Globalization has eradicated great power war, dedev reverses
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- Decline makes global conflicts inevitable---turns Middle East war, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Asia and Europe
- Economic decline causes multiple hotspots of state failure and democratic backsliding
- Robust research shows capitalism has a statistically significant relationship with solving civil war
- Regression analysis proves
- Spreading capitalism and growth is key to peace—best studies
- Our study is the best and controls for multiple factors
- Ignore their WW2 example – it was just war inflation, not a K wave
US Econ Decline ImpactUS economic decline will cause a global depression, trade wars and shooting warsJudis, Carnegie Endowment, 2011, The New Republic, August 8, [John], p. http://www.npr.org/2011/08/08/139080654/new-republic-a-lesson-from-the-great-depression The first consideration has to do with the sheer gravity of the situation. What is at stake goes beyond an abstract rate of unemployment, or the prospect of a Republican White House in 2012, or even the misery of the long-term unemployed. From the beginning, this recession has been global. Germany has to take leadership in Europe, but the United States is still the world's largest economy, the principal source of consumer and investment demand, and the banking capital of the world. If the United States fails to revive its economy, and to lead in the restructuring of the international economy, then it's unlikely that other economies in the West will pull themselves out of the slump. And as the experience of the 1930s testified, a prolonged global downturn can have profound political and geopolitical repercussions. In the U.S. and Europe, the downturn has already inspired unsavory, right-wing populist movements. It could also bring about trade wars and intense competition over natural resources, and the eventual breakdown of important institutions like European Union and the World Trade Organization. Even a shooting war is possible. So while the Obama administration would face a severe challenge in trying to win support for a boost in government spending, failing to do so would be far more serious than the ruckus that Tea Party and Republican opposition could create over the next year. Decline --> InstabilityDecline makes global conflicts inevitable---turns Middle East war, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Asia and EuropeFerguson ’09 (Niall, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, 3-14, The Times, “Introducing the axis of upheaval” lexis, jj) Unfortunately, that same crisis is making it far from easy for the United States to respond to this new "grave and growing danger". When Mr Bush's speechwriters coined the phrase Axis of Evil, they were drawing a parallel with the wartime alliance between Germany, Italy and Japan. The axis of upheaval, by contrast, is more reminiscent of the decade before the outbreak of the Second World War, when the Great Depression unleashed a wave of global political crises. The Bush years revealed the perils of drawing facile historical parallels. Nevertheless, there is good reason to fear that the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression could have comparable consequences for the international system. In The War of the World, I argued that three factors made the location and timing of lethal organised violence more or less predictable in the last century. The first was ethnic disintegration: violence was worst in areas where majorities lived uneasily side by side with religious or linguistic minorities. The second factor was empires in decline: when imperial rule crumbled, battles for power were most bloody. The third was economic volatility: the greater the magnitude and frequency of economic shocks, the more likely conflict was. In at least one of the world's regions - the greater Middle East - two of these three factors have been present for some time: ethnic conflict has been rife there for decades and, after the difficulties and disappointments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US is preparing to wind down its quasi-imperial presence in the region. The Obama Administration is hoping that, with a second military surge, General David Petraeus can achieve in Afghanistan what he achieved in Iraq - enough stabilisation to permit a "drawdown" of US troops. Now the third variable, economic volatility, has returned with a vengeance. Ben Bernanke's "Great Moderation" - the supposed decline of economic volatility that the Federal Reserve Chairman hailed in a 2004 lecture - has been obliterated by a financial chain reaction, beginning in the sub-prime mortgage market, spreading through the banking system, reaching into the "shadow" system of credit based on securitisation, and now triggering collapses in asset prices, production and trade around the world. After nearly a decade of unprecedented growth, the global economy may even shrink in 2009. It won't be as bad as the Great Depression that began in 1929, because governments worldwide are, trying to repress this new depression with policies undreamt of 80 years ago. But no matter how low interest rates go or how high deficits rise, Depression Lite will cause a substantial increase in unemployment and a painful decline in incomes. Such pain nearly always has geopolitical consequences. Indeed, we can already see the first symptoms of the coming upheaval. NEEDLESS to say, there are some parts of the world where upheaval is the norm. Probably the Democratic Republic of Congo would be sliding back into civil war even if the world economy were still booming. Anarchy and piracy would still be rampant in Somalia and hyperinflation would continue to ravage Zimbabwe. The Colombia-style escalation of Mexico's drug wars can't really be blamed on the recession in El Norte. Likewise, in the wake of the Israeli assault on Hamas in Gaza, it is tempting to think that things could hardly get worse in the Middle East. Yet the financial crisis will have the effect of raising the political temperature even higher. Conditions in Gaza, which were already dire enough, will surely get worse as the global crisis snuffs out what little remains of economic activity. This is hardly likely to strengthen the forces of moderation among Palestinians. Moreover, events in Gaza have fanned the flames of Islamist radicalism. From Cairo to Riyadh, not to mention Baghdad, rising unemployment means more frustrated young men with nothing better to do than to fantasise about jihad. Expect violence to revive in Iraq as US troop levels fall. Iran, meanwhile, continues to support both Hamas and its Shia counterpart in Lebanon, Hezbollah, and to pursue an alleged nuclear weapons programme that Israelis legitimately see as a threat to their very existence. With presidential elections due in June, President Ahmadinejad has little incentive to tone down his anti-Israeli rhetoric. Economically, to be sure, Iran is in a hole that will only deepen as oil prices fall further. History suggests that it is precisely when such regimes feel insecure that they are most likely to take foreign policy risks. Just ask Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, who has been aiding and abetting the Iranian nuclear programme. "Let us be frank," he declared darkly at Davos. "Provoking military-political instability and other regional conflicts is also a convenient way of deflecting people's attention from mounting social and economic problems. Regrettably, further attempts of this kind cannot be ruled out." In Afghanistan upheaval also remains the disorder of the day. General Petraeus's task there is made difficult by the anarchy that prevails in neighbouring Pakistan. India, meanwhile, accuses some in Pakistan of having had a hand in the Mumbai terrorist attacks last November, spurring yet another South Asian war scare. India, too, has an imminent election. Expect gains for sabre-rattling Hindu nationalists. The governments in Kabul and Islamabad are two of the weakest anywhere. Among the biggest risks the world faces this year is that one or both will break down. Once again, the economic crisis is playing a crucial role. Pakistan's small but politically powerful middle class has been hammered by the collapse of the country's stock market. Meanwhile, a rising proportion of the country's huge population of young men are staring unemployment in the face. Remember: the most likely recruits to radical Islamist organisations are not the sub-continent's millions of dirt-poor slumdogs but the relatively well-off educated twentysomethings who have glimpsed prosperity only to have their hopes dashed. THE CRISIS of globalisation is bringing trouble to parts of the world we thought had been made safe for democracy. The financial crisis is proving to be most severe among the newly industrialised countries of Asia - South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand - where collapsing exports have caused steep declines in industrial production. In the space of just a few months, the Asian "tigers" have turned into mangy tomcats. Of the three, Thailand is the most politically vulnerable. At the end of 2007 it reverted to democracy after a spell of military rule that was supposed to crack down on corruption. But within a year the country was in chaos, with protesters blocking the streets of Bangkok and a ban on the majority People's Power Party. The prospects for the new minority government are surely bleak. The other region suffering acute pressure at the moment is Eastern Europe, where many former Communist countries are paying the price of a reckless borrowing binge. Already the Latvian Government has been toppled as a consequence of the financial crisis. But the most troubling case is Ukraine, where economic collapse threatens to trigger political disintegration. While President Yushchenko leans towards Europe, his ally-turned-rival, the Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko, now favours a Russian orientation. This reflects the widening gap between the Ukrainian West of the country and its Russian East. Meanwhile, in Moscow, Mr Putin talks menacingly of "ridding the Ukrainian people of all sorts of swindlers and bribe-takers". The Crimean peninsula, with its ethnic Russian majority, is the part of the "near abroad" (meaning the former Soviet Union) that Mr Putin covets most. The wrangle over gas supplies may well have been just the first phase of a Russian bid to destabilise and even break up Ukraine. The Soviet Union may be gone, but it has left a legacy of Russian minorities all over Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Adding economic volatility to the mix of ethnic disintegration and post-imperial conflict is a recipe for upheaval. THE PROBLEM is that, as in the 1930s, most countries are looking inward, grappling with the domestic consequences of the economic crisis and paying little attention to the wider world crisis. This is true even of the US, which is so preoccupied with its own domestic problems that countering global upheaval looks like an expensive luxury. Even with the White House's optimistic forecasts for growth, its gross federal debt is going to balloon to 100 per cent of GDP within ten years. Few commentators are asking what all this implies for US foreign policy. The answer is obvious: the resources available for policing the world are certain to be reduced. Economic volatility, plus ethnic disintegration, plus empires in decline: that combination is about the most lethal in geopolitics. We now have all three. The age of upheaval starts here. Economic decline causes multiple hotspots of state failure and democratic backslidingFerguson July 2009 Niall, Professor of History @ Harvard, Harvard Business Review; Jul/Aug2009, Vol. 87 Issue 7/8, p44-53 Will this financial crisis make the world more dangerous as well as poorer? The answer is almost certainly yes. Apart from the usual trouble spots -- Afghanistan, Congo, Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan -- expect new outbreaks of instability in countries we thought had made it to democracy. In Asia, Thailand may be the most vulnerable. At the end of 2007 it reverted to democracy after a spell of military rule that was supposed to crack down on corruption. Within a year's time the country was in chaos, with protesters blocking Bangkok's streets and the state banning the People's Power Party. In April 2009 the capital descended into anarchy as rival yellow-shirted and red-shirted political factions battled with the military. Expect similar scenes in other emerging markets. Trouble has already begun in Georgia and Moldova. Then there's Ukraine, where economic collapse threatens to trigger political disintegration. While President Viktor Yushchenko leans toward Europe, his ally-turned-rival Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko favors a Russian orientation. Their differences reflect a widening gap between the country's predominantly Ukrainian west and predominantly Russian east. Meanwhile, in Moscow, Putin talks menacingly of "ridding the Ukrainian people of all sorts of swindlers and bribe-takers." The Crimean peninsula, with its ethnic Russian majority, is the part of the "Near Abroad" (the former Soviet Union) that Putin most covets. January's wrangle over gas supplies to Western Europe may have been the first phase of a Russian bid to destabilize, if not to break up, Ukraine. The world's increasing instability makes the United States seem more attractive not only as a safe haven but also as a global policeman. Many people spent the years from 2001 to 2008 complaining about U.S. interventions overseas. But if the financial crisis turns up the heat in old hot spots and creates new ones at either end of Eurasia, the world may spend the next eight years wishing for more, not fewer, U.S. interventions. Capitalist Peace TheoryCap solves war—capitalist peace theory Harrison 11 (Mark, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, “Capitalism at War”, Oct 19 http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/harrison/papers/capitalism.pdf) Capitalism’s Wars America is the world’s preeminent capitalist power. According to a poll of more than 21,000 citizens of 21 countries in the second half of 2008, people tend on average to evaluate U.S. foreign policy as inferior to that of their own country in the moral dimension. 4 While this survey does not disaggregate respondents by educational status, many apparently knowledgeable people also seem to believe that, in the modern world, most wars are caused by America; this impression is based on my experience of presenting work on the frequency of wars to academic seminars in several European countries. According to the evidence, however, these beliefs are mistaken. We are all aware of America’s wars, but they make only a small contribution to the total. Counting all bilateral conflicts involving at least the show of force from 1870 to 2001, it turns out that the countries that originated them come from all parts of the global income distribution (Harrison and Wolf 2011). Countries that are richer, measured by GDP per head, such as America do not tend to start more conflicts, although there is a tendency for countries with larger GDPs to do so. Ranking countries by the numbers of conflicts they initiated, the United States, with the largest economy, comes only in second place; third place belongs to China. In first place is Russia (the USSR between 1917 and 1991). What do capitalist institutions contribute to the empirical patterns in the data? Erik Gartzke (2007) has re-examined the hypothesis of the “democratic peace” based on the possibility that, since capitalism and democracy are highly correlated across countries and time, both democracy and peace might be products of the same underlying cause, the spread of capitalist institutions. It is a problem that our historical datasets have measured the spread of capitalist property rights and economic freedoms over shorter time spans or on fewer dimensions than political variables. For the period from 1950 to 1992, Gartzke uses a measure of external financial and trade liberalization as most likely to signal robust markets and a laissez faire policy. Countries that share this attribute of capitalism above a certain level, he finds, do not fight each other, so there is capitalist peace as well as democratic peace. Second, economic liberalization (of the less liberalized of the pair of countries) is a more powerful predictor of bilateral peace than democratization, controlling for the level of economic development and measures of political affinity. Yes Diversionary War Yes diversionary war Pickering and Kisangani 2009 – department of political science at Kansas State, citing the International Military Intervention dataset (Jeffrey and Emizet, British Journal of Political Science, 39:483-515, “The dividends of diversion”, ProQuest) In this article, we contend that the Argentinian use of diversionary force was an anomaly in 1982, but the British diversion was not. Contrary to common normative assumptions, leaders in mature, established democracies are more prone to use foreign military force for domestic political gain than even the most contemptible autocrats. This argument seems paradoxical, because policy makers in established democracies have presumably not only accepted norms which emphasize negotiation, compromise and the value of human life, they operate within systems designed to check their own authority. We maintain that it is these very checks which often compel decision makers in mature democracies to divert. Institutional and partisan restraints prevent them from implementing effective domestic policy when their electoral prospects dim, forcing them to at least consider diversionary force. Leaders in the most liberal states in the international system may consequently, and seemingly illogically, fall into an illiberal pattern of using foreign military force to solve domestic problems. We have followed our own earlier extension of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his associates’ institutional approach, rational choice literature on voting and research on democratic audience costs to develop the three major components of our argument.7 We define ‘audience costs’ as the penalty that leaders incur for failing to keep commitments or for initiating disastrous policies.8 Following Michael Doyle’s conceptualization, we define mature democracies as countries with sovereignty, market and private economies, judicial rights and representative political institutions.9 The institutional approach highlights the institutional barriers that leaders in mature democracies encounter when they try to find domestic solutions to certain domestic problems. The rational choice literature on voting demonstrates how difficult it is for leaders in mature democracies to regain popular support when the country has experienced domestic economic difficulties. Even domestic policy which successfully resolves economic problems and increases growth often does little to boost the political executive’s popular support and may even have the seemingly contradictory effect of reducing the leader’s standing in public opinion polls further.10 Since the voting public is not inclined to reward successful economic policy, embattled leaders in mature democracies may turn to foreign policy to regain their political credibility and to improve their chances of retaining office. The decision to use diversionary force is made easier when leaders are confident that the military operation will be both a military success and provide the domestic political boost they are seeking. Recent research on audience costs suggests that military missions launched by leaders in mature democracies have a high probability of achieving both of these outcomes. Of course, a good deal of institutional variation exists among countries typically labelled ‘mature democracies’. The final component of our theory refines our earlier approach further by developing hypotheses on the impact that institutional differences have on mature democracies’ diversionary proclivities. To determine whether the leaders of mature democracies, and especially certain types of mature democracies, are more likely both to use diversionary force and to reap political rewards from doing so than other leaders, we test the reciprocal relationships which exist between the use of foreign military force and the domestic political and economic variables which may cause it. Our study is certainly not the first to analyse mature democracies’ propensity to use diversionary military force. A number of studies have been undertaken on the subject with, to date, mixed results.11 Our analysis is, however, the first to separate out and test the diversionary behaviour of several distinct types of established democracies and to determine whether diversionary force by these actors ‘works’ by producing domestic political and economic benefits for leaders. To our knowledge, it is also the first to develop an integrated, multi-layer theory that attempts to bring greater clarity to the seemingly illogical phenomenon of democratic diversion. Political constraints against economic reform make democratic leaders turn to foreign policy adventurism Pickering and Kisangani 2009 – department of political science at Kansas State, citing the International Military Intervention dataset (Jeffrey and Emizet, British Journal of Political Science, 39:483-515, “The dividends of diversion”, ProQuest) Domestic economic difficulty is, in fact, a particularly vexing problem for mature democrats. Even when mature democrats are free to intervene in the economy, they have few policy options which will produce either guaranteed or quick results. Among the alternatives they might consider are tax cuts to lessen the impact of unemployment, interest rate cuts by central banks to increase investor confidence and fiscal austerity programmes to curb inflation. None of these options works rapidly to ameliorate economic problems, and all have the potential for negative side-effects. Tax cuts diminish revenue for other programmes, including those designed to buffer individuals from economic hardships. Fiscal austerity programmes tend to dampen economic growth. Interest rate cuts may reduce savings and create dangerous bubbles in the economy. Worse still for mature democrats, dramatic macroeconomic policy changes stand a good chance of alienating important domestic constituencies.36 Political executives in mature democracies consequently often find themselves ‘hemmed in’ by institutional, partisan and policy checks when they attempt to forge domestic legislation to solve major domestic economic and political problems. When mature democrats find that they cannot implement effective national policy in response to mounting domestic problems, they may turn to foreign policy in an attempt to salvage their political careers and in the hope of winning another term in office. The use of military force overseas is not the only foreign policy option mature democrats may consider to improve their standing at home, but if they want to initiate a decisive shift in the domestic agenda it is often their most potent alternative.37 In our earlier work we examined consolidating democracies and autocracies as well. While we had anticipated that both regime types would have considerable potential to use diversionary force, our empirical results refuted this presumption. We thus concluded with the seemingly paradoxical finding that the countries with the greatest amount of political freedom are also the most prone to dispatch troops abroad for personal political gain. While our adaptation of the institutional approach took us some way towards explaining this outcome, we believe that insights from two related literatures add important substance to the argument. Actual models establish that societies like ours are most likely to try this Pickering and Kisangani 2009 – department of political science at Kansas State, citing the International Military Intervention dataset (Jeffrey and Emizet, British Journal of Political Science, 39:483-515, “The dividends of diversion”, ProQuest) Our control variables provide further evidence that mature democracies may be more prone to use military force in response to domestic stimuli than other regimes. The statistical significance and positive direction of strategic rivalry and sub-system crisis indicate that leaders in non-democracies dispatch troops overseas in response to external threats rather than to domestic difficulties. These external variables are, in contrast, negative when interacted with mature democracy. The interaction term for strategic rivalry is also statistically significant. Our formula provides marginal effects for strategic rivalryt3democracyt of 0.017311[(20.01204)3(119)]521.4155 for 119 year old democracies and 0.017311[(20.01204)3(119)]521.9693 for 165 year old democracies. Thus, as democracies become more mature, they grow less likely to use military force abroad in response to the external stimuli of strategic rivalry (or, in this case, an increase in the number of rivals). The overall balance of data and history supports our conclusion Pickering and Kisangani 2009 – department of political science at Kansas State, citing the International Military Intervention dataset (Jeffrey and Emizet, British Journal of Political Science, 39:483-515, “The dividends of diversion”, ProQuest) CONCLUSIONS In his seminal review of diversionary research, Jack Levy contends that most diversionary studies are mis-specified because they are unidirectional.100 Using the GMM method, we provide properly identified models to test our argument that mature democracies are especially prone to use diversionary force and especially likely to receive domestic political and economic benefits from doing so. Our results lend considerable support to our argument, although some caveats apply. When mature democracies are studied as a single group, the empirical results support our argument. In our sample of 140 countries from 1950 to 1996, mature democracies are found to use military force for a domestic reason, namely mass unrest, even when we control for the opportunities provided by international crises and strategic rivalries. In contrast, non-democracies use force in response to the international stimuli of crises and rivalries, but not in response to domestic variables. Mature democrats also benefit domestically when they intervene militarily abroad. Levels of elite unrest and mass unrest decline both during and up to a year after the intervention, and economic growth rates increase markedly the year of the intervention as well as the following year. In stark contrast, non-democracies see levels of mass unrest increase by as much as 45 per cent when they intervene abroad, while their economic growth rates plummet by 78 per cent. Non-democratic leaders may thus refrain from using diversionary force because they have domestic policy options that leaders of mature democracies lack, as the policy availability argument contends. They may also, however, realize that using military force abroad tends to generate negative economic and political repercussions in their societies. Our results on democratic diversion and the domestic dividends that it generates thus seem unambiguous. Analysing different types of mature democracies muddies these outcomes slightly. Contrary to our expectations, majoritarian governments appear to have a propensity for diversionary behaviour, while presidential governments do not. Most types of mature democracies reap domestic rewards for using military force abroad, but not all do. In particular, domestic economic and political difficulties seem to escalate when democracies with coalition governments intervene with military force overseas. It thus seems that only certain types of mature democracies, namely majoritarian and minority governments, have a propensity to both use diversionary force and to benefit domestically from it.101 These results indicate how important it is to ‘unpack’ regime types in analyses of diversionary force. What seems like unqualified support for our argument using a time dependent measure of mature democracy becomes more nuanced when we distinguish different democratic regime types. The nuance also brings greater clarity, however, about which specific influences prompt leaders in different democratic systems to divert and the types of domestic benefits these leaders should expect from the use of force abroad. Given the broad swath of states included in our category of non-democracies, it would also be wise to ‘unpack’ these regimes to grasp their diversionary tendencies in future research more effectively. Mark Peceny, Caroline Beer and Shannon Terry-Sanchez’s analysis of different autocratic regimes may offer a useful starting point for this type of study.102 While diversionary behaviour clearly varies among democratic regime types, the general finding that mature democracies are more prone to use diversionary force than other states still holds. With the exception of coalition governments, mature democracies are also more likely to gain domestic political and economic benefits when they use military force abroad than non-democracies. Therefore, our contention that the Galtieri government’s involvement in the Malvinas/Falklands War was an aberration but the Thatcher government’s was not is supported by our results. We find that majoritarian democracies are prone to use diversionary force when they encounter domestic economic problems and elite unrest, as the Thatcher government did in 1982. The startling rise of Thatcher’s poll numbers during and after the war also correlates well with our findings of sharply declining levels of mass unrest both the year a majoritarian democracy intervenes and the following year. Though more fine-grained research on the diversionary propensities of different types of democracies clearly needs to be undertaken, this study makes clear that the most liberal, domestically egalitarian states in the international system, mature democracies, also have the greatest predilection for using diversionary force. In fact, the incentives that leaders in certain forms of mature democracy have for using diversionary force seem to increase as the democracy ages, and democratic norms and institutions become more deeply entrenched. Economic crisis causes diversionary wars Kagotani et al. ‘13 Koji, Associate Professor @ the Graduate School of International Cooperation @ Kobe University in Japan, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Volume 14, Issue 1, “Democracy and diversionary incentives in Japan–South Korea disputes”, http://irap.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/1/33.full#aff-1 2.1 Economic diversion¶ The literature on the diversionary use of force attributes adventurous foreign policy to economic distress. An aggressive foreign policy can provide a policy alternative when economic policies are unable to address the underlying economic problems. When tensions escalate between countries, the general public might pay more attention to the foreign disputes rather than to an economic downturn (Ostrom and Job, 1986; DeRouen, 1995; Fordham, 1998, 2002). Therefore, economic turmoil can be a driving force of diversionary foreign policy.¶ Consider economic diversion from the viewpoint of policy availability. Leaders are limited in the policies they can pursue to address an economic downturn, because macroeconomic policy alternatives such as financial and fiscal policies can stimulate growth only in the short term. If leaders increase public works projects to ameliorate unemployment or reduce taxes to stimulate the economy, they need to tackle fiscal deficit reduction through budget cuts or tax increases sooner or later. If leaders increase the money supply to stimulate the market, they eventually need to suppress the money supply in order to tame inflation in the near future. If these macroeconomic policies cannot serve as solutions for serious recession, leaders need another policy alternative to divert public attention from economic distress. Thus, as long as economic growth is the primary goal, economic turmoil is a driving force behind diversionary foreign policy.
Dennis M., PhD and Assistant Professor of International Studies and Political Science at the Virginia Military Institute, Jonathan W., PhD and Associate Professor of Political Science, “Leaders' Cognitive Complexity, Distrust, and the Diversionary Use of Force”, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/fpa.12019/references RESULTS The results of the directed-dyadic analyses of incident initiation are presented in Table 2, and the results of the monadic models of the Howell and Pevehouse (2007) ―major uses‖ variable are presented in Table 3. 5 In general, the interaction of Distrust and Misery is positive in both models, but attains a generally accepted level of statistical significance in only the ―Major Uses‖ model, indicating preliminary support for Hypothesis 1 in the monadic model only. On the other hand, the trichotomous interaction terms are statistically significant in both models. Among the control variables, ongoing war has, as expected, a consistent negative effect on force usage across both dependent variables. Unified government and Democratic presidency significantly influence the monadic measure as expected, and preference similarity, joint democracy, and increasing geographic distance all significantly diminish the likelihood of force usage in the directed-dyadic model. The only surprising finding among the control variables concerns the negative and significant coefficient for relative power in the dyadic setting: all else equal, the United States uses force against stronger states, relative to the mean power of all other states in the system. ¶ In order to more definitively assess the pertinent interaction terms, we conduct several marginal effects analyses. Our operational goal here is simply to gauge whether, when holding economic misery at values of interest to diversionary theory (specifically, its mean, one standard deviation above its mean, and its observed maximum), the ―movement‖ of Distrust and/or Conceptual Complexity increases or decreases predicted force usage and, of equal importance, whether these increases and decreases are statistically significant. The formula ) exp( = ) | ( β x i x i x i y E ―gives the expected magnitude of the occurrence of the dependent variable in [Poisson and] negative binomial models given any value of a particular covariate, while holding the values of all other covariates constant (here, at the mean for continuous variables and zero for dichotomous variables)‖ (Foster, 2006:437, from Long, 1997). Using the method developed by Brambor, Clark, and Golder (2006), we obtain 10,000 simulated parameter estimates of expected magnitude, the marginal effects of those estimates (i.e., their ―first differences‖ in relation to expected magnitudes at the immediately lower specified level of economic misery), and 90% confidence intervals around those marginal effects. The most interesting marginal effects are given in Figures 2, 3, and 4.¶ As suggested by the original analysis, distrust and misery in the significantly increases the predicted number of ―major uses of force usage in the expected fashion. The effects of increasing distrust on the use of force given mean misery are both substantively negligible and statistically insignificant, indicating that distrust generally does not increase belligerence during¶ ―normal‖ economic times. 6 When misery is specified at one standard deviation above its mean, increasing distrust significantly increases the likelihood of force usage, and this trend intensifies dramatically when misery is specified at its maximum. For example, given misery one standard deviation above population mean, the most distrusting president in the post-1952 period (Eisenhower) is predicted to use nearly twice as much force as the least distrusting president in that period (Kennedy); when misery is at its maximum, however, the former are predicted to use eight times more force than the latter. In all, Figure 2 provides rather strong support for Hypothesis 1, at least in regards to one widely-employed measure of force usage.¶ Figures 3 and 4 correspond to tests of Hypothesis 2. While the trichotomous interaction term is statistically significant in both models, marginal effects analyses reveal that this statistical significance is only applicable to presidents with extremely low distrust when looking at ―major uses‖ of force; nevertheless, the nature of this relationship is anticipated by Hypothesis 2. Specifically, as seen in Figure 3, given minimum distrust, decreasing conceptual complexity is associated with increases in force usage in both ―normal‖ and ―bad‖ economic times (i.e., when misery is at its mean and when it is one standard deviation above its mean). Moreover, the slopes of the two trends are generally similar, albeit with the former increasing slightly more given decreasing conceptual complexity than the latter. However, there are statistically significantly differences in the volume of force usage at each level of misery. In sum, therefore, we find that, among the least distrusting presidents, the likelihood of diversion is always less than that of the use of force under normal economic circumstances, despite the fact that both types of violence increase when conceptual complexity decreases. Thus, Figure 3 confirms our expectations about the general dampening effects of trustfulness on the use of force, while highlighting the likelihood that conceptual simplicity still causes even trustful leaders to marginally discount the costs and risk of conflict. Figure 4 reflects the influence of various values of the three variables comprising the trichotomous interaction term in the directed-dyadic MID incident model (and includes the names of presidents near their actual scores on conceptual complexity and, less precisely, distrust); as is apparent, the statistical significance of these findings is more general. We run two sets of marginal effects analyses, one holding Distrust constant at one standard deviation below its mean and one holding that variable at a standard deviation above its mean; in each of these scenarios, we (as in Figure 3) then track the association of conceptual complexity and incident initiation at mean, one standard deviation above mean, and maximum misery. All told, the findings present a complex portrayal of the influence of psychology on force usage which supports Hypothesis 2, but with an important caveat. As with the monadic variable, relatively trusting presidents are predicted to initiate more incidents as conceptual complexity decreases, but the volume of violence is predicted to be less for any given president as the economy worsens. Though relatively distrusting presidents are also predicted to initiate more incidents as conceptual complexity decreases, the volume of violence is predicted to be greater for any given president as the economy worsens. Illustratively, both the relatively distrusting Eisenhower and Nixon are predicted to initiate more incidents when misery is high than when misery is low. This would seem to contradict the expectations of Hypothesis 2, in that these presidents differ greatly in conceptual complexity. But at the same time, at each level of misery, the conceptually simplistic Eisenhower is predicted to initiate roughly twice as many incidents as the conceptually complex Nixon. In sum, these analyses would suggest that, while a cybernetic decision-making process is a predictor of increased force usage in general, the predisposition to reach for forceful policy instruments explains why both risk-ignorant cybernetic and risk-aware rational presidents use force for diversionary purposes. 7 CONCLUSION The current literature on the diversionary use of force is characterized by a variety of competing theoretical perspectives and contradictory empirical findings. These competing models differ primarily in their assumptions about leaders‘ beliefs, perceptions, and calculations – assumptions which logically lead to different expectations concerning the prevalence of the political use of force. As scholars have not convincingly demonstrated the universal applicability of one model over the others, uncertainty persists as to whose assumptions about leaders‘ calculations are more accurate. However, if leaders‘ beliefs and decision-making styles are variables rather than constants, as research on political psychology and decision-making suggests, then each model is likely to be correct when its assumptions about leaders‘ cognition hold. If so, efforts to discover a universally applicable model for the political use of force should give way to a more nuanced search for the scope conditions under which different explanations become more or less accurate. This is precisely what this project has sought to do: by integrating the literatures on political psychology and the political use of force we have developed a set of 7 Economic decline triggers diversionary wars Howell ‘13 Patrick Davis, B.A. from Emory University and Masters in Political Science from the University of Georgia, “Economic Crises and the Initiation of Militarized Disputes”, https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/howell_patrick_d_201305_ma.pdf Conclusions¶ Altogether, there can be said to be a robust, positive relationship between the occurrence of economic crises and the rate of dispute initiation by states. This effect is especially strong and demonstrable when time ordering is preserved by examining how crises in the previous year affect states in their current year. These findings can also be said to have a relatively high degree of substantive import as well. As Figure 1 showed, the occurrence of each subsequent economic crisis increases the chances of a state initiating disputes by almost 3%. The nearly 20 percentage point increase in dispute initiation across the range of the lagged economic crisis variable also represents a substantial impact, especially considering the rare event nature of militarized disputes to begin with.¶ This generalizable finding can have far-reaching impact to both the study of diversionary war in academia, as well as directly for policymakers. In academe settings, there is good evidence to support the use of acute economic crises over those variables based on the slower- shifting trends of GDP or public opinion measurements. Economic crises act as an explicit trigger that can mark a leader’s shift into a losses frame and engage in riskier behavior consistent with both prospect theory and diversionary war hypotheses. Meanwhile, applying this observed effect to the real world would seem to indicate that if a state goes through an economic crisis, other states should have increased wariness in their dealings with the crisis-stricken state and/or be more prepared for the possibility of a new dispute emerging in the wake of such an event.
Patrick Davis, B.A. from Emory University and Masters in Political Science from the University of Georgia, “Economic Crises and the Initiation of Militarized Disputes”, https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/howell_patrick_d_201305_ma.pdf Implications¶ The findings are clear: economic crises are an important trigger for shifts in a state’s rate of dispute initiation. By using a large sample of states over a period of 185 years, this conclusion then can also be taken as generalizable to the entire population of states in the international system. In addition to providing support for issue crossover and the influence economic troubles can play on foreign policy decisions, the findings here also support the methodological rationale for using economic crises as explicit, observable events, instead of as trends in other variables (e.g. GDP growth). Of course, this is not to say that all work on this topic is final. There exist a number of areas where this research agenda can be improved upon and/or extended to in order to provide a more holistic account of where and how economic crises exactly apply political pressure on leaders. Growth Good – Civil War Robust research shows capitalism has a statistically significant relationship with solving civil warMousseau 12 Michael Mousseau, Koc University, International Studies Quarterly (2012) 56, 470–483, Capitalist Development and Civil War, online, jj Drawing on new economic norms theory (Mousseau 2000, 2009), this article presents a single and novel account for some of the oldest questions in the study of politics, including the linkages of capitalist development with liberal preferences, civil peace, state capacity, and the democratic rule of law. This account explains liberal values and interests without relying on any of the old modernization school assumptions; nor does it require a great leap of faith: it rests only on the conventional assumption that individuals normally pursue their economic interests with the information available to them. Liberal values and interests are deduced from the uncontroversial axiom that a ‘‘market- capitalist’’ economy is one where profit-maximizing actors exchange goods, services, and labor in free and voluntary contracts. Prior research has already established that marketcapitalism promotes liberal values and peace among nations (Mousseau 2009). This article applies the theory to civil wars and reports compelling results: from 1961 to 2001 not a single civil war, insurgency, or rebellion occurred in any nation with a market-capitalist economy. Market-capitalism appears to be the strongest variable in the civil conflict literature, by a large margin, and many of the most robust long-standing relationships in this literature are spurious— including per capita income, state capacity, and oil-export dependency. Regression analysis provesMousseau 12 Michael Mousseau, Koc University, International Studies Quarterly (2012) 56, 470–483, Capitalist Development and Civil War, online, jj Initial bivariate regressions of CIEBinary and war (unreported) produced a startling result: there has never been a civil war in a nation with a contract-intensive economy, at least over the 1961–2001 period of observation. Chi-square tests establish that the odds of this being due to chance are one thousand to one. Further tests yield only three cases of Armed Conflict onsets in countries with contract-intensive economies. The odds of this being due to chance are less than one thousand to one. It is thereby possible to state with confidence that nations with market-capitalist economies do not have civil wars, and they very rarely have civil armed conflicts. A closer look at the three armed conflicts that did occur in market-capitalist nations shows that all are related to terror groups; none were insurgencies or rebellions. Terrorist attacks can be carried out by extremely small groups that lack popular support. Economic norms theory models social values and preferences, not the behaviors of a few. In fact, two of these three conflicts are from of acts of terror carried out by groups that may have lacked widespread support. One was from Basque-related terror in Spain, from 1991 to 1992; the other was from a terror bombing in North-ern Ireland in the United Kingdom in 1998. In both cases, there are many indications that at the time these attacks occurred the responsible terrorist groups did not have significant support from their constituent communities. Also, in 1991 Spain had only recently (in 1986) transitioned into contract-intensive economy, as had, I suspect, Northern Ireland in 1998 Spreading capitalism and growth is key to peace—best studiesMousseau 12 Michael Mousseau, Koc University, International Studies Quarterly (2012) 56, 470–483, Capitalist Development and Civil War, online, jj Since capitalist states do not fight each other (Mousseau 2009) and have been shown here to not have civil wars, clusters of capitalist nations will be peaceful. A difference of means test with the variable Neighbor at War confirms that contract-rich nations are significantly more likely than contract-poor ones to have neighbors in peace (P < .001). This indicates that prior reports that having a neighbor at war may increase the risk of conflict (Hegre and Sambanis 2006) may be spurious. In Model 11, Neighbor at War (0.45) is positive and significant, indicating that even if CIE is a partial cause of peaceful neighbors, this factor has a robust impact on conflict in ways that cannot be attributed to contract-poor economy. Our study is the best and controls for multiple factorsMousseau 12 Michael Mousseau, Koc University, International Studies Quarterly (2012) 56, 470–483, Capitalist Development and Civil War, online, jj Implications and Conclusion While the correlations of liberal preferences with economic development, civil peace, and democracy are among the most powerful and longstanding observations in the study of politics (Dixon 2009:723), the field lacks any widely considered fully encompassing theory for these phenomena; moreover, there is no existing consensus for an explanation for any of these patterns separately. This study showed how a particular kind of economic development, market-capitalism, can offer a single account for all of these patterns. In societies with contract-rich economies, almost everyone has free choice in employers and regularly obtains goods and services from strangers located in a market. Due to everyone having greater opportunities to contract when everyone else has greater opportunities to contract, individuals in these societies have direct economic interests in each other’s rights (to contract) and welfare. Furthermore, they have interests in their states producing the public goods of law and order, reliably and impartially enforcing contracts, and doing whatever it takes to promote market growth. As a consequence, market-capitalist nations tend to be democratic with strong and functional states, while having advanced economies. Prior studies have confirmed the predicted linkages of market-capitalism with liberal preferences (Mousseau 2009:61), human rights (Mousseau and Mousseau 2008), and global conflict and cooperation (Mousseau 2003, 2009). Herein, we saw that market-capitalism Granger-causes higher income in nations, and higher incomes do not Granger-cause market-capitalism. Analyses of armed conflict in most nations from 1961 to 2001 showed that not a single civil war, insurgency, or rebellion occurred in any nation with a market-capitalist economy. This result is highly unlikely to be the result of chance and, after controlling for every known robust variable in civil war studies, market-capitalism emerged as the most powerful explanatory factor in the field, by a large margin. In addition, many leading prior variables in the civil conflict literature are spurious, including economic development, state capacity, oil-export dependency, economic freedom, contract-intensive money, government spending, electoral regulation, and Western. After extensive tests, only two other variables, Economic Growth and Regime Instability, can be said with confidence to influence the odds of both armed conflict and civil wars in nations. UQ – Violence DownViolence is decreasing worldwide – every measure Kenny, ’11 (Charles, senior economist on leave from the World Bank as a joint fellow at the New America Foundation and the Center for Global Development, Getting Better, p. 87, bgm) Over the very long term, the world is a considerably more peaceful place than it was before the agricultural revolution, when somewhere between 5 and 30 percent of deaths were probably caused by violence. And the world as a whole today is also comparatively crime-free compared to Britain in the Middle Ages, when homicide rates were around 23 per 100,000. The global average is one-third that level today. Still, evidence from a global sample of countries suggests that the homicide rate increased from 5 to 7 per 100,000 people per year between the late 1970s arid the early 1990s. Violent crime increased particularly dramatically in countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that are connected to the international drug trade. Violent crime in Jamaica increased 150 percent between 1977 and 2000, for example. And the proportion of people dying in wars each year also grew from as few as 1 percent of deaths in the nineteenth century to perhaps as many as 4 percent in the twentieth. Governments killed as many as 170 million civilians from 1900 to 1987. The good news is that the tide appears to have turned since the end of the Cold War, with regard to violence both within and across countries. The number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to fewer than 2,000 per year in the current decade. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was perhaps the only explicit war of conquest in the postwar period. And “traditional” wars that pit two states against each other in a battle over land and resources are also almost completely extinct—a recent sputtering exception being the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Most remaining international wars of the last ten years have involved police actions, many approved by the UN Security Council. Measures that include civil war suggest that the period around 1900 was still more peaceful than today, and horrific conflicts are ongoing not least in the Congo. But the number of major civil and international wars being fought also declined from twenty-six to four between 1991 and 2005. A2: K-Waves Kondratieff wave theory empirically false North, ’09 (Gary, economist and publisher and PhD in history from the University of California, Riverside, The Myth of the Kondratieff Wave, http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north725.html, 6/27/09) THE K-WAVE These days, the Kondratieff Wave has a spiffy new name: the K-Wave. (I can almost hear it: "Attention: K-Wave shoppers!") The K-Wave is supposedly going to bring a deflationary collapse Real Soon Now. The Western world's debt structure will disappear in a wave of defaults. Kondratieff's 54-year cycle is almost upon us. Again. The last deflationary period ended in 1933. This became clear no later than 1940. World War II orders from Great Britain, funded by American loans and Federal Reserve policy, ended the Great Depression by lowering real wages. In 1942, price and wage controls were imposed by Washington, the FED began pumping out new money, ration stamps replaced the free market, the black market overcame shortages, and the inflationary era began. That was a long time ago. But the K-Wave is heralded as a 50 to 60-year cycle, or even more specifically, a 54-year cycle. That's the entire cycle, trough to trough or peak to peak. The K-Wave supposedly should have bottomed in 1933, risen for 27 years (1960), declined in economic contraction until 1987, and boomed thereafter. The peak should therefore be in 2014. There is a problem here: the cyclical decline from 1960 to 1987. It never materialized. Prices kept rising, escalating with a vengeance after 1968, then slowing somewhat – just in time for the longest stock market boom in American history: 1982–2000. OK, say the K-Wavers: let's extend the cycle to 60 years. Fine. Let's do just that. Boom, 1932–62; bust, 1963–93; boom, 1994–2024. Does this correspond to anything that happened in American economic history since 1932? No. More empirical ev North, ’09 (Gary, economist and publisher and PhD in history from the University of California, Riverside, The Myth of the Kondratieff Wave, http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north725.html, 6/27/09) You may think that I am devoting way too much space to this. But I want my readers to understand why Kondratieff was wrong in 1925. His popularizers were even more wrong in 1975–85, with their "idealized" chart, and their contemporary heirs' unwillingness to learn from the fact that the downward phase of the cycle is now 44 years late. It should have begun no later than Kennedy's administration: 1932+30=1962. This assumes that the original downward phase was due in 1932. It wasn't. It was due around 1926: 1896+30=1926. It should have lasted until 1956. But 1945–73 was a boom era, with mild recessions and remarkable economic growth per capita. Forget about a K-Wave which is going to produce price deflation. The Federal Reserve System remains in control. Sorry about that. It is creating new money. Long-term price deflation of 5% per annum is not in the cards or the charts – anywhere. I recommend that you not take seriously arguments to the contrary that are based on the latest updated version of the K-Wave. The K-Wave forecasted that secular deflation was just around the corner, repeatedly, ever since 1932. It wasn't. Ignore their WW2 example – it was just war inflation, not a K waveRothbard, Austrian School of Economics, ‘3 (Murray, Dean of above school, “The Kondratieff Cycle: Real or Fabricated?” 2003, http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard44.htm) To the criticism that "Kondratieff peaks" are simply the results of war-borne inflation, the Kondratieffites have an answer: "Ahh, but this analysis is superficial, for the wars themselves are caused by the arrival of the Kondratieff peak!" Well, in a sense: the War of 1812–Napoleonic War, the Civil War, World War I, major wars all, came at (i.e., brought about) Kondratieff peaks. Can we then say which was cause and which was effect – the war or the cycle? Aside from the fact that we would again have to postulate some mysterious force that drives men mad and on to war during Kondratieff peak periods, there is one mighty counter-example that destroys this theory totally: World War II, which came, not at the end of a Kondratieff boom, but rather – in stark contrast – at the end of a Kondratieff depression. This example indicates another gross error in the Kondratieff analysis. Where real cycles exist, in physics, astronomy or biology, the scientist concludes that there are cycles after hundreds, if not thousands, of mutually confirming observations. But in the alleged "Kondratieff," there are, at very most, only three-and-a-half cycles. What kind of analysis builds a cycle theory on only three-and-a-half observations? 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