Asia & the Pacific

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Washington last week, making his fourth trip to the United States since taking office just two years ago. India and South Asia Program Fellow, Ronak Desai examines the strategic approach to India's relations with the United States.

"In our view, the field has moved away from a careful reliance on theory, and is just mindlessly going out and testing hypotheses without thinking very hard about what's really causing what."

States use wedge strategies to prevent hostile alliances from forming or to dis­perse those that have formed. These strategies can cause power alignments that are otherwise unlikely to occur, and thus have significant consequences for international politics. How do such strategies work and what conditions promote their success? The wedge strategies that are likely to have significant effects use selective accommodation—concessions, compensations, and other inducements—to detach and neutralize potential adversaries. These kinds of strategies play important roles in the statecraft of both defensive and offensive powers. Defenders use selective accommodation to balance against a primary threat by neutralizing lesser ones that might ally with it. Expansionists use se­lective accommodation to prevent or break up blocking coalitions, isolating opposing states by inducing potential balancers to buck-pass, bandwagon, or hide. Two cases—Great Britain’s defensive attempts to accommodate Italy in the late 1930s and Germany’s offensive efforts to accommodate the Soviet Union in 1939—help to demonstrate these arguments. By paying attention to these dynamics, international relations scholars can better understand how balancing works in specific cases, how it manifests more broadly in interna­tional politics, and why it sometimes fails in situations where it ought to work well.

Currently there seems to be an increasing interest in and demand for China's mediation in resolving conflict. To certain extent, such a phenomenon is associated with China's re-emerging power. But more importantly, it is probably the style and skills of China's mediation that matter, which represents the emerging of a unique mediation culture, with China being its messenger. The paper examines key elements of such a mediation culture, using examples of China's mediation in regional and international affairs. The shaping of such a culture offers good lessons for mediators around the world who strive for effective conflict resolution.

"Diplomatic sanctions...entail a number of often overlooked consequences for the United States. The potential costs of diplomatic sanctions include not only a substantial loss of information and intelligence on the target state, but also a reduction in communication capacity and a diminished ability to influence the target state. Ironically, diplomatic sanctions may even undermine the effectiveness of other coercive policy tools, such as economic sanctions. These adverse effects ought to cause policymakers to reassess the value of diplomatic isolation as a tool of foreign policy and recognize the inherent value of diplomatic engagement."

Bargaining models of war suggest that war ends after two sides develop an overlapping bargaining space. Through preference, information, and entrapment obstacles, wars can become "stuck" and require a change in expectations to produce a war-terminating bargaining space. A major source of such change is a shift in belligerents’ governing coalitions.

"The recent crisis in Abkhazia reveals a fundamental qualitative change in the conflict in which the balance among three main actors is shifting, and increasingly the conflict plays a more important role in the triangular relations between Georgia, Russia and the West. The search for a new equilibrium in the conflict, one that would be an optimal outcome for the actors involved, will require rethinking the mutually constitutive roles (identities) and interests they want to assume with respect to the conflict and the entire South Caucasus...."

This article was prepared for a Council on Foreign Relations/International Institute for Strategic Studies Symposium on Iraq's Impact on the Future of US Foreign and Defence Policy, with generous support from Rita E. Hauser.