When Opponents Cooperate: Great Power Conflict and Collaboration in World Politics (review)

We live in a new world. The end of the Cold War requires fresh thinking about the nature of international relations generally and American foreign policy specifically. So it is claimed.

Is the world so different that there are no lessons to be learned from the past? To answer “yes” is to hold not only that there have been important changes in the dynamics of international affairs, but that there is a blank slate from which the United States, either alone or through multilateral cooperation with other states, can shape the direction of international affairs. To answer “no” is more realistic because it recognizes that the past is prologue and demands a sensitive understanding of continuities as well as changes. Such a position is more challenging, for it involves an awareness of the difficulties facing states, even great powers like the US, in managing and directing the course of events. It also facilitates drawing on past experience to learn lessons, drawn from mistakes to avoid and successes to emulate, that can help in creating the future.

Learning lessons from the past is, however, a potentially risky endeavor. All too often, “lessons” from the past are inaccurate and dangerously misleading. The use of analogies—Munich or Vietnam —frequently indicates lack of thought rather than great insight, the substitution of mantra for analysis. Such is the case, for example, with calls for American involvement in the Balkans based on the analogy of World War I, which, advocates of intervention point out, also started in Sarajevo. But this is to highlight and focus on one coincidental similarity and ignore fundamental differences, including, inter alia, that no great power is directly threatened by events in the Balkans, as Austria-Hungary was by Serbia, and the common perception that contemporary military technology (ie. nuclear weapons) gives the advantage to the defense. For lessons to be applicable and indicative, differences as well as similarities must be taken into account; the analysis must be both acute and astute.

That lessons from the past can be useful in understanding international relations is a core assumption of Benjamin Miller’s ambitious and wide-ranging When Opponents Cooperate. Among the topics addressed are how the interactions of the great powers affect regional conflicts—in this case the Middle East...and, in turn, how regional states seek to affect the policies of their great power allies. As the title indicates, Miller, an assistant professor of international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, addresses a central question in international relations: how great powers in an anarchic system can coordinate their actions to avoid inadvertent conflict. He does so by examining cooperation among the great powers during the nineteenth century’s Concert of Europe and the Cold War, two vastly different international systems. While the structure of the nineteenth century was multipolar, that of the Cold War was bipolar; where the foreign policies of the Concert’s great powers were moderate and pragmatic, those of the two superpowers were heavily imbued with ideologies that were mutually exclusive; and the roughly similar domestic systems of the Concert’s states are a contrast to what were the radical differences between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The point of comparing such different systems is this: to the extent that there are common causes of cooperation, there is reason to believe that they are robust guides for future policy. It is not, however, so straightforward and simple. Given the intricacy of the two systems and the multitude of factors that are in play at the international, domestic, and individual levels, it may be that there are no common causes. Indeed, Miller leans in this direction. The different systems engendered distinct forms of cooperation. The Concert was marked by explicit and deliberate cooperation that sought, and achieved, positive goals such as conflict resolution while the Cold War was characterized by tacit and unintended cooperation with the more modest negative...