Few topics are as critical to peace and international security as is nuclear proliferation. The illegitimate pursuit of nuclear weapons featured prominently as a justification for going to war in Iraq and will likely remain a crucial challenge for any administration grappling with the future of the Middle East, East Asia, and beyond. President Obama’s Nobel Prize speech echoes the view that different proliferation cases entail different responses; that sanctions must be biting but a door to dialogue should remain open; and that collective action (coordination across senders) is key. A remarkable speech that in many ways reflects state of the art thinking about statecraft in the early twenty-first century, it also mirrors some of the outstanding quandaries facing the international community in its effort to stem nuclear proliferation. This concluding chapter highlights ten crucial dilemmas in nonproliferation statecraft.

Preface and acknowledgments

This book seeks to illuminate dilemmas of statecraft in the prevention of nuclear proliferation. It focuses largely – but not uniquely – on experiences in the last two decades, primarily with Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Libya. These dilemmas make it clear that we are far from reaching a final word on the subject and that our efforts to unpack the paths and effects of external inducements within target states may introduce more questions than can be answered in this salvo. Far from seeking to reach unanimity on a subject ridden with quandaries, the primary aspiration of this volume is to reflect on those cases and experiences with an eye on improving our knowledge of the scope conditions, processes, and causal mechanisms that link inducements to specific outcomes. This entails a better understanding of the domestic distributional costs and benefits of external inducements on target states. At the very least, the effort to concentrate on those causal mechanisms connecting sanctions and positive inducements to outcomes broadens a more typical focus on whether or not such inducements “work.” Not only can assessments of outcomes be overly simplistic but too narrow a focus on outcomes often comes at the expense of a deeper and productive inquiry into why different instruments may or not yield expected effects under particular circumstances.

The main objective was thus not to take sides in the sanctions pessimism–optimism debate. Although there is plenty of that here as well, there is also ample divergence among authors over whether or not comprehensive sanctions work, targeted sanctions are less or more effective, positive inducements are any more efficient than negative ones, what should a right mix of both consist of, and whether or not all types of inducements may have proven futile. We aim not at definitive conclusions – given contested readings of the evidence – but rather at redirecting attention to the anatomy of inducements, the causal processes they unleash in the domestic politics of target states, and the intended, unintended, and unexpected outcomes inducements can yield.

In June 2009 the streets of Tehran were burning, literally and figuratively. The Obama administration faced a crucial dilemma in its effort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Should President Obama openly support the persecuted opposition, as some argued, and if so, what language should he use? Should he abstain from any response, so as to avoid intruding in the internal turmoil brewing within Iran’s regime? Should the US administration “talk” to Ahmadinejad or to his competitors within Iran’s ruling coalition? Should the nuclear issue be raised in the repressive post-election context to signal the economic and other opportunity costs of the regime’s behavior for the Iranian public? Could positive outreach by the president toward the Iranian regime yield any fruit? Were positive inducements offered too little or too much? Were sanctions too punitive or toothless? Was support extended to Iran’s (and Syria’s) opposition adequate considering stronger endorsement of popular uprisings in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia in early 2011? Are security assurances to nuclear proliferators a proven means to obviate their quest for nuclear weapons?

The intractability of these dilemmas is the subject of extensive public discussion worldwide. Notably, the international relations scholarly literature on sanctions and nuclear nonproliferation offers limited answers to most of these questions and has largely neglected more systematic analysis of the domestic distributional consequences of external attempts to influence target states’ nuclear postures. A domestic distributional focus requires particular attention to cui bono (who gains) and cui malo (who loses) from sanctions and positive inducements, and how those, in turn, affect the outcome. This volume thus seeks to contribute to the study of nonproliferation statecraft in several ways.

The different chapters in this volume discuss different dimensions of bilateralism and multilateralism in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, definitions of these particular forms of international cooperation and competition abound and different meanings can be attached to them. This terminological variance can hinder our understanding of the phenomena under study. This chapter attempts to provide a general overview of some basic concepts underlying this collaborative project as they have been dealt with in the international relations literature. Arriving at common definitions is not always easy but, at a minimum, the effort can help raise awareness of different interpretations of concepts across contexts. At best, the adoption of consensual terminology can help carry out a more convergent set of empirical studies, with a potentially more robust set of propositions and findings.

I provide an outline of seven core concepts as they have been used in representative literature in international relations: multilateralism, multilateral/regional institutions, regionalism versus regionalization, networks, forum shopping, and bilateralism. This literature spans security and political economy. Both can inform the discussion in several ways. First, the seven mentioned concepts may have been applied to one realm (economics, for instance) in the academic literature but often spilled over into the other (security). Gauging the utility of core concepts across issueareas can provide important insights and extend our understanding of their distinct operation and meanings in each case. Second, in the real world of international politics, considerations of security and political economy are joined at the hip, in Southeast Asia and beyond. Third, it is important to understand whether the substantive evolution of multilateralism, regionalism, or any of these concepts tends to follow any sequential logic, so that economic bilateralism may beget security bilateralism, or vice-versa. These synergies are too important to disregard both in the conceptual literature and in empirical studies. Examples from ASEAN and the Asia-Pacific will be weaved through the conceptual discussion in this chapter.

The literature on the international sources of domestic politics has an important pedigree in comparative politics in the works of Herz (1950), Gerschenkron (1962), Hintze (1975), Gourevitch (1978, 1986), Cameron (1978), Skocpol (1979, 1992), Bates (1981), Tilly (1985), Katzenstein (1985), Putnam (1988), Rogowski (1989), and world system and dependency theory, among others. Although, as Gourevitch (1996: 8) argued over a decade ago, “comparative politics have never been wholly autonomous from international influences,” the end of the Cold War marked an explosion in the study of internationalization, globalization, and their effects on domestic politics. This chapter addresses developments in this literature published since this volume's first edition.

The relationship between domestic and international politics entails two kinds of linkages (see Figure 9.1). The first are known as “second-image reversed” effects (Gourevitch 1978), referring to the impact of international forces on domestic politics, from the outside-in. Many among the intellectual forerunners in the study of domestic–international linkages cited earlier fall under this category. The second kind – “second-image” effects (Waltz 1954) – link domestic structures and institutions to international politics from the inside-out. These two types of effects intersect in the domestic realm, where a process of conversion takes place. States, political parties, social movements, peak associations, labor unions, policy networks, armed forces, and other collective and individual actors respond to “second-image reversed” effects – on the basis of rational incentives and normative tendencies – with preferences and policies that feed into “second-image” effects from the inside out.

In its nearly sixty years of existence the Arab League has achieved a relatively low level of cooperation. Although the League has had a measure of influence in socializing some Arab elites, it has fallen short in changing state preferences, in forcing significant adjustment of prior policies, or in achieving a pan-Arab blueprint to guide their collective behavior. At the same time, to the extent the League was designed to enhance state sovereignty, it has certainly succeeded in doing so. Prima facie, this relatively limited cooperation is something of a surprise for several reasons. First, the League of Arab States was the first regional organization established after 1945. Second, its members share a common language, identity, and culture. Third, there is an arguable shared threat in Israel and continuing suspicions of the West. Fourth, there have been expectations of joint gains from trade and commerce, although similar production patterns detracted from benefits achievable through complementarity. Such shared identities and interests would surely place the Arab states system high on most predictors of regional institutionalization. Yet, the most that can be said is that a shared Arab identity keeps Arab states oriented toward one another, but obstacles toward meaningful institutionalization and cooperation of any depth have never been surmounted.

Why such disappointing results? We reject several conventional explanations for sub-Pareto outcomes and failure to cooperate.