The Military Lens: Doctrinal Difference and Deterrence Failure in Sino-American Relations

1. The Military Language of Diplomacy

THE DEATHS OF MILLIONS in the Korean War might have been avoided if China and the United States had read each other’s military signals correctly. Similarly, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 might have been averted if the antagonists had evaluated threats and the overall balance more accurately ; if so, the Middle East might look very different now. Overoptimism in France, Germany, and the United States during World War II all stemmed from the same misunderstanding of the military balance. Today, across the Taiwan Strait the same dangers are growing. Practitioners and scholars alike emphasize that misperception pervasively affects international relations. The sources of perception have been studied extensively, yet the potential of military doctrine to distort perception has not been systematically examined . As this book will show, doctrinal differences can lead to severe misperceptions and tragic miscommunications, both of which can impose a huge human cost. Doctrinal differences complicate the ability of leaders to accurately perceive the actions of other nations and the international system. Scholars have long known of the dangers stemming from “the inability of foreign-policy makers to view events from the perspective of their adversaries.”1 When nations have different doctrines and hold different beliefs about the nature 1 Alexander L. George, Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980), 66–67. See also Keith B. Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001). 1 the military language of diplomacy 4 THE MILITARY LENS of effective military strategies and capabilities—in other words, different “theories of victory”—diplomacy and signaling will be more difficult. For international communication to be effective, both sides must understand the language of diplomacy being used. When that language depends on military threats, different theories of victory can lead to problems in “translation” or understanding and thus to unnecessary conflict. In order to send an effective signal to an adversary, nations must understand how that adversary will interpret the signal. Furthermore, doctrinal differences complicate assessments of the balance of power, leading policymakers to false optimism.2 This also further complicates crisis diplomacy. In short, this book examines the causal claim that doctrinal differences worsen misperceptions, which can lead to escalation. Such troubles might be avoided if signals are better tailored to the adversary’s perceptual framework with regard to military doctrine and effectiveness , that is, to its theory of victory. This is rarely done. This book draws on theoretic work on the sources of military doctrine, the causes and dangers of misperception, false optimism, conventional deterrence , and the measurement of power, as well as approaches used in the study of crisis diplomacy. It contributes to understanding how information asymmetries can result in bargaining failure that leads to war, by examining a source of asymmetry that has not been studied, and whose correction requires specifically targeted policies. The arguments of “doctrinal-difference theory” have important implications for international relations theorists in the areas of rationalist views of war, the roles of military doctrine in shaping international outcomes, the importance of substate variables in shaping international systemic outcomes, the understanding of the sources of deterrence failure, and the importance of crisis diplomacy and statecraft. This book examines the implications of doctrinal differences with a particular focus on interactions between the United States and China during the 1950s. Beijing repeatedly disregarded both implicit and explicit American threats of nuclear attack and strategic air attacks, because it regarded nuclear weapons as mere “paper tigers.” From the other side, the United States 2 The term “false optimism” refers to unwarranted confidence about a situation or the near future. Several prominent scholars emphasize it is an important phenomenon in international politics. Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1988), chapter 3, “Dreams and Delusions of a Coming War”; Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), chapter 2, “False Optimism: Illusions of the Coming War”; John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War, 8th ed. (New York: Wadsworth, 2001). THE MILITARY LANGUAGE OF DIPLOMACY 5 gave little credence to China’s threats of intervention based on its strategy of “People’s War.” Each side, in other words, viewed the other’s key military doctrine with disdain. This led each to miscalculate the overall balance of power between...