Christopher Preble | American Military University (original) (raw)

Papers by Christopher Preble

International Politics Reviews, 2017

U.S. nuclear weapons' policies have long rested on myths invented to manage Pentagon politics, pl... more U.S. nuclear weapons' policies have long rested on myths invented to manage Pentagon politics, placate allies and, to an extent, to bluff enemies.

troops will be removed from Saudi Arabia represents a significant and welcome change in U.S. poli... more troops will be removed from Saudi Arabia represents a significant and welcome change in U.S. policy toward the Persian Gulf. This wise decision to shift U.S. forces out of the kingdom should be only the first of several steps to substantially reduce the American military presence in the region. In addition to the removal of troops from Saudi Arabia, U.S. forces should be withdrawn from other Gulf states, including Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq, and the U.S. Navy should terminate its long-standing policy of deploying a carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf. The United States need not have troops stationed in the Persian Gulf in order to remain engaged in the region. The Gulf’s energy resources are important to the global economy, but goods and services flow on the world market absent explicit “protection” by military forces. Further, the United States will continue to exert a stabilizing influence from a distance by drawing on its economic assets and its political standing. In the highl...

AARN: Globalization & Transnationalism (Topic), 2016

The end of the Cold War ushered in a unipolar world, cementing U.S. dominance over a generally li... more The end of the Cold War ushered in a unipolar world, cementing U.S. dominance over a generally liberal international order. Yet where once it seemed that U.S. foreign policy would be simpler and easier to manage as a result, the events of the past 15 years — the 9/11 attacks, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Arab Spring, and Russia’s invasions of Georgia and Ukraine — strongly suggest otherwise. The world today is certainly safer for Americans than it was under the existential threat posed by the Soviet Union. But the world is undoubtedly more complex, as nonstate actors, shifting alliances, and diverse domestic political factors complicate U.S. foreign policy formation and implementation. A robust debate on America’s foreign policy choices is urgently needed.

Journal of Strategic Studies, 2017

Harvard International Review, 2008

The bipartisan Beltway consensus that sponsored the Iraq war is in the uncomfortable and unfamili... more The bipartisan Beltway consensus that sponsored the Iraq war is in the uncomfortable and unfamiliar position of having to justify its most basic tenets. After the Washington foreign policy community all but unanimously assured Americans of the prudence and necessity of starting a war with Iraq, other articles of faith in foreign policy circles are coming under attack. Perhaps most pernicious among them is the consensus view that the United States must reconstitute its national security bureaucracy in order to develop the capacity to fix failed states. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The fetish for fixing failed states is found in Democrats and Republicans alike. Take, for one example, former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger's 2005 article in The National Interest titled "In the Wake of War." There, Scowcroft and Berger assure us that "action to stabilize and rebuild states emerging from conflict is not 'foreign policy as social work,' a favorite quip of the 1990s. It is equally a national security priority." This is argument by assertion. A better-founded argument would at least go to the trouble of defining its terms. Alas, any attempt to define terms would also demonstrate the unconvincing nature of the thesis. Failed states rarely present threats to the United States, and attempting to "fix" them portends serious problems for US policy. To assess whether or not failed states pose a threat to US national security, we must first define "state failure" and then examine the historical cases that meet that definition. Failure Is in the Eye of the Beholder The most comprehensive and analytically rigorous study of state failure was a task force report commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Intelligence in 2000. The report's authors sought to quantify and examine episodes of state failure between 1955 and 1998. Working from their first definition of state failure (when "central state authority collapses for several years"), the authors only found 20 cases of bona fide state failure--too small a number to produce statistically significant conclusions. As a result, the authors chose to broaden the definition. After establishing those new criteria, the authors found 114 cases of state failure between 1955 and 1998. The new methodology increased the number of failed states nearly sixfold by changing the definition of what constituted state failure. Although the authors made the change to achieve a degree of statistical significance, they contended that the new methodology was appropriate because "events that fall beneath [the] total-collapse threshold often pose challenges to US foreign policy as well." That speculative and highly subjective standard produced a list that characterized China, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Israel, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, and Turkey as failed states as of December 1998. A data set that includes such disparate countries does little to inform US policy toward failed states. It is less useful as a heuristic for guiding national policy than is blithely declaring that "states that begin with the letter I pose challenges to US foreign policy." More recent efforts offer little encouragement. A 2007 update of the Fund for Peace/Foreign Policy magazine "Failed States Index" promises on the magazine's cover to explain "why the world's weakest countries pose the greatest danger." In what can only be described as false advertising, the article does little to prove or even argue this claim. It instead concedes that "failing states are a diverse lot" and that "there are few easy answers to their troubles." But since the concept of "failedness" tells us so little about these states, why assemble such a category at all? One could imagine any number of arbitrary distinctions that would group together less disparate states than those that receive the designation "failed." Still, with the problem diagnosed as failure, the proposal is to fix the failure. …

U.S. security does not require nearly 1,600 nuclear weapons deployed on a triad of systems — bomb... more U.S. security does not require nearly 1,600 nuclear weapons deployed on a triad of systems — bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) — to deliver them. A smaller arsenal deployed entirely on submarines would save roughly $20 billion annually while deterring attacks on the United States and its allies. A missile dyad is more politically feasible but saves less.The triad grew from the military services’ competition to meet the Soviet threat. The arguments for it arrived to rationalize its components. The public rationale was a second strike: a diversity of delivery systems insured the nuclear arsenal’s survival against a Soviet preemptive attack. The more sophisticated rationale was a first strike: deterring Soviet aggression against European allies required the ability to preemptively destroy their nuclear forces. U.S. power today makes the case for the triad more dubious. Survivability is no longer a feasible justification. No U.S. adversary has the capability to destroy all U.S. ballistic submarines, let alone all three legs, and there would be time to adjust if that changed. Nuclear weapons are essentially irrelevant in actual U.S. wars, which are against insurgents and weak states without nuclear arsenals. Nuclear threats have a bigger role in hypothetical U.S. wars with nuclear-armed powers. But cases where the success of deterrence hinges on the U.S. capability to destroy enemy nuclear forces are far-fetched. In any case, U.S. submarines and conventional forces can destroy those forces. Even hawkish policies do not require a triad.Nuclear weapons are no longer central to the identity or budget of the Air Force and Navy. Especially while austerity heightens competition for Pentagon resources, service leaders may see nuclear missions as red-headed step-children that take from true sons. That shift would facilitate major reductions in the nuclear arsenal, the elimination of at least one leg of the triad, and substantial savings.

The American foreign policy establishment has identified a new national security problem. Over th... more The American foreign policy establishment has identified a new national security problem. Over the past two decades, foreign-policy scholars and popular writers have developed the ideas that "failed states" present a global security threat, and that accordingly, powerful countries like the United States should "fix" the failed states. 1 However, the conventional wisdom is based on a sea of confusion, poor reasoning, and category errors. Much of the problem stems from the poor scholarly standards that characterize the research on state failure. The definitions of a "failed state" are now nearly as numerous as the number of studies about the subject. That ambiguity confounds analyses that seek to correlate threats with the "failedness" of states. Nevertheless, the idea received a boost after the ter rorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Analysts concluded en masse that since Afghanistan was both a failed state and a threat, failed states were threatening. Interest in remedying state failure grew after the United States toppled the rickety structure of the Iraqi state, when it became clear that attempting to administer a failed state was difficult. Believing these dif ficulties can be overcome, many analysts suggest that if the United States can prevent state failure or repair failed states, it can reap gains not just in terms of international development but also in national security. This article calls into question the validity of the concept of failed states and highlights the consequences of integrating fear of failed states into American grand strategy. Four areas are considered. First, we outline the Justin Logan is associate director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He holds a master's degree in international relations from the University of Chicago and a bachelor's degree in international relations from American University.

Foreign policy experts and policy analysts are misreading the lessons of Iraq. The emerging conve... more Foreign policy experts and policy analysts are misreading the lessons of Iraq. The emerging conventional wisdom holds that success could have been achieved in Iraq with more troops, more cooperation among U.S. government agencies, and better counterinsurgency doctrine. To analysts who share these views, Iraq is not an example of what not to do but of how not to do it. Their policy proposals aim to reform the national security bureaucracy so that we will get it right the next time.The near-consensus view is wrong and dangerous. What Iraq demonstrates is a need for a new national security strategy, not better tactics and tools to serve the current one. By insisting that Iraq was ours to remake were it not for the Bush administration's mismanagement, we ignore the limits on our power that the war exposes and in the process risk repeating our mistake.The popular contention that the Bush administration's failures and errors in judgment can be attributed to poor planning is also f...

The Handbook on the Political Economy of War

The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism

Mediterranean Quarterly, 2004

Page 1. Yugoslavia Unraveled Sovereignty, Self-Determination, Intervention Page 2. Page 3. Yugosl... more Page 1. Yugoslavia Unraveled Sovereignty, Self-Determination, Intervention Page 2. Page 3. Yugoslavia Unraveled One OOL5-5NH-KDWP Page 4. Advance Praise for Yugoslavia Unraveled &quot;Yugoslavia Unraveled makes a solid ...

... Christopher Preble is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. More by Chris... more ... Christopher Preble is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. More by Christopher A. Preble. ... Cato Policy Forum, Noon. February 23-26, 2012. 24th Annual Benefactor Summit Cato Conference, 8:00 am The Breakers, Palm Beach, FL. February 27, 2012. ...

International Studies Review, 2014

Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age. By Francis J. Gavin. Ithaca... more Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age. By Francis J. Gavin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. 240 pp., $35.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-801-45101-0). This book studies the history of nuclear weapons, especially the strategies for their employment, and the influence of those strategies on international politics. The history is interesting in its own right and bears directly upon contemporary and future policy, because author Francis J. Gavin is a rare sort of historian. Like his mentor, Marc Trachtenberg, Gavin doesn't shy away from challenging the conventional wisdom based on a careful reading of the relevant documents. And his myth-busting has a clear purpose—to improve policy. “Bad history is almost worse than no history” (p. 2). “We cannot begin to assess the merits of critical policies,” Gavin explains, “ranging from the goal of ‘global zero’ to threatened use of preventive war to reverse proliferation, until we have a much better understanding of the historical forces that brought us where we are today” (p. 11). Thus, his work is of interest not only to academic historians and political scientists, but also to contemporary policymakers and scholars in the wider foreign policy community. In clear, readable prose, Gavin, the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, and the Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, addresses a series of discrete questions, organized more or less chronologically. He challenges the conventional view that John F. Kennedy's approach to nuclear weapons was dramatically different from Dwight D. Eisenhower's. From there, Gavin moves to the Berlin Crisis, which straddled the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and then to the debate over nuclear nonproliferation in the wake of China's ascension into the nuclear club. Here, Gavin finds important discontinuities between Kennedy's and Lyndon Johnson's approaches to nonproliferation, particularly toward US allies such as West Germany. The book moves on to the …