Power, Threat, or Military Capabilities by Carmel Davis (review)

The topic of when, why, and how states perceive others as threats is remarkably understudied despite its central importance. Carmel Davis takes the period 1970 to 1982 as his set of cases to consider how well U.S. perceptions of the extent of the danger posed by the Soviet Union can be explained by one version of balance-of-power theory, balance of threat, and what he calls the balance of military capabilities. This is an important period of the Cold War, and Davis’s summary of the relevant facts, figures, and intelligence judgments is useful. The exposition of the theories, although done without much nuance, raises interesting and important issues. In the space of 114 pages, quite a bit is conveyed very concisely. But enough issues and questions are missed so that in the end the contribution is limited.

Like many authors before him, Davis argues that balance of power is measured by the size of a country’s economy and that armed forces are too blunt an instrument to reveal much to scholars or cotemporary decision-makers. Not surprisingly, Davis argues that this view does not fit the changing U.S. perceptions of the USSR. For one thing, a state may view another as very powerful and yet friendly, as was largely the case for Western allies’ views of one another. This is why Stephen Walt argued in his Origins of Alliances that what was key was perceptions of whether other countries posed a threat to the state. The important thing was how others behaved, although certain factors such as their domestic political systems could also play a role. Less convincingly, Davis discards this hypothesis as well, arguing (correctly) that in the late 1970s the Soviet Union did not behave as aggressively as it might have (pp. 64–65) and that under both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter interpretations of Soviet behavior varied. But Davis’s treatment of what the USSR was doing and how it was perceived is too sketchy to vindicate his conclusions. He ignores Soviet “adventures” in Africa and Moscow’s generally increased assertiveness during these years, which many contemporary political leaders and subsequent scholars attributed in part to the Soviet military buildup under Leonid Brezhnev, the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and the domestic preoccupations of U.S. policymakers.

Davis’s preferred explanation is what he calls the balance of military capabilities. Although built on the same variables as balance of power, this is more precise in its measurement of the likely outcome of possible wars, taking into account a more fine-grained appraisal of adversary strength and, most importantly, doing a “net assessment” of the capabilities of both sides. His claim is that the extent of U.S. perceptions of the Soviet threat track closely on such net assessments.

This is an argument worth considering, but the treatment is much too brief and superficial to be convincing. Net assessment is a very tricky business, and it is hard to trace changes in these judgments over time. Furthermore, Davis does not discuss how politicized they are. When the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) started making these estimates, the Department of Defense strongly objected on the grounds that the CIA had no business looking at U.S. capabilities and that the relevant expertise was in the Pentagon. Readers of this journal are not likely to be surprised to learn that the Defense Department estimates were pessimistic about the prevailing situation but implied that with proper efforts and increased military spending the situation could be rectified. It is also unfortunate that even in a brief treatment Davis ignores the raging debate over Soviet nuclear doctrine and Soviet leaders’ attitudes toward whether nuclear or even large-scale conventional wars could be kept limited. From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s this was one of the main battlegrounds between the competing schools of thought in Washington.

More broadly, Davis’s treatment is apolitical in two related senses. First...