,” I discuss how the “euphoria”32 after the collapse of the Soviet Union manifested itself in certain beliefs that fit the definition of New Era Thinking, and discuss the specific character of those beliefs and demonstrate their proliferation through the contemporary intellectual community. New Era Thinking (defined as the popular perception that the future is

32 James Flanigan, “Economics After the Cold War: Global change: Public euphoria for East Block reform may be matched by enormous commercial progress. But the process won’t be painless,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1989, http://articles.latimes.com/1989-11-26/business/fi-166_1_cold-war. 13 brighter or less uncertain than it was in the past33) both provides the fertile soil within which a mania can grow and helps us understand which kinds of foreign policies

(“investments”) are adopted. If we can identify what is thought to be brighter, and what kinds of risk are thought to be diminished, we can make predictions about what foreign policy choices states will be likely to make during the manic period. In this dissertation, I examine a particular period: the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union. I argue that the end of the Cold War inevitably produced New Era Thinking within the policy and policy-adjacent communities34 and that this New Era Thinking had four basic components: (1) the belief in the inevitable proliferation of democracy, (2) the belief in the inevitable integration of the global economy, (3) the belief that the end of bipolarity would mean increasing instability, particularly but not exclusively in Eastern Europe, and (4) the belief that the

United States needed to maintain a leadership role. These beliefs would persist and drive foreign policy choices in the subsequent years.

In Chapter Four, “The New Era and Overconfident American Foreign Policy,” I argue that one way in which the beliefs associated with post-Cold War New Era Thinking

33 Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 123. 34 By “policy and policy-adjacent communities,” I mean to include both practitioners of foreign policy, people who are not currently practitioners but who were previously, and the community of other opinion leaders who help shape public perception of the wisdom of given foreign policies. Included are: “practitioners, policy analysts, journalists, scholars, intellectuals, and the like” who use major foreign policy journals (Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The National Interest) as a platform for communication and debate. For a more robust defense of this approach, see: Rosati, Link, and Creed, “A New Perspective,” 462. 14 expressed themselves was in NATO enlargement. The process of NATO enlargement, and its acceleration from the beginning of the process in 1993 to the third round of post-

Cold War enlargement in 2009, was one that possessed manic characteristics: namely, its increasing willingness to ignore known risks with each subsequent round, despite the simultaneously increasing prevalence of those risks. Other examples of manic foreign policy, not addressed as closely but also emerging out of the New Era Thinking of the period, are the multiplication of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs)35, adoption of the

Euro36, expansion of the European Union37, and use of democracy promotion as a foreign policy tool.38 Importantly, I am not arguing that NATO enlargement (or any of these other policies) was completely wrongheaded – just as with the Northern Pacific Railroad, the problem wasn’t that the idea was automatically bad. But as mania took hold, it lead to the failure to recognize, and failure to address, the risks that accompanied each.

Finally, in the Conclusion I will open the door for other implications of confidence for IR: how this theory of confidence would predict crises (“panics”) to occur and their dynamics (especially in comparison to market busts in economics, the parallel to which has both merits and demerits); the positive consequences of mania and how

35 Daniel Behn, Ole Kristian Fauchauld, and Malcolm Langford, “Bursting policy bubbles: The international investment treaty regime,” PluriCourts Research Paper No. 15-15 (2015), http://ssrn.com/abstract=2704340. 36 Tim Worstall, “The Euro Is A Disaster – Stiglitz, Krugman, Milton Friedman and James Tobin Agree,” Forbes, September 11, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/09/11/the-euro-is-a-disaster-stiglitz- krugman-milton-friedman-and-james-tobin-agree/#19a569ea6063. 37 Dorothee Bohle, “Neoliberal hegemony, transnational capital and the terms of the EU’s eastward expansion,” Capital and Class 88 (2006): 57-86. 38 Jonathan Monten, “The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in US Strategy,” International Security 29, No. 4 (2005): 112-156. 15 while it does create serious risk of failure, it also makes possible aspirational policy that can lead to otherwise impossible success if that risk can be managed; and the possibility that IR could feature periods of underconfidence and the potential for the foreign policy equivalent of a depression. I also suggest that if there is a pattern of “mania” and “panic” that is recurrent in foreign policy, it may make sense to think about the need for

“Keynesian Politics”: deliberately adopting more ambitious policies in times of anxiety and less ambitious policies in times of confidence, in order to minimize the dangers of over- and underconfidence that might exacerbate existing problems.

16

Chapter 2: A Theory of Confidence and Mania in International Relations

The object of this chapter is to expand a concept and its consequences for international relations: the concept of confidence. Confidence, or a feeling of assurance about the nature of the future which is reasonable but can become unreasonable

(overconfidence), is known to but underutilized in international relations theory. I will focus on one particular major implication of that concept for International Relations: a foreign policy mania. I will explain why we can expect foreign policy manias – or periods where foreign policy is produced on the basis of unreasonable expectations of benefits to and the absence of risks from that policy despite specific evidence contradicting these assumptions – to be recurrent, particularly after periods of systemic disruption. In the two subsequent chapters, I will argue that the end of the Cold War was such a disruption, and that foreign policies adopted in its aftermath (particularly NATO enlargement) were the product of manic processes, with demonstrable overestimations of benefit and underestimations of risk despite clear, contemporary evidence to the contrary.

This chapter lays out the theoretical underpinnings that allow this case to be made.

I will proceed in three steps:

First, I will discuss the concept of confidence, taking the writing of Jennifer

Mitzen and Randall Schweller as a foundation. Individuals require confidence to

17 overcome the problem of Knightian uncertainty (all the things that we don’t know that we don’t know); without confidence agency is impossible. Confidence is a product of two components: the weight of the evidence, and an emotional component that we might think of as “animal spirits”39 which creates the impetus for action despite uncertainty.40

Confidence expresses itself a “feeling of knowing”41: a feeling that we know what the future will bring as a consequence of our actions. Confidence is rational, but it is possible to be either “overconfident” or “underconfident,” with a feeling of assurance about the future that is imperfectly calibrated (excessive optimism or pessimism absent evidence, respectively).

Second, I will discuss confidence as a social phenomenon: collective confidence.

Because of the tendency of humans to herd beliefs (herding)42, and to use the beliefs of others as justification for their own beliefs (social proof)43, confidence is contagious: it tends to spread through a community. It is not just the case that “I am confident,” but frequently “we are confident.” Like individual confidence, this is generally rational: the beliefs of others are appropriate to consider as evidence for one’s own beliefs. But, also

39 John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936): 161-162; William Safire, “Animal Spirits,” New York Times, March 10, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/magazine/15wwln-safire-t.html; 40 Alexander Dow and Sheila Dow, “Animal Spirits and Rationality,” Keynes’ Economics: Methodological Issues (London: Croom Helm, 1985): 46-65. 41 Robert A. Burton, On Being Certain (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 3. 42 David S. Scharfstein and Jeremy C. Stein, “Herd Behavior and Investment,” The American Economic Review 80, No. 3 (Jun., 1990), 465-479. 43 Robert B. Caldini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (New York, NY: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1984), 114-166. 18 like individual confidence, it is possible for us to become either “collectively overconfident” or “collectively underconfident.”

Third, I will discuss the implications of collective overconfidence. A degree of overconfidence or underconfidence is both predictable and unavoidable, but under certain circumstances this overconfidence can become manic.44 This means that in additional to dismissing uncertainty, we also collectively dismiss risk. In extreme cases, we can even ignore clear evidence that contradicts the beliefs about which we feel assured. Dismissing uncertainty is necessary for individual agency and is inherently rational, but dismissing risk leads to misplaced perceptions about the presence of exaggerated benefits and the absence of danger from potential courses of action.

Importantly, mania is a collective phenomenon: it is what happens when overconfidence finds purchase in an echo chamber where skeptical voices are increasingly drowned out in (or convinced by) a chorus of optimism. This reaches a fervor that can only be described as irrational – and yet, it is an entirely predictable consequence of how confidence operates under certain conditions.

This third section will explore mania from two different disciplinary perspectives:

First, I will explain the nature of speculative mania based on the economics literature, with a particular focus on the work of Robert Shiller. Briefly summarized, manias occur as a consequence of a pattern that has three distinct components: (1) an exogenous shock (or “displacement”) to an existing system that convinces the community

44 By mania I do not mean the clinical definition. Rather, I refer to mania in the sense that economics uses the term, as part of “speculative mania”: an emotional phase of the market cycle, where enthusiasm and optimism predominate. 19 that the old rules of the system now no longer apply and creates new opportunities for profit45; (2) “New Era Thinking”, or beliefs that “the future is brighter, and less uncertain than the past,”46 which emerge out of the need to understand the reason for and consequences of the displacement; and (3) the first round of investment in those new opportunities for profit, which reinforces the development and purchase of New Era

Thinking and marginalizes skeptical voices. Positive feedback between New Era

Thinking and investment causes mania: with optimism ascendant and pessimism (or prudence) silenced, investors dismiss even obvious risks and buy stocks or commodities

(often with borrowed wealth provided by overconfident lenders) on the expectation that profits in the recent past from such investments presage the future.47

Second, I will explain how and why manias can occur within International

Relations. The same fundamental drivers of mania that exist in economics also exist in

IR, and the result is the potential for and realization of manic foreign policy: foreign policy decisions made with an unreasonable expectation of benefits, and/or an unreasonable expectation of the absence of risk. Such periods begin slowly, but tend to accelerate with time (becoming “more irrational”), with the result that policies which may begin with reasoned foundations become manic with subsequent iterations.

45 Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 39. 46 Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 123. 47 Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 70, 80-84. 20

I. The Concept of Confidence

Introducing Confidence

What is confidence? The word itself has a variety of meanings when used in common parlance: it could be a sense of certainty, a shared secret with another, a sense of trust or reliance, or a conscious feeling of self-assurance, among others.48 In economics,

“consumer confidence” is a measure of investor “optimism,” generally measured through survey questions about the perceptions of individuals about the relative state of their personal finances and the business climate and in the short-term future.49

When I use the word “confidence,” I build on the work of International Relations scholars Jennifer Mitzen and Randall Schweller.50 Their definition is drawn from the work of sociologist Jack Barbalet51 (himself inspired by John Maynard Keynes):

“[Confidence is] an ‘anticipatory’ emotion – a feeling directed towards future behavior, which ‘provides a sense of certainty’ about what cannot be known. Confidence is a

‘projected assured expectation’ about the future, brought back and felt in the present.”52

Let us break this down into its components. First, confidence is a “feeling” or

“emotion”: it is not derived purely from an analysis of the weight of the evidence.

48 “Confidence,” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, accessed June 18, 2018, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/confidence 49 “Consumer Confidence Survey,” The Conference Board, accessed June 18, 2018, https://www.conference-board.org/data/consumerconfidence.cfm 50 Jennifer Mitzen and Randall L. Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns: Misplaced Certainty and the Onset of War,” Security Studies 20, No. 1 (2011): 2-35. 51 Jack Barbalet, “A characterization of trust, and its consequences,” Theor Soc 38 (2009): 367-382. 52 Mitzen and Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns,” 26-27. 21

Second, confidence creates a “sense of certainty” (not actual certainty; actual certainty is, of course, impossible53). The result is “an assured expectation about the future”: a feeling of certainty that the future is going to have specific characteristics. This assurance exists despite the impossibility of certainty about the future – and it opens the possibility for mistakes when we misplace that certainty. This is unavoidable, however: absent confidence, we would be unable to act at all.

Such projected assured expectations are generated by confidence’s two elements: the “weight” of the evidence, and animal spirits (which Mitzen and Schweller termed

“the emotional salience of fundamental uncertainty”). Both will be discussed in greater detail later. Importantly, confidence also operates at the level of the collectivity: because humans tend to herd beliefs, and because we use the beliefs of others as evidence for our own beliefs, confidence is contagious. We can thus speak of “collective confidence” and not merely individual confidence. Collective confidence, its sources and its consequences will be the subject of Sections II and III of this chapter.

Confidence does not mean that an individual is optimistic, necessarily. Rather, it means she feels certain – whether she is certain or not – that the future is going to bring a certain outcome. Individuals can be either optimistic or pessimistic (“grimly confident”) about this future. Confidence provides an individual with both an assured expectation

53 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969). 22 about that future, and a sense that she can control her own outcome within it.54 This sense of control helps produce confidence: a “feeling of assurance about the future.”

Having defined confidence, we must address a second, foundational question: why do we need confidence?

Why Do Individuals Need Confidence

This section makes the argument that confidence, defined as a feeling of assurance about the future, is a necessary component of human decision-making because of the intractable problem of Knightian uncertainty: our inability to make estimations about the probability of future events. Again, building off the work of Jennifer Mitzen and Randall Schweller, I will work backwards, starting with a discussion of uncertainty and Knightian uncertainty, explaining how uncertainty so understood presents a problem for expected utility theory that is solved by making assumptions that can never be fully warranted by evidence.

Confidence is made necessary for decision-making by a simple fact: as Thomas

Schelling cogently put it, “uncertainty exists.”55 There are things in the world that we do not know, both in the present and especially in a yet-to-be-realized future. And yet it is not so simple. Particularly in the realm of international relations, it becomes important for

54 Anat Bracha and Elke U. Weber. “A Psychological Perspective of Financial Panic,” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Discussion Paper No. 12-7 (2012). https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2192183 55 Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 92. 23 us to clearly define and understand “uncertainty”, which can have a variety of meanings and implications depending on which understanding takes priority.56

Within International Relations, “uncertainty” is sometimes rendered with a tripartite classification.57 The first kind of uncertainty is produced by a lack of information (potential for change58 or ignorance59), and is essentially a product of our inability to have all the information.60 The second kind of uncertainty is produced by confusion (ambiguity), and is a problem of complexity: all the information may be available to us, but we are unable to process or understand it perfectly (the problem of perception and misperception).61 Finally, there is the third kind: indeterminacy.

Indeterminacy can be explained with the pithy phrase: “the world is uncertain because it is what we make of it.” In their discussion of confidence, Mitzen and Schweller call this

“fundamental uncertainty”, and explain it in the following way:

56 Brian C. Rathbun, “Uncertain about Uncertainty: Understanding the Multiple Meanings of a Crucial Concept in International Relations Theory,” International Studies Quarterly 51 (2007): 533-557. 57 Mitzen and Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns” 23-26. 58 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001). 59 Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 60 Brian Rathbun presents four kinds of uncertainty, but his first two: fear and ignorance, are both “lack of information.” The difference between fear and ignorance is in its assumed consequences: Realists ascribe to lack of information (specifically about the future intentions of other states) a particular consistent emotional response (fear), while Rationalists do not assume an absence of information has any kind of automatic emotional response (fear is possible, but not necessary). 61 Robert Jervis, “Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). 24

“Fundamental uncertainty exists because in social life the future is indeterminate. First, human free will and creativity mean that technological innovations, novel practices, and surprising choices always are possible. In addition, our own decisions today might change the future in ways we cannot predict, which, had we known, would have altered the decision we made today. The state of the world in the future is in an important sense endogenous to our actions today. If the future is not determined, all the information in the world will not definitively tell us what it will bring.”62

Similarly, David Dequech describes the basis of fundamental uncertainty as human creativity: the potential for individual human beings to alter the nature of social reality through social and technological innovation.63

For the purposes of this project, however, condensing the tripartite distinction into a binary one will create added clarity on key concepts and effects. Instead of distinguishing between risk, ambiguity, and indeterminacy, I wish to rely on Frank

Knight’s classic distinction between risk and uncertainty64, and distinguish between theoretically calculable (risk) and theoretically incalculable (Knightian uncertainty, or just uncertainty).

Under a condition of risk, it is possible for us to calculate the probability of a proposition. Under a condition of Knightian uncertainty (which economist Tony Lawson argues is what John Maynard Keynes meant every time he referenced “uncertainty”65), it is impossible to calculate the probability of a proposition. This incalculability may be

62 Mitzen and Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns,” 25 63 David Dequech. “Uncertainty: A Typology and Refinements of Existing Concepts,” Journal of Economic Issues XLV, No. 3 (2011): 631-633. 64 Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921). 65 Tony Lawson, “Uncertainty and Economic Analysis,” The Economic Journal 95, No. 380 (1985): 909-927. 25 because the information is currently unavailable to us, or it may be because such a calculation is impossible due to the indeterminacy of the future. “Uncertainty” and

“improbability” are therefore different, as Keynes explained:

“[By very uncertain I do] not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game of roulette is not subject, in this sense to uncertainty nor is the prospect of a Victory bond being drawn. Or, again, the expectation of life is only slightly uncertain. Even the weather is only moderately uncertain. The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever.”66

“Some cases, therefore, there certainty are in which no rational basis has been discovered for numerical comparison. It is not the case here that the method of calculation, prescribed by theory, is beyond our powers or too laborious for actual application. No method of calculation, however impracticable, has been suggested.”67

Uncertainty understood as such is a product of two potentialities: the possibility of unexpected social change and the possibility of unexpected material change. The future may be radically different from what we expect it to be because humans are amazing creatures and (at least in recent centuries68) have a tendency towards radical innovations both technological and social69. The future may also be radically different because of an

66 John Maynard Keynes, quoted in Lawson, “Uncertainty and Economic Analysis,” 914. 67 John Maynard Keynes, quoted in Lawson, “Uncertainty and Economic Analysis,” 914. 68 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1999). 69 Joseph A. Schumpeter, “Entrepreneurship as Innovation,” Entrepreneurship: The Social Science View (2000): 51-75. 26 exogenous shock to our environment (the “Little Ice Age” had profound consequences for European politics that could not have been foreseen, for instance70). There are potentialities to which we cannot (or could not) put definite probabilities. These are

Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns.”71

The inexorability of Knightian uncertainty creates a problem for decision-making.

Namely: how do we deal with unknown unknowns when choosing a course of action?

Expected-utility models of rational decision-making presume that actors have set objectives and make choices designed to achieve the optimal balance of objective minus cost (to maximize their expected utility). Putting aside for the moment questions of how that initial objective is generated72 or the variety of other challenges this model of rationality has73, an explicit incorporation of Knightian uncertainty challenges it in its own way: if it is impossible for us estimate the probabilities of future events due to the indeterminability of the future, we cannot estimate the expected utility of our choices of action.74 Most scenarios involve degrees of risk, but every scenario has a degree of uncertainty (what do we not know that we do not know?), especially in social life where most outcomes are dependent on the actions of others. If we held out for decisions that

70 Wolfgang Behringer, “Climactic Change and Witch-Hunting: the Impact of the Little Ice Age on Mentalities,” Climactic Change 43, No. 1 (1999): 335-351. 71 “DoD News Briefing – Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers,” Department of Defense, accessed June 18, 2018, http://archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2636 72 Jonathan Mercer, “Emotional Beliefs,” International Organization 64 (2010): 10. 73 Matthew Rabin and Richard H. Thaler, “Anomalies: Risk Aversion,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 15, No. 1 (2001): 219-232; Ziva Kunda, “The case for motivated reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin 108, No. 3 (1990): 480-498. 74 Bayesian decision-making theory addresses this by denying that there is a distinction between Knightian uncertainty and risk. 27 we knew for certain were optimal, or even where we knew for certain our odds of success, we would never act: humans don’t get to be omniscient.

Knightian uncertainty is thus a challenge for agency. Mitzen and Schweller explain that the precondition for agency is: “a stable cognitive environment, at least the subjective feeling of stability, in the sense that the actor must feel that she knows the basic cause-effect relations that constitute the decision-making context in order to act on her preferences and goals.”75 Knightian uncertainty makes this objectively impossible: she can never know how means and ends relate because the unknown unknowns present an unmeasurable variable that may compromise the relationship. As Mitzen and

Schweller explain: “when actors sense that their probability estimates are unreliable, that there is a high potential for surprise and new information will not increase the weight of those estimates – that is, when they become aware that they face fundamental uncertainty

– this cognitive stability begins to unravel.”76

Confidence is our solution to this problem, in that confidence allows for the subjective feeling of stability. Confidence is normal, even the default:

“The normal case is that of confidence. You are confident that your expectations will not be disappointed… you cannot live without forming expectations with respect to contingent events and you have to neglect, more or less, the possibility of disappointment. You neglect this because it is a very rare possibility, but also because you do not know what else to do. The alternative is to live in a state of permanent uncertainty and to

75 Mitzen and Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns,” 29 76 Mitzen and Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns,” 29 28

withdraw expectations without having anything with which to replace them”77

“This kind of confidence that our expectations will not be disappointed, being part of our daily routine and normal behavior, is not concerned with knowing the essential truth about a matter. For example we have confidence in the purchasing power of money, which is based more on our familiarity with it rather than our precise knowledge of the working of currency. Moreover, we are not involved in the process of deciding whether or not to accept money each time we encounter it. We assign our expectations to it, knowing – on the basis of our previous experience – that the danger of disappointment is minimal”78

We are confident (we feel sure) about lots of things every day. We are confident about gravity, we are confident about oxygen, we are confident about the sunrise and sunset.

We are also confident about socially constructed aspects of life: we are confident about the value of money, we are confident about the meaning of a handshake, we are confident about the meaning of words we use to communicate (thought on this one, perhaps we should be less so). For the most part, well-adjusted individuals do not worry about the potential that we might be wrong about these things.79 The possibility we are wrong is either unthinkable or unthought.80 These assumptions are fundamental to an individual’s

77 Niklas Luhmann, “Familiarity, Trust, and Confidence: Problems and Alternatives,” in Trust, Making and Breaking Cooperatie Relations, edited by Diego Gambetta, 94-108 (New York: Basil Blackwood Ltd, 1988). 78 Barbara Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies: The Search for the Bases of Order (Oxford: Polity Press, 1996), 75. 79 People who suffer from anxiety disorders are an exception to this rule. Since 1980, people have been diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). People diagnosed with GAD tend to suffer from anxiety about “many circumstances of daily life,” and can have difficulty functioning. For more, see: Marc-Antoine Crocq, “The history of generalized anxiety disorder as a diagnostic category,” Dialogues Clin Neurosci 19, No. 2 (2017): 107-116. 80 Timur Kuran, “The Unthinkable and the Unthought,” Rationality and Society 5 (1993): 473-505. 29 operation in the world, but each of them is contingent on consistency in the behavior of others.

Confidence is emotional: it expresses itself as a feeling. Barbalet discusses the feeling of confidence and its consequences in the following passage:

“There is widespread agreement that emotion typically includes a subjective component of feelings, a physiological component of arousal or bodily sensation, and an impulsive or motor component of expressive gesture. Each of these obtain for the experience of confidence. The feeling of confidence has characteristic content and tone which is both experienced subjectively (one knows when one feels confident) and expressed behaviorally (others can see that one is confident). Those who feel confident are likely also to report bodily sensations of muscular control, deep and even breathing, and other sensations of well-being” 81

We know when we are confident, and we act differently when we are confident. It provides us a sense of control over the future, despite the existence of fundamental uncertainty.

But where does an individual’s confidence come from?

Where Does Confidence Come From

This section argues that confidence, or a “feeling of assured expectation about the future,” is a product of two elements. The first of these elements if the weight of the available evidence, which often is reducible to the assumption that current circumstances and trends will remain consistent with the way they are currently. This element is alone

81 Jack Barbalet, Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 84. 30 insufficient to produce confidence, as it cannot surmount the problem of uncertainty. The second of these elements is Keynes’ “animal spirits,” defined as an “optimistic disposition to face uncertainty,” which is emotional and operates absent evidence.

Despite this, animal spirits, and thus confidence, are fundamentally rational.

Two essential elements comprise confidence: the weight of the evidence, and animal spirits. We will examine each of these in turn.

What is “weight”? Mitzen and Schweller define weight as: “the quality and completeness of the information that an actor has available,” and explain its consequence for confidence: “[in] general, the more weight given to a probability distribution, the more confident a decision maker will be in it.”82 Put simply, weight is a combination of the available evidence and an estimation of how completely that evidence permits us to understand a given situation. You might think of weight as an estimate of how certain we are that we know the way the world works, given the information we have and the information we know we do not have.

In general, the evidence that we use to make these estimations is generated by experience. In his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes made the following relevant observation: “In practice, we have tacitly agreed, as a rule, to fall back on what is, in truth, a convention. The essence of this convention – though it does not, of course, work out quite so simply – lies in assuming that the existing state of affairs will

82 Mitzen and Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns,” 27 31 continue indefinitely, except in so far as we have specific reason to expect a change.”83

Generally, the weight of the evidence points us to assume consistency in either circumstances or trends, which is then tempered by any specific information we may possess that indicates a change may be pending. In other words: we do not worry about

Knightian uncertainty (the unknown unknowns), we worry about the known unknowns. If we think back to the causes of Knightian uncertainty, we see that this makes sense.

Knightian uncertainty is caused by the possibility of unexpected material or social change.

What do we mean by unexpected material change? Essentially, some unpredictable exogenous event that is outside of human control that fundamentally alters the way we live. It makes very little sense to worry about such things for four reasons.

First, these events are outside of our control anyway, so there is nothing we can do to prevent them. Second, if they and their consequences are inherently unpredictable, we can neither control them, nor can we make preparations for them that will improve our ability to adapt to the sudden change. Third, there are infinite potential exogenous events that could alter the way we live whose probability we cannot estimate (ranging from Q from Star Trek changing the gravitational constant of the universe to possibilities considerably less fictional). And fourth, experience tells us the probability of any of these events is near to zero, even if it is not zero (absent Q, the gravitational constant of the universe isn’t changing. Gravity hasn’t failed me yet, and I only ever think about the possibility when I am writing this chapter).

83 Keynes, General Theory, 152. 32

What do we mean by unexpected social change? Similar to unexpected material changes, we mean an unpredictable event, but this event is driven by human activity: technological or social revolution, essentially. All the reasons for not worrying about unexpected material change also apply to unexpected social change. It is, however, worth noting that this means assuming that our fellow humans are not going to suddenly and radically change their behavior. In the abstract, this causes more discomfort than assuming the laws of physics are not going to change. But there are reasons to believe that this is the case: the social practices that provide regularity to behavior. Within

International Relations theory, Mitzen’s work on routine84 and Ted Hopf’s work on habit85 represent two perspectives on how humans create regularities in their social behavior, causing Keynes’ convention to be (more or less) accurate within the social realm of state interaction. (Even when such events do become likely, the evidence that could help us predict them may not be available to us.86)

However: just because we typically dismiss specific unknown unknowns does not mean we dismiss the idea that there are unknown unknowns. Everyone knows that we exist in an environment where there are things that we don’t know that we don’t know.

“The [world] is an open, organic system, where creativity and evolutionary change

84 Jennifer Mitzen, “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma,” European Journal of International Relations 12, No. 3 (2006): 341- 370. 85 Ted Hopf, “The Logic of Habit in International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations 16 (2010): 539-561. 86 Charles Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Timur Kuran, “Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolutions of 1989,” World Politics 44, No. 1 (1991): 7-48. 33

[mean] that the past is only a limited guide to the future” (italics added).87 Individuals can thus dismiss specific uncertainties, but still need to overcome generalized Knightian uncertainty: the fear that whatever we might try will fail because of something unforeseeable. Confidence thus also requires animal spirits.

What are “animal spirits”? In their book Animal Spirits, economists George

Akerlof and Robert Shiller note animal spirits’ etymological history; the term originally comes from the Medieval Latin spiritus animalis and refers to “basic mental energy and life force.”88 They call animal spirits “noneconomic motivations,” and citing heavily from Keynes they provide the following description:

“[Keynes] stressed [animal spirits’] fundamental role in businessmen’s calculations. ‘Our basis of knowledge for estimating the yield ten years hence of a railway, a copper mine, a textile factory, the goodwill of a patent medicine, an Atlantic liner, a building in the City of London amounts to little and sometimes to nothing,’ he wrote. If people are so uncertain, how are decisions made? They ‘can only be taken as a result of animal spirits.’ They are the result of a ‘spontaneous urge to action.’ They are not, as rational economic theory would dictate, ‘the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”89

In other words: animal spirits are a “spontaneous urge to action” which is not a product of probabilistic reasoning, as probabilistic reasoning is impossible in a great many cases.

87 Alexander Dow and Sheila C. Dow, “Animal Spirits Revisited,” Capitalism and Society 6, No. 2 (2011): 1-23. 88 George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3. 89 Akerlof and Shiller, Animal Spirits, 3 34

David Dequech redefines animal spirits as the “optimistic disposition of the individual to face uncertainty;”90 it is this concept that Mitzen and Schweller use to formulate their related concept of “uncertainty salience.”91 Similarly, Alexander and

Sheila Dow define animal spirits as “the (psychological) urge to action which [explains] decisions being taken in spite of uncertainty.”92 Importantly, by calling “animal spirits” optimistic, Dequech does not mean that people assume that the future will be a “good” place; rather, animal spirits provide an individual with the belief that they can change the future by virtue of their own creativity and knowledge.93 In essence, animal spirits provide the sense of control over the future that confident people possess, even if that means control in an otherwise undesirable situation.94

Animal spirits are thus emotional.95 As Mitzen and Schweller explain it: “to feel confidant involves going beyond the available evidence. It is an emotional projection, a

90 David Dequech , “Expectations and Confidence under Uncertainty,” Journal of Post- Keynesian Economics 21, No. 3 (1999), 419 91 Mitzen and Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns,” 28. 92 Dow and Dow, “Animal Spirits Revisited,” Abstract 93 Dequech, “Expectations and Confidence Under Uncertainty.” 94 In this way, animal spirits operate as almost the inverse of the Realist’s expectations of behavior under uncertainty. As identified by Rathbun, realists respond to uncertainty with fear; animal spirits dictate a response to uncertainty with unwarranted optimism. 95 In the IR literature, the terms “affect”, “feeling,” and “emotion,” are essentially used interchangeably. I am not going to push against this conflation in this particular work, continuing with this convention and using the three words without attempting to distinguish between them. In psychology, however, affect is used to reference to abstract pre-conscious and inarticulate sensation, while feeling is a sensation that is labeled and compared to past experience, and emotion is a projection or display of feeling. “Confidence” and “overconfidence” as discussed in this chapter can occur at all three of these levels: confidence can be something that is essentially unconscious (you are confident in gravity), something about which we make a distinct consideration (I have seen others succeed and therefore I will attempt to duplicate their success), or something that we physically express and broadcast (I convey my confidence, which allows others 35 leap of faith that is as much an act of will as a process of discovery. To be certain is to impose our mind on the world, not, as the risk model [of decision] understands it, to fit our mind to it” (italics added).96

That confidence has an emotional component is not surprising when we consider that risk also has an emotional component. Paul Slovic and Ellen Peters distinguish between risk as feelings, which refers to instinctive and intuitive reactions to danger, and risk as analysis, which brings logic, reason, and scientific deliberation to bear.

Importantly, and reflective of Daniel Kahneman’s later distinction between Type 1 and

Type 2 thinking, they note that “most risk analysis in daily life is handled quickly and automatically by feelings arising from what is known as the ‘experiential’ mode of thinking.”97 They thus argue that risk analysis is best explained by “dual-process theories of thinking, knowing, and information processing,” with both intuitive and deliberative processes.98 Animal spirits are a component of an intuitive, not a deliberative, process.

Animal spirits vary in strength from person to person and from time to time. The literature in economics often ascribes entrepreneurism to animal spirits, with

“entrepreneurs” who start businesses being those who are more willing or able to make

to respond to it). For more on the distinction between these three terms, see: Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal 8, No. 6 (2005), http://journal.media- culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php 96 Mitzen and Schweller “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns,” 27 97 Paul Slovic and Ellen Peters, “Risk Perception and Affect,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15, No. 6 (2006): 322. 98 Paul Slovic, Melissa L. Finucane, Ellen Peters, and Donald G. MacGregor. “Risk as Analysis and Risk as Feelings: Some Thoughts about Affect, Reason, Risk, and Rationality,” Risk Analysis Vol. 24, No. 2 (2004): 311. 36 this kind of leap of faith (and who, in so doing, often but not always fail).99 An individual’s willingness to invest is also easily manipulated: experimentally, priming an individual in certain ways can either enhance or depress their animal spirits, making them more or less likely to act under conditions of risk and uncertainty.100 Animal spirits are understandably difficult to calibrate. This thus opens up the possibility of both overconfidence and underconfidence. (This does not, as I will argue below, make them irrational.)

Introducing Overconfidence

What are overconfidence and underconfidence? Overconfidence and underconfidence are feelings of assurance about the future that have become unreasonable. They are distinct from one another in their sense of future direction: an optimistic vision of the future (overconfidence) or a pessimistic one (underconfidence).

The focus of this dissertation is overconfidence, but many of the causes and effects of underconfidence are similar (I will discuss underconfidence more in the Conclusion). As explained by Dominic Johnson and James Fowler: “Overconfidence amounts to an ‘error’ of judgment or decision-making, because it leads to overestimating one’s capabilities and/or underestimating an opponent, the difficulty of a task, or possible risks. It is therefore no surprise that overconfidence has been blamed throughout history for high

99 Patrick Francois and Huw Lloyd-Ellis, “Animal Spirits Through Creative Destruction,” American Economic Review 93, No. 3 (2003): 530-550. 100 David P. Porter & Vernon L. Smith, “Stock Market Bubbles in the Laboratory,” Journal of Behavioral Economics 4, No. 1 (2003): 7-20. 37 profile disasters such as the First World War, the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis and the ill-preparedness for environmental phenomena such as Hurricane

Katrina and climate change.”101

The distinction between confidence and overconfidence may seem an odd one at first. Confidence, after all, is a feeling of assurance that is always to some degree unwarranted. We use confidence to overcome uncertainty: to pretend that the possibility of Q changing the gravitational constant of the universe (for instance) is not one we need to worry about. Uncertainty is something we ca not judge probabilistically – there are too many things we don’t know that we don’t know. But confidence is nonetheless fundamentally rational: we need to act and if we spent the energy worrying about all the things that could happen but are unlikely to, we never would.102 Dismissing these possibilities is the only thing we can do.103

Alexander Dow and Sheila Dow thus argue that, “behavior which ignores the limitations on calculative rationality would itself be irrational.”104 In other words: would

101 Dominic D. P. Johnson and James H. Fowler, “The evolution of overconfidence,” Nature 477 (2011): 317. 102 Mitzen, “Ontological Security,” 346. 103 One alternative is to always assume the worst. Assuming the worst is essentially the prediction of realists like Mearsheimer, who argue that because the cost of being wrong is potentially death (of the individual or more problematically of the state), that we necessarily err on the side of caution. But the empirical evidence suggests that we do not always assume the worst, rather we make the assumption that Keynes’ suggests: we assume the present will continue unless we have a specific reason to assume something else. By “dismissing these possibilities,” I am suggesting that we neither assume the best nor the worst, we assume consistency with the present and ignore alternative outcomes that we perceive to be unlikely given our past experiences. A third possibility would be to assume what is best for us as a consequence of motivated biases, which can be a spur for overconfidence. 104 J. A. Kregel, cited in Dow and Dow, “Animal Spirits Revisited,” 6. 38 it be rational for actors to cease all action because of the constant, overwhelming fear of uncertainty, or rational for actors to choose to act despite that uncertainty? Animal spirits and confidence may not fall under the category of calculative rationality, but this is insufficient to call them irrational. Animal spirits, which inspire action despite uncertainty, and confidence, are both therefore rational.105

But overconfidence, by contrast, is irrational. When we are confident, we dismiss

Knightian uncertainty and make an analysis based on a combination of the weight of the evidence, with animal spirits allowing us to act despite the incompleteness of that evidence. When we are overconfident, we dismiss not only uncertainty but also risk. In the extreme, it is a feeling of assurance about the future despite the existence of objective, recognizable and available facts that should challenge this feeling of assurance. This causes us to act in “irrational and misguided” ways.106 As Daniel Kahneman describes overconfidence: “[people] seem to believe they know more than they actually do know.”107

105 George Akerlof and Robert Shiller disagree with this assessment, presenting animal spirits as always fundamentally irrational and misguided. I believe the contradiction between their argument that animal spirits are irrational, and Alexander and Sheila Dow’s argument that animal spirits are rational, is in the context. Dow and Dow focus on animal spirits’ role in decision making in general, while Akerlof and Shiller focus on animal spirits and their role in crises. In other words, Akerlof and Shiller look primarily at animal spirits insofar as they contribute to overconfidence and mania (and thus people fail to properly account for the weight of the available evidence), while Dow and Dow look at animal spirits insofar as they’re necessary for confidence (where people don’t make that mistake). Animal spirits are rational insofar as they’re necessary for action, but under the right circumstances they can still cause irrational behavior due to process errors. 106 Akerlof and Shiller, Animal Spirits, 3 107 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 89. 39

For Jennifer Mitzen and Randall Schweller, the related concept of misplaced certainty is “a situation where a decision maker has eliminated uncertainty prematurely”108, (a mistake) combined with persistence: the refusal to assimilate information that clashes with their original judgment.109 As Mitzen and Schweller put it: the mind “seizes and freezes.”110 Misplaced certainty so defined represents one possible cause of overconfidence. It also fits in with the psychological literature on motivated reasoning, another possible cause.111 But overconfidence, and – as we will see in Section

II – especially collective overconfidence – has a broader set of causes and consequences.

With that in mind, we turn now to Section II and collective confidence.

II. Collective Confidence and Overconfidence

Introducing Collective Confidence

What is collective confidence? Put simply, collective confidence is a “feeling of assurance about the future” which is shared within a social group. In other words, it is often the case that “we are confident” in addition to “I am confident.” The specific assured beliefs that I possess about the future are often shared with other people around me.

108 Mitzen and Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns,” 21 109 Mitzen and Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns,” 21 110 Arie Kruglanski and Donna Webster, “Motivated Closing of the Mind: ‘Seizing’ and ‘Freezing,’” Psychological Review 103, No. 2 (1996): 263-283. 111 Kunda, “The case for motivated reasoning.” 40

We are collectively confident in part because we have shared experiences. A key element of the genesis of confidence is the Keynesian convention that we expect the existing state of affairs will continue, absent a specific reason to expect it to change. Our experiences of the “existing state of affairs,” are in part socially determined: while our individual experiences within the material and social laws that govern behavior may have divergent outcomes (due to any number of variables, including chance), our experiences of those material and social conventions are similar. People within a social group learn to expect similar principles to have similar consequences over time;112 resulting shared beliefs help produce social solidarity.113

Indeed, it is our collective confidence about these social variables that allows them to have the regulative effects that they do: if our collective confidence in the value of money, or the safety of a bank, were to fail, at best the result would be social paralysis; at worst, the result would be panic. I am confident about the value of a dollar bill; we are also confident about the value of a dollar bill, and the latter informs and secures the former. Collective confidence thus gives us a shared sense of control over our collective outcomes.114 If I should ever have reason to believe that my fellows distrust the institution that keeps my money (for instance), the very fact of that shift in belief could

112 Elinor Ostrom, “Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, No. 3 (2000): 137-158; Martha Finnemore, “International Organizations as teachers of norms: the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and science policy,” International Organization 47, No. 4 (1993): 565-597. 113 Daniel Bar-Tal, Shared Beliefs in a Society: Social Psychological Analysis (London: Sage Publications, Ltd., 2001). 114 John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York, N.Y.: The Free Press, 1995). 41 potentially compromise that bank’s future solvency, and I would no longer be able to trust that my money would be accessible to me in a time of need.115 And conversely, if I do not have reason to believe that there has been a change in the degree to which my bank is trusted, I am not going to worry about it. I have other more pressing things to worry about, like what I’m going to make for dinner.

But shared experiences seem insufficient to justify confidence as a social variable.

This is particularly so because confidence is not purely a product of the weight of experience, but also rests on animal spirits.

So: why does confidence spread?

Why Does Confidence Spread

To understand why confidence spreads, we will examine both information cascade and emotional contagion. Information cascade helps us understand why specific beliefs spread from individual to individual within a social group; two specific and interrelated drivers of this are social proof and herding. But confidence’s emotional component can also cause confidence to spread; emotion is infectious and within social groups can spread from individual to individual. Let us address each of these pathways in turn.

First: confidence spreads through a community as a consequence of information cascade. Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch define the effect of an

115 Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig, “Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance, and Liquidity,” The Journal of Political Economy 91:3 (June 1983): 401-419 42 informational cascade as: “individuals rapidly [converging] on one action on the basis of some but very little information,” while the cause of informational cascades is “when it is optimal for an individual, having observed the actions of those ahead of him, to follow the behavior of the preceding individual without regard to his own information.”116 Let us break the information cascade down into three elements: (1) individuals observe the behavior of other individuals, (2) individuals use the behavior of other individuals as evidence (social proof), (3) individuals within a given social group adopting similar behaviors (herding).

What is social proof? The principle of social proof is that: “[a] means [individuals use] to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct. The principle applies especially to the way we decide what constitutes correct behavior.”117 If everyone around us is doing or believes something, we tend to assume that it is the right thing to do or believe. This makes sense: the behaviors of others reveal the social practices and norms of the society. They also will quickly alert us to known dangers

(places people are avoiding, for instance).

This principle makes perfect sense in general, but it also presents dangers. As

Robert Caldini, whose book provided the definition above, explains it: “the tendency to see an action as more appropriate when others are doing it normally works quite well. As a rule, we make fewer mistakes by acting in accord with social evidence than contrary to

116 Susil Bikhchandani, David Hirsheifer, and Ivo Welch, “A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades,” Journal of Political Economy 100, No. 5 (1992): 994. 117 Caldini, Influence, Chapter 4 43 it. Usually, when a lot of people are doing something, it is the right thing to do. This feature of the principle of social proof is simultaneously its major strength and its major weakness. Like the other weapons of influence, it provides a convenient shortcut for determining how to behave but, at the same time, makes one who uses the shortcut vulnerable...”118 The danger is simple: most of the time, mimicking the behavior of the people around us is the right thing to do. We thus do it all the time, and experience tells us it rarely leads us astray. But when it does lead us astray, it means we are all wrong together.

Similarly, within economics it is common to speak of herding. What is herding?

Put simply: herding is when individuals imitate authority figures. “Herding is said to be present in a market when investors opt to imitate the trading practices of those they consider to be better informed, rather than acting upon their own beliefs and private information.”119 The consequence of this is “the influence of private information on individual choices is overwhelmed by the influence of public information about the decision of a herd or group”120: we weight what we see others do more heavily than we do our own information.

118 Caldini, Influence, Chapter 4 119 Natividad Blasco, Pilar Corredor, and Sandra Ferreruela, “Herding, Volatility, and Market Stress in the Spanish Stock Market,” in Handbook of Investors’ Behavior During Financial Crises ed. Fotini Economou, Konstantinos Gavrilidis, Greg N. Gregoriou, and Basileious Kallinterakis (Academic Press, 2017), 151-168. 120 Michelle Baddeley, Demetris Pillas, Yorgos Christopoulos, Wolfmram Schultz, and Philleppe Tobler, “Herding and Social Pressure in Trading Tasks: A Behavioral Analysis,” University of Cambridge Working Paper in Economics No. 730 (2007): 2. 44

Like social proof, herding can be rational: particularly for “less sophisticated investors” and when gathering information is expensive, it makes sense to imitate the behaviors of successful, established ones.121 But there is a great deal of evidence within economics that herding behaviors also contribute to market volatility, producing contagion122 under both conditions of extreme market conditions123 and during periods of market calm.124 The result is overreaction to events. In a recent article on the phenomena, three Spanish economists, Natividad Blasco, Pilar Corredor, and Sandra Ferreruela, find that: “during extreme bullish days, investors mimic more intensely on the sell side, while during extreme bearing days they are more prone to follow the buys”125: when things are going well, people are more likely to follow the lead of people aiming to achieve gains; when things are going poorly, people are more likely to follow the lead of people trying to avoid losses.126 And it is important to note: herding is imitation that can occur despite the imitator’s own beliefs or private information! They may believe imitation is not wise, and they may even have information that indicates imitation is not wise, but they tend to

121 Haroon Khan, Slim A. Hassairi, and Jean-Laurent Viviani, “Herd Behavior and Market Stress: The Case of Four European Countries,” International Business Research 4, No. 3 (2011): 53-66. 122 Emilios Avgouleas, “What Future for disclosure as a regulatory technique? Lessons from the global financial crisis and beyond,” in The Future of Financial Reuglation, ed. L. MacNeil and J. O’Brien (London: Hart Publishing, 2010), 211-231. 123 Laura E. Kodres. and Matthew Pritsker, “A Rational Expectations Model of Financial Contagion,” The Journal of Finance 57, No. 2 (2002): 769-799. 124 Soosung Hwang and Mark Salmon, “Market stress and herding,” Journal of Empirical Finance 11, No. 4 (2004): 585-616. 125 Blasco, Corredor, and Ferreruela, “Herding, Volatility, and Market Stress,” 24 126 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk,” Econometrica 47, No. 2 (1979): 263-292. 45 assume the wisdom and information of the authority figures within their social group is superior to their own and follow anyway.

Social proof and herding are related concepts, and both provide explanations and evidence for beliefs and behavior to cascade through groups. But confidence also has an emotional component, not just a belief or behavioral component. There is also reason to believe that emotion cascades through groups.

So second: emotional contagion is: “a process in which a person or group influences the emotions, or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes.”127 The key takeaway is simple: on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis, starting with something as simple as facial expression mimicry128, emotional states can spread through individuals within a social group. We tend to be sympathetic with other members of our group or tribe.129

The end result of information cascade and emotional contagion is that confidence is contagious. The “feeling of assurance about the future” tends to spread through social groups, going from the individual to the collective. This contagiousness is why the animal spirits component of confidence operates at not just the individual, but also the social level. Combined with information cascade, it is how we get collective confidence.

If it were the case that reasonable, accurate confidence spread through a community, and then that community routinely made reasonable judgments about what to

127 Gerald Schoenewolf, “Emotional Contagion: Behavioral Induction in Individuals and Groups,” Modern Psychoanalysis 15, No. 1 (1990): 50. 128 Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson, Emotional Contagion (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 129 Lauren Wispé, The Psychology of Sympathy (New York: Plenum Press, 1991). 46 believe and consequently how to act, there would not be a problem here. But there are reasons to believe that it is not only confidence that can spread through a community, but overconfidence. How does overconfidence become a social phenomenon?

Collective Overconfidence

What is collective overconfidence? Essentially, we are asking about a market failure in the “marketplace of ideas.” In the abstract, we would expect that a collection of individuals would have the ability to properly weigh the available evidence and use their cumulative knowledge to make a more accurate assessment of the state of reality than any individual.130 But it does not necessarily work this way. The aggregation of knowledge from the level of the individual to the social can cause market failures, leading to overconfidence: feelings of assurance about the future that have become unreasonable and are shared within a social group. It can cause collective overconfidence.

There are two things that we need to keep in mind when discussing collective overconfidence. First is that just as confidence is contagious, so is overconfidence.

Second is that the process by which confidence spreads through a social group causes the increased prevalence of overconfidence at the social level.

All of the drivers of a contagion of confidence are also going to be the cause of a contagion of overconfidence. First, social proof: if we believe that something is appropriate on the basis of the beliefs of others, then if those initial beliefs are overconfident, then those believes will spread through the community. Second, herding:

130 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor Books, 2004). 47 if our behaviors are based on imitations of authority figures, then if those authority figures are acting on the basis of overconfident beliefs, then so too will we (and authority figures are prone to making mistakes of overconfidence particularly when they feel in control131). Finally, if the animal spirits of some members of a social group are either high or low, and the act of witnessing another person’s emotional state can cause us to reflect that state, then that can serve to amplify or depress our collective animal spirits and thus our collective confidence132 (this is recognized as a major contributing factor to economic depressions, hence the name133).

But not only is there the question of simple contagion, there’s the fact that the process of contagion is one in which known facts can be dismissed. Both theories of social proof and herding specifically note that beliefs can spread despite the prevalence of evidence that contradicts those beliefs. For social proof, Caldini points out that we instinctively and reflexively respond to “partial or fake evidence” (one example is that laugh tracks make bad jokes seem funnier, because of the illusion of the belief that other people find them funny). What we see other people believing can override what we believe, even if what we believe has an empirical basis. And for herding, we are willing

131 Nathanael J. Fast, Niro Sivanathan, Nicole D. Mayer, and Adam D. Galinsky, “Power and overconfident decision-making,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 117, No. 2 (2012): 249-260. 132 Sigal G. Barsade, “The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion in Groups,” Yale School of Management Working Paper #01 (2001), https://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/papers/others/2001/barsade2001ua.pdf 133 Akerlof and Shiller, Animal Spirits, 59-73. 48 to follow figures in positions of authority, trusting in their judgment even if we have specific reasons to think those authorities might be wrong.134

In the language of animal spirits: an individual’s animal spirits are in part a product of the animal spirits of those around her, and when sufficiently strong they can override the weight of the evidence. Thus, as part of the transformation from confidence to collective confidence, a social group tends to become overconfident – and that overconfidence can itself then spread. The consequence is that we, together, as a group, can come to collectively dismiss risk. This is mania: an extreme form of overconfidence that leads a number of individuals within a given social group to disregard known risks in choosing their individual and collective actions. Additionally, if not checked, mania gets worse over time. Mania, the forms it can take (specifically in economics and in foreign policy), and the conditions under which it is most likely to emerge are the subject of

Section III.

III. Speculative Mania in Economics and International Relations

Introducing Mania

In this, the final section of this chapter, I address the heart of the project: mania.

Mania is the practical consequence of collective overconfidence run amok. In essence, mania is collective overconfidence stuck in a positive feedback loop. The mania is the process by which confidence spirals into greater and greater collective overconfidence.

134 Caldini, Influence, Chapter 4. 49

The end result is that a group of people comes to wildly over-estimate benefits, and under-estimate risks (not just uncertainties, but risks), associated with a specific set of choices they make and behaviors they adopt.

Based on the writings of economists Charles Kindleberger, Robert Shiller, and

George Akerlof, who have studied manias and their relationship to stock market bubbles and subsequent economic crashes, we know that manias have a recurrent and predictable pattern. Manias occur in a pathway that can be understood in three steps:

First: “displacement.” Something happens that undermines the existing system, demands explanation, and creates reason for confidence about the future. 135

Second: “New Era Thinking.” The need to explain the displacement, and the evidence from the displacement and the success of initial investments, leads to the beliefs that suggest “the future is brighter or less uncertain than it was in the past.”136

Third: “investment.” Entrepreneurs act on this confidence, pursuing the potential gains made possible by the initial displacement. New Era Thinking and investment feed off of one another, with successful investment spurring New Era Thinking and New Era

Thinking inspiring further rounds of investment. It is this positive feedback between New

Era Thinking and investment that drives overconfidence.

Combined, these produce mania. The tenants of New Era Thinking become the primary justification for further investments, and individuals disregard facts that provide contradictory evidence. Second-mover investors thus believe that the benefits are great

135 Kindleberger and Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, 39. 136 Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 123 50 and the risks are low, with these beliefs intensifying over time. If allowed to persist: optimistic voices dominate, skeptical voices are sidelined, and the perceptions of benefit increase towards infinity while the perceptions of risk decrease towards zero. The community becomes “euphoric.”

The remainder of this section will proceed in two steps. First, I will provide expanded discussions of the components of mania, explaining how they operate in economics. Second, finally, and most crucially for this particular project, I will explain how, just like investors in a stock market, foreign policy decision-makers can also become manic.

The Three Stages of Mania

Displacement is the first stage of mania. Put simply, displacement represents a shock to the existing system, something that disrupts the existing consensus wisdom.

Displacements can be technological (e.g. the invention of the Internet), political (e.g. the

Iraq War, or the Arab Spring), social (e.g. the rise of social media), or geographic (e.g. the “discovery” of the silver deposits in Central and South America by the Spanish).

These displacements fundamentally altered the perception of opportunity, opening up new doors for individuals to pursue their interests.

What constitutes a displacement? This is hard to answer without the benefit of hindsight. Kindleberger’s definition above is vague, and Shiller offers numerous very specific examples but declines to try to generalize.137 Some displacements are sudden,

137 Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, Chapter 4. 51 instantaneous shocks that immediately cause the perception of change (e.g. a change in government policy). Others can build up over time with the realization that something has changed coming only in hindsight (e.g. the development of a new technology).

Kindleberger, summarizing the work of a predecessor, Hyman Minsky, explains:

“If the shock was sufficiently large and pervasive, the economic outlook and the anticipated profit opportunities would improve in at least one important sector of the economy. Business firms and individuals would borrow to take advantage of the increase in the anticipated profits in this sector. Economic growth would quicken and in turn there might be feedback to even greater optimism.138 Put simply: the shock leads to belief in opportunity, which leads to efforts by individuals to pursue that perceived opportunity, which leads to economic activity and growth.

New Era Thinking is the second stage of mania. An era of New Era Thinking is one in which it becomes popular to believe that “the future is brighter or less uncertain than it was in the past.”139 New Era Thinking develops as a consequence of the belief that something about the displacement represented a truly fundamental change. As Shiller and

Akerlof explain it: “The confidence of a nation, or of any large group, tends to revolve around stories. Of particular relevance are new era stories, those that purport to describe historic changes that will now propel the economy into a brand new era.”140

New Era Thinking emerges out of the need to be able to explain the causes and effects of a displacement. Shiller explains the development of New Era Thinking as

138 Kindleberger and Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, 39. 139 Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 123 140 Akerlof and Shiller, Animal Spirits, 54 52 follows: “Conventional wisdom interprets the stock market as reacting to new era theories. In fact, it appears that the stock market often creates new era theories, as reporters scramble to justify stock market price moves. The situation reminds one of the

Ouija board, where players are encouraged to interpret the meaning of movements in their trembling hands and to distill forecasts from them. Or the stock market is seen as an oracle, issuing mysterious and meaningless pronouncements, which we then ask our leaders to interpret, mistakenly investing their interpretations with authority.”141 In other words: the shock to the system disrupted our existing ability to explain and be confident in the world, and we respond by taking the events of the displacement and developing new stories which help us explain what just happened, why it happened, and project into the future.

Figure 1: Preliminary Stages of Mania

If we recall once again Keynes’ basic convention – the expectation that things will remain the same as they are now absent a specific reason to expect change – we see how this can become problematic. These new stories are based off perilously little information, as the displacement is still recent. Evidence from before the displacement is

141 Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 126 53 dismissed as no longer relevant in the New Era. Consequently, the available weight of the evidence available to help make decisions is low.

Investment is the third stage of mania, but investment and New Era Thinking occur simultaneously and are interactive with one another. Investment starts with the entrepreneurs: the people who respond most aggressively to the displacement to take advantage of the opportunities it presents. Using the Internet as a parallel, we mean the

Mark Zuckerbergs: the people who have an idea and pursue it, with perilously little evidence that it will succeed, and succeed spectacularly.

These first-wave investors are inspired by and help inspire New Era Thinking.

They also help New Era Thinking propagate through the rest of their community: they become an evidence of success. Herding and social proof, which already help to spread

New Era Thinking, are reinforced by a shift in psychological mindset from the domain of gains to the domain of losses: no one wants to be left out of what is starting to seem like a sure bet.142 As Kindleberger explains: “A follow-the-leader process develops as firms and households see that the investors make a lot of money. ‘There is nothing as disturbing to one’s well-being and judgment to see a friend get rich.’ Unless it is to see a non-friend get richer… Making money never seemed easier.”143

This leads to second and third-wave investment. With each wave that occurs, New

Era Thinking becomes stronger. People become enthralled with the potential for gain, and confidence transforms fully into overconfidence – causing people to begin disregarding

142 Kahneman and Tversky, “Prospect Theory.” 143 Kindleberger and Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, 43. 54 known, recognizable risks. Skeptics stop voicing their skepticism when the dangers they identified do not immediately come to pass, and no one listens to them anyway.144 Even those who are skeptical may buy in, attempting to profit from the mania while they can.145 In economics, Adam Smith calls the consequence “overtrading”, which includes speculation about increases in prices and overestimates of prospective returns.146 This is a positive feedback loop: New Era Thinking leading to Investment leading to New Era

Thinking leading to Investment leading to New Era Thinking, with each round causing people to become more convinced of the benefits and less cognizant of the risks. This loop is mania.

Figure 2: The Three Stages of Mania

144 Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 188-191. 145 Kenneth A. Froot, David S. Scharfstein, and Jeremy C. Stein, “Herd on the Street: Informational Inefficiencies in a Market with Short-Term Speculation,” The Journal of Finance 47, No. 4 (1992): 1461-1484. 146 Kindleberger and Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, 42. 55

Iteration can occur for a number of reasons. Bryan Jones, Hershel Thomas, and

Michelle Wolfe present a series of reasons why policies are more likely to get caught in a positive feedback loop, including (1) low levels of positive or balanced news coverage,

(2) a persuasive causal story that accompanies the investment, (3) “identification with the means”, or cognitive and emotional investment with the policy as a means rather than its instrumental value, (4) adjustment of the baseline relative to the new normal, rather than the initial starting point, and (5) leaders averse to being blamed for potential failures.147

The result of mania in an economic marketplace is economic activity that is unsupported by the “fundamentals”148: the purchase of already highly-priced stocks because of the belief that the will continue to rise forever, or the making of loans to entrepreneurs pursuing riskier projects. As Kindleberger describes it:

“Minksy highlighted a mild form of this type of irrationality in his discussion of ‘euphoria’ of markets. In an earlier day, such waves of excessive optimism perhaps followed by extreme pessimism might have been explained by ‘sunspots’ or the paths of Venus or of Mars through the heavens. In Minksy’s formulation these waves of optimism start with a ‘displacement’ or shock that leads to an increase in optimism of investors and business firms and of bank lenders. More confident expectations of a steady stream of prosperity and of an increase in profits induce investors to buy riskier stocks. Banks make riskier loans in this more optimistic environment. The optimism increases and may become self-fulfilling until it evolves into a mania.”149

147 Bryan D. Jones, Herschel F. Thomas III, and Michelle Wolfe, “Policy Bubbles,” The Policy Studies Journal 42, No. 1 (2014): 152-153. 148 By fundamentals, we mean the “information about current and future returns from an asset.” See: Olivier J. Blanchard and Mark W. Watson, “Bubbles, Rational Expectations, and Financial Markets,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 945 (1982), https://www.nber.org/papers/w0945.pdf 149 Kindleberger and Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, 57. 56

In the context of economics, mania involves specific investment activities: loans, investments, etc. But speaking more generally, we can think of mania a period where people invest with increasingly, excessively overconfident perspectives about the potential gains and risks of those investments.

The longer the policy appears calibrated (“there is a relatively high correspondence between policy predictions and their actual occurrence”), the more overconfident the people pursuing that policy become.150 This is particularly true when the tasks they are performing are difficult – the harder the task, the more overconfident we tend to be.151

This leads us to one, blessedly final question: how can this help us understand foreign policy decisions?

Mania in Foreign Policy

In this section, I will examine the three stages of mania and their applicability to foreign policy. The general pattern of displacement to New Era Thinking to investment

(and overinvestment) is one that occurs in foreign policy as well as economics, though I will re-christen “investment” as “policy adoption” in this domain. After a major systemic

150 Moshe Maor, “Policy Bubbles: Policy Overreaction and Positive Feedback,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 27, No. 3 (2014), 475 151 Sarah Lichtenstein, Baruch Fischhoff, and Lawrence D. Phillips, “Calibration of Probabilities: The State of the Art to 1980,” Office of Naval Research DTIC Document (1981). 57 displacement, foreign policy-makers (like everyone else) are prone to New Era Thinking.

This New Era Thinking is not totally unwarranted, but as policy is adopted based on its premises, those premises go increasingly unquestioned. This leads to further policy adoption, which leads to stronger New Era Thinking, and we fall into a manic feedback loop. The overall effect is manic foreign policy: policies adopted by a collective foreign policy elite who are overconfident, possessing an unreasonable feeling of assurance about the future that leads them to dismiss not only uncertainty but also known, demonstrable risk.

Displacement is the first stage of foreign policy mania: a shock to the existing system, something that disrupts the consensus wisdom. One example a of foreign policy displacement, an event that fundamentally altered the rules by which states in a state system operated (creating new opportunities for some of those states to take advantage of), was the end of the Cold War. Indeed, the End of the Cold War as a displacement event, and subsequent New Era Thinking, will be a focus of Chapter 3 of this dissertation.

Some examples of displacements are religious or political: the Protestant Reformation152, the French Revolution, and the end of the Napoleonic Wars153 all changed the existing rules of the game in certain profound ways. Technology, too, had displacement potential: the invention of the Railroad, the invention of the Internet154, the invention of the

152 Derek Croxton, “The Pease of Westphalia of 1648 and the Origins of Sovereignty,” The International History Review XXI, No. 3 (1999): 569-853. 153 Jennifer Mitzen, Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 154 Joe Trippi, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything (New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2004). 58

Drone155, or the invention of Nuclear Weapons156 (for instance). Other examples are social: the rise of Nationalism is one example157, the rise of Imperialism another.158 Each of these occurrences possessed displacement potential: it fundamentally altered the way the existing game was played, creating a new set of rules, with new potential for foreign policies designed to maximize a nation’s objectives.

That they possessed displacement potential does not necessarily mean that each cause manic foreign policies. Again, a displacement is a necessary, not a sufficient cause.

For mania, we need to fall into a feedback loop between New Era Thinking and policy adoption.

New Era Thinking is a natural consequence of a displacement: the belief that there have been historic changes which mean the world has entered into a new era, which will be played by new and different rules. The classic example of New Era Thinking, the emergence and character of which will be the primary focus of Chapter 3, was rendered in Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” following the fall of the Berlin Wall in

1989.159 But there are other examples. International Relations is littered with New Era

Thinking: for instance, how the ICBM changed international politics (and the degree to

155 P. W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty- First Century (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009). 156 Geoffrey L. Herrera, Technology and International Transformation: The Railroad, the Atom Bomb, and the Politics of Technological Change (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006). 157 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006). 158 P. J. Cain and Anthony G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688-1914 (New York: Longman, 1993). 159 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18. 59 which it did).160 Other common examples in contemporary scholarship involve

Democracy (which changed the rules via Democratic Peace Theory)161, Economic

Interdependence (which changed the rules via trade and interdependence)162, American

Unipolarity (the presence of a singularly powerful state presents profound consequences for what states can and cannot do)163, or post-World War II norms of statecraft.164

Importantly, saying that these beliefs represent New Era Thinking does not mean they are wrong. New Era Thinking can reflect an accurate assessment about the way in which the world has changed. Just because the dot-com bubble eventually burst does not mean the

Internet did not represent a fundamental change in the world, for instance.

But New Era Thinking can lead to mania insofar as its tenants are adopted unquestioned by individuals who can make policy decisions. The feedback loop of investment and New Era Thinking in economics can occur in the realm of international relations, with a feedback loop of foreign policy adoption and New Era Thinking.

160 Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics Before and After Hiroshima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 161 Karen Rasler and William R. Thompson, Puzzles of the Democratic Peace: Theory, Geopolitics, and the Transformation of World Politics (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). 162 Katherine Barbieri, “Economic Interdependence: A Path to Peace or a Source of Interstate Conflict?” Journal of Peace Research 33, No. 1 (1996): 29-49; Dale C. Copeland, “Economic Interdependence and War: A Theory of Trade Expectations,” International Security 20, No. 4 (1996): 5-41. 163 G. John Ikenberry, Michael Mastanduno, and William C. Wohlforth. “Introduction; Unipolarity, State Behavior, and Systemic Consequences,” World Politics 61, No. 1 (2009): 1-27. 164 Mark W. Zacher, “The Territorial Integrity Norm: International Boundaries and the Use of Force,” International Organization 55, No. 2 (2001): 215-250. 60

Certain kinds of policies may be more prone to this than others. If a policy is attractive for emotional or ideological reasons, it can appear more attractive than it might be otherwise. “According to Cox and Béland, ‘a policy idea is attractive when its valence matches the mood of a target population.’ Furthermore, people may ‘fall in love’ with

‘fantastic objects’ – defined as subjectively very attractive ideas or people that individuals imagine can satisfy their deepest desires that they may only be slightly aware of or not at all.”165 Policies that fit with an ideological vision of the world, or provide status and create positive public reactions (and which have positive electoral ramifications) are thus more likely to fall into a feedback loop.166

In IR in particular, we also have the issue of dominant actors. As discussed earlier, herding means that individuals use authority figures to help them guide their judgments about what they should believe. New Era Thinking thus spreads more readily when powerful individuals or states embrace it. This means that Great Powers can be particularly influential in this regard, and ideas that find purchase in the foreign policy elites of Great Powers spread more readily to other states in the international system.167

165 Moshe Maor, “Policy Bubbles: Policy Overreaction and Positive Feedback,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 27, No. 3 (2014), 475. 166 Jones, Thomas, and Wolfe, “Policy Bubbles,” 152-153. 167 My preferred definition of a “Great Power” is “a state that has special global rights and responsibilities which give it a sense of authority over other states (except other great powers) regardless of geographic proximity.” Remembering the dynamics of herding and social proof and how authority figures can elicit imitation, other states should be expected to follow the lead of the Great Powers, as investors are expected to follow the lead of their larger, more ostensibly knowledgeable peers. This is similar to “Soft Power”; see: Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The changing nature of American power (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 61

The confidence and overconfidence of a great power has more of an impact than the confidence or overconfidence of a minor power.

Foreign Policy Adoption is the third stage of mania. It starts with the community of foreign policy decision-makers (the foreign policy elite)168: members of the policy- making community see that the displacement brings opportunity. These elites can respond to (for instance) the new reality of 19th century nationalism with the hope for unification of countries like Italy (giving us the word “irredentism”).169 The result is both a given state repeatedly adopting foreign policies based on New Era Thinking (iteration), and multiple states adopting foreign policies based on New Era Thinking (imitation).

The first-movers are inspired by and help inspire further New Era Thinking. If they succeed (and sometimes even if they fail), they become evidence of the potential for success and proof that there is opportunity in this new era that had previously been absent. Out of the hope of achieving further gains, and the desire to take fullest advantage of the presented opportunity, the first-movers iterate their policies to push them as far as possible. And, out of the hope of achieving gains, and especially out of the fear of being left behind by competitors, other states imitate.170 With each subsequent round of policy

168 The focus here is on the foreign policy elite, as they are the ones who are most closely analogous to the investors in a stock market or commodity: they make “purchasing” decisions and are aiming to maximize the national interest. However, manias could not persist without the masses being explicitly supportive or, if not supportive, at least insufficiently skeptical for their skepticism to turn into broad opposition to the program. Opposition of the masses can be a driving factor that destabilizes a manic feedback loop. 169 Naomi Chazan, ed., Examining Irredentism: Irredentism and International Politics (Boulder, C.O.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991). 170 Benjamin E. Goldsmith, Imitation in International Relations: Observational Learning, Analogies and Foreign Policy in Russia and Ukraine (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 62 adoption, both within states (foreign policy elites within a state repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results) and between states (one state’s elites adopting the same policy of another state and expecting the same results), the expectations grow: expected benefits increase, and perceived risks decrease. Even those who are skeptical may buy in, attempting to “ride the bubble” and get what they can before the entire thing collapses.171 This is a positive feedback loop: New Era Thinking leading to Policy Adoption leading to New Era Thinking leading to Policy Adoption leading to New Era Thinking, with each round causing people to become more convinced of the benefits and less cognizant of the risks. This is mania.

Figure 3: The Three Stages of Mania in International Relations

2005); Jack S. Levy, “Learning and Foreign Policy: Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield,” International Organization 48, No. 2 (1994): 279-312. 171 Dilip Abreu and Markus K. Brunnermeier, “Bubbles and Crashes,” Econometrica 71, No. 1 (2003): 173-204. 63

The result of mania in foreign policy is states end up putting themselves on unstable footing. Just because states are acting manically does not necessarily mean that the entire thing is going to implode on them – sometimes they get lucky. But especially in an International Relations context, where states have rivals seeking to take advantage of them, mania is dangerous because it creates vulnerabilities that may not be perceptible for the policy elites of those now vulnerable states. States discontented with the status quo can “countermobilize”172, which may or may not be strong enough to puncture the bubble inflated by the mania. But so caught up in their New Era Thinking, foreign policy elites don’t recognize how vulnerable they have made their states, and fail to prepare countermeasures for the event that something does go wrong. And, once they have become truly manic, this is despite the fact that they do have specific reasons to expect something to go wrong.

The principle example I utilize to demonstrate this is the end of the Cold War and the three initial post-Cold War rounds of NATO enlargement. In Chapter 4, I will show how with each round NATO enlargement after the first (1999, 2004, 2009) the perceived benefits of NATO enlargement increased, and the perceived risks declined, despite growing reasons for concern that were known even at the time.

The remainder of this dissertation will proceed in three chapters:

172 Jones, Thomas, and Wolfe, “Policy Bubbles,” 153.

64

In Chapter 3 I discuss the End of the Cold War as a displacement and (1) demonstrate that it provoked New Era Thinking, and (2) explain the particular beliefs that were characteristic of New Era Thinking during the post-Cold War period.

In Chapter 4, I argue that these New Era beliefs inspired numerous foreign policy choices in the United States and Europe, examining in particular NATO enlargement. I argue that the initial round of NATO enlargement in 1999 was risky but that this risk was clearly acknowledged (though there were early indications of overconfidence even then), but that by 2007 the NATO enlargement policy and process had clearly become manic: both predicated on excessively optimistic about the benefits that NATO enlargement would bring, and dismissive of the risks. I also discuss how to recognize foreign policy mania in progress.

In Chapter 5, I explore other implications of confidence for international relations.

These include the possibility for panic and crisis following a period of mania and the possibility of the foreign policy equivalent for an extended period of underconfidence and depression. I also discuss confidence and Idealism: potential beneficial consequences of overconfidence in making possible positive outcomes that would otherwise be impossible.

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Chapter 3: New Era Thinking After the End of the Cold War

“On November 9, 1989, our era ended. The breaching of the Berlin Wall sounded the end of not merely the Cold War, but an epoch of global conflict that started with the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand on June 28, 1914. Now with the twentieth century truncated, we are straining to discern the shape of the 21st.”173

-Robert L. Bartley

It is not controversial to assert that the events of 1989, 1990, and 1991 changed international relations. The discipline of IR within political science is, thirty years later, still grappling with the ramifications of the radical transformations that took place following Gorbachev’s ascension to the post of General Secretary of the Central

Committee of the Communist Party in 1985.

The end of the Cold War, starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and effectively confirmed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, constituted a significant displacement: a shock to the existing system which disrupted it and all the recognized rules of that system. With the end of the Cold War so many of the old rules died (or seemed to die) sudden, unexpected deaths: bipolarity, democracy vs. authoritarianism, capitalism vs. communism, internationalism vs. regionalism. This

173 Robert L. Bartley, “The Case for Optimism,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 4 (1993): 15. 66 displacement shocked experts around the world who strained to discern the shape of the new era that would replace that of the Cold War.

This shock, and the need to explain it, opened the door for New Era Thinking: the idea that there had been a truly fundamental change, one that created a new age where the future had become brighter, and uncertainty about that future lesser, than had been true in past eras. 174 It was true, of course, that the world had indeed changed – the dissolution of the Soviet Union unmistakably altered world politics – but that did not mean that the degree of confidence that was provoked in its aftermath was warranted. New Era

Thinking was first and most famously evident in Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 “End of

History”175, written while the rest of his colleagues were still skeptical that the fall of the

Berlin Wall had really been as shattering an event as he posited it to be (all would be convinced that a new era really had begun by the end of 1991), Fukuyama presented many of the fundamental beliefs about the new world that would come to characterize the majority of the community of public intellectuals who wrote about it in major public foreign policy journals. Some of these beliefs would, bolstered by the events of the years immediately following the end of the Cold War, proliferate through the community of scholars.

By reviewing the articles published in Foreign Affairs, National Interest, and

Foreign Policy between the beginning of 1988 and the end of 1993, we see the

174 Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance: Revised and Expanded Third Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 123. 175 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest 16 (1989): 3-18. 67 emergence of a broad consensus within this community about three specific New Era beliefs:

First, that democracy would be a characteristic of the new era, with a steady, inexorable spread of that manner of government and transformation of authoritarian states into democratic states.

Second, that economic integration would be a characteristic of the new era, with states expected to progressively integrate their economies into a truly global economic apparatus, characterized by a proliferation of trade agreements that would benefit all.

Third, that regional instability would be a characteristic of the new era, with the end of the stability of bipolarity176 opening the door for civil conflict, both ethnic and religious, particularly in regions that were ethnically and religiously diverse.

These three beliefs combined to produce one consequential belief about what should be done: one belief about how the United States needed to respond to the New

Era, the opportunities presented by it, and the dangers lurking within. Namely, that the

New Era would be and needed to be one of American leadership, where the United

States would ensure the success of democracy and economic integration and prevent the dangers of regional instability. The era needed to be one of hegemonic or unipolar stability, and only the United States could be the hegemon. While the most contentious, by 1994 a majority of the community of scholars who discussed this issue advocated confidently for the need to have the United States in such a role.

176 Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Long Grove, I.L.: Waveland Press, Inc., 1979). 68

Each of these beliefs was embraced with increasing confidence as the early post-

Cold War era proceeded. By 1992-1993, 66% of the community wrote unambiguously that democracy would be characteristic of the New Era and only 5% argued that it wouldn’t; 78% wrote unambiguously that economic integration would be characteristic of the new era and only 6% argued that it wouldn’t; and 61% argued that instability would be characteristic of the new era and only 7% argued that it wouldn’t. Even the most contentious belief, that the United States needed to adopt a hegemonic role, had a slight majority of 52% of the community writing that the USA needed to be a leader, 29% unsure, and only 19% unambiguously opposed. The collective confidence of the community about each assessment grew from far more ambiguous stances in 1988-1989.

This does not mean that these beliefs were wrong, necessarily. The growth in confidence about democracy, economic integration and instability was a direct consequence of the major events of the day: the Revolutions of 1989 and the beginning of the Yugoslavian Civil War (1991) in particular played prominent roles in their development. The weight of the evidence helped facilitate the growth in confidence. The world really had changed, and the rules really were different – but it nonetheless provided fertile conditions for the development of manic foreign policy.

That is what this chapter is about: the first two components of a mania. In it, I first argue that the End of the Cold War, the Collapse of the Soviet Union, and the

Revolutions in Eastern Europe constitute a displacement which created the conditions for

New Era Thinking. I then argue that New Era Thinking emerged in the next few years, complete with the belief that there had been a historic change and that the future would

69 be brighter and less uncertain than the past had been. This created the potential for, but not the reality of, manic foreign policy. It will be the job of the subsequent chapter to argue that this potential was realized.

Figure 4: The Preliminary Stages of Mania, 1989-1993

This chapter will proceed with three sections:

First, I will revisit the theory of mania, explaining displacement and New Era

Thinking and discussing how we can recognize them when we see them. I will then explain the methodology of the chapter. In brief, I examined articles written in three major American foreign policy journals between the years 1988 and 1993, identifying the major consistent debates (or points of consensus) and tracing the process of their development from the early phases of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union through the end of the first year of the Clinton presidency. I will show how these beliefs

70 progressed towards consensus as time passes, suggesting that New Era Thinking was spreading through both the community of public intellectuals producing those journals and the community of policy elites that overlapped with it.

Second, I will focus on the first stage of mania: displacement. Here I will provide evidence for why the end of the Cold War was a displacement event: that people came to believe that the end of the Cold War really had heralded a new historical era in which the old rules no longer applied.

Third, I will focus on the second stage of mania: New Era Thinking. Here I will explain in more detail the content of the four major beliefs about the new era, explain the events that provoked their development and proliferation, and argue that the New Era

Thinking they represented set the stage for manic foreign policy in subsequent years. I will discuss this in four sections, one dedicated to each of the four beliefs that characterized the New Era Thinking of the era: democracy, economic integration, regional stability, and American leadership. The subsequent chapter will discuss the consequences.

I. Identifying New Era Thinking

New Era Thinking: What to Look For

The focus of this chapter is to examine empirical examples of the first two stages of a foreign policy mania: Displacement and New Era Thinking. Displacement is a shock to an existing system that disrupts the consensus wisdom; New Era Thinking is the belief

71 that a new historical era has begun with new rules. New Era Thinking then takes the form of specific stories about the nature of the new era: stories that explain what has happened and which can be used to predict what will happen. Thanks to the predisposition for beliefs to cascade, these beliefs can proliferate through a community – and in so doing, become increasingly confident about the verity of those beliefs to the point of overconfidence.

New Era Thinking specifically refers to periods when the popular perception is

“that the future is brighter or less uncertain than the past.”177 It is not the case that such perceptions are always wrong – there are indeed times when the introduction of new technology, or political change, or environmental shift, or any number of other variable factors – can cause an increase in general well-being of a society that can be recognized.

Importantly, however, New Era Thinking does not reflect the reality of the underlying conditions. As Shiller puts it, “By many measures the world has indeed been growing into a new and better era. But the most salient characteristics of popular [New Era

Thinking] is that it is not continuously in evidence, it occurs in pulses.”178 Namely, New

Era Thinking emerges out of a kind of triumphalism: during periods of success, particularly unexpected success that occurs to the surprise and amazement of witnesses.

In economics, Shiller explains that “whenever the market reaches a new high, public speakers, writers, and other prominent people suddenly appear, armed with explanations for the apparent optimism seen in the market. Reporters may not always get

177 Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 123. 178 Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 123. 72 the timing right, and they may suggest that it was the words spoken by these great men and women that cause the market shifts… the New Era Thinking they promote is part of the process by which a boom may be sustained and amplified-part of the feedback mechanism that, as we have seen, can create speculative bubbles.”179 The period of displacement, especially positive displacement, demands explanation and provokes beliefs that can become the fodder for later mania. In this chapter, the mania is left aside for later; the object is to show that both displacement and New Era Thinking can occur in the realm of international politics.

Specifically, I seek to both establish that New Era Thinking was characteristic of the post-Cold War era, and then to subsequently identify the particular beliefs which would go on to influence specific policy decisions. To do this, I must first establish a set of characteristics that, if present, would be indicative of New Era Thinking. They are as follows:

(1) A period of unexpected, amazing success leading to subsequent triumphalism.

This is not sufficient to prove the presence of New Era Thinking, but it is an

indicator of fertile conditions for the growth of New Era Thinking.

(2) Subsequent theories and explanations about the causes and consequences of this

period indicate that the future will be more certain than the past. There should be

clearly definable rules that will make the new era predictable.

179 Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 125. 73

(3) Subsequent theories and explanations about the causes and consequences of this

period indicate that the future will be more positive than the past. The new era

should create the conditions for identifiable improvement as compared to the past

on some measure of interest.

(4) These beliefs should trend towards consensus within the policy-relevant

community. Theories of predictability and positivity are themselves insufficient

for New Era Thinking; such theories must be broadly shared. This does not mean

they are unquestioned – there are always some skeptics – but they must reach the

point of “popular perception.”

When and Where to Look for New Era Thinking?

In order to establish New Era Thinking specifically in the post-Cold War context,

I examined articles published in three American foreign policy journals: National

Interest, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs. I do this following the lead of Jerel Rosati,

Michael Link, and John Creed, who published “A New Perspective on the Foreign Policy

Views of American Opinion Leaders in the Cold War and Post-Cold War Eras,” in

1998.180

If New Era Thinking is to have an effect on policy, it must be present in the policy community: it must be held, at least in part, by the elites who are responsible for consolidating the ideas and then acting on those ideas in the form of policy. These

180 Jerel A. Rosati, Michael W. Link, and John Creed, “A New Perspective on the Foreign Policy Views of American Opinion Leaders in the Cold War and Post-Cold War Eras,” Political Research Quarterly 51, No. 2 (1998): 461-479. 74

“opinion leaders” can both create and collapse consensus views. Such leaders include politicians and journalists, academics both in academia and at think tanks, and other respected public intellectuals. As noted in the aforementioned article: “the viewpoints of such opinion leaders will probably serve as a guiding force in the search for a new foreign policy consensus as the United States enters the 21st century.”181 I refer to this community as the “policy and policy-adjacent” community, because it comprises people who were either part of the policy process (at the time or at other points in their careers) or whose opinions would have been listened to by those who were direct contributors to the policy process.182

The three journals above were selected for a few major reasons:

First, because they presented the opportunity to take a sample of the broader argument in the policy and policy-adjacent community: these journals present various arguments about the wisdom of policy in a way that is publicly available. They thus have advantages of ease of access, as well as a specific focus on the issues of interest to this project, which makes them easier to work with that other potential sources.

Second, they permit an analysis of a range of partisan views. The journals selected ensure that views on both the American political right and political left from the time are part of the sample: The National Interest presents a perspective that is more to the right, Foreign Policy the left, and Foreign Affairs the center.183 It is vitally important

181 Rosati, Link, and Creed, “A New Perspective,” 462. 182 Charles W. Kegley, Jr., “Assumptions and Dilemmas in the Study of Americans’ Foreign Policy Beliefs: A Caveat,” International Studies Quarterly 30, No. 4 (1986): 447-471. 183 Rosati, Link, and Creed, “A New Perspective,” 463. 75 that the data not be biased towards one side of the political spectrum or the other, as New

Era Thinking requires a degree of consensus that straddles both sides of the political fence if it will result in sustainable foreign policy.

Third, the nature of these journals – namely that they were published four or five times a year, every year during the period of interest – means that we can use them to track how thinking changed on a more granular and clearly-defined basis than would be offered by something like a survey. An important element of the project is seeing not just that New Era Thinking developed, but how New Era Thinking developed, and identifying in the source material when exactly it was that the content of the conversations changed.

Fourth, and relatedly, the journals present a corpus of documents that is clearly defined. I still had to make decisions about which years and which journals to use, but the convenience of a relatively large, but not unmanageably large, sample of documents whose boundaries were clearly defined helps limit the possibility that we find New Era

Thinking because of a biased sample that fails to incorporate contrasting views.

I decided to read articles from six years: 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993.

These years represented the transition from “Cold War” to “Post-Cold War”. They also captured a year of the Reagan Administration, all four years of the George H. W. Bush

Administration, and the first year of the Clinton Administration, thus making it possible to see what effect each change in administration had on the overall process.

Importantly, I did not read only samples from each year; doing so might have meant missing specific arguments that attacked any consensus that emerged in the policy and policy-adjacent community in this period. I endeavoured to read and code every

76 article published in these three journals over this six-year period. In doing so, I aimed to have access to a sample that was representative of the broader discourse within my community of interest, present through the entirety of my time period of interest.

This is not the only time period which presents the possibility of New Era

Thinking. It is, however, one where the idea that it represented a new era is popularly accepted; information about the ideational development during the transition phase is easily available; and the potential consequences of a New Era Thinking driven mania

(and a potential subsequent period of systemic distress or panic) are of clear importance to both modern politics and IR scholarship.

II. The End of the Cold War as Displacement

Before examining the specific narratives that characterized the new era, we need to establish that people believed it was a new era: that the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s represented a shift so profound that the system as it had been no longer functioned. In other words, a necessary first step is to clearly articulate that the “old” era, and the rules that had governed it, is seen to have passed. With its passing, a new understanding of the system is thus required, which opened the door for the New Era thinking that we are interested in.

As discussed previously, this kind of narrative shift emerges when an existing consensus belief is proven wrong repeatedly, and in dramatic fashion. The consensus, if the foundation on which it sits is sufficiently impugned, is thus shattered. The story of the

77 end of the Cold War is a story of repeated shocks to an existing consensus: chipped away at by the ascent of Gorbachev and early perestroika and glasnost, then pulverized by the hammer blow of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The final shock, the dissolution of the Soviet

Union, eliminated a remaining argument that yes things had changed, but it would take little effort for them to revert to the previous state. Once the U.S.S.R. had become Russia and the Soviet republics had gained their independence, that narrative vanished: whatever else might be true, it was clear that things were not going to be going back to the way thing had been before. It was, indeed, a new era.

Table 1: Is it a New Era? 1988-1989 1990-1991 1992-1993 No 17 27.42% 3 2.44% 0 0.00% Ambiguous 23 37.10% 15 12.20% 6 10.0% Yes 22 35.48% 105 85.37% 53 90.00%

In this instance, the idea that a new era had arrived, which opened the door for subsequent New Era thinking, was essentially a product of Soviet decline and change.

Because of the nature of the Cold War narratives of bipolarity, mutual deterrence, ideological contestation, and domino theory, a fatal decline of the Soviet Union was one

(though not the only) way to demonstrate their increasing irrelevance. Others, which were also present in this period though of less vital importance, were the decline of the United

States, and the rise of other political entities to prominence (particularly Japan and a prospective unified Europe).

78

In the remainder of this section, I will examine the articles published in the three selected journals, National Interest, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs, and explain how the conversation shifted from late 1987 to 1991, and how each of the three shocks to the international system visibly shifted the discourse from skepticism, to near-certainty, to certainty over that period.

May 25, 1989 – November 9, 1989: Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev

“I am skeptical about the probability of any fundamental reorientation in Soviet global purposes before the turn of the century, if then”184 -Robert C. McFarlane

When discussing the end of the Cold War, the role of Mikhail Gorbachev is unavoidable. As summarized by Robert G. Kaiser in 1991: “In just over five years,

Mikhail Gorbachev transformed the world. He turned his own country upside down.”185

His policies of glasnost and perestroika combined to fundamentally alter both the way the Soviet Union functioned internally and the way it functioned externally. Becoming

General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, and then Chairman of the Supreme

Soviet on May 24, 1989, Gorbachev’s reforms would eventually result in nothing less than the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in December 1991.

184 Robert C. McFarlane, “Effective Strategic Policy,” Foreign Affairs 67, No. 1 (1988): 34 185 Robert G. Kaiser, “Gorbachev: Triumph and Failure,” Foreign Affairs 70, No. 2 (1991): 160 79

But while Gorbachev’s influence was recognized prior to the fall of the Berlin

Wall, the idea that he had or was heralding a “new era” in international politics was not so clear. An analysis of the articles published in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The

National Interest suggest that while there was a degree of openness to the idea that a new era had begun or was about to begin in 1988 and 1989, after glasnost and perestroika had started to be implemented, there was no consensus within that community about it.

The standard-bearer for the idea that a new era had begun was, of course, Francis

Fukuyama, who published his “End of History” in The National Interest in the summer of

1989. Fukuyama’s argument, that political and economic liberalism had fundamentally defeated its ideological rivals (first fascism in the 1940s and then communism in the

1980s), suggested that the subsequent new era would be characterized by the absence of the ideological contestation that had defined the previous one. He, and other scholars who made similar arguments during the period, used the changes in the Soviet Union (and elsewhere) to argue that such a transformation was under way.

Also in this period were scholars like Michael Blumenthal and Walter Wriston, both of whom made arguments about the transformational effects of technology.

Blumental argued: “revolutionary technology change has profoundly and permanently altered the domestic and world economic scene.”186 Wriston similarly made the claim that: “In the last years of this century, however, the velocity of change in the world has become so great that there are literally no precedents to guide us. Policymakers are

186 Michael W. Blumenthal, “The World Economy and Technological Change,” Foreign Affairs 66, No. 3 (1988): 544. 80 discovering that many of the events that are altering the world come not in response to their actions, but are driven by technologies which they may only dimly understand.”187

This technological argument was at this point independent from the political argument, though over the next few years some writers would also suggest that the development of information technology played a role in undermining the fundamentals of the Soviet

Union, though those arguments had not yet arrived in 1989.188

But the assertion or assumption that a new era had arrived characterized only about a third of the arguments made in the pre-Berlin Wall period. The remaining two- thirds of the arguments largely argued that either Gorbachev’s policies did not represent the kind of fundamental change that Fukuyama believed they did, or that they could but it was too early to tell; it could yet go either way. As Casper Weinberger put it: “Trust that

Mr. Gorbachev will turn his back on the goals of the Soviet state? Trust that he is becoming more like us in terms of democratic values? Trust that the Soviet Union will never violate an agreement with the United States (the historical record notwithstanding)?

Trust that Mr. Gorbachev is diametrically opposed to the precepts of the Communist

Party that he leads – precepts which are of course diametrically opposed to Western values and principles? All of this is highly unlikely.”189 In the end, while the idea that the

Cold War could be ending had permeated the policy-adjacent community, a veto-proof

187 Walter B. Wriston, “Technology and Sovereignty,” Foreign Affairs 67, No. 2 (1988): 63. 188 Abraham F. Lowenthal, “Latin America: Ready for Partnership?” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 1 (1993): 77 189 Caspar W. Weinberger, “Arms Reductions and Deterrence,” Foreign Affairs 66, No. 4 (1988): 701. 81 majority of that community still believed that, at best, “it [was] still too early to claim that the Soviet-American relationship has fundamentally changed.”190 Before November 9,

1989, the focus was on understanding current events within the context of the Cold War era and associated Cold War rules. The principal responses to Fukuyama were varying degrees of skeptical, not an enthusiastic embrace.

November 9, 1989 – December 26, 1991: The Fall of the Berlin Wall

“The cold war is over – nearly. The postwar era is finished – absolutely”191 -Jeane Kirkpatrick

The conversation shifted after November 9, 1989: the day the Berlin Wall fell.

The shift was from speculation about if the Cold War was over, to discussion about what to do now that the Cold War was over. The subsequent debates were thus largely about policy choices in a new strategic environment, not about the nature of that strategic environment.

This is seen in the dramatic shift in the data. Where before the fall of the Berlin

Wall the published work had shown a healthy debate between scholars who thought that

Gorbachev’s reforms heralded a new era and those who believed it did not; following the fall of the Berlin Wall nearly 85% of scholars who discussed the issue indicated either explicitly or implicitly that they believed it was a new era. The era of bipolarity was over.

190 Sergey M. Rogov, “Détente is Not Enough,” Foreign Policy 74 (1989): 89-90. 191 Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Beyond the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 1 (1989-1990): 1 82

The principal reason for this being the break point was the political transformation in Eastern Europe. Academic Arnold Horelick, writing in early 1990, explained that:

“The collapse of communist domination of Eastern Europe had made a crucial difference.

It provided dramatic, tangible evidence of a change both in the policies and geopolitical position of the U.S.S.R. that could not possibly be explained away as a ruse or a temporary retreat which might leave the Soviet Union free to resume the old struggle after a respite.”192

The Cold War era, defined by hegemonic competition within a Europe divided by the Iron Curtain, was over. The breaching of the Berlin Wall was a determinative symbol of its conclusion: “The watershed date was November 9, 1989; the breaching of the

Berlin Wall was the dramatic symbol of a new, profoundly different era in Europe.”193

The handful of authors who disagreed with the consensus prior to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. did so for one of two reasons:

(1) That the Soviet Union was still the Soviet Union (“the underlying

problem has hardly vanished. There is Russia, larger and militarily

more potent than anyone else…”194), and would respond to the

seeming transformations with various measures to ensure continuing

effective control, causing the Cold War to continue but “[in] a more

192 Arnold Horelick, “U.S.-Soviet Relations: Threshold of a New Era,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 1 (1989-1990): 58. 193 Flora Lewis, “Bringing in the East,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 4 (1990); 15. 194 Josef Joffe, “America’s Purpose Now,” The National Interest 21 (1990): 39. 83

subtle and dangerous phase”195. There were too many unresolved

tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union that remained

outstanding for the claim that the Cold War was over to be convincing

(and “excessive optimism could again be a cause of failure as it has

been in the past”196)

(2) Particularly following the Gulf War, that the changes wrought by the

end of the Cold War might have broad international effects but change

little in regional politics: “President Bush’s triumph in the Gulf War is

in danger of becoming a footnote in contemporary history, not the

turning point it should be”197, and “there is ample reason for concern,

however, that in many ways the new Middle Eastern order will

suspiciously mirror the old one”198

These skepticisms come in two varieties: that the Cold War was not really over (because of the persistence of the U.S.S.R and its economic and military capacity), merely changed; or that the end of the Cold War would not mean the end of the old era and the beginning of a new one. The first of these qualms was predominant through 1990 and

195 Malcolm Wallop, “America’s Purpose Now,” The National Interest 21 (1990): 47 196 George McBundy, “From Cold War Toward Trusting Peace,” Foreign Affairs 69 No. 1 (1989-199): 197. 197 Alvin Z. Rubinstein, “New World Order or Hollow Victory,” Foreign Affairs 70 No. 4 (1991): 53. 198 Muhammad Muslih and Augustus Richard Norton, “The Need for Arab Democracy,” Foreign Policy 83 (1991): 3. 84 faded in the discourse in 1991; the second largely emerged with Iraq’s invasion of

Kuwait in 1990 and the subsequent Gulf War in 1991.

While the geopolitical transformation was the primary cause of the perceived shift from Cold War era to post-Cold War era, several authors point to a different variable as determinative of the transformation: the advancement of information technology. They point to this as something that may have helped to precipitate the revolutions in Eastern

Europe199; others discuss it as an independent force also helping to transform the system independent of the contemporaneous political transformations by empowering social classes in poverty.200

But while there was consensus about the fact that it was a new era, there was little agreement about what the nature of that new era would be, and thus equally little agreement about what policies should be adopted in response to the transformation. The polar extremes of the post-Cold War debate were both defined by articles in the National

Interest in 1989-1990. The first was Charles Krauthammer’s “Universal Dominion:

Towards a Unipolar World”, in which Krauthammer advocates nothing short of an abrogation of sovereignty by Western states in order to form a larger confederation of

Western states with the United States serving as the cornerstone.201 The second was Pat

Buchanan’s “America First – and Second, and Third”, which argued that the end of the

Cold War should also mean the end of Cold War realpolitik and of American “globalist

199 Blumenthal, “The World Economy and Technological Change.” 200 Sheldon Annis, “Giving Voice to the Poor,” Foreign Policy No. 84 (1991): 93-106. 201 Charles Krauthammer, “Universal Dominion: Towards a Unipolar World,” The National Interest No. 18 (1989-1990): 46-49. 85 crusade”. Where Krauthammer points towards an integrated West, Buchanan points towards a “distant and detached”202 United States that would prioritize economic liberalism but otherwise remain politically separate from Eurasia.203 The key point here is that despite their radically different opinions about the ideal future for American foreign policy, Krauthammer and Buchanan did not disagree that it was now a new era; rather,

Krauthammer and Buchanan disagreed about what the United States should do in response to the dawning of the new era.

After December 26, 1991

“Until the failed Soviet coup in August 1991 it was still possible for NATO officials to frame strategy in terms of the dangers of a resurgence of traditional Soviet power”204 -Lawrence Freedman

The failed putsch against Chairman Gorbachev in August 1991, and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union and the return of Russia as an independent geopolitical actor in late December 1991, did not radically transform the number of scholars arguing that a new era had begun. That debate has been effectively opened and closed two years earlier. What it did do, however, was change the tenor of the debate:

202 George Washington, “The Address of General Washington to the People of the United States on his Declining of the Presidency of the United States,” American Daily Advisor, September 19, 1796. 203 Pat Buchanan, “America First – and Second, and Third,” The National Interest No. 19 (1990): 77-82. 204 Lawrence Freedman, “Order and Disorder in the New World,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 1 (1992): 24-25. 86 those who believed a new era had arrived now believed it was greater fervor; those who asserted the rules of the old era persisted did so in much broader, more academic terms.

After 1991, the idea that it was a new era was essentially unquestioned. Numerous quotes from 1992 reflect the degree to which this had been absorbed by the policy- adjacent community that publishes in foreign policy journals:

“The end of the Cold War has thrown our existing assumptions and most of our traditional political divisions into turmoil”205

“This time the cliché is true: this is a new era, but we are only in the opening phases.”206

“The last decade has seen our century-and our world-transformed. The bipolar arrangement is ending…”207

“It is possible that our historical sense has been unduly truncated, and that what ended in 1989 was not only the Cold War, but the era of human history launched by the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions-the modern era.”208

“The rules of the game have changed; indeed, the game itself has changed.”209

“World politics is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be-the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others.”210

205 Norman J. Ornstesin, “Foreign Policy and the 1992 Election,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 3 (1992): 1 206 William G. Hyland, “The Case for Pragmatism,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 1 (1992): 42. 207 Kim Dae Jung, “The Once and Future Korea,” Foreign Policy 86 (1992): 40 208 Edward Alden and Franz Schurmann, “Neo-Nationalist Fallacies,” Foreign Policy 87 (1992): 120 209 Kishore Mahubabani, “The West and the Rest,” The National Interest 28 (1882): 4 210 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs 73, No. 3 (1993): 22 87

“We have been delivered into a new world, to be sure. But it is not a world where the writ of civilization runs.”211

“The end of the Cold War has indeed brought about a new phase in world politics, yet its impact is not unidirectional.”212

These quotes are representative of the tenor of the articles published in 1992 and 1993 in these foreign policy journals. Each of them asserts in clear and unambiguous terms that the fundamental changes wrought in 1989 and 1991 altered the fabric of international politics and changed the rules by which the game was played. They may, like

Krauthammer and Buchanan a year or two earlier, disagree about the new rules of the game and how that game should best be played to win, but that it was a new game with new rules was no longer questioned.

An addition to the discussion in this period is a conversation about the difficulty of adaptation. As then Senator David L. Boren put it, reflecting arguments often made in the ontological security literature: “Nothing is harder to change than our basic idea of the world and our role in it.”213 The idea that both the American public at large, and the

American policy community in particular, were having trouble adjusting to the new reality were common, often in the context of articles critiquing foreign policy decisions for not sufficiently adjusting to the new reality. As the ontological security literature

211 Fouad Ajami, “The Summoning: ‘But They Said, We Will Not Hearken’,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 4 (1993): 9 212 Lui Binyan, “Civilization Grafting: No Culture is an Island,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 4 (1993): 19 213 David L. Boren, “The Intelligence Community: How Crucial?” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 3 (1992): 52. 88 would suggest, several scholars argued that the difficulty of accepting this kind of dramatic change led to the persistence of now outdated policies.214

This leads to the first of the two kinds of skeptics still present in this period: those who believed that it could be a new era, but so long as American policy refused to change in response to the changed world, old rules would (unnecessarily and problematically) continue to apply. Both strong and weak versions of this argument existed at the time: the weak arguments claiming that it was a new era, and that the United States was failing to adapt to it; the strong arguments claiming that the coming of a new era (at the time often referred to as a New World Order, echoing President Bush’s language at the time of the

Gulf War) was possible, but that the persistence of Cold War era American security policies were preventing the transformation into a new post-Cold War era from being completed. For these scholars, there was an opportunity to create a new era, but it was being wasted by an inability to seize it. Both frequently argued the underlying problem was either bureaucratic inertia or a larger inability to shake old routines and habits.215 In the words of Adlai Stevenson, who also wrote about this possibility with Alton Frye a few years earlier: “If the international aggrandizement of Stalin and Brezhnev gives way to genuine restraint and gradual democratization at home, it would ill serve the interests

214 Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz, “American Hegemony: Without an Enemy,” Foreign Policy 92 (1993): 5-6. 215 The weak argument was coded a ‘5’ or ‘Yes’ for whether or not it was a new era; the strong argument was coded a ‘3’ or ‘Ambiguous’. 89 of the United States to play the implacable antagonist, blinded by preconceptions and paralyzed by inertia and timidity.”216

The second kind of skeptic was the realist: Owen Harries and Fareed Zakaria both published articles that essentially accepted that things had dramatically changed with the conclusion of the Cold War, but that the basic rules of realism would continue to apply. It may be a new era of a sort, but that did not mean the rules of the game had completely changed: “View with extreme skepticism the current outpouring of claims that which had been true about relationships between states from the time of Thucydides until yesterday no longer holds.”217 Perhaps a more pointed criticism in this school comes from Robin

Fox, who pointed out in her “Fatal Attraction: War and Human Nature” that: “History is not kind to the hopeful. And it may have the last laugh over the equally perky ‘end of history’ movement.”218

But even these skeptics did not try to make the claim that nothing has changed.

By 1993, repeated shocks to the Cold War era and its assumed rules of the game had shattered those basic assumptions. It was indeed a new era. But what kind of new era would it be?

Now that we have established that the end of the Cold War presented a new era, the second step is to dig into this second question. What were the new narratives for the

216 Adlai E. Stevenson and Alton Frye, “Trading with the Communists,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 2 (1989): 53. 217 Owen Harries, “Fourteen Points for Realists, “ The National Interest 30 (1993): 109. 218 Robin Fox, “Fatal Attraction: War and Human Nature,” The National Interest 30 (1993): 11. 90 new era? And did those narratives take the form of New Era Thinking? In the remainder of this chapter I will first examine each of three narratives that come to govern how the new era is conceived: that it will be an era of democracy, an era of free-market capitalism

(particularly with regards to trade), and an era of instability where the absence of bipolar stability and the spread of the democratic impulse could lead to region and civil conflicts.

These three narratives also lead to a fourth: that the new era needed American leadership to help propagate its good impulses and stifle the bad.

III. Democracy will be Characteristic of the New Era

The first of the key narratives about the nature of the new era was that it would be democratic: meaning that states around the world would increasingly adopt democratic governance. These narratives were not wholly absent prior to the end of the Cold War; an overall trend towards democratic governance in prior decades will help prime this narrative for takeoff following the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the early 1990s. But it was those revolutions that caused the narrative to go from topic of debate, to general acceptance, even as questions about its specific nature and consequences remained.

Table 2: Democracy will be Characteristic of the New Era

1988-1989 1990-1991 1992-1993 No 12 21.82% 7 8.14% 5 4.95% Ambiguous 29 52.73% 24 27.91% 29 28.71% Yes 14 25.45% 55 63.95% 67 66.34% 91

It is clear from a first look at the data that the end of 1989, and the fall of the

Berlin Wall and subsequent trend towards “Western liberal democracy” in Eastern

Europe altered the terms of the debate. In the initial 1988-1989 period, when perestroika in the Soviet Union was underway but there had not yet been the transformations in

Eastern Europe, the consensus was largely one of ambiguity. But following 1989, the consensus shifted to one that fundamentally accepted that the spread of democracy was underway. This was not uniform, of course, but most of the disagreement fell into the category of ‘the outcome is not yet clear,’ rather than ‘democracy is not spreading.’

Both the precise nature of ‘democratic governance’ and its consequences were not totally clear, and different authors had different perspectives. ‘Democratic governance’ could mean anything from a greater role for a national public in the selection of government officials to an established system of checks and balances; as the period went on, the dangers of having the first without the second became more prominent even as the overall trend towards democracy remained. Democratization was thus seen as both a force for stability219 and a force for disruption and instability, with the latter especially becoming more prevalent after the onset of the Yugoslav Civil War in 1991.

The remainder of this section, however, is dedicated to examining the belief that democracy was spreading. The consequences of democracy, and whether it was a force

219 Sol M. Linowitz, “Latin America: The President’s Agenda,” Foreign Affairs 67, No. 2 (1988): 48 92 for stability or instability, will be an area of focus two sections from now, in the

“Instability will be Characteristic of the New Era” section. This section will be divided into an analysis of the two periods that emerge from the data: the 1988-1989 pre-Velvet

Revolution period, and the 1990-1993 post-Velvet Revolution period.

1988-1989: Before the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“Even if Moscow is open to reconsidering what forms of government are desirable in Eastern Europe, moreover, many of the local leaders are not.”220 -Michael Mandelbaum

The years 1988 and 1989 were years in transformation: the changes in the Soviet

Union under Gorbachev had opened the door for changes in the Soviet sphere of influence. Gorbachev adopted a lighter touch over the states on the eastern side of the

Iron Curtain. In response, the American policy-adjacent community held its breath, wondering if democracy was about to flower: the majority hopeful, but not yet euphoric.

The perspective taken by the optimistic but not euphoric community of policy makers and scholars was primarily regional. Articles from these two years are peppered with stories of potential for regional democratization: the Soviet Union221, East

220 Michael Mandelbaum, “Ending the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs 68, No 2 (1989): 23. 221 Marshall D. Shulman, “The Superpowers: Dance of the Dinosaurs,” Foreign Affairs 66, No. 3 (1987/1988): 497. 93

Germany222, Eastern Europe223, El Salvador224, Haiti225, Chile226, Paraguay227, South

Africa228, Pakistan229, Burma230, Cambodia231, South Korea232, China233 and the Asian world234 were all the focus of articles that discussed their real but as yet unrealized, and perhaps unrealizable, democratic potential.

These regional articles generally present similar perspectives to one another: potential for democracy exists in the region or country of interest. That potential has been explored to one degree or another in each case: the Arias peace plan in Latin America and its associated push for democratization, or Tiananmen Square in China, or the election of

Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, etc. But the push towards democratization was incomplete and faced barriers to its further development (usually in the form of existing autocratic leadership), and it was not clear that the process that had begun previously would manage

222 Daniel Hamilton, “Dateline East Germany: The Wall behind the Wall,” Foreign Policy No. 75 (1989): 176-197. 223 Stephen F. Larrabee, “Eastern Europe: A Generational Change,” Foreign Policy, No. 70 (1988): 48-49. 224 Joaquín Villalobos, “A Democratic Revolution for El Salvador,” Foreign Policy 74 (1989): 103-122. 225 Robert I. Rotberg, “Haiti’s Past Mortgages Its Future,” Foreign Affairs 67, No. 1 (1988): 93-109. 226 Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, “Chile’s Return to Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 5 (1989): 169-186. 227 Riordan Roett, “Paraguay after Stroessner,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 2 (1989): 124- 142. 228 John A. Marcum, “Africa: A Continent Adrift,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 1 (1989): 159-179. 229 Thomas P. Thornton, “The New Phase in U.S.-Pakistani Relations,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 3 (1989): 142-159. 230 Maureen Aung-Thwin, “Burmese Days,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 2 (1989): 144. 231 Nayan Chanda, “Civil War in Cambodia?” Foreign Policy 76 (1989): 27. 232 James Chace, “Inescapable Entanglements,” Foreign Affairs 67, No. 2 (1988): 27. 233 John Fincher, “Zhao’s Fall, China’s Loss,” Foreign Policy 76 (1989): 5. 234 Paul H. Kreisberg, “Containment’s Last Gasp,” Foreign Policy 75 (1989): 154. 94 to get over the remaining hurdles. Nor was it clear in most cases that the drive towards democracy was a lasting phenomenon: in most of these articles, the regional or national movements for democracy were not guaranteed to persist and would require external aid.

The quarter of authors who wrote about democracy and did believe that it was ascendant, by contrast, take an ideological perspective and treat the drive towards democracy as inexorable. These authors, including both Francis Fukuyama and Zbigniew

Brzezinski, emphasize the relative decline of communist authoritarianism: “the failure of state-controlled communism to fulfill man’s hopes and the vindication of the free market system as the surest guarantee of both freedom and prosperity,”235 and the subsequent

“universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”236 They point to increasing pressures for democratization, often tied to economic development (especially in the East Asian context using Taiwan and South

Korea as cases237), and argue that these trends are bound to continue more broadly going forward.

235 Giovanni Agnelli, “The Europe of 1992,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 4 (1989): 67. 236 Fukuyama, “The End of History,” 4. 237 Selig S. Harrison, “Taiwan after Chiang Ching-Kuo,” Foreign Affairs 66, No. 4 (1988): 793, Kreisberg, “Containment’s Last Gasp,” 154. 95

1990-1993: The Revolutions in Eastern Europe

“A revolution is sweeping the world: a revolution of democracy.”238 -Stanley Kober

“If governments are not responsive to that force they will sooner or later be swept away.”239 -Michael Howard

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the conversation shifted from uncertainty about democracy’s future role, to relative certainty that the drive towards democracy would characterize the era that was beginning. There was some skepticism about whether that drive would ultimately be fulfilled, especially from scholars who approached the question from a regional focus, but that the drive was present and powerful characterized about two-thirds of scholars who discussed the question.

The decisive shift was in Eastern Europe, and the largely peaceful transitions in

Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany. The later failure of the 1991 putsch against Gorbachev in the Soviet Union that led to the dissolution of that Union was seen as reinforcing a broader global democratic movement.

One quote which best characterizes this narrative was from Carol Lancaster, a former State Department official and at the time faculty at Georgetown University’s

School of Foreign Service. An Africa expert, Lancaster made the following observation in 1991: “Perhaps the most important lessons Africans drew from the dramatic events in

238 Mandelbaum, “Ending the Cold War,” 23. 239 Michael Howard, “The Springtime of Nations,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 1 (1989/1990): 18. 96

Eastern Europe was that popular pressure could bring about political change even in the face of repressive, strongly authoritarian regimes. The lessons has only been reinforced by the failure of the August 1991 hardliners’ putsch in the Soviet Union. As Omar

Bongo, president of Gabon, observed recently, ‘the wind from the East is shaking the coconut trees of Africa.”240

Lancaster’s premise, that the success of pro-democracy activists in Eastern

Europe was ricocheting through the world and engendering similar success elsewhere, was echoed by experts of a variety of regions. Gorbachev’s reforms, and then his restraint, had “opened the way for a democratic revolution.”241 In the 1988-1989 period, numerous scholars discussed how there were latent or weak democracy movements all over the world; now, those democracy movements took on a new energy. In Latin

America it was a “march towards democratization,”242 in Taiwan, South Korea, and the

Philippines “the process of democracy [was] moving apace”243, and in the Middle East

“the Gulf Arab regimes will become more vulnerable to the charge that they are not modern or democratic – a pressure already heightened by the democratic revolutions in

Eastern Europe.”244

In each case, the argument that this was inevitable hinged on three things:

240 Carol Lancaster, “Democracy in Africa,” Foreign Policy 85 (1992): 152. 241 Kirkpatrick, “Beyond the Cold War,” 3. 242 George A. Fauriol, “The Shadow of Latin American Affairs,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 1 (1990): 117. 243 Frederick F. Chien, “A View from Taipei,” Foreign Affairs 70, No. 5 (1991): 93. 244 Michael Sterner, “Navigating the Gulf,” Foreign Policy 81 (1991): 49. 97

First, democracy was seen as on the march because of the failure of communism and the more general failure of authoritarian governance. The collapse of the Soviet

Union was a final symbolic blow, and the existing narrative of conflict between the two contrasting ideologies meant the natural interpretation of the failure of the one meant the victory of the other. This had been rejected by some scholars in 1988-1989, but following the revolutions in Eastern Europe most of the skeptics either stopped being skeptical, or at least stopped being visible about their skepticism in these popular journals. Instead, you get quotes from people like the then Prime Minister of Japan, Toshiki Kaifu, that

“Marxist-Leninist communism has clearly failed to prove its validity; and the concepts of liberty, democracy and the market economy are spreading around the globe… of particular note is the rising tide of democracy in Eastern Europe and around the world,”245 or from John Lewis Gaddis that “The end of the Cold War was too sweeping a defeat for totalitarianism – and too sweeping a victory for democracy – for this old geopolitical map to be of use any longer.”246

Second, the expectation was that successful democracies would serve as models that would demand imitation by non-democracies. Turkey was to be a model for the

Middle East247 and the new ethnically Turkic republics of Central Asia248; South Korea to

North Korea and China249, Latin America to Cuba (“It is only a matter of time before

245 Toshiki Kaifu, “Japan’s Vision,” Foreign Policy 80 (1990): 29-30. 246 John Lewis Gaddis, “Toward the Post-Cold War World,” Foreign Affairs 70, No. 2 (1991): 103. 247 Eric Rouleau, “The Challenges to Turkey,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 5 (1993): 115. 248 Graham E. Fuller, “The Emergence of Central Asia,” Foreign Policy 79 (1990): 67 249 William J. Crowe Jr. and Alan D. Romberg, “Rethinking Security in the Pacific,” Foreign Affairs 70, No. 2 (1991): 132-133 98

Cuban communism collapses”)250, etc. So, essentially the domino theory that had in-part driven America’s commitment to South Vietnam in fear of a spread of democracy globally now worked in reverse: states that had fallen to democracy, and states that were in the process of falling to democracy, would cause a cascade until democracy was all that was. This reflected Fukuyama’s original “End of History” thesis in which he argued that the end of the ideological conflict meant democracy would be the final form of human governance; from 1990-1993 a great many scholars took this thesis as close to gospel.

Finally, this was reinforced by a third argument: that economic and social development drives the demand for democracy, and was increasingly a force in world politics. Speaking both generally and specifically about China, Michael Howard explained: “If governments are not responsive to that force they will sooner or later be swept away… unless they imitate Gorbachev’s courage in embracing the future, these

Chinese leaders will be faced, sooner or later, with other Tiananmen Squares”251 Lessons from South Korea’s transition to democracy spoke loudly here, with its history of economic development in an authoritarian context leading to eventual demands for increasingly pluralistic government, combined with the Soviet Union’s experience with perestroika and glasnost, combined to reinforce a broader trend towards the belief that economic and technological development created demand for popular political participation.

250 Susan Kaufman Purcell, “Collapsing Cuba,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 1 (1992): 130. 251 Howard, “The Springtime of Nations,” 18, 21. 99

Skeptics argued that these forces were in no ways inexorable or irreversible, pointing to increases in nationalism and continuing authoritarian impulses (especially in the Soviet Union252 or Russia253, depending on the year). Some skepticism persisted that democracy could or would take permanent hold, and many arguments about the dangers of democracy in a transitional state and a potential reversion to authoritarianism: “The burst of optimism that greeted the downfall of Soviet communism has given way to anxiety that years will pass before the new states in the East can become effective market economies and democracies – and that some may not make it all the way before dictatorship returns.”254 These skeptics were increasingly heavily outnumbered from

1990-1993.

This leads to one last point, which will become more important later: there was also relatively little agreement about what the consequences of a world of democracies would mean. Particularly after the dissolutions of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the concern became that democracy was on the march but would be a destabilizing, rather than a stabilizing force – previously the idea of democratic peace theory and an associated optimism about a new age of peace had been more influential. The transition from “democracy creates peace” to “democratization causes instability” would cause a serious shift in perceptions about the nature of the new era, and we will discuss that more in Section V.

252 Richard Thornburgh, “The Soviet Union and the Rule of Law,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 3 (1990): 26. 253 Dimitri Simes, “Gorbachev’s Time of Troubles,” Foreign Policy 84 (1991): 97-100. 254 Leonard Silk, “Dangers of Slow Growth,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 1 (1993): 173. 100

IV. Economic Integration will be Characteristic of the New Era

The second of the key narratives about the nature of the new era was that it would be one of economic integration: the combination of technological and political change produced both the incentives for and the opportunity to further integrate national economies into regional and global economic structures.

Economics was a huge part of the discourse in the 1988-1993 period. Francis

Fukuyama’s “liberal victory” was not just a victory for democracy but for market-based economic institutions at the state level: the two were seen as inextricably linked, often with economic liberalization driving democracy (and vice versa). Such arguments are highly correlated with the narrative discussed in the previous section, with a noticeable spike after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

However, a related but separate narrative is also presented by the data: the expectation that the future will be characterized by increasing economic integration and interdependence, specifically in the form of greater amounts of global trade. Economic competitiveness could only be assured to states that chose to integrate: the major exemplar of this being the European Community and the drive towards the single market:

“a catalytic force in an increasingly competitive world economy.”255

Unlike the narratives about democracy and state-based market capitalism, however, the belief that the world was necessarily becoming more economically

255 Jacques Delors, “Europe’s Ambitions,” Foreign Policy 80 (1990): 22. 101 integrated did not emerge as a new consensus in the American policy and policy-adjacent community in the 1988-1993 period. Rather, the period begins with the consensus already largely formed. The end of the Cold War removed impediments to global free trade that had been imposed by the bipolar distribution of power and the U.S.-Soviet security competition. The Cold War was, in essence, a dam that broke, allowing the pre-existing water to begin to fall.

1988-1989: Demands of Technology

“As long as technological change was slow, [isolation from the world economy] was not a serious problem, but as the pace of innovation has quickened, and industry moves into the age of high technology, this isolation has hindered China and the Soviet Union in keeping up with technological advances… the recognition that without integration their technologies would fall even further behind may explain more than anything else their willingness to ignore the ideological implications of encouraging joint ventures.”256 -Marshal I. Goldman and Merle Goldman

The belief that economic integration, particularly in the form of trade, would be characteristic of the new era was driven largely by the fundamental belief that technology had fundamentally changed the game. Before the major transformations of late 1989 and the early 1990s, the policy-adjacent community identified technology as the key variable that had forced countries like China and Russia, as well as other communist states, to move towards greater integration into the world economy. Communications technology and a high pace of innovation was outpacing what those countries could generate

256 Marshall I. Goldman and Merle Goldman, “Soviet and Chinese Economic Reform,” Foreign Affairs 66, No. 3 (1988): 568. 102 internally; the need to compete would eventually drive them to integrate, whatever the costs. In 1989, Jerry Hough would explain Gorbachev’s reforms by referencing Western common economic wisdom: “Western textbooks proved to be absolutely right on the consequences of protectionism, let alone total protectionism: low quality, lack of innovation, inefficiency and unresponsiveness to consumer demand… autarky doomed

Russia to inferiority.”257

This was reinforced by a series of regional and global trade agreements which were in process in 1988 and 1989: the European Community had already decided to move towards economic integration with a 1992 marriage date258; the U.S.-Canadian trade agreement had recently been signed and was seen by Henry Kissinger and Cyrus

Vance (writing together) as a model for future such agreements259, and the General

Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was both a tool for encouraging future trade liberalization globally, and an objective to be hotly pursued260. At the same time as reforms in communist states were reinforcing that even they were subject to universal economic forces which punished autarky and rewarded integration, integrative policies were increasingly characteristic of Western states: additional evidence of the power of trade’s appeal.

257 Jerry F. Hough, “Gorbachev’s Politics,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 5 (1989): 31. 258 Charles Gati, “Eastern Europe on its Own,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 1 (1989): 100. 259 Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance, “Bipartisan Objectives for Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 66, No. 5 (1988): 917. 260 Carlisle Ford Runge, “The Assault on Agricultural Protectionism,” Foreign Affairs 67, No. 1 (1988): 149. 103

Yet, while the benefits of trade (and the necessity of trade and integration for prosperity) were seen as necessary among this community (“Now the Japanese are growing aware that their country cannot continue to enjoy this good life unless the rest of the global economy prospers as well”261); there was a great deal of skepticism that such policies could be pursued to the degree that was both desired and necessary. This skepticism was not about desirability of increased trade, though: while a handful of authors voiced concerns about foreign ownership and a consequential “[reduction of]

America’s economic and political autonomy,”262 they also accepted that the problem was not interdependence itself but the policies the United States was using in response to interdependence263. Rather, the fear was of protectionism from below: special interest groups that would be individually harmed by trade, or perceive a harm from trade, that would prevent politicians from adopting policies in the best interest of the United States as a whole.

While the Reagan administration had been verbally supportive of free trade, its policies had not always been reflective of the rhetoric. A Reagan critic, David Hale, pointed out that “the U.S. political process appears to be more supportive of protectionist trade and industrial policies today than at any time since the late 1920s. Despite its free- trade rhetoric, the Reagan administration increased the share of U.S. imports subject to some form of restraint from 12 per cent in 1980 to 24 per cent in 1988”.264 This particular

261 Saburo Okita, “Japan’s Quiet Strength,” Foreign Policy 75 (1989): 145. 262 Thomas Omestad, “Selling off America,” Foreign Policy 76 (1989): 125. 263 Ibid, 140. 264 David D. Hale, “Picking Up Reagan’s Tab,” Foreign Policy 74 (1989): 146. 104 fear – that a populist, protectionist American public would make it politically difficult for politicians to engage in the policies that the policy and policy-adjacent community largely believed were both good and necessary, would persist into the 1990s and become particularly acute during the contentious 1992 election cycle.

Table 3: Economic Integration will be Characteristic of the New Era 1988-1989 1990-1991 1992-1993 No 3 7.69% 2 4.55% 4 5.97% Ambiguous 10 25.64% 6 13.64% 11 16.42% Yes 26 66.67% 36 81.82% 52 77.61%

1990-1993: Demands of Technology and Moments of Opportunity

“Protectionist has its exponents everywhere but, thus far, more rational policies have usually prevailed.”265 -Robert A. Scalapino

The period after 1990 represented not a difference in kind from the arguments of the years that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall, but a difference in magnitude. The arguments that had been made about technology furthering both the necessity and inevitability of further “transnational economic integration” were reinforced by the perceived “validation of capitalism”266 that the end of the Cold War heralded.

265 Robert A. Scalapino, “Asia and the United States: The Challenges Ahead,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 1 (1990): 108. 266 Chalmers Johnson, “Rethinking Asia,” The National Interest 30 (1993): 24. 105

The perceived validation of capitalism was widespread: as with increased faith in the efficacy and inevitability of democracy, the belief that states would adopt market- based economic systems became part of a new consensus within the policy-adjacent intellectual community. However, one key piece of this new consensus was specifically faith in the need for countries to integrate into the world economy, with post-communist countries proving as the example that proved the rule. They represented the hard case: if even countries like the former Soviet Union were moving away from autarkic economic policies because economic necessity had defeated previous ideological fervor, then it became difficult to believe that the transition would not take on a global cast.

And those transitions were taking place. In a 1991 article, Graham Fuller articulated the most convincing evidence of this trend: “No serious Soviet policy specialist believes that the old days of Soviet isolationism and economic autarky are any longer in the country’s best interests. If the Soviet Union is ever to prosper in a high-tech environment and globalized economy, it will have to deal as a full partner on the international scene.”267 Combined with the unification and economic integration of the two Germanys, and the broader path of “the two Europes [towards] the progressive integration of their economies”268 advocated by the then Italian Minister of Foreign

Affairs, it seemed that the end of the Cold War had eliminated the political barriers that had held back the tide.

267 Graham E. Fuller, “Moscow and the Gulf War,” Foreign Affairs 70, No. 3 (1991): 69. 268 Gianni de Michelis, “Reaching out to the East,” Foreign Policy 79 (1990): 47. 106

Indeed, one major concern of all the major players: the Americans, the Europeans, and the Asians (especially the Japanese)269 was that increased regional trade would fracture the international system into multiple, competing regional trade blocs centered on Japan in the East, the European Community in both Western and Eastern Europe270

(with Germany as the cornerstone), and the United States and its proposed NAFTA and theorized Pan-American271 free trade areas. One effect of this was not broad opposition to regional trade integration, but an insistence that regional trade integration was only a stepping-stone to broader and absolutely necessary global trade integration under the

GATT framework: “it [was] time for America to return to GATT as the best means to liberalize world trade.”272 While there was broad agreement that success in the Uruguay

Round was not guaranteed, it was nonetheless consensus that both (1) the aim of the

GATT to further liberalize world trade was desirable, and (2) that its success was contingent largely on political will to overcome domestic political problems.

One barrier to the overall process was China. The other of the major communist world powers, China’s economic policies had, like the Soviet Unions, been historically more predicated on isolationism and autarkic preferences. But this had been changing, and the early 1990s saw it change dramatically. In 1991, Chinese leaders were seen as being “mercantilist” but nonetheless acknowledging increasing economic

269 Yoichi Funabashi, “Japan and the New World Order,” Foreign Affairs 70, No. 5 (1991): 68. 270 Walter Goldstein, “EC: Euro-Stalling.” Foreign Policy 85 (1992): 129. 271 Mark A. Uhlig, “Latin America: The Frustrations of Success,” Foreign Affairs 70, No. 1 (1991): 105. 272 Jagdish Bhagwati, “Beyond NAFTA: Clinton’s Trading Choices,” Foreign Policy 91 (1993): 159. 107 interdependence in the global economy273 and [favoring] continued integration internationally, not a return to isolation.”274 Chinese behavior matched these perceptions of its preferences, pushing for entry into the GATT and making concessions in order to make it possible.275

While the view that further economic integration was inevitable, and needed to be pursued both regionally and globally in order to manage the process and avoid potential conflicts, represented a significant majority of the scholars in the 1990-1993 period, there were both dissenters and concerned voices. In the early part of this period, the concerned voices emphasized the difficulties of trade negotiations and, in particular, potential conflicts between the United States and either (or both) Japan or the European

Community.276 Such concerns frequently emphasized the American trade deficit, which was a persistent theme during this period (although frequently was seen as a sign not of the dangers of trade, but of American domestic weakness277). But these concerns were seen as surmountable, if dangerous.

The more acute danger was domestic. For some authors, concerns about political will to overcome domestic political barriers to trade integration gave way to concerns about American populism and resistance to trade. They in particular feared the possible

273 Michel Oksenberg, “The China Problem,” Foreign Affairs 70 No. 3 (1991): 10-11 274 Judy Polumbaum, “Dateline China: The People’s Malaise,” Foreign Policy 81 (1991): 181. 275 Barber B. Conable Jr. and David M. Lampton, “China: The Coming Power,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 5 (1992): 139. 276 Stanley Hoffmann, “A New World and Its Troubles,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 4 (1990): 116. 277 Robert B. Reich, “The Economics of Illusion and the Illusion of Economics,” Foreign Affairs 66, No. 3 (1988): 516-528. 108 elections of actively protectionist politicians in the United States and elsewhere. Such arguments emerged in the very early 1990s and became more and more prevalent as the next few years progressed, emerging in force as explicitly protectionist politicians such as

Pat Buchanan, Jerry Brown, and Ralph Nader had success across the American political spectrum during the elections of 1992:

“The goal of a liberal world economy is now questioned… those who view Japan and the other newly industrializing countries through revisionist eyes argue that the United States has become a liberal dupe in a world that does not operate according to neoclassical economic principles.”278

“The core issues in the NAFTA debate revolve around a tug-of-war between a liberal attitude towards world free trade and a protectionist streak in the U.S. body politic.”279

“Continued public support for a liberal trade policy depends on more than vague promises about future export-related jobs and lectures on the benefits that consumers derive from low-cost imports.”280

“Political leaders may argue that the present relationship does benefit the United States economically as well as Japan. But the public is persuaded otherwise. It sees the relationship as zero-sum, with Japan the winner and the United States the loser. Significantly, Americans do not place majority blame on the Japanese. Much of the fault, they believe, lies with America itself, notably the shortsightedness of American business and the inadequacy of American government policies.”281

“It was the fear of trouble around the corner that came to the fore last year. The United States turned inward. And the enlightened self-interest that had led to the creation of institutions like the General Agreement on

278 Miles Kahler, “The International Political Economy,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 4 (1990): 149. 279 M. Delal Baer, “North American Free Trade,” Foreign Affairs 70, No. 4 (1991): 143. 280 Alfred E. Eckes, “Trading American Interests,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 4 (1992): 153. 281 Daniel Yankelovich, “Foreign Policy after the Election,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 4 (1992): 8. 109

Tariffs and Trade and the G-7 became twisted into a less generous, less enlightened mindset that looked for new ways to subordinate international economic arrangements to satisfy the nation’s economic insecurity.”282

Even at the peak of these concerns, 75-80% of this subsection of the policy-adjacent community continued to either ignore these concerns altogether or dismiss them as a mere political problem that could and would be overcome with proper international negotiation and domestic political skill. And despite the importance of Buchanan, Brown, and Nader, the 1992 election ended up being a contest between George H. W. Bush and

Bill Clinton, both of whom were adherents to neoclassical economics: each contributed to the negotiation, ratification, and implementation of NAFTA during their time as

President.

The final year examined, 1993, remained a year of confidence about both the desirability and prospects for further global economic integration. In fact, the response was to double down on the benefits of trade and to push harder, with numerous articles explaining the dangers of protectionism and benefits of trade liberalization.283 In the end, the consensus remained that “technology suggests an approach of ensuring greater openness in overseas markets or responding to unfair trade policies, rather than erecting trade barriers at home,”284 with a solid majority of authors who discussed the subject expressing similar views.

282 Alan Murray, “The Global Economy Bungled,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 1 (1993): 161. 283 Silk, “Dangers of Slow Growth,”; William A. Orme Jr., “Myths versus Facts: The Whole Truth about the Half-Truths,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 5 (1993): 2-12. 284 Daniel F. Burton Jr., “High-Tech Competitiveness,” Foreign Policy 92 (1993): 125. 110

V. Instability will be Characteristic of the New Era

The third of the key narratives about the nature of the new era was about its presumed stability: that is, would it be a system characterized more by peaceful conflict resolution both in the relations between states and within states, or would it be a system characterized by increasing violence. On this count, the policy-adjacent community went through the most pronounced changes; in the early years ambiguity characterized the plurality of authors who discussed the topic, with a lean towards an expectation of peace.

But as the years progressed, a series of events caused a strong expectation that the new era was likely to be less stable, and more violent, than the Cold War era that had preceded it.

Table 4: Stability will be Characteristic of the New Era

1988-1989 1990-1991 1992-1993 No 20 24.39% 37 33.04% 66 61.11% Ambiguous 34 41.46% 53 47.32% 35 32.41% Yes 28 34.15% 22 19.64% 7 6.48%

Two facts are worth noting before we examine the data in more detail. First, this is the first of our narratives that is not overtly perceived to be a positive change from the preceding era. Transformations of states into democracies and enhanced global economic integration were both largely seen as positives: contributors to optimism. Increased instability and propensity for violent conflict resolution, by contrast, was uniformly seen as a negative that must be dealt with as a consequence of the loss of bipolar stability.

111

This does not mean such a narrative cannot be indicative of New Era Thinking, which requires either certainty or optimism, not necessarily both. As we will see, increasingly the policy-adjacent community will, for a variety of reasons, present a consensus that the new era is certain to be unstable, and more prone to violent conflict (particularly within states).

Second, this narrative is fundamentally intertwined with two of our other narratives. One, obviously, is the belief that democracy will be characteristic of the new era. While presumed to be a positive in general, associated dangers of nationalism and ethnic conflict become more evident over this six-year period, and the positivity about democracy as a potential spur for more peaceful conflict resolution (largely inspired by

Doyle’s work on democratic peace theory published in the late-80s) largely disappears from the discourse under a deluge of concerns about regional conflicts, which take focus by 1993.

The other key narrative will be discussed subsequent to this one, and is about the perceived necessity of American leadership. As apparent instabilities and associated dangers become more evident, so too do arguments that the United States occupied a unique role in the international system and had a responsibility to act to mitigate these instabilities; indeed, that the United States could, and that only the United States could.

As instability becomes increasingly apparent, it becomes the impetus for this argument.

112

1988-1989: Soviet Uncertainties

“Real independence of the East European countries must be desired by the West, but it would challenge the bipolar stability that has characterized Europe since 1945.”285 -Richard K. Betts

The key question in 1988 and 1989 was simple: what did Gorbachev mean for the

European security system? Bipolarity and the Iron Curtain had characterized Europe since 1945, and no one quite knew what to make of Gorbachev’s attempts to mitigate

U.S.-Soviet security competition in that theatre. The consequence was most authors in this period expressed a sense of ambiguity: “well, it could mean peace, but that’s going to depend on interim outcomes yet unknowable” characterized a plurality of the responses.

However, there were numerous arguments made that the new international system was characterized by stability rather than instability. These arguments borrowed from

Cold War narratives of superpower stability, with the apparent Soviet acceptance of

NATO as an element of the European security order286, combined with the continued presence of nuclear deterrence287, as sustained and enhanced drives of systemic stability in the late-1980s. Importantly, the fact that the Soviet Union remained present, and the fall of the Berlin Wall had not yet occurred, meant that the basic bipolar framework was still seen as a force for stability in general: “So long as the Soviet Union, North Korea,

285 Richard K. Betts, “NATO’s Mid-Life Crisis,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 2 (1989): 40. 286 Gregory Flynn, “Problems in Paradigm,” Foreign Policy 74 (1989): 74 287 Richard H. Ullmann, “Ending the Cold War,” Foreign Policy 72 (1988): 139; Benjamin Lambeth and Kevin Lewis, “The Kremlin and SDI,” Foreign Affairs 66, No. 4 (1988): 758. 113 and Vietnam retain huge land armies in Asia, the latter two with Soviet support, the

United States will be under pressure from its allies to continue to maintain visible naval and air superiority”288, but now with Gorbachev in power the Soviet Union was no longer the same kind of threat of military invasion that it had been under previous Soviet leadership.289 In this, it seemed that the changes might mean the best of both worlds.

In Europe, the possibility of a more secure peace was aided not only by

Gorbachev’s short-term leadership but also entrenched in agreements negotiated by

Reagan and Gorbachev that could make this new stability permanent.290 Outside of

Europe, regional conflicts were perceived to have lost intensity in places like the Middle

East291 and become better managed by the U.S. and Soviet Union.292 The consequence, summarized by Larry Minear, was: “Peace is breaking out all over, it seems. Intractable conflicts are on their way to settlement in such regional trouble spots as Afghanistan, the

Persian Gulf, southern Africa, and Indochina.”293

The skeptics, comprising about a quarter of the scholarship, took two aggressive tracks. One of these was broad, and largely emerged in direct response to Francis

Fukuyama’s “End of History.” Fukuyama had presented the possibility of an impending end of history characterized by liberal democracy and market economics; Samuel

288 Donald S. Zagoria, “Soviet Policy in East Asia: A New Beginning?” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 1 (1988): 134 289 David K. Shipler, “Dateline USSR: On the Human Right’s Track,” Foreign Policy 75 (1989): 164. 290 Lynn E. Davis, “Lessons of the INF Treaty,” Foreign Affairs 66, No. 4 (1988): 733. 291 Farid el-Khazan, “The Rise and Fall of the PLO,” The National Interest 10 (1988): 42. 292 Neuman, “Arms, Aid, and the Superpowers,” 1044-1045. 293 Minear, “The Forgotten Human Agenda,” 76. 114

Huntington was among those authors who challenged this presumed the stability of

Fukuyama’s proposed end-state:

“The end of the Cold War does not mean the end of political, ideological, diplomatic, technological, or even military rivalry among nations… It very probably does mean increased instability, unpredictability, and violence in international affairs. It could mean the end of the Long Peace.”294

“The mixture that Fukuyama expects to freeze history forever – a combination of Enlightenment values with the free market – is actually one of the most explosive mixtures known to man.”295

“But the fact that liberal outcomes are stable once reached does not establish what the process of reaching them is like.”296

These authors each argue that the stability presumed to emerge out of a liberal system is either (1) extremely difficult to achieve, with the process involving a great deal of potential for political and military violence, or (2) even if achieved would not entail the stability Fukuyama anticipated.

The second significant danger of instability perceived was specific to a single region: Eastern Europe. These authors pointed out that Gorbachev had creates the conditions for dramatic change behind the Iron Curtain, and that “some degree of instability is a necessary condition of any far-reaching change.”297 The possibility of the

Soviet Union as the new “sick man of Europe” as the Ottoman Empire had been a century

294 Samuel Huntingdon, “No Exit: The Errors of Endism,” The National Interest 17 (1989): 6. 295 David Stove, “More Responses to Fukuyama,” The National Interest 17 (1989): 97. 296 Stephen Sestanovich, “Responses to Fukuyama,” The National Interest 16 (1989): 33. 297 Gail W. Lapidus, “Gorbachev’s Nationalities Problem,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 4 (1989): 94. 115 earlier created the real possibility of civil war within the Soviet sphere as that empire attempted to retain its coherence.298 Even if that outcome didn’t come to pass, Zbigniew

Brzezinski presciently worried that “the growing sense of national distinctiveness among the non-Russian nations of the Soviet ‘Union’ will soon make the existing Soviet bloc the arena for the globe’s most acute national conflicts,” and that the Cold War-era stability of

Eastern Europe had been “historically artificial.”299

1990-1991: (In)stability After the Cold War

“The world is facing a new postwar period, and Europe’s past experience suggest how hard it is to manage peace, even the peace that follows a Cold War.”300 -Gianni de Michaelis

The fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, and the consensus view that the Cold War was now over, caused the policy-adjacent community to shift towards ambiguity and concern regarding the future of systemic stability, and further concern about Eastern

European stability in particular.

Among scholars and others more confident in a stable post-Cold War settlement were two major types of opinions. The first type was that the existing institutional order was, in and of itself, already sufficient to manage threats and ensuring the continuation of perceived bipolar stability. Alan Sked summarizes this view with his simple quote: “In

298 Wriston, “Technology and Sovereignty,” 4. 299 Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Post-Communist Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 4 (1989): 1, 17. 300 de Michaelis, “Reaching out to the East,” 44. 116 fact, peace in Western Europe is already secure under present institutional arrangements and there is no need to go further.”301 Others within this category emphasize the continuing presence of NATO and the Warsaw Pact302, the American-Japanese military alliance303, information technology as a tool for international consensus building304, and the new potential for democracy and the democratic peace.305 Stanley Kober optimistically argued that: “If it is democratic institutions like those in the West that prevent war, then where is the threat to peace? Logically, it must come from those countries without such democratic institutions – countries like the Soviet Union.

Astonishing as it may seem, this realization is one of the foundations on which perestroika is being built.”306 Here, Kober was arguing that the Soviet Union was democratizing in part because it had come to recognize its own existing style of government as a threat to world peace.

The second type of opinion encompasses both those confident in peace, and those who believe the situation is more ambiguous. In this, the difference between the two camps is how optimistic they are about a new institutional framework being established to address the transforming international system. A handful saw an international system

301 Alan Sked, “Myth of European Unity,” The National Interest, No. 22 (1991): 72. 302 McBundy, “From Cold War Toward Trusting Peace,” 197-212. 303 Fred Charles Ikle and Terumasa Nakanishi, “Japan’s Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 3 (1990): 85. 304 Sanford J. Ungar, “Pressing for a Free Press,” Foreign Policy, No. 77 (1990): 151. 305 Carl Gershman, “Freedom Remains the Touchstone,” The National Interest, No. 19 (1990): 86; Nathan Glazer, “America’s Purpose Now,” The National Interest, No. 21 (1990): 33. 306 Stanley Kober, “Idealpolitik,” Foreign Policy, No. 79 (1990): 17. 117 that requires new management, and an institutional framework already being established to fulfill that purpose with American and European teamwork at its heart.307

The majority of the policy-adjacent community in these two years, however, saw the situation as more ambiguous. A plurality, 47%, of the community who discussed these issues saw an international system with potential for stability or instability; which outcome subsequent events would realize was a matter for human and state agency.

Dangers of instability in a new, potentially multipolar international system with the

United States, European Community, and Japan as the poles could be managed through collective leadership308; potential regional instability caused by the rise of Germany and

Japan could be managed by America reassuring their nervous neighbors309; the relationship between an increasingly isolated and nervous North Korea and its southern neighbor could be managed by acknowledging and soothing the fear and gradually ramping down American military assets on the peninsula.310 In other cases, the key was not the United States but the future Soviet Union, which might withdraw its global influence and radically destabilize other communist states,311 or a reunified Germany and its decision to integrate into Western Europe, Eastern Europe, both, or neither.312 Then

307 Charles William Maynes, “The New Decade,” Foreign Policy, No. 80 (1990): 3-13. 308 Fred C. Bergsten, “The World Economy After the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 3 (1990): 105 309 Robert W. Tucker, “1989 And All That,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 4 (1990): 110. 310 Andrew Mack, “North Korea and the Bomb,” Foreign Policy 83 (1991): 104. 311 John B. Dunlop, “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until the Year 2000?” The National Interest 18 (1990): 75; Scalapino, “The United States and Asia,” 21-22. 312 Angela Stent, “The One Germany,” Foreign Policy 81 (1991): 67, 70. 118

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney summarized the most common view at the time: “it’s an open question as to how these changes will affect regional stability.”313

However, those arguing that the new, post-Cold War era international system was fundamentally unstable and dangerous comprised a larger share of the policy-adjacent community in 1990 and 1991 than they had in the two previous years (25%-33%). These scholars almost uniformly pointed to instability within Eastern Europe and the Soviet

Union proper as the source of systemic instability, and furthermore pointed specifically to ethnicity, religion, nationalism, and xenophobia as key drivers314: “Fierce nationalism and xenophobia have long been part of Eastern Europe’s political culture. These traits pose a danger to the growth of a stable and truly pluralistic democratic order.”315

Economic instabilities from the state to market oriented economy were a further aggravator of the perceived dangers.316

Were these phenomena limited just to Eastern Europe, this third of the policy- adjacent community may have been less concerned, but nationalism and economic instabilities were seen in East Asia, especially China317 as well: James Baker argue: “the dark countertrends that President Bush pointed to in his September 1991 speech to the

313 Selig S. Harrison and Clyde V. Prestowitz, Jr, “Pacific Agenda: Defense or Economics?” Foreign Policy 79 (1990): 68. 314 Paul H. Nitze, “America: An Honest Broker,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 4 (1990): 12; Danwart A. Rustow, “Democracy: A Global Revolution?” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 4 (1990): 85; Delors, “Europe’s Ambitions,” 16. 315 Abraham Brumberg, “Poland: The Demise of Communism,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 1 (1990): 88. 316 Marshamm Brement, “Reaching Out to Moscow,” Foreign Policy 80 (1990): 58. 317 Edson W. Spencer, “Japan as Competitor,” Foreign Policy 78 (1990): 168; Murray Sayle, “Trouble on the Oriental Express: The Crises in China and Japan,” The National Interest 18 (1990): 44. 119

U.N. General Assembly are also evident in Asia: the reemergence of ethnic rivalries, nationalist aspirations and territorial or political disputes which were suppressed during the Cold War years.”318

These authors often suggested new courses of action, but their views began from the assumption that instability was coming and needed to be managed, rather than instability was possible but could be prevented. Eliot Cohen, who would later go on to be an advisor to Condoleezza Rice during her time as Secretary of State, put it: “War, and potential war, will remain a feature of international politics.”319

John Lewis Gaddis pointed to the precise dimensions he saw as driving, at least in the short term, additional regional conflict: “But another form of competition has been emerging that could be just as start and just as pervasive as was the rivalry between democracy and totalitarianism at the height of the Cold War: it is the contest between forces of integration and fragmentation in the contemporary international environment.”320 This fragmentation, he feared, would drive civil, and possibly international, conflict. These skeptics would, over the course of the early 1990s, go from a third of the voices in the conversation, to a solid majority.

318 James A. Baker III, “America in Asia: Emerging Architecture for a Pacific Community,” Foreign Affairs 70, No. 5 (1991): 2. 319 Eliot A. Cohen, “The Future of Force: and American Strategy,” The National Interest 21 (1990): 8. 320 Gaddis, “Toward the Post-Cold War World,” 103. 120

1992-1993: Aftermath of Iraq and Yugoslavia

“Today there are other Saddam Husseins in the world. There is one in North Korea, and there is the original still in the Middle East – and no reason to believe his successor would be any different. Moreover, the instability and uncertainty that always accompany the fall of empires are growing rather than diminishing.”321 -Colin L. Powell

When Gaddis pointed towards the forces of fragmentation and the associated threats of war, he represented a minority of the policy-adjacent community. By the end of

1993, the share of that community espousing similar views had grown to 61%, nearly doubling.

The events that drove this transformation largely took place in 1991: the Gulf

War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and especially the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the subsequent civil war all pushed the community towards adopting a new consensus that instability really was going to be one of the chief characteristics of this new era. Earlier elements of the discourse, particularly Brzezinski’s concerns about nationalism and the initial criticisms of Fukuyama in the late-1980s that had previously been relegated to the margins become dominant; the earliest optimism about democracy steadily expanding a zone of peace vanished almost completely:

“From an oasis of stability in an unstable world, Europe has become among the most turbulent of continents. Old states are falling apart and new ones are being created, all sharing economic fragility but varying greatly otherwise in culture, tradition, and potential economic weight.

321 Colin L. Powell, “U.S. Forces: Challenges Ahead,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 5 (1992): 34-35. 121

There is the prospect of isolated famine and mass migration. In some areas violence is becoming endemic and routine. A long-locked cupboard, packed full of old worn ideologies and prejudices, has suddenly burst open.”322

“The strongest new force is nationalism. It is rising everywhere, manifesting itself as Islamic fundamentalism, as regionalism, as economic protectionism, in ethnic conflict and revolutionary upheavals.”323

“But as the Soviet empire decomposes, possibly giving rise to the kind of turbulence that followed the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, American commitment in this time of transition is still crucial for the well-being of both the United States and Europe.”324

“The post-Cold War era, contrary to our present expectations and desires, will be marked by a significant increase in conflicts and localized war around the world. Nationalism and ethnic struggles, often attended by religious zeal, will lie at the heart of these conflicts.”325

The dangers of nationalism were not limited to Eastern Europe; concerns which had first emerged in the prior period about nationalism and ethnic conflicts elsewhere were restated with greater frequency. China (with early concerns about the South China Sea326 as well the potential for internal conflagration327), Indonesia328, southern Africa329, the

322 Freedman, “Order and Disorder in the New World,” 25. 323 Hyland, “The Case for Pragmatism,” 43. 324 Elizabeth Pond, “Germany in the New Europe,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 1 (1992): 117. 325 Graham E. Fuller, “The Breaking of Nations: and the Threat to Ours,” The National Interest 26 (1992): 14. 326 Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Rise of China,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 5 (1993): 68. 327 Roger W. Sulivan, “Discarding the China Card,” Foreign Policy 86 (1992): 4. 328 Bilahari Kausikan, “Asia’s Different Standard,” Foreign Policy 92 (1993): 40-41. 329 Nelson Mandela, “South Africa’s Future Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 4 (1993): 88. 122

Middle East330, and the Third World more generally331 all are highlighted as zones with serious conflict potential.

These processes potentially extended to areas that, previously, had been seen as nearly inviolable zones of peace: “The disintegration of the Soviet Union has set loose disintegration tendencies in the West also. At first, it seemed as if the reverse was about to be the case.”332 Reinforcing Gaddis’ observation about the competing integrative and disintegrative tendencies, the fear was that disintegrative tendencies were winning: a product of the breakdown of the previous era’s system of order, the re-assertion of nationalism and forces of resentment. The danger, commonly recognized among this policy-adjacent community (even as several of these scholars criticized a perceived misplaced optimism among the ‘mainstream’), was that “in most places centrifugal forces, forever present, [were] accelerating.”333

Other dangers were also highlighted as drivers of potential instability. Narcotics were seen as a threat throughout Latin America and the post-Soviet sphere334, population migration presented a potential aggravator to nationalism335, and a resurgent Russia was deliberately destabilizing some post-Soviet states that refused to hew to the new Moscow

330 Bartley, “The Case for Optimism,” 16. 331 Mahbubani, “The West and the Rest,” 5. 332 Conor Cruise O’Brien, “The Future of ‘the West’,” The National Interest 30 (1993): 3. 333 Amitai Etzioni, “The Evils of Self-Determination,” Foreign Policy 89 (1993): 27. 334 Rensselar W. Lee, III and Scott B. MacDonald, “Drugs in the East,” Foreign Policy 80 (1993): 101 335 Mark Almond, “Europe’s Immigration Crisis,” The National Interest 29 (1992): 53- 61. 123 line.336 A Bush-era national security review included these and other potential destabilizing forces: environmental problems, terrorism, disease, technology competition, and potential nuclear proliferation all made the list.337

Most concerning was the possibility of contagion. The danger of instability in one region causing instability in neighboring regions, including (and especially) Western

Europe, enhanced the perception that instability would be a systemic, rather than a regional, issue.

Those authors who were more optimistic about the possibility for stability tended to focus on regional threats, rather than global ones. As they had in the previous period, these authors pointed to potential threats to stability that could be defused, rather than merely managed. Russia338, China339, Cuba340, Africa341, Mexico342, Korea343, Turkey344,

Japan345 – authors in this category point to each one, and in each case argue that stability could be assured by wise American, European (especially German), or Japanese policy.

336 Thomas Goltz, “Letter from Eurasia: The Hidden Russian Land,” Foreign Policy 92 (1993): 104. 337 Loch K. Johnson, “Smart Intelligence,” Foreign Policy 90 (1993): 60-61. 338 Fred Charles Iklé, “Comrades in Arms: The Case for a Russian-American Defense Community,” The National Interest 26 (1992): 31 339 Yoichi Funabashi, “Japan and America: Global Partners,” Foreign Policy 86 (1992): 30 340 Carla Anne Robbins, “Dateline Washington: Cuban-American Clout,” Foreign Policy 88 (1992): 176 341 Marguerite Michaels, “Retreat from Africa,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 1 (1993): 94 342 Paul Krugman, “The Uncomfortable Truth About NATFA: It’s Foreign Policy, Stupid,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 5 (1993): 14 343 Richard J. Ellings and Edward A. Olsen, “A New Pacific Profile,” Foreign Policy 89 (1993): 129 344 Morton I. Abramowitz, “Dateline Ankara: Turkey after Ozal,” Foreign Policy 91 (1993): 164-181. 345 Leonard Silk and Tom Kono, “Sayonara, Japan Inc.,” Foreign Policy 93 (1994): 125 124

Some of these concerns, especially in the European context, were enhanced by the fear that the European Community, which had been a presumed force for stability in this new era, had been divided and unable to act in a uniform fashion in response to both the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait of 1990 and the Yugoslavian Civil War.346 These authors tended to believe that the problems could be overcome, but the overall tenor of the conversation in this period had moved very hard to a consensus on future instability.

A handful of stubbornly optimistic authors continued to believe that the new era would be one of increasing stability. Of those authors, one is worth noting in detail:

James P. Grant, then the director of UNICEF. As Grant explained it:

“Many predicted widespread famine, chaos, and instability for the last third of this century. But then, quite suddenly, within four or five years, the Green Revolution took hold in Asia… in country after country, wheat and rice production increased at annual rates unprecedented in the West... We may be in a similar position today, but on a much broader front – poised for advances in primary health care, basic education, water supply and sanitation, family planning, and gender equity, as well as food production – and covering a much wider geographical area, including Africa and Latin America as well as Asia.”347

Grant’s perspective emphasized technology and development, pointing out the great positive potential. But Grant’s optimism was a lone voice against a rising tide of concern, and in some ways was addressing a fundamentally different kind of question than most of his contemporaries in the policy-adjacent community: he saw stability emerging from the bottom-up, rather than stability being imposed from the top-down.

346 Michael J. Brenner, “EC: Confidence Lost,” Foreign Policy 91 (1993): 28. 347 James P. Grant, “Jumpstarting Development,” Foreign Policy 91 (1993): 125-126. 125

It is important to note that the instability perceived by these authors generally did not entail a new risk of great power conflict. Concerns about possible war between the

United States and Soviet Union, or Russia, were not characteristic of perceptions of the new era; quite the opposite tended to be true. But despite this particular element of stability, the consensus was that the international system would be unstable, that this instability was generated by forces unleashed by the lifting of the pacifying effect of bipolarity, and that – as we will see in the next and final section – if this instability was to be addressed effectively, it would have to be with either the support or the direction of the United States.

VI. American Leadership should be Characteristic of the New Era

The fourth and final of the key narratives about the nature of the new era was prescriptive, rather than descriptive. The three narratives we have discussed so far: that the new era would be democratic, that it would feature increasing economic integration, and that it would be destabilizing, described the perceive traits of the new era international system. This final narrative, that the United States should play a key leadership role, described the general preference of the policy-adjacent community at the time, rather than something they believed was a necessary feature of that system.

Over the course of the six years, scholars tended to fall into three camps on this issue: (1) that the United States needed to maintain and even expand its role in the international system in order to achieve good outcomes and prevent bad ones; (2) that the

126

United States needed to remain involved in the international system but not necessarily to the same extent it had during the prior era; and (3) that American leadership was either no longer necessary or no longer possible, and the United States should revert to an older foreign policy strategy more akin to George Washington’s “distance and detachment” than post-WWII hegemonic bipolarity.

Over the course of the six years, belief in the necessity of American leadership will rest on numerous different arguments: from the need for the United States to uphold its half of the bipolar calculus, to the need for the United States to insert itself into new power vacuums to ensure stability. The share of the policy-adjacent community that believes in the desirability of stable or expanded American leadership grows from 43% in

1988 and 1989, to 46% in 1990 and 1991, and then 52% in 1992 and 1993; a steady increase over the six years, and always maintaining a least a plurality within the community.

Table 5: American Leadership in the New Era 1988-1989 1990-1991 1992-1993 No 15 15.31% 27 18.12% 23 18.85% Ambiguous 41 41.84% 53 35.57% 35 28.69% Yes 42 42.86% 69 46.31% 64 52.46%

More than the other elements of the post-Cold War discourse, the question of

American leadership featured an active and conscious debate between the extreme factions, with the camp in favor of increased or maintained American leadership

127 responding to more isolationist arguments (and vice-versa). The result is a steady polarization between the two camps, as the middle steadily shrinks while those both for and against American global leadership come to characterize a greater share of the policy-adjacent community.

1988-1989: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

“Despite our vast military power, our ability to shape the world unilaterally is increasingly limited. Even with strong domestic support, we can no longer afford financially to do as much internationally by ourselves as was the case in the immediate postwar period… but we are also convinced that it is the duty of our national leadership to prevent international burdens from jeopardizing important American interests and the cause of freedom.”348 -Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance

The debate over American leadership in 1988 was heavily influenced not only be recent events, but in particular by a book that had been published the year before. Paul

Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers argued that American military and economic power was in the process of inevitable erosion, the product of expanding military commitments and declining economic dominance.349 Combined with the

Reagan-era trade and budget deficits, both new and terrifying, the result was a persistent conversation about American weakness.

348 Kissinger and Vance, “Bipartisan Objectives for Foreign Policy,” 900 349 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Vintage Books, 1987). 128

Among scholars who asserted the necessity of continued American leadership, there were two responses to this narrative. The first was to deny its factual basis:

“The air is full of warnings against overestimating America’s economic strength. The more likely error, I think, is the opposite... The hypothesis that the American economy is so overstretched that we must curtail our commitments abroad or suffer economic decline at home – that there is no third choice – is odd even on its face.”350

“Overall, [Kennedy’s] argument fails; it is seriously weak both on the extent and causes of decline. The image of renewal is far close to the American truth than the image of decadence purveyed by the declinists.”351

These scholars approached the problem of American decline first by denying that the problem existed as such. Their focus was not on the necessity of continued American leadership – although this was a common refrain – but that the argument that American decline necessitated an American drawdown was based on a faulty premise. In this, these scholars represented a minority, as the majority at a minimum accepted that American strength had gone through a relative decline.

More common was the a second argument: yes, the United States was in a decline, but no, this did not mean the United States either should nor even could take a more isolationist posture. The United States was the cornerstone to global and regional

350 Francis M. Bator, “Must We Retrench?” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 2 (1988): 93-94 351 Samuel P. Huntington, “The U.S. – Decline or Renewal?” Foreign Affairs 67, No. 2 (1988): 77 129 stability: required in Europe352, in Asia353, and in the Middle East.354 The lessons of the interwar period were foremost: “Most Europeans agree that the central tragedy of their history in the early and mid-twentieth century was the reluctance of the United States to participate in Europe’s affairs. What they fear most is a return to American isolationism.”355 From an American perspective, these scholars asserted, it was not obvious that reduced military spending would necessarily lead to an improved American economy, and that the opposite was quite likely the case356; and even if the United States had declined relatively, it remained both the single most powerful state and most able to act in the new global context thanks to its ability to exploit technological advantages.357

These optimistic scholars represented a little more than 40% of the policy- adjacent community in this two-year period. A second camp (coded as “ambiguous”), also representing about 40% of the community, diverged in emphasis: yes, the United

States was in decline, and yes this would require an adjustment in strategy, but the solution was a more co-equal partnership. The United States had allies in Europe and

Asia thanks to the long success of the Marshall Plan and recovery of Germany and Japan, among others; drawing back on American expenditures overseas by leaning more on those allies would allow the United States to manage its decline without pulling the rug

352 Davis, “Lessons of the INF Treaty,” 733; Thierry de Montbrial, “Security Requires Caution,” Foreign Policy 71 (1988): 96. 353 Zagoria, “Soviet Policy in East Asia,” 121. 354 Keith A. Dunn, “NATO’s Enduring Value,” Foreign Policy 71 (1988): 171-172; Robert A. Mortimer, “Maghreb Matters,” Foreign Policy 76 (1989): 174-175. 355 Paul Johnson, “Europe and the Reagan Years,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 1 (1989): 29. 356 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Understating U.S. Strength,” Foreign Policy 72 (1988): 129. 357 Zbigniew Brzezinski, “America’s New Geostrategy,” Foreign Affairs 66, No. 4 (1988): 682, 686. 130 out from under the postwar international system.358 In particular, these scholars highlighted the limitations of American military power: it was useful (even vital) for defense against a persistent Soviet threat359, but not for implementing transformational change.360

Easily the smallest, but perhaps the most vociferous, of the three cohorts was the skeptics. For these scholars, American leadership was in inexorable decline thanks to the combination of internal weakness361 and external (in particular Japanese362) strength. The costs of American leadership were too high363 and the needs for American domestic reform were dire.364 Without a potent foreign foe – and the Soviet Union was rapidly losing its cache – the American public might simply refuse to continue bearing the burdens of leadership.365 It was necessary not just for the United States to begin a drawback, but “to start demanding much more favorable quid pro quos,”366 and if it could not receive them then a full return to isolationism was, perhaps, in order. These arguments would only become more pointed in the next few years.

358 Brzezinski, “Post-Communist Nationalism,” 71-73, 87. 359 Graham T. Allison, Jr., “Testing Gorbachev,” Foreign Affairs 67, No. 1 (1988): 26. 360 Robert W. Tucker, “Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 1 (1988/1989): 15. 361 Rogov, “Détente is Not Enough,” 88-89. 362 George Soros, “After Black Monday,” Foreign Policy 70 (1988): 71; Charles H. Ferguson, “America’s High-Tech Decline,” Foreign Policy 74 (1989): 123. 363 Harold von Cleveland, “The Dollar and the Defense of the West,” Foreign Affairs 66, No. 4 (1988): 858. 364 Reich, “The Economics of Illusion and the Illusion of Economics,” 523; Felix Rohatyn, “America’s Economic Dependence,” Foreign Affairs 68, No. 1 (1989): 58. 365 Huntington, “The Errors of Endism,” 5. 366 Alan Tonelson, “A Manifesto for Democrats,” The National Interest 16 (1989): 45-46 131

1990-1991: Krauthammer vs. Buchanan

“The goal, one might say, is the world as described by Francis Fukuyama… The West has to make it happen, and for that, the United States has to wish it.”367 -Charles Krauthammer

“What we need is a new nationalism, a new patriotism, a new foreign policy that puts America first, and not only first, but second and third as well.”368 -Pat Buchanan

The end of the Cold War caused the community to further polarize. It was in the period immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall that Charles Krauthammer and

Pat Buchanan wrote their competing editorials in The National Interest arguing for the extreme positions on the engagement-detachment spectrum: Krauthammer arguing that the United States needed to lead in order to realize Fukuyama’s vision of the future;

Buchanan arguing that American leadership was no longer necessary or desirable and that it was time to leave the world to its own devices.

The share of the policy-adjacent community that was committed to persistent

American leadership in the new era neared, but did not quite reach, the 50% mark. The arguments among this chorus reflected the arguments they had made in the previous period, with a particular emphasis on regional instability.

First and foremost was the belief that the United States’ military power was now, and would remain for the foreseeable future, both unchallenged and unchallengeable –

367 Krauthammer, “Universal Dominion,” 49 368 Buchanan, “America First,” 82 132 even if its economy were in relative decline.369 It was now that the term “unipolarity” entered the discourse, introduced by Charles Krauthammer.370 The consequence of this was, as Joseph Nye explained: “In a world of growing interdependence, [advising isolationism] is counterproductive and could bring on the decline it is supposed to avert; for if the most powerful country fails to lead, the consequences for international stability could be disastrous.”371 Other scholars, writing in The National Interest, said more bluntly:

“The Declinists are wrong when they say America will no longer be Number One, but more important, and less noticed, is the implicit notion that they don’t want America to be Number One.”372

“U.S. noninvolvement in the world is no longer a serious option.”373

The principal concern of this branch of the policy and policy-adjacent community was the possibility of American withdrawal; they encouraged the United States to continue its extant leadership role. European and Asian statesmen took to the pages of Foreign Policy to argue for the continuation of American military deployment in Europe374 and Asia.375

In particular, with the conclusion of the Gulf War, the need for American involvement in

369 William G. Hyland, “America’s New Course,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 2 (1990): 11. 370 Krauthammer, “Universal Dominion.” 371 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Soft Power,” Foreign Policy 80 (1990): 153. 372 Ben J. Wattenberg, “America’s Purpose Now,” The National Interest 21 (1990): 51. 373 Peregrine Worsthornea, “America’s Purpose Now,” The National Interest 21 (1990): 60 374 de Michaelis, “Reaching out to the East,” 534 375 Kaifu, “Japan’s Vision,” 32 133 the Middle East to contain any future aggression from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq became a point of serious concern.376

The fall of the Berlin Wall also introduced another, more aggressive element to this branch of the discourse: scholars arguing for increased American engagement to secure and institutionalize the gains that 1989 represented. The need to act to “secure the victory” drove not just an impulse to maintenance, but to expansion.377 Krauthammer’s introduction of the term unipolarity was not merely to describe what he perceived as the new state of play, but to argue for a “new universalism,” aiming for nothing less than the

“unification of the industrial West.” Although Krauthammer accepted that the goal was likely not achievable, he believed it was the ideal teleological objective for the new era.378 Krauthammer’s was the most extreme rendition of this position, but his was not the only argument in this vein. In addition to “unipolarity,” the term “New World Order” also entered the American political lexicon, and as James Kurth explained it: “The collapse of the Soviet threat has meant the removal of the major obstacle in the Second

World to the American conception of One World… now appears a fitting time indeed to declare a New World Order… the only global power for some time will be the United

Sates, and the only world order will be an American one.”379

Both the sustainers and the transformers believed in the necessity of American leadership, though they disagreed about how aggressive it would need to be. These two

376 M. A. Adelman, “Oil Fallacies,” Foreign Policy 82 (1991): 16. 377 Malcolm Wallop, “America’s Purpose Now,” The National Interest 21 (1990): 49. 378 Krauthammer, “Universal Dominion,” 49. 379 James Kurth, “Things to Come: The Shape of the New World Order,” The National Interest 24 (1991): 4-5. 134 camps, both bullish on American leadership, combined represented about 46% of the community. They were joined by a more skeptical group, representing about 35% of the policy-adjacent community: the multilateralists. For this camp, some kind of American leadership remained necessary and desirable, but would have to be drawn down: the decline in American military capacity made sustaining extant commitments as they had been impossible, and the collapse of the Soviet Union made them unnecessary. This camp anticipated multpolarity, rather than unipolarity380, and was more concerned with

American domestic affairs and balancing the need for continued American leadership with earning a peace dividend. They continued the arguments about the need for a more co-equal partnership with America’s Cold War allies.

The remainder of the policy-adjacent community, approximately 18% of the scholarship, was outright skeptical about American leadership period. This did not necessarily make them isolationists, but nonetheless they believed that America’s global role would be reduced: as a consequence of its own economic weakness381, or the lack of necessity382, or the fatigue of its partners with their subservience383, or – most prominently – the fatigue of the American public.

Pat Buchanan’s “America First – and Second, and Third,” presented the clearest statement that the United States had lost more than it had gained from the role it adopted

380 Martin Walker, “Dateline Washington: Victory and Delusion,” Foreign Policy 83 (1991): 163; Steven Kull, “Dateline Moscow: Burying Lenin,” Foreign Policy 78 (1990): 184. 381 Michael Vlahos, “Culture and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy 82 (1991): 78. 382 Tucker, “1989 And All That,” 106. 383 Jim Hoagland, “Europe’s Destiny,” Foreign Affairs 69, No. 1 (1990): 46. 135 after World War II. Buchanan, explicitly responding to Krauthammer’s teleological vision, saw a United States “drained of wealth and power by wars, cold and hot,” which

“cannot forever defend wealthy nations that refuse to defend themselves we cannot permit endless transfusions of the life blood of American capitalism into the mendicant countries and economic corpses of socialism, without bleeding to death.”384 Buchanan’s declarations, and others that supported him in kind if not wholly in substance, may have only represented a minority of the scholarship, but they nonetheless set the terms of the debate: those most in favor of American leadership often began by noting that isolationism was increasingly in vogue, and then explaining both why it would be an unwise policy and calling on the wisdom of elected leaders to resist the populist impulse that Buchanan vocalized.385 This debate would continue, intensified, into the subsequent period.

1992-1993: The 1992 Election Cycle and its Aftermath

“The United States is not and will not be in decline – unless, that is, Americans deliberately decide to fold their tents and adopt isolationism and protectionism in the name of looking after Number One.”386 -Richard G. Lugar

384 Buchanan, “America First,” 81. 385 Norman J. Ornstein and Mark Schmitt, “Dateline Campaign ’92: Post-Cold War Politics,” Foreign Policy 79 (1990): 169-186. 386 Richard G. Lugar, “The Republican Course,” Foreign Policy 86 (1992): 98. 136

The debate between those in favor of American engagement and those in favor of

American isolationism intensified in 1992, in part as a result of the 1992 Presidential

Election. The shift in favor of American leadership and engagement continued, with the share of the policy-adjacent community expressing optimism for that project finally breaking the 50% mark in this period. Their growth came not from the isolationists, however, as the middle group – those who had desired American leadership but in a declining role – shrank, while the skeptics remained skeptical.

The majority, in favor of engagement, was also more unified theoretically. In the previous period they had been divided between the “sustainers” and the “transformers,” those who wanted to continue the extant Cold War-era American force and alliance posture and those who wanted to expand it; in this period, fewer authors expressed a desire for an aggressive expansion of the kind previously advocated by Krauthammer.

However, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 did leave a vacuum, and the possibility of expanding the American security umbrella to encompass an unstable

Eastern Europe was raised to address that vacuum.387

The scholarship arguing for maintained or expanded American leadership thus made three key arguments:

(1) With the death of the Soviet Union, the United States was now indisputably

the most powerful nation in the world when it came to military capacity: “In

1991 the United States was clearly the only superpower, and President Bush

387 Pond, “Germany in the New Europe,” 124-125. 137

had displayed a willingness to use overwhelming force where American

interests were at stake.”388 America may be in relative economic decline, but

its absolute power advantages were still substantial and were expected to

persist.

(2) The United States was the only actor on the world stage capable of exercising

leadership. This was true even, and perhaps especially, in Europe, where the

crisis in Yugoslavia and the failure of the European Community to manage

that crisis was seen as evidence that the United States could not be soon

replaced by a unified European Community as a world leader: “Even before

the Yugoslav civil war spread beyond Slovenia and Croatia to the central

republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Europeans had conceded defeat and

requested American leadership.”389 This was not merely a product of

America’s military power, but also of Americas political unity: Europe had

failed to act in a unified manner in response to either Iraq’s invasion of

Kuwait or the Yugoslavian civil war, and the lack of unity meant Europe

could not be an effective pacifying force. Thus, “The United States is the only

remaining superpower capable of exercising global leadership.”390

(3) The institution of NATO, which had previously often been seen as on the road

to obsolescence with the retreat and then removal of the Soviet threat, was

388 M. Graeme Bannerman, “Arabs and Israelis: Slow Walk Towards Peace,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 1 (1993): 149. 389 Dusko Doder, “Yugoslavia: New War, Old Hatreds,” Foreign Policy 91 (1993): 4. 390 Kausikan, “Asia’s Different Standard,” 29-30. 138

now one of the only tools that could effectively exercise leadership, and thus

maintain stability, in Eastern Europe.391 NATO was without an enemy392, but

it had also been the only military force to respond to the U.N.-declared no fly

zone in Bosnia.393 NATO thus became both a key to maintain stability in

Eastern Europe, with support from Germany and from Eastern European

countries, which for the first time started discussing the possibility of

membership.394 A councilor to then Mayor of Paris and future President of

France, Jacques Chirac, stated: “The concept of a broad transatlantic alliance

maintains a fundamental instrument of stability and peace in Europe. It also is

essential to the United States, which intends to maintain its status as a world

power.”395

In the now diminished middle camp, which actively advocated American leadership in a reduced form, the focus was on diminished American capacity and willingness for action:

“Instead of a sense of triumph, the American people are displaying an anxiety and loss of confidence as deep as any since 1932.”396 The danger of American nationalism in the

391 Josef Joffe, “The New Europe: Yesterday’s Ghosts,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 1 (1993): 43. 392 Mark M. Nelson, “Transatlantic Travails,” Foreign Policy 92 (1993): 84. 393 Doder, “Yugoslavia,” 5. 394 Pond, “Germany in the New Europe,” 122, 124-125; Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Great Transformation,” The National Interest 33 (1993): 13. 395 Pierre Lellouche, “France in Search of Security,” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 2 (1993): 125. 396 Eric Wofford, “The Democratic Challenge,” Foreign Policy 86 (1992): 10. 139

Buchanan-vein was an acute concern, and their response was to advocate maintaining a degree of American leadership during a period of drawdown.397

In particular, this manifested in the form of two specific suggestions. The first was the construction of a multilateral system of leadership, with the United States handing the baton off to the European Community in the West398 and Japan in the East399.

The U.S. would not withdraw totally, but its role would be as supporter, rather than primary. In this new role, the United States would be more reluctant to use military force, which was of limited utility despite its clear dominance.400

The second was to avoid any expansion of NATO. This audience saw NATO as hopelessly outdated, and unlike the optimists who were more aggressive about American leadership, they did not believe that NATO was an institution that could be re-forged to address the dangers of domestic instability that Yugoslavia had come to exemplify:

“[It has become apparent] that NATO is mismatched with Europe’s future security problems: more eruptions like Yugoslavia, not a Soviet invasion across the central German plain.”401

“A move east [for NATO], however, would suffer from a variety of specific difficulties and complications, making it in all likelihood unworkable.”402

397 Clyde V. Prestowitz, Jr., “Beyond Laissez-Faire,” Foreign Policy 87 (1992): 69-70. 398 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “What New World Order?” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 1 (1992): 95. 399 Funabashi, “Japan and America,” 37. 400 Ted Galen Carpenter, “A New Proliferation Policy,” The National Interest 28 (1992): 67; Martin Laurence, “Peacekeeping as a Growth Industry,” The National Interest 32 (1993): 8. 401 Gregory F. Treverton, “The New Europe,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 1 (1991/1992): 94. 402 Owen Harries, “The Collapse of ‘The West,’” Foreign Affairs 72, No. 4 (1993): 42. 140

“NATO does not provide the best answer for contemporary and future American security in Europe… More radical proposals, championed by Germany, would extend NATO membership to East European countries. The good intentions would produce adverse consequences.”403

“Efforts to saddle NATO with the role of European gendarme, called upon to stamp out ethnic conflict, are almost certain to fail.”404

Thus, the scholars in favor of continued American engagement and leadership split largely on the NATO issue, with the divide falling on the degree of American responsibility, and NATO capacity, to address the instabilities that had been generated in the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

Finally, the last group of scholarship in this period was from the skeptics of

American leadership. They were even more extreme in their skepticism about NATO, and fondly chorused that the United States was not the world’s policeman405: “The time of world policemen is over, as is the era of military confrontation. The role of NATO is bound to change under the circumstances.”406

But more than any other variable, these authors began from the premise of anti- engagement American populism: the idea that the American public would simply not allow the United States to continue to be engaged as it had been. Weary of the costs of war, and harried by an economic recession, the public would demand a return to

403 Jonathan Clarke, “Replacing NATO,” Foreign Policy 93 (1994): 23, 25-26. 404 Charles William Mayes, “A Workable Clinton Doctrine,” Foreign Policy 93 (1994): 8. 405 Sabrina Petra Ramet, “War in the Balkans,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 4 (1992): 96. 406 Andrei Kozyrev, “Russia: A Chance for Survival,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 2 (1992): 14. 141

Washington’s 1796 strategy of detachment.407 These authors were not always advocates of such a strategy – some lamented what they perceived as its inevitability – but they believed that anything else was fundamentally unsustainable.408 The fact that its allies were now competitors put particular point on this issue, with a new, pointed economic rivalry between the United States and both Europe409 and Japan410 further diminishing the public’s willingness to spend blood or treasure to defend either one.

The 1992 election cycle brought this bubbling to the surface. In a trio of articles from local journalists in New Jersey, Iowa, and California designed to sample the public’s views on America’s ideal foreign policy platform in the new era, the response was uniform: it was time to come home.

“The economic downturn seems to have produced an awareness among people [in New Jersey] that, after decades of success and even preeminence in foreign affairs, it is time to bring the national concern, and the money that goes with it, back home.”411

“Indeed, Iowans probably prefer a presidential candidate who would accelerate the withdrawal of American forces abroad beyond the current administration’s plans.”412

“In that regard, [San Diegans] tend to have become more isolationist.”413

407 Leon V. Sigal, “The Last Cold War Election,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 5 (1992): 1. 408 Doug Brandow, “Avoiding War,” Foreign Policy 89 (1993): 158. 409 Immanuel Wallerstein, “Foes as Friends?” Foreign Policy 90 (1993): 145. 410 Stephen W. Bosworth, “The United States and Asia,” Foreign Affairs 71, No. 1 (1992): 117. 411 E. J. Baumeister, Jr., “From Trenton,” Foreign Policy 88 (1992): 39. 412 Dennis R. Ryerson, “From Des Moines,” Foreign Policy 88 (1992): 52. 413 Gerald L. Warren, “From San Diego,” Foreign Policy 88 (1992): 54. 142

Pat Buchanan, the standard-bearer for such views among the American right, would win

23% of the vote in the Republican primary in 1992, and Ross Perot, advocating something similar, would win an impressive 19% as a third-party candidate in the presidential election.

Despite this, the policy-adjacent community reached a majority view by 1993 that

American leadership needed to at a minimum be maintained, and perhaps expanded.

Most of the remainder of the population was bullish about the need for a degree of

American leadership, even if they wished to see a reduction in its overall footprint. Only a fraction supported the view that a new American isolationism was the way forward, though that view often serves the role of bogeyman, with frequent calls from more aggressive authors for politicians to summon the political courage to carry the torch for

American leadership and resist the temptation to succumb to populism. As then-

Republican Senator and two-time Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Dick Lugar put it: “The United States is not and will not be in decline – unless, that is,

Americans deliberately adopt isolationism and protectionism in the name of looking after

Number One.”414 What was important was convincing the American public that the gloomy national mood was mistaken, to ensure that the United States would not put down the mantle of leadership that only it could hold.415 This became a shallow consensus.

414 Lugar, “The Republican Course,” 98. 415 Murray, “The Global Economy Bungled,” 158, 166. 143

VII. The Narratives of the Post-Cold War Era as New Era Thinking

This chapter featured two key questions: did the immediate post-Cold War period take on the elements required to be characterized as New Era Thinking, and what were the precise elements of the narratives that emerged about the nature of that new era?

In the immediate post-Cold War period, four basic narratives emerged about the nature of the new era: (1) that states would increasingly be democratic, (2) that states would be increasingly integrated into a global economic system, (3) that the international system would be characterized by instability generated by domestic conflicts, and (4) that the United States needed to play a leadership role. The first three each came to comprise more than sixty-percent of the discourse; the fourth managed a majority.

But: did these narratives mean the policy-adjacent community was subject to New

Era Thinking? Earlier in the chapter I presented four basic requirements for New Era

Thinking, let us now examine each one in turn.

(1) A period of unexpected, amazing success leading to subsequent triumphalism.

This in and of itself is not a clear indicator of New Era Thinking, but it is an

indicator of fertile soil for the growth of New Era Thinking.

Of the four requirements for New Era Thinking, this one is the most obviously true. The end of the Cold War is practically the dictionary example of a period of unexpected success from the perspective of the United States and its allies, and a major consequence

144 of that success was a profound reconsideration of the previously-agreed upon rules of the game of international politics. If there is a historical moment that is most laden with the potential for New Era Thinking, particularly in recent history, it is the end of the Cold

War and the subsequent narratives of a New World Order.

(2) Subsequent theories and explanations about the causes and consequences of this

period indicate that the future will be more certain than the past. There should be

clearly definable rules that make the new era predictable.

(3) Subsequent theories and explanations about the causes and consequences of this

period indicate that the future will be more positive than the past. The new era

should create the conditions for identifiable improvement as compared to the past

on some measure of interest.

(4) These beliefs should trend towards consensus within the policy-relevant

community. Theories of predictability and positivity are themselves insufficient

for New Era Thinking; such theories must be broadly shared. This does not mean

they are unquestioned – there are always some skeptics – but they must reach the

point of “popular perception.”

For New Era Thinking to be operative, the consensus must rest on the idea that the world is more certain and likely also more positive. This certainty provides the foundations for overly optimistic, even manic policy decisions that produce bubbles in both economics and in international politics.

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The first two identifiable narratives in the policy-adjacent community fulfill both of these requirements. That the world would be more democratic, and more economically integrated, were both seen as consequences of the victory of American democratic capitalism, and for most scholars were inherent, fundamental goods in and of themselves.

Outright skepticism about the victory of democracy and the global world economy represented only a small fraction of the expressed views of the community (under 5% in both cases). In these cases, we can feel comfortable that New Era Thinking was present.

The third identifiable narrative, that the world would be increasingly unstable, is not as clear. The instability narrative did provide a certain kind of certainty: that countries, particularly post-Soviet and Third World, but potentially also First and Second world countries, would suffer from nationalism and ethnic and religious conflict meant that states could design policies to address the future threat. But this is not a narrative of optimism: that the new era might be one of hope and peace broached itself weakly in the first few years of the period, but never represented more than a third of the expressed views in the policy-adjacent community, and by 1994 had almost entirely evaporated.

New Era Thinking does not require positivity, however, and manic decision-making can be based purely on the excessive confidence that the future will be a certain way and that it can be anticipated and shaped through policy.

This, of course, leads us to the fourth identifiable narrative: that the United States needed to play a leadership role. While American leadership never reaches the level of consensus that the other three narratives do, only getting to 50% in the final two years examined in this chapter, it does have a great deal of optimism: that the instability

146 characteristic of the new era could be handled through the expeditious use of American political and military power.

The consequence is that we cannot say for certain that New Era Thinking was present among the policy-adjacent community. We can, however, look for it via its consequences: did the United States adopt policies in the subsequent period on the basis of narratives akin to the one identified in the policy-adjacent community, and were those policies manic in that they disregarded the concerns raised by the skeptics?

The next chapter is designed to address these questions. In it, I will use NATO enlargement as an example of a policy derived, in part, as a consequence of New Era

Thinking. In NATO enlargement we see the development of a mania: each round of

NATO enlargement occurred more confidently than the one that had occurred prior, despite the prevalence of increasing risk. The feedback loop of mania and policy adoption

– New Era Thinking leading to Policy Adoption leading to New Era Thinking leading to

Policy adoption – was realized, with the stage set for it by the development of New Era

Thinking in the immediate post-Cold War period.

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Chapter 4: The New Era and Overconfident American Foreign Policy

“NATO’s announced position is that the question of enlargement is not whether, but when and how. Somehow I have missed any logical explanation of WHY.”416

-Senator Sam Nunn (D-SC), 1995

In 2007, President George W. Bush signed into law the “NATO Freedom

Consolidation Act of 2007.” This act was seen as another small step towards the integration of and assurance of peace and stability inside of the European community: it was possible because of, and would assure, the growth and maintenance of democracy and market economies inside of the post-Soviet sphere in a post-Cold War Europe.

It was the latest in a series of steps, each one taken along this path following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this way, it was a thoroughly unspectacular law:

NATO and the European Union had already expanded to include a number of other

Eastern European states, and the results seemed to speak for themselves: those new

NATO members featured steady economic growth, a thickening democratic civil society, and the absence of the civil conflicts that had characterized the Balkans after the end of the Cold War.

416 Senator Warner (VA). “NATO Expansion.” Congressional Record 141: 9571 (June 30, 1995). Available from: ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 148

One aim of the act was to continue the enlargement of NATO into Eastern

Europe, with Ukraine being a singular objective. In the words of Representative David

Dreier, a Republican from California’s 26th District: “We all want to see Ukraine in

NATO one day. We want to see Ukraine solidify its democratic tradition, strengthen its institutions, modernize its defense systems, grow its economy and play an important role in both the West and the East.”417

These arguments, that enlargement would secure democracy, economic integration, and stability and peace, echoed the classic narratives that had emerged with the end of the Cold War. Between 1988 and 1993 the American policy-adjacent community came to a consensus that three things were true: that democracy was on the march, that the world was becoming more integrated economically, and that the collapse of bipolarity meant the danger of future instability. Finally, these all contributed to a fourth, narrower consensus: that the United States would need to be a global leader to both cement the gains won and avert the dangers of nationalism and ethnic conflict. This lead to the potential for manic policy adoption in a variety of related domains: the enlargement of the EU, the adoption of the EURO, and the growth of the international investment treaty regime (BITs)418 offering a handful of possibilities.

417 Congressman Dreier (CA). “Georgia and Ukraine NATO Membership.” Congressional Record 154: 53 (April 1, 2008) p. 514. Available from: ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 418 Daniel Behn, Ole Kristian Fauchald, and Malcolm Langford, “Bursting policy bubbles: The international investment treaty regime,” PluriCourts Research Paper No. 15-15, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2704340 149

In this chapter I argue that the process of NATO enlargement from 1993-2008 can be characterized as manic: a product of excessively intense enthusiasm, interest, and desire, and one whose strength only grew in conviction as those fifteen years progressed.

The initial, shocking victory over the Soviet Union, made undeniable by virtue of its dissolution, produced beliefs in a new era: a new era of democracy and global economic integration – but also an era of regional instability and danger. To address that danger, the

United States would be the bulwark to see that democracy and trade were victorious – and to ensure that instability would not undermine the entire project. The tool that the

United States settled on for achieving these objectives, at least in the European setting, was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The expansion of NATO was the key policy implication. Even at the start of the process, the people who advocated and carried it forward seemed to overestimate the benefits and underestimate the risks. But particularly as NATO expanded farther and farther eastward over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, this overestimation of benefits and the underestimation of risks grew progressively stronger. The process of NATO enlargement became “manic”.

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Figure 5: NATO Enlargement as Foreign Policy Mania

The product of the displacement of the end of the Cold War and the resultant New

Era Thinking, NATO enlargement proceeded in three stages between 1999 and 2009.

With each subsequent stage following rounds of NATO enlargement that had been short- term successes, the expectations for benefits increased, and expressed recognition of the risks of the future rounds declined. The culminated in 2007-2009, with proposals and plans for enlargement to Georgia and Ukraine that passed through the US Senate without a single objection, despite contemporaneous objections and threats of retaliation from

Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is in this final round we see the most conclusive evidence of a manic foreign policy process.

Importantly, this is not a criticism of the idea of NATO enlargement. An overestimation of the benefits does not mean that there were no benefits, nor that those benefits were not substantial; an underestimation of the risks does not mean that the risks were prohibitive. Rather, the specific risks that existed – negative reactions from Russia and potential backlash from the American public – went effectively unaddressed, despite 151 being known and having been expressed during early rounds of enlargement.

Additionally, the assumed benefits, democratic stability and regional stability, were overstated.

This chapter will proceed in three sections:

First, I will discuss the theory of mania and bubble, and describe how such a bubble can be expected to operate within international relations. In essence, I argue that it exists as a positive feedback loop: success (or at the very least, the absence of dramatic failure) breeds the expectation of future success that comes to exceed the reasonable. In both economics and international relations, it brings an expectation of returns greater than is warranted and a related underestimation of associated policy risks.

Second, I will discuss how such a period of mania can be identified in international relations. In essence, because of the difficulty of distinguishing confidence from overconfidence, I must look for periods where states pursued policies with increasing intensity despite the fact that those policies were simultaneously becoming increasingly risky.

Third, I will show how NATO expansion is an example of a period of manic policy through an examination of the Congressional record, and the arguments and votes on the issue taken with each round of NATO expansion, starting in 1993 and culminating in 2008 with the Russian invasion of Georgia. Here I will argue that the two major risks of NATO expansion, the danger of Russian resistance and the uncertainty of future

American domestic support, were known throughout the process, but despite the fact that

152 those dangers were increasingly close to being realized as the years progressed thanks in part to continuing expansion, they were also less frequently acknowledged. This, I argue, was overconfidence expressed in the form of policy mania. As with mania in economics, the bubble inflated, and produced the long-term potential for catastrophic failure when the known, but disregarded, risks were eventually realized.

I. Identifying Mania

Mania: A Feedback Loop between New Era Thinking and Outcomes

The first and most difficult question to answer about studying mania in international relations is: what does it look like? What are its identifiable characteristics, how can those characteristics be identified and measured, and – most difficult – how can mania and overconfidence be distinguished from warranted confidence?

We have discussed the three phases of mania repeatedly in the past chapters: displacement, New Era Thinking, and policy adoption. The first two phases are relatively straightforward: displacement is a sudden, unexpected change that undermines existing understandings of the mechanics that govern behavior and open new opportunities. This leads to New Era Thinking, the belief that history has entered a new stage, with new rules, and where “the future is brighter or less uncertain than it was in the past.” New Era

Thinking expresses itself in stories that explain the new rules of the game, typically ones that seem certain and optimistic.

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But neither of these two phases is the mania itself. Rather, mania is in the potential interaction between behavior and New Era Thinking. Once New Era Thinking has proliferated, people begin acting on those beliefs: they go out and move to take advantage of the opportunities presented. These individuals may be overconfident – entrepreneurs often are – but even this is not necessarily manic. Mania comes in with iteration: as that initial round of entrepreneurism occurs, if it is successful in achieving its ends, or even if it just does not provoke dramatic failures, it can cause imitation. The entrepreneurs who are successful are even more convinced that the New Era Thinking beliefs have been shown to be right – they now have evidence! And others see the entrepreneurs achieving their objectives and may buy into New Era Thinking themselves

– and invest. These investments occur with less consideration – the feeling of assurance has grown on the basis of recent evidence. And this repeats, iterating until something happens to disrupt the loop.

Figure 6: The Mania Feedback Loop

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This is not simply learning. Each round causes overconfidence to grow; the people making these investments increasingly come to disregard pieces of evidence that indicate the presence of risk. The longer the cycle continues without a clear failure of

New Era Thinking, the more dramatic it becomes. This is mania: the feedback loop of beliefs and outcomes. Behavior becomes irrational, with individuals expecting unrealistic benefits and completely disregarding risk: either by failing to even acknowledge it exists, or by acknowledging it but failing to consider seriously the possibility that risk could be realized.

Mania in Foreign Policy

The primary discipline that has explored the basis and effects of mania is economics, where it is discussed in the context of “bubbles” of stock or commodities prices. In this section, I go into a little more depth about how economics discusses the process of bubble inflation, and how we can use that to think about how manias operate in the realm of foreign policy.

Let us start with Adam Smith and the concept of overtrading. Noted previously, overtrading lacks a specific definition but includes “speculation about increases in prices of securities and commodities, an overestimate of prospective returns and ‘excessive leverage’.”419 This essentially can be divided into two related, but conceptually independent components: (1) speculation about increases in prices, and (2) an

419 Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 42 155 overestimation of prospective returns. What does each of these mean, and how would they apply in international relations and foreign policy?

First, speculation about increases in prices: in the economics context, this means that a potential investor looks at a potential purchase and believes that the price he can purchase it at today is lower than the price he would be able to sell it at (or would have to purchase it at) at some point in the future. In other words, he is speculation about something that might be true about the future, and he has a theory about why he believes that possibility is likely.

Second, an overestimation of prospective returns: this serves as an amplifier on his speculation; it is not just that he believes that the price in the future will be higher than the price today, but also that his estimation of that future price increase is substantial. The opportunity the prospective investor is presented with is thus substantial

– and the costs of missing that opportunity equally so.

All right, we have the fundamentals. Now: how to translate speculation and overestimation from economics to international relations? What does speculation actually look like, who is doing the speculating, and what are they speculating about? What are the returns that are being overestimated?

The object of speculation in this context is the prospects for a foreign policy strategy. Speculation about optimal strategies for achieving certain goals in the international system is necessarily constant. Following a displacement, room opens up for new speculation: either a new, previously unattainable or unthought goal becomes possible, or perhaps a change in the political geography of a region makes it possible to

156 extend a goal pursued elsewhere into that region. If a state, or a multilateral coalition of states, adopts a given foreign policy, it makes it possible for them to achieve their objectives – but the opportunity may be fleeting, so it is important to act. Both the potential for gains, and the danger of missing out on those gains, apply.

The overestimation of returns involves the belief that achieving this goal – whatever it may be – will bring benefits to these states that are perhaps overestimated.

Overconfidence can thus take the form of overly optimistic beliefs about the prospects for success, or overly optimistic beliefs about the benefits of success. In either case, it also entails a disregard for the risks involved (compared to confidence, which would properly evaluate those risks and incorporate them into the decision-making process).

The speculator of key interest is the foreign policy elite. As in economics, where the key actor is the investor (or the investment firm), the key actors here are the political elites who get to make foreign policy decisions. Non-elites are of interest in that this optimism is unlikely to be sustained in the face of serious criticism – at the very least, non-elites need to be unaware or disinterested – but if we are looking for mania we need to look mostly closely at the decision-makers. They, their speculations, and the foreign policies they pursue are the object of our primary interest in this chapter.

Identifying Foreign Policy Mania

Identifying a period of mania in international relations involves identifying each of the four stages of the process I identified earlier: the displacement, the new speculation about potential opportunity for gain, the period of initial investment, and the subsequent

157 period of overinvestment. In Chapter 3 I focused on identifying displacement and New

Era Thinking. In this chapter my focus is on the mania itself (identifying

“overinvestment”), or the period where policy decisions become recognizably overconfident and manic.

The difficulty in identifying overinvestment, and overconfidence in general, is in the over. How can we be sure that the elites making investment decisions are acting in an overconfident manner? We can find periods where foreign policy decisions failed by virtue of hindsight, but simply claiming that any foreign policy that failed was overconfident seems infantile and unfair. Just because a strategy failed does not mean the strategy was produced by a manic process; moreover, if I cannot offer some guidance about how to identify a period of mania without the benefit of hindsight the project would offer only descriptive, rather than prescriptive, value.

The single greatest difficulty in accomplishing this is in defining a baseline. In economics, a bubble occurs when the price of an asset or commodity is greater than its

“fundamental” value,420 or “information about current and future returns from [the asset or commodity].”421 Alternatively we can think of the fundamentals as “the expected benefits (direct and indirect; positive and negative) from a policy.”422 In any event, assessing these in the foreign policy realm is extraordinarily difficult, in part because the

420 Moshe Maor, “Policy Bubbles: Policy Overreaction and Positive Feedback,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 27, No. 3 (2014): 472. 421 Olivier J. Blanchard and Mark W. Watson, “Bubbles, Rational Expectations and Financial Markets,” NBER Working Paper Series No. 945 (1982): 1. 422 Bryan D. Jones, Herschel F. Thomas III, and Michelle Wolfe, “Policy Bubbles,” The Policy Studies Journal 42, No. 1 (2014): 149. 158 benefits of a policy depend greatly on how other people react to that policy, and in part because of complexity and uncertainty.

So. How can we identify manic overconfidence in foreign policy in real time?

Unfortunately, I am not sure we can identify periods of mania in foreign policy with absolute surety. However, I do believe that manic periods will be predictable components of the international foreign policy making process, and that I can identify particular warning signs are suggestive of a manic process. These warning signs are not guarantees that the process has become manic – the difficulty in distinguishing confidence and overconfidence is one of the reasons overconfidence is so pernicious – but when they are present it behooves policy makers to stop and reconsider their speculations and assumptions.

The best indication of a period of overconfidence in foreign policy involves two inverse trends: first, an increase in the aggressiveness with which a given foreign policy strategy is pursued (which means we are necessarily looking at a policy that is being implemented by a single stage in stages, by multiple states in succession, or both); second, a decline in the acknowledgement of the risks of that strategy. When both trends are present simultaneously, policy elites and observers should consider whether the policies they adopt are the product of mania.

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Figure 7: Measurable Indicators of Mania

It is important to note that these indicators are only identifiable in comparison to some initial policy implementation. The moment preceding manic foreign policy is the moment of first investment: the moment when the first-mover investors see and move to take advantage of a new opportunity. This moment may itself be characterized by overconfidence on the part of the investors (it may too be manic), but the difficulty of distinguishing confidence and overconfidence makes this a hard determination to make absent the benefits of hindsight.

It becomes easier to identify overconfidence in subsequent moments. As time progresses, confidence based on initial successes can transform into mania. If it does, it should express itself in the form of a doubling-down on the policy in question. It should

160 also mean the estimations of the value of the policy should increase, and the perceived risks of policy failure – both in probability and in acuity – should decline.

This can result in a feedback loop that causes both trends to spiral towards the extreme, with a maximal adoption of the policy tied to a minimal acknowledgement of risks. In economics, this is sustained until something happens that causes the bubble to be punctured (either the bubble pops from growing internal pressure or its exposed by some exogenous event), at which point investors realize the risks they have disregarded – and react, potentially, with panic. In international relations, it should operate similarly, with the policy eventually hitting a point of unsustainability where those previously disregarded risks are necessarily realized.

To identify mania, I thus need indicators of both policy aggressiveness and an indicator of risk acknowledgement:

For policy aggressiveness, the ideal is a policy that is implemented in multiple, additive stages. It needs to be deliberately adopted incrementally; with each subsequent phase a conscious, voluntary expansion on the preceding stage that increases assumed benefits and associated risk.

For risk acknowledgement, the ideal is a consistent decline in the conversation about the policy’s risks during the policy deliberation process. This can be identified through an examination of policy elites and their deliberations at each of these stages.

Elites discuss the policy’s potential benefits and risks before each round of adoption.

Mania presents when each subsequent round of policy adoption features a significant decline in risk acknowledgement.

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Importantly, both of these variables must be identifiable not only in hindsight, but in real time, which provides an avenue for recognizing when current policies choices are showing signs of mania. As Moshe Moar explains it: “only the pursuit of policies against existing knowledge to the contrary should be considered a bubble.”423

In the previous chapter, I examined the post-Cold War period and attempted to demonstrate how that period featured an initial displacement that produced New Era

Thinking and profoundly changed speculation about the opportunities that existed in the international system. In the remainder of this chapter, I attempt to show how that speculation resulted in a manic policy process. The decision to expand NATO, and especially the incremental rounds of expansion that occurred between 1997 and 2009, were a period like the one I described theoretically above. It was both a period where a policy become more aggressive over time, and thus riskier over time, and a period where the risks associated with that policy were more infrequently acknowledged by policy elites with each subsequent round.

II. Overconfidence in Foreign Policy: A Decade of NATO Enlargement

The policy of interest for this project is that of NATO Enlargement: the process of expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to include Eastern European countries following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I will argue that NATO expansion is

423 Maor, “Policy Bubbles,” 474. 162 an example of a manic foreign policy, and that we can recognize this because of both the increasing aggressiveness with which the policy was pursued and the decline in the acknowledgement of the risks involved in that policy as the policy became more aggressive.

I will proceed in three steps:

First, I will quickly summarize the events of 1989-1991 and how the abrupt, surprising end of the Cold War presented new opportunity for speculation about potential foreign policy success – and new potential for foreign policy failure in the absence of action. In essence, this is a summary of how the period of the end of the Cold War constituted a displacement and speculation about gains to be had from new foreign policy choices. This was discussed in detail in Chapter 3.

Second, I will discuss how we can demonstrate both foreign policy aggressiveness and risk acknowledgement over the period of NATO enlargement, which essentially occurred between the years 1993 and 2008. I will argue that aggressiveness can be demonstrated through an examination of each wave of NATO enlargement and the fact that each one represented an expansion of the policy with increasing risks; I will argue that risk perception can be deduced through an examination of the United States

Congressional verbal, written, and voting records, with the United States Senate in particular being the key foreign policy elite thanks to the requirement that it consent and advise the President on each wave of NATO expansion.

Third, I will perform an analysis of NATO enlargement and articulate the risks associated with each subsequent round of enlargement. I will argue that the program grew

163 riskier for reasons that had been identified in Congressional debates during the early enlargement period, even as the articulation of those risks by policy elites subsided over time. This, I argue, is evidence of overconfidence and mania.

Speculation and Opportunity after the Cold War

The End of the Cold War fundamentally changed the game of international politics as it had been played since the end of World War II. A stagnant world of bipolar competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was transformed into a world that was alternatively perceived as multipolar or unipolar. The ideological defeat of communism and the perceived ideological victory of democratic capitalism, a view which was clearly ascendant in the early 1990s, meant that suddenly the potential for a global transformation to an international system characterized by American ideological preferences seemed a real possibility.

In the language of foreign policy mania, this was the displacement: the sudden change the altered the incentives for foreign policy investment.

The speculation, however, was not entirely positive. Firstly, it was generally believed that for these positive potentials to be fully realized, American (or multilateral) action would be required. Second, following events like Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, it was believed that the removal of the stability of bipolarity had the potential to unleash a wave of nationalism and instability. So, while the potential for democratic capitalism and generally more peaceful resolution of conflicts was real, it was not guaranteed. There was potential for great gains if states invested

164 wisely; there was potential for great and terrible loss if states missed the investment opportunity that they had been gifted.

Finally, and vitally, by the mid-1990s there was a growing consensus that the

United States would have to be the leader, and that NATO represented the principal and most important tool by which the United States could exercise leadership. The European

Community had demonstrated weakness and disunity following the Maastricht Treaty and in response to the Yugoslav and Kuwait crises, and while NATO’s performance in

Yugoslavia had been imperfect; it had nonetheless been the only actor that had demonstrated an ability to perform.

The combination of these factors led to a general belief within the American foreign-policy adjacent community that NATO expansion was the best tool available to lock-in the gains of the Cold War victory while averting the dangers the systemic transformation away from bipolarity generated.

III. Congressional Arguments about Risks and Benefits of NATO Enlargement

In order to estimate perceived opportunity and risk on the part of the policy- makers, we need to first examine the content of their debate. In the remainder of this chapter, I will describe the Congressional debate and its trajectory using two different sources:

First, I examined the Congressional Record. The Congressional Record is a history of remarks made in the House and Senate. Using Proquest’s Congressional Daily

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Record search, I read and coded references to NATO enlargement between 1990 and

2017, looking especially for statements of support, opposition, and the arguments for that support or opposition.

Second, I examined the transcripts of Senate Committee Hearings specifically on

NATO enlargement. These hearings were held as part of the Senate requirement to provide advice and consent prior to Presidential ratification of NATO enlargement in

1999, 2004, and 2009. I read and coded each Senator’s public preferences in each of these hearings, looking again for statements of support, opposition, and their arguments for that support or opposition.

I will proceed by examining the post-Cold War NATO enlargement process in three steps: the arguments leading up to the accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; the arguments leading up to the accession of Bulgaria, Estonia,

Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; and finally the arguments leading up to the accession of Albania and Croatia – a debate which also included discussions about Ukraine and Georgia – which was voted on in August 2008 and competed in 2009.

I will conclude that there were essentially three general arguments made: first, that NATO expansion was necessary to ensure democracy in and the stability of Europe; second, that NATO expansion was risky because of the costs involved and the potential future American rejection of the necessary commitments; third, that NATO expansion was risky because it could potentially provoke the new Russian state or empower nationalist political forces in Russia. Finally, I will show that the articulation and

166 consideration of these risks declined from each period of enlargement to the subsequent period, and that this lack of consideration was despite the increased probability of the realization of these risks.

August 6th 1993 – March 12th 1999: The 1st Wave of Post-Cold War Enlargement

The beginning of the public debate about NATO enlargement into post-Soviet

Eastern Europe in the American Congress was on August 6th, 1993. On that date, Senator

Joe Lieberman (D-CN) stood on the floor of the Senate and made the following statement:

“Mr. President, the Bosnian crisis has underlined the need for a redefinition of NATO’s mission and organization structure. Throughout the cold war, NATO limited its mission to defending the territory of its member states. Yet, the collapse of the Soviet bloc has left that mission largely irrelevant. As Senator Lugar has cogently put it: ‘NATO will either develop the strategy and structure to ‘go out of area’ or it will ‘go out of business’.’

Going out of area means increasing defense cooperation with the new democracies of Eastern Europe, notably Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Western training, the exchange of military personnel and intelligence, and the sale and leasing of military equipment should receive a greater emphasis. The modernization of Eastern European Armed Forces with Western military equipment would help facilitate their coordination with NATO in any future crisis. Eventual membership in NATO for these countries should be considered a genuine possibility [emphasis added].”424

424 Senator Lieberman (CN). “The Need to Reinvigorate NATO.” Congressional Record 139: 114 (August 6, 1993) p. 10943. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 167

Lieberman’s statement was ahead of the curve. It was the first statement on the floor of the House or Senate that proposed the idea of enlarging NATO to include post-Soviet states. NATO enlargement was still an inchoate idea in the Washington, and would only solidify as a Clinton administrative objective in the following months of 1993 and early months of 1994.

Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Lieberman’s statement of support for

NATO enlargement, the U.S. Congressional Daily Record featured no overt discussions about the possibility. In fact, the dialogue at the beginning of this period was largely skeptical about the future prospects for NATO in general. The tenor of the conversation in 1990 and 1991 emphasized three essential points: First, that NATO’s responsibilities were likely to be reduced425; second, that the United States needed to reduce the financial burden of global and regional defense426; and third, that regional alliance partners would need to be more responsible for leadership, finances, and capabilities.427 Congressman

Barney Frank (D-MA) spoke for the most skeptical voices when he argued in 1992 that:

“NATO has outlived its usefulness and the administration’s continued insistence on maintain it gets in the way of the kind of enlightened foreign policy we should be

425 Congresswoman Schroeder (CA). “Introduction of NATO Infrastructure Reform Bill.” Congressional Record 136: 86 (July 10, 1990) p. 2264. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 426 Congressman Traficant (OH). “Cut NATO and Foreign Aid, Not Raise Taxes.” Congressional Record 136: 57 (May 9, 1990) p. 2115. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 427 Senator Cohen (ME). “Support for NATO and Contributions to the Persian Gulf War.” Congressional Recird 137: 47 (March 19, 1991) p. S3470. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 168 pursuing both in our own interest and in that of the values we seek to advance in the world.”428

The pre-1993 conversations were not wholly skeptical about NATO in general:

Lieberman and Senator William Roth (R-DE) had spoken forthrightly about the need for

NATO to expand its commitments and role to deal with the post-Cold War Era and the new dangers that accompanied the transformation. But prior to Lieberman’s August 1993 statement asserting the desirability and necessity of NATO enlargement, the possibility had not been raised in Congress, and indeed NATO enlargement would not become a major objective of the Clinton administration or NATO itself until the latter months of

1993.429

Once NATO enlargement became a Clinton administration objective, the debate would begin in earnest. Between Lieberman’s 1993 statement and the accession of

Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to the alliance in 1999, the argument being had can be summarized as follows:

(1) Pro-Enlargement: NATO expansion to encompass Eastern Europe would

ensure stability of that region at a time when its stability was otherwise in

question. In essence, NATO would mean additional mechanisms to control the

428 Congressman Frank (MA). “NATO, Down and (Soon) Out.” Congressional Record 138: 112 (August 3, 1992) p. E2347. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 429 James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether but When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999): 45-52. 169

dangers of nationalism and ethnic conflict that had created the conflagration in

the former Yugoslavia: it would expand the zone of peace.430

(2) Pro-Enlargement: the democratic and market economic transformation in

Eastern Europe could be ensured through an enlargement of NATO to include

those newly democratic countries. This was an extension of the previous

argument, asserting that lack of recognition431 or instability432 would

jeopardize the long-term viability of the region’s transformation.

(3) Pro-Enlargement: NATO expansion would provide the United States with

new and potentially powerful military allies with whom the burdens of global

leadership could be shared433

430 Senator Biden (DE). “NATO Enlargement After Paris.” Congressional Record 143: 82 (June 12, 1997) p. S5590; Senator Biden (DE). “The Strategic Rationale for NATO Enlargement.” Congressional Record 143: 140 (October 9, 1997) p. S10782; Senator Roth (DE). “Commending the Senate for Addressing NATO Enlargement.” Congressional Record 143: 155 (November 7, 1997) p. S119557; Senator Murkowski (AK). “NATO Enlargement.” Congressional Record 144: 31 (March 19, 1998) p. S2250. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 431 Congressman Gilman (NY). “Introduction of NATO Expansion Act of 1994, N.R. 4210.” Congressional Record 140:41 (April 15, 1994) p. E666; Senator Simon (IL). “Time for NATO to Admit Trio from Eastern Europe.” Congressional Record 140: 148 (November 30, 1994) p. S15258. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 432 Senator Santorum (PA). “Defend Peace in Poland.” Congressional Record 140: 104 (August 2, 1994) p. E1624; Senator Roth (DE). “The NATO Enlargement Facilitation Act of 1996.” Congressional Record 142: 81 (June 5, 1996) p. S5784; Senator Lugar (IN). “Getting Back to Basics: NATO’s Double Enlargement.” Congressional Record 142: 84 (June 10, 1996) p. S6000, Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 433 Senator Durbin (IL). “In Support of Enlarging NATO to Include the New Invitees and the Baltic Countries.” Congressional Record 143: 153 (November 5, 1997) p. S11787; Senator Roth (DE). “Commending the Senate for Addressing NATO Enlargement.” Congressional Record 143: 155 (November 7, 1997) p. S119557. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 170

(4) Pro-Enlargement: Specifically with regards to Russia, NATO expansion into

Eastern Europe would affect NATO’s relationship with its former foe in one

of three ways:

a. Increased stability on Russia’s western border would increase the

probability that reform-minded actors within Russia would win the

ongoing political struggle; here, the potential end-game posited

included partnership with Russia up to and including the possibility of

Russia attaining NATO membership434

b. NATO, as a purely defensive alliance, was not targeted against Russia

or any other outside state in particular, and so would have no effect on

Russia so long as Russia did not have aggressive intentions against

NATO members435

c. NATO, as a defensive alliance, would offer security to Eastern

European states that they would otherwise lack in the event of a

Russian return to a revisionist foreign policy436

434 Congressman Lantos (CA). “Democratic Russia Joins the Partnership for Peace with NATO.” Congressional Record 140: 81 (June 23, 1994) p. E1305; Senator Cochran (MS). “NATO Alliance Membership for Romania.” Congressional Record 143: 65 (May 16, 1997) p. S4625. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 435 Congressman Hyde (IL). “Revitalizing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” Congressional Record 140: 53 (May 5, 1994) p. H3151; Congressman Smith (NJ). “Russia and NATO Expansion.” Congressional Record 141: 155 (September 29, 1995) p. E1894; Senator Lieberman (CT). “NATO Expansion.” Congressional Record 141: 156 (October 10, 1995) p. S14843. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 436 Congressman Solomon (NY). “Appeasement Does Not Work: NATO Must Expand.” Congressional Record 142: 11 (January 25, 1996) p. E102; Congressman Bereuter (NE). “Recommended Reading on the Changing NATO and the Effect of Globalization on the 171

(5) Anti-Enlargement: NATO expansion would represent a financial and military

burden on the United States with no expiration date437, one that might

eventually cause the American public to resent the alliance and desire to

escape it.438

(6) Anti-Enlargement: NATO expansion would decrease the probability that

reform-minded actors within Russia would win the ongoing political struggle;

here, the potential-end game posited a resurgence of Russian nationalists and

an eventual return of aggressive Russian foreign policy that was, at this time,

not a foregone conclusion.439

Transatlantic Relationship.” Congressional Record 142: 142 (October 21, 1997) p. E2025; Congressman Barret (WI). “Thoughts on NATO.” Congressional Record 143: 145 (October 24, 1997) p. E2091. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 437 Congressman Hamilton (IN). “Perspective on NATO Expansion.” Congressional Record 141: 30 (February 14, 1995) p. E347; Congressman Sandlin (TX). “NATO Infrastructure Fair Share Act.” Congressional Record 143: 157 (November 9, 1997) p. E2273; Congressman Harkin (IA). “NATO Expansion.” Congressional Record 144: 29 (March 17, 1998) p. S2145. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 438 Senator Kassbaum (KA). “NATO Expansion.” Congressional Record 141: 156 (October 10, 1995) p. S14843; Senator Roberts (KA) “Bosnia and NATO Enlargement.” Congressional Record 143: 138 (October 7, 1997) p. S10456. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 439 Senator Warner (VA). “NATO Expansion.” Congressional Record 141: 109 (June 30, 1995) p. S9571; Senator Hutchison (TX) and Sam Nunn (GA). “NATO Expansion.” Congressional Record 141: 156 (October 10, 1995) p. S14843; Senator Sanders (VT). “If NATO is Expanded, Our Allies Must Pay More of the Costs.” Congressional Record 143: 80 (June 10, 1997) p. E1159; Senator Warner (VA). “NATO Expansion Moratorium Condition.” Congressional Record 144: 17 (February 27, 1998) p. S1173. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 172

a. An aggressive Russia would also be a less cooperative partner in

addressing serious foreign policy concerns that would require joint

United States-Russian effort, particularly the danger of post-Soviet

“loose nukes”440

(7) Anti-Enlargement: An initial round of NATO expansion could lead to

“precipitous, future expansion rounds” the wisdom of which would not be

fully debated.441

Additionally, opponents of enlargement challenged the key pro-enlargement argument that NATO expansion would create stability in Eastern Europe that would help secure the growth of nascent democracies and allow the practice to flourish in other regional states, arguing that this was not guaranteed442 and that the European Union, rather than NATO, would be the proper institution to serve this purpose and that E.U. expansion should precede NATO expansion.443

In his superb Not Whether but When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO, James

Goldgeier argues that this initial phase of post-Cold War NATO enlargement happened

440 Senator Craig (ID). “NATO Expansion.” Congressional Record 144: 17 (February 27, 1998) p. S1152. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 441 Senator Thurmond (SC). “Statement of Senator John Warner on the NATO Expansion Amendment.” Congressional Record 144: 9 (February 10, 1998) p. S584. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 442 Senator Warner (VA). “NATO Expansion.” Congressional Record 141: 109 (June 30, 1995) p. S9571. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 443 Senator Moynihan (NY). “NATO Expansion and the EU.” Congressional Record 144: 19 (March 3, 1998) p. S1290. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 173 despite the fact that key questions of “when, how, who, or even why” NATO enlargement was going to be policy had no convincing answers.444 He takes the title of his book from a talking point utilized by Senator Sam Nunn (D-SC), one of the more robust critics of the NATO enlargement plan, who argued:

“NATO’s announced position is that the question of enlargement is not whether, but when and how. Somehow I have missed any logical explanation of WHY. I cannot speak of public opinion in other countries, but in America when the enlargement debate focuses on issues of NATO nuclear policy, NATO troop deployments, and formal NATO military commitments – played against the backdrop of repercussions in Russia – somebody had better be able to explain to the American people WHY, or at least WHY NOW…

In short, if NATO enlargement stays on its current course, reaction in Russia is likely to be a sense of isolation by those committed to democracy and economic reform, with varying degrees of paranoia, nationalism, and demagoguery emerging from across the current political spectrum.”445

These arguments were present in both the Congressional Record and in transcripts of Senate hearings. First, examining the Congressional Record: the arguments break down into three categories: statements in favor of NATO expansion as soon as possible, statements opposed to NATO expansion but leaving open the possibility for future expansion if certain additional criteria were met (coded as ambiguous), and statements opposed to NATO expansion (and, in some cases, advocating disbanding the alliance altogether) under any circumstance.

444 Goldgeier, Not Whether but When, 152 445 Senator Warner (VA). “NATO Expansion.” Congressional Record 141: 109 (June 30, 1995) p. S9571. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 174

Table 6: Congressional Floor Statements about NATO Enlargement (1993-1999) No Enlargement 8 11.27% Ambiguous 17 23.94% Yes Enlargement 46 64.79%

The majority of arguments within Congress argued in favor of NATO expansion, and indeed from 1993 onwards NATO enlargement had strong bipartisan support: approximately 65% of all statements made on the topic expressed support, citing one or multiple of the arguments listed above. By contrast, a total of 35% of all statements expressed skepticism of varying degrees.

The Senate Committee hearings were similarly divided. The Budget Committee,

Appropriations Committee, and Foreign Relations Committee all held hearings on NATO enlargement in 1997 or 1998; the Foreign Relations Committee held three independent hearings that met a total of eight times, producing almost a thousand pages of transcript.

These hearings called almost fifty total witnesses, with vocal supporters and detractors both present in that number (as well as a number of specialists called to answer specific questions about implementation and cost). The overall distribution of Senator support reflected the distribution in the Congressional Record: significantly more Senators expressed support, but a substantial minority of Senators expressed opposition and even among those Senators expression support there remained a number of concerns, particularly about cost and Russian reaction.

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Table 7: Senator Expressions of Support in Committee Hearings about NATO Enlargement (1993-1999)

No Enlargement 10 19.23% Ambiguous 20 38.46% Yes Enlargement 22 42.31%

In the end, the Senate approved NATO expansion on April 30th, 1998 by a vote that reflected the dynamics of the underlying Congressional debate: 80 in favor, 19 opposed.

While there are some signs that indicate even this stage of the NATO enlargement process was overconfident (Goldgeier’s description, for instance, is potentially one reflective of a manic process), overconfidence is more easily identified using the 1993-

1999 period as a baseline. Next, I will explore the two subsequent waves of NATO enlargement: the debates prior to the 2004 accession of seven Eastern European countries to the alliance, and the debates prior to the 2009 accession of Albania and Croatia to the alliance. My aim is to demonstrate that the debates that I have discussed here represent the high-water mark of debate in the United States Congress, and that each subsequent wave was debated less – despite the fact that these two concerns in no way subsided, and in fact became more concerning, over the subsequent period. In other words, even as

NATO enlargement continued, the Congressional debate about the merits of NATO enlargement receded asymptotically towards zero: the decline in the debate was not reflective of a decline in the underlying issues.

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March 13th 1999 – March 28th 2004: the 2nd Wave of Post-Cold War Enlargement

Following the initial wave of post-Cold War NATO enlargement, the institution continued on the path of further enlargement, aiming to incorporate more Eastern

European states. These prospective members included the Baltic states, which had been part of Russia proper. In this section, I aim to show that despite the risks entailed by

NATO enlargement identified by Senator Nunn and others prior to 1999 persisting, and becoming even more acute thanks to this further eastward reach, the debate among the policy elites whose advice and consent was required for the enlargement dwindled. Both the amount of debate, and the robustness of the debate, declined even as the long-term dangers increased. This, I argue, is evidence that the policy adoption process was based not on confidence but on overconfidence, and is suggestive that the process had become manic.

As before, the evidence of reduced policy elite risk perception compared to the prior era is derived from analysis of the Congressional Record and Senate Committee hearings. Each record of the Congressional debate reveals a smaller, less contentious debate:

Table 8: Congressional Floor Statements about NATO Enlargement (1999-2004)

No Enlargement 2 4.44% Ambiguous 5 11.11% Yes Enlargement 38 84.44%

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Table 9: Senator Expressions of Support in Committee Hearings about NATO Enlargement (1999-2004)

No Enlargement 3 8.57% Ambiguous 6 17.14% Yes Enlargement 26 74.28%

Let us start by examining the Congressional Record. During the 1993-1999 process, there were a total of 71 statements made by members of the House or Senate in the

Congressional daily record, an average of about 9 a year. During the later, 1999-2004 process, there were a total of 45 statements made, averaging about 6 a year. In other words, the conversation on the floor of Congress about NATO enlargement was reduced by about 33% from the 1st to the 2nd round: there was less debate.

More significantly, the content of the debate radically shifted. The percentage of statements critical of NATO enlargement was reduced from 35% before 1999 to 15% between 1999 and 2004. Of the statements that remained critical of NATO enlargement, the most critical statements came from a single source: Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX).

Congressman Paul was critical not only of NATO enlargement, but the institution of

NATO, making the following statements in April 1999 and May 2004:

“NATO’s days are surely numbered. This is the message of the current chaos in Yugoslavia. NATO may hold together in name only for a while, but its effectiveness is gone forever. The U.S. has the right to legally leave NATO with a 1-year’s notice. This we ought to do, but we will not. We will continue to allow ourselves to bleed financially and literally for many years to come before it is recognized that governance of diverse people is best done by diverse and small governments, not by a one-world government dependent on the arbitrary use of force determined by

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politically correct reasons and manipulated by the powerful financial interests around the world.”446

“In conclusion, we should not be wasting U.S. tax money and taking on more military obligations expanding NATO. The alliance is a relic of the Cold War, a holdover from another time, an anachronism. It should be disbanded, the sooner the better.”447

Paul’s principal argument was a reprise of one of the major arguments made in the preceding period: that the United States was making obligations to spend money and lives on behalf of foreign countries, and that such obligations were not in the American national interest. His solution was to disband the institution altogether. His voice, however, was a voice alone.

Other critics of NATO enlargement refrained from advocating a policy so extreme. Representing two of the voices critical of NATO enlargement in the previous period, Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) and John W. Warner (R-VA) restated the major concern about NATO enlargement: that it would provoke Russian distrust.448

But, while not lone voices in the wilderness, these Senators hardly represented a chorus, and their share of the debate was chopped in half after 1999.

446 Congressman Paul (TX). “U.S. Foreign Policy and NATO’s Involvement in Yugoslavia and Kosovo.” Congressional Record 145: 55 (April 21, 1999) p. H2261. Senator Warner (VA). “NATO Expansion.” Congressional Record 141: 109 (June 30, 1995) p. S9571. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 447 Congressman Paul (TX). “Welcoming the Accession of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia to NATO.” Congressional Record 150: 45 (April 2, 2004) p. E530. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 448 Senator Moynihan (NY). “On NATO Intervention in Kosovo.” Congressional Record 145: 62 (May 3, 1999) p. S4571. Available from ProQuest ® Congressional; Accessed: 12/15/17. 179

These patterns were repeated in the Senate Committee Hearings. Between 1999 and 2004 the Senate held six committee hearings on NATO and NATO enlargement discussing the relative merits of enlargement. In all of those hearings, only three Senators expressed a firm unwillingness to support a second round of NATO enlargement:

Senators Warner, Roberts, and Inhofe. Their arguments echoed those of the previous period: that NATO enlargement entailed a U.S. commitment to uphold Article V in much more of Eastern Europe449, including the Baltic States, that those states offered marginal utility to the alliance450, and that a further enlargement would be a budget burden.451

But, as these arguments faded in the Congressional Record, so they did in the committees: Senator Warner would later support NATO enlargement, somewhat tepidly, after acknowledging that NATO allies could provide “niche capabilities”452, and Senators

Roberts and Inhofe would not make strong statements either in opposition or in favor in any Senate hearing after 2002.

Perhaps most damningly, the Senate Hearings featured another characteristic that wildly deviated from the 1990s norm: the critical experts stopped appearing. Prior to

1999, each of the Senate Committee Hearings had featured at least one expert witness who vociferously disagreed with a policy of NATO enlargement. During the debate prior to the second wave of NATO enlargement, the Senate continued to hear from experts,

449 U.S. Senate. Committee on Armed Services. The Future of the North Atlantic Treaty Orgnization (NATO), Hearing. Washington: Government Printing Office, 2002. (S. HRG. 107-764; Date: February 28, 2002) p. 6. Text in ProQuest ® Congressional Hearings Digital Collection; Accessed: December 15, 2017. 450 Ibid, 11. 451 Ibid, 13 452 Ibid, 22. 180 representing both the Bush administration and some outside groups, but not one of those experts came to argue against further NATO enlargement. NATO-skeptical voices were far from unknown in the larger academia and media environment453; those voices could have been invited to speak by the committee chairs or the minority members of the committee. Those voices were not brought into the room.

The result was predictable. The advise-and-consent vote in the Senate on the second round of NATO enlargement took place on May 8th, 2003. The vote was unanimous: 96-0, with four senators absent, to add Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia,

Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania to NATO.454 The remainder of NATO’s member countries would ratify this decision in the subsequent weeks.

Was this overconfident? I argue that it was.

The threat of Russian reaction against NATO enlargement grew considerably following the incorporation of the Baltic states into NATO. This risk was known, and acknowledged: while critics were not brought into the Senate committee hearings, the question of whether Russia would respond negatively to Baltic incorporation into NATO was nonetheless asked of many of the witnesses. These witnesses routinely dismissed the danger.

453 Jeffrey Taylor, “The Next Threat to NATO,” The Atlantic, February 2002, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/02/the-next-threat-to-nato/302422/; Ted Galen Carpenter, “The Folly of NATO Enlargement,” CATO Institute, https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/folly-nato-enlargement. 454 Brian Knowlton, “Senate Votes Unanimous to Approve Expansion of NATO,” The New York Times, May 8, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/international/worldspecial/senate-votes- unanimously-to-approve-expansion-of.html. 181

The perspective on the threat from Russia was that it had been wildly overstated in the late 1990s, and that the circumstances of the post-9/11 period meant that Russia would tolerate NATO enlargement, including NATO enlargement into the Baltics.

Ambassador Marc Grossman, then Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, was frequently called to brief Senate Committees on NATO enlargement and he argued that

Russia would not “love” NATO enlargement, but would tolerate it because of an increased emphasis on terrorism and coordination between NATO and Russia.455

A second expert, Dr. F. Stephen Larrabee from RAND, summarized the general perspective in 2003:

“For a long time Russia strongly opposed Baltic membership in NATO, arguing that a Baltic membership in the Alliance would cross a ‘red line’ and lead to a serious deterioration of Russia-NATO relations. At the Helsinki summit in March 1997, President Yeltsin tried to get a private oral agreement from President Clinton – a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that would not be made public – not to admit the Baltic states into the Alliance. President Clinton flatly refused to make such a commitment…

Some Western observers have expressed fears that Baltic membership in NATO would seriously complicate NATO’s relations with Russia. However, this seems unlikely. As noted, Putin played down the Baltic issue in the run-up to the Prague summit. His main goal is to try to improve ties to NATO. Thus, he is unlikely to make Baltic membership a major issue in relations with NATO”456

455 U.S. Senate. Committee on Armed Services. The Future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). (S. HRG. 108-258; Date: March 27, 2003), p. 30. Text in ProQuest ® Congressional Hearings Digital Collection; Accessed: December 15, 2017. 456 U.S. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. NATO Enlargement: Qualifications and Contributions). (S. HRG. 108-180; Date: March-April 2003), p. 119. Text in ProQuest ® Congressional Hearings Digital Collection; Accessed: December 15, 2017. 182

These arguments, or ones that matched them in character, were the only arguments made in Senate committee hearings on NATO enlargement. Despite Dr. Larrabee acknowledging that “Western observers” were concerned about further enlargement and how it could complicate the relationship with Russia, and noting how the Baltics had represented a “red line” in the past, no experts, nor Senators, ever made these arguments in Committee or in public statements. The arguments were acknowledged and promptly dismissed, rather than taken with deadly seriousness as they had been in the 1990s.

While Dr. Larrabee accurately reproduced Putin’s comments at the time, he neglected to mention that Putin’s expressed view was contrasted by the views of other members of the Russian government, and that at other times Putin had made contradictory statements. Russia’s foreign minister simultaneously stated that “We don’t want this enlargement, and we will continue to maintain a negative attitude. It’s a mistake. The presence of American soldiers on our border has created a kind of paranoia in Russia.”457 In 2002, Putin had made public statements that he would never cease to oppose NATO’s enlargement until the organization had evolved from a military to a

“political” organization.458 Outside of the Congressional debate, other scholars – not invited to Senate hearings – argued that incorporating the Baltic countries was a particular risk, given their large Russian minority populations and proximity to Russia.459

457 Anto La Guardia, “NATO is no problem in Baltics, Putin tells the West,” The Telegraph, April 3, 2004, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1458449/Nato-is-no-problem- in-Baltics-Putin-tells-the-West.html. 458 Taylor, “The Next Threat to NATO.” 459 Taylor, “The Next Threat to NATO.” 183

Arguments that expansion into Russia’s “near abroad” was unwise were common in both academia and journalism during this period460, and yet advocates for those arguments do not appear in Senate hearings on the issue.

One recurrent justification for why the Russians would accept NATO enlargement was the NATO-Russia Council, which was meant to both diffuse tensions and produce cooperation in counter-terrorism and other issues.461 But, while dismissive of the threat, experts did acknowledge that Russia did not like NATO enlargement into the Baltic

States: “I cannot say the Russians are pleased about it. They are clearly not pleased about it. They are particularly sensitive, of course, to the three Baltic countries whom we strongly support for membership… Some Russians tend to be either wrongly nostalgic for that period or they are sensitive because these three countries are contiguous to western Russia.”462 Another speaker suggested, without providing evidence, that “the invitation to the Baltic countries would… set the stage for a new [peaceful] relationship between Europe and Russia,”463 and a third: “Some observers have worried that NATO membership with have a negative impact on Baltic-Russian relations. The opposite, in my

460 Carpenter, “The Folly of NATO Enlargement.” 461 U.S. Senate. Committee on Armed Services. Military Implications of NATO Enlargement and Post-Conflict Iraq). (S. HRG. 108-526; Date: April 10, 2003), p. 34. Text in ProQuest® Congressional Hearings Digital Collection; Accessed: December 15, 2017. 462 U.S. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. NATO Enlargment: Qualifications and Contributions – Parts I-IV. (S. HRG. 108-180; Date: March 27 and April 1, 3, and 8, 2003), p. 71. Text in ProQuest® Congressional Hearings Digital Collection; Accessed: December 15, 2017. 463 U.S. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. NATO Enlargment: Qualifications and Contributions – Parts I-IV. (S. HRG. 108-180; Date: March 27 and April 1, 3, and 8, 2003), p. 79. Text in ProQuest® Congressional Hearings Digital Collection; Accessed: December 15, 2017. 184 view, is likely to be the case. Rather than leading to a deterioration in Baltic-Russian relations, as some fear, Baltic membership in NATO is likely to lead to a gradual improvement of Baltic-Russian relations.”464 He too offered no justification for this claim. The speakers provide reason to expect future problems – the resentment of the

Russian population (if misguided) – but blithely assume this resentment will fade away without providing a convincing reason to expect it will (or any reason, in the case of the latter two), and despite the existence of existing evidence (that went without being presented at all in these hearings) that the opposite could or would be true. The assumption was that since there had not been major problems yet there would not be major problems ever, which is indicative of overconfidence in that it dismisses both uncertainty and risk.

The increasing risk of a Russian reaction against NATO enlargement, given the special importance of the Baltics to Russia, also increased a second danger: that of the

United States being called to uphold its commitments under Article V of the NATO charter. This recalled Senator Roberts’ concerns that the American people were not willing to do so; or, a less extreme variant on a theme, that the American people did not want to pay the requisite bills of the NATO alliance. These concerns were buried. The context of the conversation had shifted from whether Americans would accept the burden of supporting European countries under threat to how those countries had been

464 U.S. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. NATO Enlargment: Qualifications and Contributions – Parts I-IV. (S. HRG. 108-180; Date: March 27 and April 1, 3, and 8, 2003), p. 116-117. Text in ProQuest® Congressional Hearings Digital Collection; Accessed: December 15, 2017. 185 supporting the United States when it was under threat: the 2001 activation of Article V after September 11th and the subsequent provision of assistance to the United States in

Afghanistan by many of the prospective NATO member states dominated the conversation. Senator Roberts, the chief spokesperson for this argument before 2004, still in the Senate, declined to raise the issue a second time. The potential unwillingness of a future American public to live up to commitments to the security of, for instance, the

Baltic States, went unaddressed, without any clear explanation for why this concern was no longer valid.

March 30th 2004 – April 1st 2009: the 3rd Wave of Post-Cold War Enlargement

Following the accessions to NATO in 2004 of the Baltic and other Eastern

European states came the third wave of post-Cold War NATO enlargement, with five countries on the list for future membership: Croatia, Albania, Macedonia, Georgia, and

Ukraine. Over this period the United States would work deliberately and overtly towards future membership of all five of these countries; although they would be on faster or slower tracks for membership, members of the American policy elite in Congress would make clear statements advocating for the membership of each of these countries in the next five years. The basic pattern of increased risk (particularly with regards to Georgia and Ukraine, both even more sensitive to Russia than the Baltics had been) combined with decreased perception of that risk would continue.

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The general trend towards a lack of debate as NATO enlargement continued from

2004-2009, revealed in both the Congressional Record and in Senate committee hearings:

Table 10: Congressional Floor Statements about NATO Enlargement (2004-2009) No Enlargement 1 2.94% Ambiguous 1 2.94% Yes Enlargement 32 94.12%

Table 11: Senator Expressions of Support in Committee Hearings about NATO Enlargement (2004-2009)

No Enlargement 0 0.00% Ambiguous 0 0.00% Yes Enlargement 5 100.00%

Jarringly, the Senate held only one committee hearing, and this for only a single day: the

Committee on Foreign Relations met on March 11, 2008, with clear statements from

Senators Biden, Lugar, Obama, and DeMint, all in favor of NATO’s enlargement to include Albania and Croatia. Biden and Lugar would also explicitly support extending the Membership Action Plan to both Ukraine and Georgia. The Senate, which had produced almost a thousand pages of committee transcript in 1996 and 1997, now produced a total of 87 pages. In an additional hearing of the Commission on Security and

Cooperation in Europe, which possessed members from both the House and Senate,

Senator Ben Cardin would also express support, and also express support for the extension of a Membership Action Plan to Ukraine and Georgia. The singular statement of strong disagreement with NATO enlargement present in either the Congressional

Record or the Senate hearings came in 2009, only after the membership of Croatia and 187

Albania had received consent from the Senate, from Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-

CA). His arguments echoed those of Congressman Paul from the prior period.

Two key votes took place in this period. The first was on the NATO Freedom

Consolidation Act of 2007, introduced by Senator Lugar and passed by unanimous consent (meaning without a formal vote following an absence of any objections) through both the House and Senate in March of that year. The NATO Freedom Consolidation Act advocated for membership in NATO of five countries: Albania, Croatia, Georgia,

Macedonia (FYROM), and Ukraine:

(3) [Congress] endorses the vision of further enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization articulated by President George W. Bush on June 15, 2001, and by former President William J. Clinton on October 22, 1996, and urges our allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to work with the United States to realize a role for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in promoting global security, including continued support for enlargement to include qualified candidate states, specifically by entering into a Membership Action Plan with Georgia and recognizing the progress toward meeting the responsibilities and obligations of NATO membership by Albania, Croatia, Georgia, Macedonia (FYROM), and Ukraine.”465

The next year, on September 25, 2008, the Senate would agree to consent to Albanian and Croatian membership by voice vote, without any formal record of which way individual members voted; this means that again there was no objection.

Was this overconfident? I argue that it was, and indeed was more overconfident that the prior period of NATO enlargement had been.

465 U.S. Senate. 110th Congress. “S. 494: NATO Freedom Consolidation Act of 2007.” (Version: 4, Version Date: July 3, 2007). Text from: Full Text of Bills. Available from: www.govtrack.us; Accessed: 12/15/17. 188

Compared to the previous period, during which the threat posed by Russia was at least somewhat ambiguous, during this debate period there was no ambiguity. On

February 10, 2007, Putin spoke in Munich on a conference on security policy, giving a hair-raising speech filled with denunciations of the American-led post-Cold War era.

Translated excerpts of that speech and the following question-and-answer session included the following statements:

“It turns out that NATO has put its frontline bases on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfill the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all.

I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”

“We are indebted to the balance of powers between these two superpowers. There was an equilibrium and a fear of mutual destruction. And in those days one party was afraid to make an extra step without consulting the other. And this was certainly a fragile peace and a frightening one. But as we see today, it was reliable enough. Today, it seems that peace is not so reliable.”

“And now about whether Russia will use military force without the sanction of the UN. We will always operate strictly within the international legal framework. My basic education is in law and I will allow myself to remind both myself and my colleagues that according to the UN Charter peace-keeping operations require the sanction of both the UN and the UN Security Council. This is in the case of peacekeeping operations. But in the UN Charter there is also an article about self- defense. And no sanctions are required in this case.”466

466 Vladimir Putin, “Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy” (speech, Munich, February 10, 2007), wikisource, 189

Putin made three clear statements: (1) that Putin opposed NATO expansion and felt it represented a provocation against and threat to Russia; (2) that Putin was willing to use military force in defense of Russia; and (3) that Putin perceived peace in Europe to be fragile.

The February 10th speech came just days after H.R. 987, the NATO Freedom

Consolidation Act of 2007, was introduced in Congress, and just weeks before the NATO

Freedom Consolidation Act of 2007 passed through the Senate (on March 15) and House

(on March 26) of that year. President Bush would sign it into law on April 9th.

Putin’s response should not have been surprising. Immediately after the second wave of NATO enlargement, in early 2004, Russia responded with multiple expressions of discontent, including political response: a Parliamentary resolution that denounced

NATO expansion in general, and a military response: a shift in Russian military posture and doctrine.467 Yet, NATO enlargement continued unabated; and in the Senate the policy was even more unquestioned during the run-up to the third wave of expansion than it had been during the second. And, moreover, it was precisely the response predicted by the skeptics during the very first wave of NATO enlargement, some of whom – like

Senator Pat Roberts (R-KA), then serving as the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence

Committee – were still in the Congress and had made those very arguments in the 90s.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Speech_and_the_Following_Discussion_at_the_Munich_ Conference_on_Security_Policy. 467 Steven Lee Myers, “As NATO Finally Arrives on Its Border, Russia Grumbles,” The New York Times, April 3, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/03/world/as-nato- finally-arrives-on-its-border-russia-grumbles.html. 190

The conversation – to the limited extent that there was a conversation at all – was now one-sided in a way it had not been prior.

This is not to say that Russia’s now vocal unhappiness went entirely unacknowledged. During the single Senate committee hearing on NATO enlargement in

2008, the Senators discussed a verbal threat Putin had issued shortly before: to point nuclear missiles at Ukraine in the event Ukraine joined NATO: “It is horrible to say and even horrible to think that, in response to the deployment of [NATO missile defense] in

Ukrainian territory, which cannot theoretically be ruled out, Russia could target its missile systems at Ukraine.”468 Russia’s intransigence with regard to Ukraine and

Georgia was recognized – the Director of the Atlantic Council’s International Security

Program, James Townsend, specifically noted that a Georgian membership plan would provoke consternation among some NATO member countries, describing their reaction as one of: “You’re really asking for it, there,”469 but nonetheless most of the Senators who made statements about NATO expansion specifically endorsed the idea of Georgian and Ukrainian membership, and none of the Senators who made a statement rejected the idea.470

Twelve years before, Senator’s Nunn’s “not whether but when” speech had pointed out: “if NATO enlargement stays on its current course, reaction in Russia is

468 Peter Finn, “Putin Threatens Ukraine on NATO,” Washington Post, February 13, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2008/02/12/AR2008021201658.html. 469 U.S. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. NATO: Enlargement and Effectiveness. (S. HRG. 110-506; Date: March 11, 2008) p. 83. Text in ProQuest ® Congressional Hearings Digital Collection; Accessed: December 15, 2017. 470 Ibid, 1-4. 191 likely to be a sense of isolation by those committed to democracy and economic reform, with varying degrees of paranoia, nationalism, and demagoguery emerging from across the current political spectrum.” In 2007 and 2008, after Senator Nunn’s concerns had been realized, with that realization manifesting most prominently in the form of Putin’s

Munich speech, the United States House and Senate both nonetheless pursued Ukrainian and Georgian membership in NATO. It is the pursuit of further NATO enlargement, as the risks of that policy had clearly become more acute, combined with the relative absence of debate, which is the clearest indicator that NATO enlargement policy had become manic.

Finally, the risk of Russian intransigence further enunciated the downsides of

American commitments under Article V. Subsequent to the votes on the NATO Freedom

Consolidation Act, and the Senate hearing (on March 8, 2008), Georgia and Russia become embroiled in a 5-day war which saw Russia effectively occupy two Georgian provinces: South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The war, which occurred between August 7 and

August 12th of 2008, preceded the Senate vote on Albanian and Croatian membership by two weeks. And yet, despite the invasion of Georgia and the questions it raised about the dangers of provoking Russia and the vulnerability of states like Ukraine (whose membership plan was still in progress) and the Baltics, no further hearings were held and the vote was unanimous.

I began this section with the objective of demonstrating that the NATO expansion policy became more aggressive (and riskier) over time, that the risks involved with each

192 stage of expansion were known even at the time, and that the acknowledgement of those risks declined despite the greater probability and extent of the risks. I believe I have done so. With each wave of NATO expansion the United States increased the number of countries to which it committed to spend blood and treasure in the event of some external threat, and progressed deeper and deeper into post-Soviet space, risking provoking the

Russians. These risks were known from the start, acknowledged by Senators like Nunn,

Roberts, and Warner, and even as the extent of those risks grew, the attention they were paid declined, to the point where there was not a single voice in Senate hearings taking them seriously – even as the anger from Russian leadership was simultaneously taking center stage in Munich. This, I argue, is evidence that NATO enlargement in this stage was manic policy.

In the final section of this chapter, I will present some evidence from men and women who were present during the process, whose descriptions of how and why the critical voices subsided over time lend further credence to the proposition that the process took on the characteristics of a mania, thus producing more and more aggressive investment into NATO, inflating a foreign policy bubble to maximum extent until Russia finally popped it in 2008.

IV. The Mania of Post-Cold War NATO Enlargement

In the final section of this chapter, I summarize and defend the assertion that

NATO enlargement through 2008 qualifies as manic foreign policy. In the previous

193 section, I demonstrated that NATO enlargement simultaneously became more aggressive and less reflective as the risks of the policy became more acute. I argue that this is indicative of manic foreign policy. In this section, I argue that what additional evidence exists suggests that the underlying forces driving this dynamic match those of mania: actors overestimated the benefits and underestimated the risks, and both halves of this dynamic grew in strength over time.

One of the persistent questions emerging from the research above is: what caused the skeptics to cease being skeptical over the duration of this period? Why did they vanish off the stage and stop using their positions to articulate the reasons to be wary of

NATO expansion that they had in the 1990s, or what caused them to change their minds?

The most obvious way to answer this question is to simply ask them, or their staff, what changed.

To this end, I interviewed Dakota Rudesill, who served as the Legislative

Assistant for National Security for Senator Kent Conrad (D-NK) from 1999-2000, and then as a U.S. Budget Committee Staffer from 2001-2003. Senator Conrad was one of the

18 Senators to vote against NATO enlargement in 1998 and then vote for NATO enlargement in 2003. Over the course of our conversation, he suggested three reasons for the transformation of the debate in those five years:

First, there was a feeling among the NATO skeptics that “[they] had lost, the battle was over,” and that using political capital to fight a war that they could not possibly win was unwise. This is an observation that reinforces the mania explanation: after that first round of policy implementation happens, one of the reasons in rounds subsequent to

194 the first that benefits are overestimated is those who are skeptical about the policy are no longer willing to fight, as the decision has already been made. So, even as more aggressive investments are made over time, fewer criticisms are voiced.

Second, those skeptics also had to grapple with the fact that their concerns had not immediately come to pass. Yes, they were still concerned about the long-term problems they had identified, but Russia had not aggressively responded nor had the American public rejected the extension of the Article V commitment. The events of the initial period of NATO expansion provided no additional evidence for their arguments. This observation too reinforces the mania explanation: just as people become confident in the returns of their investment, people become less skeptical about the costs – the small amount of evidence available is that of gains, not costs, feeding into the positive feedback loop that drives increasingly aggressive investment. This affects both those aggressively in favor: Senators who favored NATO enlargement claimed they had been vindicated by the policy, while Senators who opposed it allowed themselves to be won over, all by a limited amount of evidence. In this we see some of the seeds for the “more profound optimism” that drives a mania.

Finally, and most potentially problematic for the mania theory, was 9/11. The attacks of September 11th become the dominant security conversation, and it sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the NATO enlargement debate. Conversations about NATO quickly became dominated by its role in Afghanistan, and many of the justifications for bringing new countries into NATO often made note that each individual prospective member had contributed to the War on Terror (hence conversations about their “niche capabilities”).

195

September 11th is a complicating factor, because it provides an alternative explanation to mania for the transformation in the debate: rather than being the product of a manic policy adoption process, the second and third rounds of NATO expansion might have been driven by an entirely different dynamic: one where the key factor was combating terrorism. I concede that this argument became a factor that may explain some of the variation over the period, but I argue that the evidence suggests that 9/11 helped magnify the mania, rather than operating independent of the mania. This is for two reasons: first, the key argument for NATO expansion, namely that it will extend the zone of peace, unite Europe, and make the world safe for democracy, continued to be the most common rationale provided for the necessity of NATO expansion in the 2001-2008 period. Second, the terrorism threat helped provide one of the key arguments for why

Russia would not oppose NATO enlargement – the two countries often presented as partners, with NATO enlargement being a secondary concern to Russia compared to terrorism – which provided a convenient way for Senators to brush off concerns about

Russia’s response to NATO enlargement. This argument was not, however, exclusive: experts usually offered it in the additional context that NATO provided stability in

Europe that was also desirable to Russia. Terrorism became part of the NATO enlargement conversation, but it did not become the conversation.

This is to say that the elements of mania were present, and 9/11 helped amplify them by stifling debate on the risks of NATO enlargement. The mania may not have been as extreme in the absence of 9/11, but 9/11 does not mean the process was not manic: the

196 policy elites increasingly overestimated the benefits and underestimated the costs of their foreign policy investments in ways that fit the a manic pattern.

That this happened is not that surprising. NATO enlargement meets many of the criteria that make a given policy more likely to be “locked-in.”471 NATO enlargement received low levels of news coverage, and mostly positive news coverage (especially after 9/11); it possessed a persuasive, persistent causal story with ideological elements that made it convincing472; both the public and especially certain members of the foreign policy elite identified with NATO as an institution and became emotionally invested in its success (even many of the NATO enlargement skeptics fit into this category); and as each round of enlargement proceeded, the baseline was adjusted to be compared to the previous increment, rather than NATO before the collapse of the Soviet Union. These factors contributed to the incremental decline in debate and the overestimation of benefits that characterized the later rounds of NATO enlargement, and 9/11 reinforced each of them after 2001.

In this chapter, I sought to demonstrate that NATO enlargement from 1993-2008, from when it was first raised as a possibility to the admittance of Croatia and Albania, showed all the signs of being the product of a manic policy process. Confidence that

NATO expansion would allow American leadership to facilitate stability and democracy

471 Bryan D. Jones, Herschel F. Thomas III, and Michelle Wolfe, “Policy Bubbles,” The Policy Studies Journal 42, No. 1 (2014): 152-153. 472 Tobias Bunde and Timo Noetzel, “Unavoidable Tensions: The Liberal Path to Global NATO,” Contemporary Security Policy 31, No. 2 (2010): 295-318. 197 showed signs of being overconfidence as early as the first round of expansion in 1998, and in each subsequent round this became more pronounced. Debate among policy elites subsided until becoming nearly non-existent; it became increasingly one sided with skepticism absent from what debate there was. And this was despite the fact that the principal risks that had been known from the start of the process were simultaneously growing.

198

Conclusion: Mania and Beyond

“Political science is the science not only of what is, but of what ought to be.”473

-Edward Hallett Carr

The central aims of this project have been: (1) to defend the theoretical proposition that, as a consequence of the human need for confidence given uncertainty, manias are possible in the realm of foreign policy, (2) to present a three-stage theory of mania, beginning with a systemic shock that provokes New Era Thinking, followed by investment in foreign policies to take advantage of the opportunities of the New Era, and finally a positive feedback loop where foreign policy elites become increasingly overconfident in both the stories about the New Era and their investments until something shakes that confidence, and (3) to present the end of the Cold War and subsequent NATO enlargement, particularly the push to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, as an example of this process. In Chapter Two I presented a theory of confidence, overconfidence, and mania; In Chapter Three I demonstrated that the end of the Cold

War was both a displacement and resulted in New Era Thinking, and in Chapter Four I demonstrated how through each of the first three stages of post-Cold War NATO enlargement American foreign policy elites (namely members of Congress) increasingly

473 Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Perennial, 2001 [1939]), 5. 199 expressed confidence in their actions, failing to articulate known risks, and increasingly uniform in support for increasingly risky policies.

In this chapter I have two broad goals. First, I want to present a handful of additional examples of displacement, New Era Thinking, and mania at work, to provide some additional grounding of the concept outside of the end of the Cold War moment.

Second, I want to expand the implications of confidence and overconfidence, with (1) a discussion of how a “panic” in International Relations could or would occur, (2) a discussion of the positive effects of mania and how they relate to and defend the importance of Idealism, and (3) a discussion of the potential for and consequences of underconfidence (perhaps even a foreign policy “depression”). I will conclude with a discussion about how foreign policy makers might be able to avoid mania, and whether avoiding mania should generally be an objective of states.

I. Additional Examples of Mania

There are two reasons to search for additional examples of mania in International

Relations. The first is to offer a degree of evidence that the phenomenon I have identified is not unique to the end of the Cold War. The Cold War certainly was a unique moment in world history, globally transformative and which altered the relations between both people and states in a multiplicity of ways. But mania can emerge out of other historical events and their consequences as well.

200

The second is to broaden the potential ideological subjects of a mania. In this dissertation, I began with John Mearsheimer’s critique of NATO enlargement and the

West’s Ukraine policy, and his particular description: “liberal delusions.”474 I do not want to leave the impression that mania is unique to liberal foreign policies. Manias occur because of underlying human psychology and how we associate with one another in groups under the condition of uncertainty; they are not the product of any given ideological vantage point. It may be the case that NATO enlargement was the product of liberal (in a philosophical rather than political sense) delusions, but it is not the case that every mania is.

When searching for additional examples of mania, we have two options. We can either look for examples of spectacular crises and work our way backwards to look for a pre-existing mania, or look for examples of displacement and look for the development of mania in their wake. Of course, it is possible for an event to be both at once. Working backwards, a selection of major transformational moments includes: the 2008 Financial

Crisis, September 11, 2001, the End of the Cold War, the End of World War II, the End of World War I, the Unification of Germany (or, alternatively, the rise of Nationalism), the Napoleonic Wars, and the French Revolution. Going further back, we commonly recognize the end of the Thirty Year’s War as a transformational moment, in that it provided the origins of the sovereignty norm.475

474 John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Foreign Affairs 93, No. 4 (2014): 77-84, 85-89. 475 Derek Croxton, “The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Origins of Sovereignty,” The International History Review 21, No. 3 (1999): 569-591. 201

Manias are also not universal. They afflict social groups476, and in the case of

NATO enlargement they specifically afflicted the social group of United States policy- makers and the policy-adjacent community, backed by enough of the Western policy community at large to allow the mania to progress (note that France and Germany were the voices within NATO that prevented Ukraine and Georgia from being offered admission to the Membership Action Plan outright – they were not as overconfident as the U.S. Congress, and served to slow enlargement’s velocity).477 And, in international relations you may have rival social groups trying to puncture the bubble, dismayed by the nature of a New Era that may not serve their interests and disgusted at policies that they perceive as detrimental.

With these points in mind, let us consider several recent moments of displacement and foreign policies adopted in their wake that we might identify as manic, and the questions that arise from each of them.

476 Particularly we can say that for a mania to spread through a community, that community needs to have a shared authority figure that is propagating the mania. If there are conflicting authority figures, that makes it more difficult for people to reach the point where they take a set of stories as “taken for granted.” A similar kind of phenomenon has been identified as operating within the realm of public opinion about American foreign policy, where the public is likely to support given foreign policies when there’s consensus among domestic and foreign elites about the wisdom of the mission. See: John H. Aldrich, Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, Jason Reifler, and Kristin Thompson Sharp, “Foreign Policy and the Electoral Connection,” Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006): 482-483. 477 Steven Pifer, “Ukraine and NATO Following Bucharest,” Brookings, Tusday, May 6, 2008, https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/ukraine-and-nato-following-bucharest/. 202

Financial Crisis of 2008

The Financial Crisis of 2008 can be thought of as the event that broke Western mania and provoked the current period of distress. But it also opened the door for other global players to conclude that the old era had perhaps reached its conclusion, and that a new one – one that was not unipolar, and did not inevitably revolve around the United

States – had begun. As Michael Ignatieff put it: “the noon hours of the United States and its global dominance are over.”478

In China, for instance, the crisis caused Chinese IR specialists to “[abandon] the view that the international system is unipolar”479 That China’s foreign policy has since become more assertive is clear, with both aggressive economic policy and increased militarization of the South China Sea emblematic of the shift,480 and an increased push towards a global leadership role.481 Indeed, China has been described as “triumphal,”482 which is the same word that was used to describe the United States coming out of the

Cold War.

478 Michael Ignatieff, “The Ignatieff Revival,” The Economist, April 25, 2009, 42. 479 Roger Irvine, “Primacy and Responsibility: China’s Perception of Its International Future,” China Security 6, No. 3 (2010): 26. 480 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “American and Chinese Power after the Financial Crisis,” The Washington Quarterly 33, No. 4 (2010): 143-153. 481 Xiaoyu Pu, “China’s International Leadership: Regional Activism vs. Global Reluctance,” Chinese Political Science Review (2017), https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Xiaoyu_Pu2/publication/319652527_China%27s_In ternational_Leadership_Regional_Activism_vs_Global_Reluctance/links/59dd05604585 15618913813f/Chinas-International-Leadership-Regional-Activism-vs-Global- Reluctance.pdf. 482 Michael Yahuda, “China’s New Assertiveness in the South China Sea,” Journal of Contemporary China 22, No. 81 (2013): 446-459. 203

But whether this has or will result in foreign policy mania is too early to tell. We are likely still in the first or second round of policy adoption, with the feedback loop in its early stages. Perhaps the biggest dangers of mania in this case are in Chinese foreign policy, with the danger that China will take successes in the South China Sea as proof that the United States has become a ‘paper tiger,’ and push harder against it. Absent a window into the mind of the Chinese foreign policy elite similar to the one offered by

American foreign policy journals and the American Congressional Record, this is impossible to estimate, but I would argue that the first two elements – the displacement and New Era Thinking – are both present.

Similarly, we should consider Russia. In addition to the financial crisis, Russia also experienced policy successes in Georgia in 2008.483 This was then followed up by

Russia’s similar intervention in Ukraine, annexation of Crimea,484 and subsequent interference in American and European domestic politics.485 These have the appearance of incremental escalations, with increasing risk of significant American and Western pushback. Whether this risk is known and considered acceptable, or disregarded given past successes cannot be known, so classifying it as “manic” is yet impossible. However,

483 Roy Allison, “Russia Resurgent? Moscow’s Campaign to ‘Coerce Georgia to Peace’,” International Affairs 84, No. 6 (2008): 1145-1171. 484 Roy Allison, “Russian ‘deniable’ intervention in Ukraine: how and why Russia broke the rules,” International Affairs 90, No. 6 (2014): 1255-1297. 485 Jonathan Masters, “Russia, Trump, and the 2016 U.S. Election,” Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder, February 26, 2018, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/russia- trump-and-2016-us-election; Matt Bradley, “Europe’s Far-Right Enjoys Backing from Russia’s Putin,” NBC News, February 12, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/europe-s-far-right-enjoys-backing-russia-s-putin- n718926. 204 again we see the displacement and New Era Thinking pattern, raising the possibility that

Russia perceive unreasonable benefits and risks of a further escalation in the Baltic

States, a possibility of which NATO is acutely aware.486

These are prospective manias: current situations which match the general pattern of manic development, but for which it is yet unclear – due to time and the lack of a window into the relevant community of foreign policy elites – whether there is a mania in progress.

The End of World War II

World War II and the subsequent Cold War period is another clear example of displacement and following New Era. We can examine numerous potential examples of mania in the subsequent period, including, potentially, decolonization and containment.

Decolonization had been in the works prior to 1945 (often the stories of New Era

Thinking have their roots in the previous period, they are rarely wholly new and unprecedented), but the rate at which it proceeded after the war increased dramatically, with some evidence that decolonization movements in one location inspired more confidence (and imitation) in others, particularly within historically and culturally linked dependencies.487 And the hopes and aspirations of the movement were so high, with expectations of the gains to come and, perhaps, a failure to acknowledge the risks: “Most

486 David A. Shlapak and Michael W. Johnson, “Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank,” Rand Corporation Report (2016), http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/1002535.pdf. 487 David Strang, “From Dependency to Sovereignty: An Event History Analysis of Decolonization 1870-1987,” American Sociological Review 55, No. 6 (1990): 846-860. 205 of the new nation-states achieved independence in a spirit of heady expectancy, a spirit captured by one of the principal characters in Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel, The Beautyful

Ones are Not Yet Born, who reflects about the moment of independence in Ghana: ‘We were ready here for big and beautiful thing . . . The promise was so beautiful.’”488 This seems to have the “excessive expectation of gains and disregard of risk” that characterizes periods of mania. (It also raises questions about the positive effects of mania, which I will discuss in Section II of this chapter, and whether decolonization could have succeeded at all had it not been manic.)

A second example of potential post-World War II foreign policy mania is containment. George Kennan’s strategy, first proposed in his 1947 “The Sources of

Soviet Conduct,” was: “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”489 Containment would go on to be an element of American foreign policy throughout the remainder of the Cold War, with the particularly varying based on the historical moment and the administrations in power in both the United States and the Soviet Union.490 The idea that the Vietnam War was a product of

“overconfidence” is hardly new: Barbara Tuchman famously argued that the Vietnam

War was “folly” in that it was a policy pursued by a government that was directly

488 Tamara Sivanandan, “Anticolonialism, national liberation, and postcolonial nation formation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 42. 489 George F. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 566 (1947): 575 490 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 206 contrary to its own interests.491 But the decisions that led to the Vietnam folly could be read both as manic and as a fear of mania, with the prevailing Domino Theory – that a single communist success would provoke a raft of imitators both regionally and globally

– being the latter,492 while the belief that the U.S. could build a free and prosperous

Vietnam, based on the successes of the Marshall Plan in Europe, being the former. (A similar process would later lead the George W. Bush administration to believe that it would be easy to transform Iraq into a liberal, capitalist democracy, using the revolutions in Eastern Europe as the precedent for the ease and sustainability of the transformation493; another legacy of the post-Cold War mania. Iraq proved significantly more difficult than this blithe comparison had suggested, and Eastern Europe’s liberal democratic transformation may not be as sustainable as it then appeared.494)

The End of World War I

The “war to end all wars,” World War I, also served as a major displacement in some ways. It too brought about the perception of a New Era: the idea that the experience of the war opened the door for deliberate, transformational change to the international

491 Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). 492 Peter T. Leeson and Andrea Dean, “The Democratic Domino Theory,” American Journal of Political Science 53, No. 3 (2009): 533-551. 493 David Hastings Dunn, “Myths, Motivations, and ‘Misunderstandings’: The Bush Administration and Iraq,” International Affairs 79, No. 2 (2003): 279-297. 494 Ted Galen Carpenter, “Europe’s Drift into Authoritarianism,” The National Interest, December 16, 2015, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/eastern-europes-drift- authoritarianism-14652; Ivan Krastev, “Eastern Europe’s Illiberal Revolution,” Foreign Affairs 97 (May/June 2018). 207 system from one where such a war was possible (and perhaps even inevitable), to one where it was avoidable. Building off preceding international agreements which served as a model and a starting point emerged a new apparatus of international institution and law, with the League of Nations and Briand-Kellogg Pact representing what was intended to be a pan-European (and even global) foreign policy strategy designed to create a true international order.

This attempt famously failed, and E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Year’s Crisis can be read as an extended critique of a mania and post-WWI utopian New Era Thinking. Carr pans the utopians as excessively optimistic, ignoring the realities of power and competition that any international system would have to account for. The utopians, in their hopes for a better future, had lost track of what was and was not reasonable, and hoped and strived unreasonably to make the utopian vision a reality – despite numerous pieces of evidence that it would not work, starting with the refusal of the U.S. Senate to assent to America’s participation in the League. As Carr described it: “The mirage of the

1920s was, as we now know, the age of continuously expanding territories and markets, of a world policed by the self-assured and not too onerous British hegemony, of a coherent “Western” civilization whose conflicts could be harmonized by a progressive extension of the area of common development and exploitation, of the easy assumptions that what was good for one was good for all and that what was economically right was

208 morally wrong.”495 Woodrow Wilson’s quote: “If it won’t work, it must be made to work,” is a picture of this hopeful overconfidence.496

This does not necessarily indicate the presence of a mania, however. Manias accelerate over time, fed by a positive feedback loop: New Era Thinking is reinforced and seems to be proven by events, creating overconfidence and the perception of certainty and control. There is some evidence to suggest this kind of process was at work.

Within the United Kingdom, faith in the League of Nations and a League-centered policy increased through the 1920s, in part because of the additional agreements (like the

Kellogg-Briand Pact) that were signed through that decade.497 In 1928, Franklin Delano

Roosevelt indicated his belief that the League had helped assure peace: “Best of all, [the

League] offers a common round table where threats against the peace of the world can be discussed and divergent views compromised” and that the United States needed to participate in that mission.498 Even after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, journals like Foreign Affairs presented the perspective that the League had mostly been a success at achieving its core purpose:

“Despite our anxiety over [Manchuria], we must not be led into minimizing the activities of the League as the guardian of peace, or its theoretical work to improve the machinery for the peaceful settlement of disputes, or its record in the practical cases in which it has taken either a direct or indirect role…

495 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 224. 496 Woodrow Wilson, quoted in Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 8. 497 Henry R. Winkler, “The Emergence of a Labor Foreign Policy in Great Britain, 1918- 1929,” The Journal of Modern History 28, No. 3 (1956): 247-258. 498 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Our Foreign Policy: A Democratic View,” Foreign Affairs 6, No. 4 (1929): 581. 209

Take, for example, the growth on all sides of the moral conviction that violence as an instrument of international policy should be abolished and that war is a crime. The well-nigh universal signature of the Kellogg Pact shows that this conviction is penetrating even official circles and is becoming an axiom in the foreign policy of countries…

We may go even further. The peaceful settlement of international disputes is becoming the official method of political procedure; it is becoming the normal rule, the recognized duty. Settlement by war is beginning to be considered immoral and abnormal. Almost all countries are now linked together by bilateral or multilateral treaties, or by general pacts and declarations, stipulating in detail the peaceful procedure to be adopted in the event of disputes.”499

This editorial was written by Edvard Beneš in 1932; he would go on to be President of the Czechoslovak Republic from 1935-1938 (resigning after the Munich Conference) and again from 1945-1948. The belief that peace was largely assured, even absent an enforcement mechanism and given specific contemporary evidence that this was not true, is striking.

Each of these examples bears, at first glance, signs of mania: of a displacement, of

New Era Thinking, and of measures of policy adoption. This recurrent pattern should persist, driven as it is by the human need for confidence and tendency to herd. When it does, it creates repeated possibilities for eventual systemic distress, panic, and collapse, as 1920s idealism collapsed into the “grim despair”500 of the 1930s.

499 Edvard Beneš, “The League of Nations: Successes and Failures,” Foreign Affairs 11, No. 1 (1932): 66-80. 500 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 224. 210

II. Beyond Mania: Additional Implications of Confidence for IR

There are three additional topics I wish to address before concluding. First, I want to address how manias end: how the bubble bursts, so to speak. Existing literature in economics and political science can inform our perspectives on this question, and in economics it’s the end of the mania that is often the most important part, as that is where the potential for major economic crises is created. Differences in setting make the parallels somewhat imprecise, however.

Second, I want to discuss mania as a positive: while manias always present an overestimation of benefits and disregard of risks, which does not mean that there are no benefits. Indeed, just as entrepreneurs whose animal spirits lead them to take ambitious risks (and often fail) are required for a healthy economy, mania may well be required if any large, ambitious foreign policy project is to succeed. Even when they fail that does not mean that the benefits accrued during the mania are totally undone. It may be that we are better off with the mania and subsequent backsliding, rather than merely aiming for incremental progress. Two steps forward, one step back.

Finally, I want to discuss the possibility of foreign policy depression. The dangers of underconfidence may be as acute as the dangers of overconfidence, leading to missed opportunities and foreign policy stagnation. Each of these offers an avenue for future research on how confidence’s role in decision-making affects foreign policy and international relations.

211

Distress and Panic in International Relations

Distress and panic are two potential consequences of mania. Both of them have their genesis in the fact that the mania necessarily involves an overestimation of benefits and a neglect of risk. As a consequence of mania, people have expectations about the future that are unreasonable. When those expectations are challenged, the feedback loop of New Era stories and policy investments terminates. As Shiller and Akerlof put it: “But when, when the confidence disappears, the tide goes out. The nakedness of their decisions stands revealed.”501

This termination occurs as a consequence of a shock (similar to the displacement that allows New Era Thinking to get going in the first place). Kindleberger calls this shock the causa proxima, “some incident that snaps the confidence of the system [and] makes people think of the dangers of failure” made possible by the causa remota, the underlying risky behaviors.502

The result is a shift in mindset “from confidence to pessimism”503. The feeling of predictability and control that characterizes confidence is challenged and potentially lost.504 Risks associated with the policy become recognized, and further investment stops.

The difference between distress and panic is in the immediacy of those risks. Distress is the premonition of failure: the recognition of the possibility without having a specific

501 George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 13. 502 Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 100. 503 Kindleberger and Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, 105. 504 Anat Bracha and Elke U. Weber. “A Psychological Perspective of Financial Panic,” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Discussion Paper No. 12-7 (2012). 212 timetable for when it could happen; during distress, there remains a feeling that panic can be prevented, which allows elites to maintain a sense of control. Panic is the realization of failure: the belief both that (1) systemic failure is either imminent or already in progress, and (2) the absence of swift defensive action to secure one’s position will result in intolerable losses. Control over the outcome has been lost. Distress thus precedes and increases the probability of panic, but it does not guarantee panic: distress can linger on for years without panic ensuing, and gradually confidence can return.

In the international system, distress should typically result in states (1) stopping the risky behaviors, now that the risks have become known (so, for instance, the United

States ceased pushing to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, and while the organization does still assert in a general sense that membership for those countries is an aspirational goal, and both countries continue to aspire for membership, it is no longer seen as imminent or reasonable without a profound change in circumstances505;) and (2) attempting to retrench in order to address the risks policy-makers have now realized their current position entails (so, for instance, NATO increasing its military presence in the

Baltic States, which are seen as vulnerable to future Russian aggression given their large

Russian minority populations and proximity to Russia, in order to deter future aggression506). One surefire sign that you’re a period of distress is when people in the

505 Associated Press, “Georgian and Ukrainian officials push for NATO membership,” The Telegraph, June 9, 2016, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/09/georgian- and-ukrainian-officials-push-for-nato-membership/. 506 Carlo Angerer, “NATO focuses on speed in the Baltics amid worries over Russia,” NBC News, June 23, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/nato-focuses-speed- baltics-amid-worries-over-russia-n885261; Keir Giles, “New Troop Deployments Signal NATO Commitment to Baltics,” Chatham House, November 2, 2016, 213 media start posing the possibility of panic (the media, as both an authority and a platform for authorities, can help drive both mania and panic507).

The question of “what is panic” is more difficult. The general description of

“defensive action to protect against losses” is clear enough, but in the International

Relations setting it is harder to articulate what that would mean. Using NATO as the example, panic would necessarily involve the rollback of enlargement: states withdrawing from the institution and potentially institutional death. But panic in the

“bank-run” model, of an immediate, nearly instant collapse should be rare: the foreign policy process is longer and more complicated than the decisions made by the members of a panicked crowd descending on a bank trying to get their money out before there is none left.

Additionally, International Relations policy has a complicating factor: countermobilization. Manias meet resistance by people opposed to the policies that they implement: “Not infrequently the development of a policy bubble meets considerable resistance at some point in the process, as do most policies. The countermobilization may or may not be strong enough to halt or reverse the overinvestment process characteristic of a policy bubble.”508 With foreign policy, these bubbles can meet countermobilization

https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/new-troop-deployments-signal-nato- commitment-baltics; Robin Emmott and Sabine Siebold, “NATO agrees to reinforce eastern Poland, Baltic states against Russia,” Reuters World News, July 7, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-summit-idUSKCN0ZN2NL. 507 Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), Chapter 6. 508 Bryan D. Jones, Herschel F. Thomas III, and Michelle Wolfe, “Policy Bubbles,” The Policy Studies Journal 42, No. 1 (2014): 153. 214 that is either domestic (e.g. Americans opposed to NATO) or foreign (e.g. Russia509).

Periods of distress and panic are, therefore, not just a feeling of pessimism, but also increased confidence on the part of these opposing forces, encouraging them to apply more pressure to the bubble to try to break it.

There are thus three broad possibilities for what happens following a mania. The first is the classic panic: “continued expansion and collapse, similar to the classic asset bubble in economics.”510 The second is a more extended period of adjustment and distress, where the spectacular failure does not occur but there is a more gradual period of rollback and transformation. The third Bryan Jones, Herschel Thomas and Michelle

Wolfe call “incorporation”: “the overinvestment gets institutionalized in a manner that locks in inefficiencies.”511 Incorporation may eventually lead to distress and panic, but it can also prolong policies developed during the mania to persist even into a period of distress. NATO’s official position of aspiration for future incorporation of Georgia and

Ukraine into the Treaty Organization is an example of incorporation.512

509 This doesn’t necessarily mean military pressure. One possible Russian countermobilization would be to use paramilitary force in the Baltic States as Russia has in Crimea and the Donbas region of Ukraine (so-called “little green men”). Anther is to exploit propaganda to try to undermine confidence in NATO among Americans and other NATO domestic political audiences. It is easy to find articles on Russian state-run media outlets like Sputnik that predict the collapse of NATO. See, for example: “Tusk Warns ‘Immense Pressure’ From Trump May Lead to NATO Collapse,” Sputnik International, July 29, 2018, https://sputniknews.com/europe/201806291065890880-trump-pressure- nato-collapse/. 510 Jones, Thomas, and Wolfe, “Policy Bubbles,” 153. 511 Jones, Thomas, and Wolfe, “Policy Bubbles,” 154. 512 “NATO Ministers affirm support for Georgia,” North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Last modified December 6, 2017, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_149665.htm; Scott Neuman, “Ukraine Recommits To NATO Membership Over Moscow’s Objections,” NPR, July 10, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- 215

But focusing solely on distress and panic may be deceptive. While it is clear that overestimating benefits and underestimating risks can create dangerous, unstable situations, focusing exclusively on the negatives cause us to miss something important: mania can also be an important tool for progress.

The Benefits of Mania and Idealism

The great problem for the entrepreneur is: it involves a leap of faith. As Keynes explained it: “if animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die.”513

The consequence is that many, or even most, entrepreneurial endeavours fail because they are based on optimism unwarranted by evidence, but without anyone trying to take that “leap of faith” 514 the economy will be paralyzed.

This leads to an interesting hypothesis posed by Monike Gisler and Didier

Sornette: that “bubbles constitute an essential element in the maturation process and in the dynamics leading to great innovations or discoveries.”515 Bubbles (or manias) are

“characterized by collective over-enthusiasm as well as unreasonable investments and efforts, derived through excessive public and/or political expectations of positive

way/2017/07/10/536450855/ukraine-recommits-to-nato-membership-over-moscows- objections. 513 John Maynard Keynes, quoted in Alexander Dow and Sheila C. Dow, “Animal Spirits Revisited,” Capitalism and Society 6, No. 2 (2011): 5. 514 William Q. Judge, “Entrepreneurship as a leap of faith,” Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion 10 (2003): 37-65. 515 Monika Gisler and Didier Sornette, “‘Bubbles in Society’: The Example of the United States Apollo Program” (2008), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1139807. 216 outcomes.” But rather than just placing the people making those investments and efforts in untenable and risky situations, they also open a window of possibility: “Only during these times do people dare explore new opportunities, many of them unreasonable and hopeless, with rare emergences of lucky achievements.”516 Yes, many – even most – policies will fail. But if you do not ever try you will never succeed, and when there are successes, they come with substantial benefits. Two specific examples of success they cite are the Apollo Program and the Human Genome Project.517 In these cases, entrepreneurship that “ignored risk considerations” and “instead [focused] on the expected returns of the invention or innovation” took priority.518 And while surely it is the case that bubbles can frequently turn out to be detrimental, these represent cases where “the long-term benefits seem to outweigh the short-term losses.”519

Indeed, E.H. Carr’s critique of post-World War I Idealists was not that they were idealistic. Rather, it was that in their idealism they attempted to defy what he saw as hard and fast, almost physical rules of social reality. Carr compared their project to that of the alchemist: “the thought of the alchemist was purely purposive. He did not stop to enquire whether the properties of lead were such as to make it transmutable into gold… It was only when this visionary project ended in failure that the investigators were prompted to apply their thought to an examination of ‘facts’, i.e. the nature of matter.”520 But Carr

516 Gisler and Sornette, “Bubbles in Society,” 1-2. 517 Monika Gisler, Didier Sornette, and Ryan Woodard, “Innovation as a social bubble: The example of the Human Genome Project,” Research Policy 40, No. 10 (2011): 1412- 1425. 518 Gisler, Sornette, and Woodard, “Innovation as a social bubble,” 1413. 519 Gisler, Sornette, and Woodard, “Innovation as a social bubble,” 1423. 520 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 6-7. 217 also believed that political science needed a visionary project that dreamed of a better world: “Political science is the science not only of what is, but of what ought to be,”521 and his book should be read not as a defense of realism but of “utopian realism,” striving for a better future within the gradually malleable constraints imposed by realities both social and physical.522

After all, even the mania that Carr criticized so fervently was not without long- term benefits. Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that the culmination of the interwar Idealist bubble, the Kellogg-Briand Pact which formally banned war in 1928, should not be so easily dismissed as a piece of paper. Rather, the Pact helped shape a new world order where violence and war bore less legitimacy, pushing towards a more peaceful, less violent future even despite its obvious failures.523

Consider NATO enlargement. It may have been a mania, but it is not clear that this means that the entire project would have been better undone. Yes, pushing hard eastward has both antagonized Russia and helped energize a spirited discontent within member countries; yes, the New Era beliefs about how NATO would lock-in democracy in member countries seems to have been overblown. Yes, we overestimated the benefits and underestimated the risks. But would we have been better off without enlarging the institution at all? The existing counterfactuals suggest that we are probably better off

521 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 5. 522 Shannon Brincat, “Reclaiming the Utopian imaginary in IR theory,” Review of International Studies 35, No. 3 (2009): 581-609. 523 Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017). 218 having done it than not done it, at least for now.524 Whether the long-term benefits of

NATO enlargement will exceed the costs is still yet to be seen, with room for future human agency to alter both those benefits and the costs.

If there are to be large, transformational moments in international politics, they will almost certainly require bursts of mania to get them over the speed bump of uncertainty. And if we lose our confidence altogether, that can have a host of other negative consequences.

Underconfidence and International Relations

One logical consequence of the theory of confidence and overconfidence presented in this book is that if overconfidence is possible, so too must be underconfidence. We can think of overconfidence as a complete failure of animal spirits: no one is willing to act despite uncertainty. Entrepreneurism stops as the anxiety that accompanies Knightian uncertainty “immobilizes us:” “[Ben] Bernanke argues that the

Depression put financial intermediaries so fully in the grip of uncertainty that they had no rational grounds for accepting many loan applications. Christina Romer has recently argued that the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent gyrations caused uncertainty about future income levels, which led consumers to postpone expenditures on durables

524 Kimberly Marten, “Reconsidering NATO expansion: a counterfactual analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s,” European Journal of International Security 3, No. 2 (2018): 135-161. 219 until they could get a better idea of future income levels.”525 When animal spirits are systemically low, everything stops.

The emergence of underconfidence would look a lot like the emergence of overconfidence: it is a story of repeated failure. Just as mania emerges as a consequence of a displacement that creates New Era Thinking: beliefs that “the future is brighter, and less uncertain than the past,” depression should emerge out of stories that convey the opposite: that the future is dimmer, and more uncertain than the past. In these periods, aspirational foreign policy should stop, and instead state elites will aim at holding on to what they have. In short, these periods are ones of ontological insecurity. Catarina

Kinnvall suggests that the implication of these periods is to cause people to become more nationalistic and religious, as those identities help reaffirm a sense of certainty and control.526 Often, given the uncertainty of the future, this means holding up the past as a picture of how things were once better: a foreign policy of nostalgia.

More broadly, the foreign policy effect of such a period would be a reduction in aspirations: states, both individually and collectively, aim lower in their objectives.

Instead, the focus becomes avoiding defeats: keeping what we already have for fear it could be lost otherwise. It predicts a bunker mentality that, once entrenched, can then be

525 Roger Koppl, “Retrospectives: Animal Spirits,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, No. 3 (1991): 203-210. 526 Catarina Kinnvall, “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security,” Political Psychology 25, No. 5 (2004): 741-767. 220 hard to escape.527 Fear becomes predominant over hope.528 We might think of an extended period of this kind of thinking as a foreign policy “depression.”

One small-scale example of this phenomenon is the failure of the Clinton

Administration to intervene in Rwanda in 1994. With the dramatic, televised failure of

American peacekeeping policy in Somalia six months earlier, confidence in future peacekeeping operations was low: “The ghosts of Somalia continue to haunt US policy…

Our lack of response in Rwanda was a fear of getting involved in something like a

Somalia all over again.”529 But the theory suggests that the dynamic should be able to exist at a larger scale, and persist for an extended period. It also is likely an opening for the importance of the public: where mania is largely the province of foreign policy elites, depression may be more the province of the masses, who see a dissonance between existing, institutionalized aspirational foreign policy and their own feelings of uncertainty and pessimism and channel resulting discontent into electoral choices. In a period of distress, where confidence has already been undermined and certainty dashed, the stage has been set for a slide into depression.

527 Ronald R. Krebs, “Israel’s Bunker Mentality: How the Occupation is Destroying the Nation,” Foreign Affairs 90, No. 6 (2011): 10-18. 528 Daniel Bar-Tal, “Why Does Fear Override Hope in Societies Engulfed in Intractable Conflict, as It Does in the Israeli Society?” Political Psychology 22, No. 3 (2001): 601- 627. 529 “Ambush in Mogadishu: Transcript,” Frontline, accessed October 27, 2009, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ambush/etc/script.html. 221

III. Managing Mania

The main implication of this dissertation is that the realm of foreign policy is subject to periods of mania: where the individuals responsible for making policy collectively feel assured that they can shape the future in ways that will produce benefits, and without substantial risk of failure. These periods tend to emerge out of moments of historical transformation, particularly transformation that is seen as having positive benefits. These inflection points seem to negate past historical examples that might inspire skepticism (they are no longer relevant in the New Era), leaving the positive transformation and its immediate consequences to be the only salient evidence. Absent a dispositive event, confidence in the New Era stories and the positivity and certainty of the future they describe accelerates faster than evidence accrues, leading to unreasonable policies based on unreasonable expectations (overconfidence). This is a “foreign policy bubble.”

Recognizing the reality of foreign policy mania helps us understand the mechanisms underneath foreign policy decisions that seem excessive in hindsight. It also helps us identify current situations where the conditions for manic foreign policy are present, and potentially work to prevent excessive overconfidence.

From this, I can derive a handful of lessons for how to manage the possibility of mania: how to recognize the potential for mania, how to recognize a mania in progress, and general rules for how to prevent foreign policy from becoming manic.

First: how to recognize the potential for mania? The key here is to be watchful for the first two stages of mania: displacement and panic. Moments of radical change in the 222 principles, norms, rules, or conventions that govern global or regional dynamics are the first step towards a mania. Watch for subsequent New Era Thinking: statements of a new period of history, with a bright and wonderful future, or the potential for creating great change. Watch especially for “triumphalism”: a feeling of victory or superiority. Even if the victory seems warranted in the moment, the assumption of victory may persist beyond its expiration date.

Second: how to recognize a foreign policy mania in progress? Watch for policies that are being expanded in scope (geographic or otherwise), with the expansion in scope entailing risks that are not being discussed among the people responsible for the decision.

This should be particularly concerning if the policies emerge out of triumphalism, or if risks associated with the policy that had been identified in the past are going unspoken during the latest round of expansion. Keep an eye for an inverse trend between risk acceptance and risk acknowledgement.

But these two are both particularly difficult, because we may ourselves become subject to the feeling of overconfidence. So there are also a handful of principles for things that we should routinely do that might help prevent excessive overconfidence.

So, Third: how might we prevent foreign policy from becoming manic? One important strategy is to always invite skeptical voices to voice their opinions about policy choices to policy elites. Perhaps the most startling discovery that resulted from reading the Congressional debates on NATO enlargement was the absence of skeptical speakers after 1999. Experts who came might present arguments against NATO enlargement, but

223 always in the context of a larger argument in favor. Always invite the truly skeptical voices about a policy to have a say.

Similarly, invite all the relevant parties to contribute. Frequently, representatives of potential NATO member countries and their advocates would submit statements to the record during Senate hearings on enlargement, but Russia did not. On the one hand this is not surprising, given the desire not to allow Russia to have a “veto” over the proceedings, but on the other hand the absence of a direct voice opportunity within the Congressional process meant increased confusion between NATO and Russia at multiple junctures in the process.

Keep in mind context. If everything seems great, try to err on the side of caution and slow progress. If everything seems horrible, try to err on the side of ambitious action.

Recognize that the dynamics of confidence incline us to overconfidence when things are going well and underconfidence when things are going poorly, and try to calibrate accordingly. International Relations does not have a Federal Reserve equivalent: there is no tool some central agency can use to deliberately spur investment confidence in lean times or tamp it down in boom times, which puts additional impetus on us to recognize the importance of confidence in the decision-making process.

Yet, these are lessons for avoiding mania. And maybe we shouldn’t. Given mania’s important role in facilitating progress and innovation, and the relatively high boiling point for systemic panic in the international system, maybe we want mania. Some foreign policy goals – combating global warming, for instance – seem both absolutely

224 necessary and hopelessly daunting. Perhaps a mania is just what we need – if we can figure out how to deliberately provoke one, despite the existing countermobilizing forces.

225

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