While there are more situations and contexts in which military force is difficult to use, it remains a vital source of power. But the fact that military power is not always sufficient to decide particular situations does not mean that it has lost all utility. Some analysts argue that military power is of such restricted utility that it is no longer the ultimate measuring rod. This leads to a larger point about the role of military force. If China’s hard power frightens its neighbours, they are likely to seek such insurance policies, and the US is likely to be the major provider. There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”Įven if the probability of the use of force among states, or of threats of its use, is lower now than in earlier eras, the high impact of war leads rational actors to purchase expensive military insurance. As US President Barack Obama said when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, “We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. The European Union’s soft power at the end of the Cold War, and that of China today, owes much to the success of the EU and Chinese economic models.Įconomic resources are increasingly important in this century, but it would be a mistake to write off the role of military power. A successful economic model not only finances the military resources needed for the exercise of hard power, but it can also attract others to emulate its example. Their suggestion was not heeded.Įconomic resources can produce soft-power behaviour as well as hard military power. In February 2010, a group of senior Chinese military officers, angered over US arms sales to Taiwan, called for China’s government to sell off US government bonds in retaliation. In this case, it resembles a “balance of financial terror”, analogous to the Cold War military interdependence in which the US and the Soviet Union each had the potential to destroy the other in a nuclear exchange. Judging whether economic interdependence produces power requires looking at the balance of asymmetries. In other words, bringing the US to it knees might well mean that China would bring itself to its ankles. But doing so would not only reduce the value of its reserves as the dollar weakened it would also jeopardise US demand for Chinese imports, leading to job losses and instability in China. True, China could bring the US to its knees by threatening to sell its dollar holdings. Today, China and the US are highly interdependent economically, but many analysts misunderstand the implications of this for power politics. Many crucial issues, such as financial stability or climate change, simply are not amenable to military force. A carrot is more effective than a stick if you wish to lead a mule to water, but a gun may be more useful if your aim is to deprive an opponent of his mule. But whether economic or military resources produce more power in today’s world depends on the context. Military power, which some call the ultimate form of power in world politics, requires a thriving economy. But, while Britain and Germany were each other’s most significant trading partners in 1914, that did not prevent a conflagration that set back global economic integration for a half-century. Political observers have long debated whether economic or military power is more fundamental. The Marxist tradition casts economics as the underlying structure of power, and political institutions as a mere superstructure, an assumption shared by nineteenth-century liberals who believed that growing interdependence in trade and finance would make war obsolete. They argue that a dominant economic power soon becomes a dominant military power, forgetting that the United States was the world’s largest economy for 70 years before it became a military superpower. Today, some interpret the rise in China’s share of world output as signifying a fundamental shift in the balance of global power, but without considering military power. Economic power would become the key to success in world politics, a change that many people thought would usher in a world dominated by Japan and Germany.
The ability to project military power has determined the international order for generations Creative Commons – Roberto BobrowĪt the Cold War’s end, some pundits proclaimed that “geo-economics” had replaced geopolitics.
0 kommentar(er)
