User talk:Sir Nils/Security dilemma

The security dilemma is an important concept in international relations theory used to explain how conflict can arise between states without aggressive intentions, which seek only to provide for their own security. In its general form, the security dilemma arises from uncertainty and anarchy in the international system. Under anarchy, states provide for their own security through forms of self-help, such as increasing military strength or pursuing alliances. When one state takes purely defensive measures to increase its own security, the resulting increase in its relative power or military capabilities may appear threatening to other states and reduce their security. Responding to the perceived threat, these states pursue measures designed to increase their own security which, in turn, appear threatening to the first state, which will take further measures to increase its security, which appear threatening to the other states. This creates a vicious cycle of escalating threat perception and insecurity.

The term "security dilemma" was first introduced by John H. Herz in 1950, though an understanding of the phenomenon is often traced back to the writings of Thomas Hobbes. Subsequent theorists, such as Robert Jervis and Glenn Snyder, further analyzed the security dilemma, grounding its logic in game theory, particularly the prisoner's dilemma and the stag hunt. These theorists also emphasized features of the international system that could either exacerbate or ameliorate the security dilemma, focusing on ways states could differentiate between aggressive and defensive intentions.

During the Cold War, the security dilemma was primarily applied to competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, but in the 1990s scholars such as Jervis, Jack Snyder and Barry Posen began to apply the concept to civil and ethnic war. This expansion of analysis has made the security dilemma one of the most important concepts in international relations; Ken Booth and Nicholas J. Wheeler have argued that it is "the most fundamental concept of all in security studies."

Origin of the concept

The frontespiece of Hobbes's Leviathan

In his 1651 book Leviathan, the British philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes developed the idea of a state of nature in which people live without political authority. He writes of this situation: "During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition, which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man." According to Hobbes, individuals escaped from this universal war by the establishment of government, but without a world government, interstate relations continued to be dominated by conflict and war. Hobbes's argument about war under anarchy paved the way for modern theories of the security dilemma, although some scholars of Hobbes, such as Michael Williams, have questioned whether modern security dilemma scholarship is actually compatible with Hobbes's own thought.

Modern scholarship of the security dilemma developed in the mid-20th century. John Herz introduced the term in his article, "Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma," which was published in the January 1950 issue of the journal World Politics. Herz described the security dilemma as the result of anarchy:

Wherever such anarchic society has existed - and it has existed in most periods of know history on some level - there has arisen what may be called the "security dilemma" of men, or groups, or their leaders. Groups or individuals living in such a constellation must be, and usually are, concerned about their security from being attacked, subjected, dominated, or annihilated by other groups and individuals. Striving to attain security from such attack, they are driven to acquire more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such a world of competing units, power competition ensues, and the vicious cycle of security and power accumulation is on.

Herz expanded on his ideas in the 1951 book Political Realism and Political Idealism, the 1959 book 'International Politics in the Atomic Age, and a number of articles published in the 1950s. At about the same time, the British historian Herbert Butterfield developed a similar set of ideas, though he did not refer to the security dilemma by that name. In his article "The Tragic Element in Modern International Conflict", pubished in The Review of Politics in April 1950, Butterfield wrote of an "irreducible dilemma" caused by mutual fear and the impossibility of knowing the intentions of others, that gives rise to insecurity:

It is peculiar characteristic of the situation I am describing - the situation of what I should call Hobbesian fear - that you yourself may vividly feel the terrible fear that you have of the other party, but you cannot enter into the other man's counter-fear, or even understand why he should be particularly nervous. For you know that you yourself mean him no harm, and that you want nothing from him save guarantees for your own safety; and it is never possible for you to realize or remember properly that since he cannot see the inside of your mind, he can never have the same assurance of your intentions that you have.

Herz and Butterfield agreed on the essential causes and nature of the security dilemma as the result of anarchy, mistrust, and uncertainty; however, they disagreed on the chances of mitigating it. Butterfield believed that the security dilemma was inevitable and that it could not be overcome, while Herz believed that it was possible for adversaries who understood the dilemma to overcome its logic. This same question of mitigating the security dilemma continues to preoccupy theorists and scholars, who have studied the security dilemma in increasing numbers.

Formulations

After its initial expression by Butterfield and Herz, the security dilemma soon attracted the attention of others. One of the first scholars to adopt the concept was Arnold Wolfers, who described the security dilemma as a fundamental problem in his classic 1952 article "National Security as an Ambiguous Symbol." Herz substantially expanded thinking on the dilemma himself in a series of books and articles in the 1950s, while other scholars retroactively applied the security dilemma to both historical events and political theory. Stanley Hoffman, for example, identified the security dilemma as an important component in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A key element of this early theorizing was the way that it "substitute[d] tragedy for evil" as the source of international conflict. This approach separated security dilemma scholars from classical realists such as Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr who saw the origins of conflict in human nature and paved the way for structural realism, focused on the nature of the international system rather than the nature of humankind.

Prisoner's dilemma

A major breakthrough in security dilemma scholarship came in the 1970s as political scientists began to extensively use the tools of game theory. In his 1971 article "Prisoner's Dilemma and Chicken Models in International Politics," Glenn Snyder examined the security dilemma as a form of the prisoner's dilemma, an important game theoretic model of conflict and cooperation developed at RAND in 1950.

The prisoner's dilemma posits a hypothetical situation involving two actors. Each actor has the choice of either cooperating with the other or defecting, and the "payoffs" for each actor depend on the combination of these choices. In his formulation, Snyder equated cooperation with the decision to disarm, and defection with the decision for a state to arm. The best result for each player is to exploit the other, by defecting while the other cooperates. The second best result is one of mutual cooperation, followed by a third best result of mutual defection. The worst payoff comes from being exploited - cooperating while the other player defects. These results (payoffs) are summarized in the table below:

	Player 2 Cooperates (Disarms)	Player 2 Defects (Builds Weapons)
Player 1 Cooperates (Disarms)	Both receive the second-best result	Player 1: Worst result Player 2: Best result
Player 1 Defects (Build Weapons)	Player 1: Best result Player 2: Worst result	Both receive the third-best result

According to game theorists, this situation will lead to an outcome in which both players defect and receive the third-best payoff. This occurs because the choice to defect is a strictly dominant strategy (i.e., it is the best option regardless of what the other player chooses). If one player cooperates, the other receives a better payoff (his best result) by defecting. Similarly, if one player defects, the other player receives a better payoff by also defecting (his third-best payoff) than he would by cooperating (his worst payoff). Thus, the game ends in mutual defection even though both players would be better off under mutual cooperation. Mutual cooperation, however, is not a Nash equilibrium outcome because either player could unilaterally improve his result by defecting. Thus, the prospect of being exploited prevents mutual cooperation despite its desirability.

Applying his analysis to the security dilemma through arms races, Snyder argues that the security dilemma resembles the prisoner's dilemma (with cooperation as disarmament and building weapons as defection) because "the parties wind up in a costly state of conflict when cooperation would have yielded better payoffs." He argues, however, that in the security dilemma, there are not necessarily "real incompatibilities of interest between the parties" like those found in the prisoner's dilemma, unless one of the actors has aggressive intentions. Actors in the pure security dilemma choose to defect out of fear that they may be exploited, preventing the optimal result, but this fear comes primarily from "uncertainty about the opponent's intentions" rather than the incompatible desires posited in the prisoner's dilemma.

Stag hunt

An alternative model of the security dilemma is the stag hunt, also known as the "assurance game." The the stag hunt was told as parable by Jean-Jaques Rousseau in his 1754 Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men and introduced into the international relations discourse by Kenneth Waltz in his 1959 book Man, The State, and War, before being formalized into game theory. Robert Jervis then applied a formal, game-theoretic model of the stag hunt to international relations in 1978. Like the prisoner's dilemma, the stag hunt examines why actors may fail to achieve cooperation that would make both better off, but it presents a different payoffs. In the stag hunt, two actors again choose to either cooperate or defect. Unlike the prisoner's dilemma, however, the best outcome is mutual cooperation. The second-best outcome is either mutual defection or to defect while the other player cooperates - both of these carry the same benefit. Finally, the worst outcome is to cooperate while an opponent defects. These are summarized in the table below:

	Player 2 Cooperates (Disarms)	Player 2 Defects (Builds weapons)
Player 1 Cooperates (Disarms)	Both receive the best result	Player 1: Worst result Player 2: Second-best result
Player 1 Defects (Builds weapons)	Player 1: Second-best result Player 2: Worst result	Both receive the second-best result

From the perspective of game theory, there is not a dominant strategy in the stag hunt. Instead, "what is rational for one player to choose depends on his beliefs about what the other will choose." A player should cooperate if he believes his partner will cooperate and defect if he believes his partner will defect. In his treatment of the stag hunt, Waltz argued that the nature of uncertainty in the international system made defection the rational choice, so that the outcome of the stag hunt is the same as the prisoner's dilemma - mutual defection. However, mutual cooperation is a sustainable Nash equilibrium under the stag hunt (neither player has an incentive to defect if the other will cooperate), meaning that if players trust each other, cooperation is possible. Thus, treating the security dilemma as a stag hunt implies a greater chance of mutual cooperation than treating it as a prisoner's dilemma.

Jervis's formulation

In his 1978 article, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma," Robert Jervis produced what is now considered the "classic consideration" of the security dilemma. Jervis writes that the security dilemma derives from the fact that "many of the means by which a state tries to increase it security decrease the security of others." In itself, this is not necessarily a problem (if a state cares only for its security and not that of others); however, as demonstrated by Herz and Butterfield, the reduction in the security of other states will tend to touch off an action-reaction cycle in which those states attempt to increase their own security, reducing the security of the first state.

It is possible to assume that this action-reaction cycle will eventually leave the states involved with the same level of security that they had to begin with; however, Jervis argues that the cycle will actually leave both states less secure than they were originally. In his analysis of Jervis's article, Charles Glaser identifies three ways in which this may occur. The first of these is a reduction in relative defensive military capability. This will occur when states take measures to increase their security that increase offensive capabilities more than they increase defensive capabilities (i.e., buying primarily offensive weapons). If both states engage in such behavior, then both will end up with greater overall military capability, but each state will also be more vulnerable to attack by the others increased offensive capability, leaving it less secure.. The second security-reducing mechanism is somewhat different. Jervis suggests that reducing the security of an opponent can "[increase] the value the adversary places on expansion" because it causes that opponent to value secure borders and defense in depth. This value attached to expansion "makes it harder to deter" the opponent, thereby reducing the security of the first state. The third and final security-reducing effect comes from "simply wasting money" on unnecessary defense expenditures.

Because these three security-reducing effects arise when both states attempt to increase their security, states should prefer security cooperation (disarmament) to a cycle of security competition. States that are purely security-seeking (i.e., do not have aggressive or expansionist motives) will also prefer mutual disarmament to unilateral armament (arming when their opponents do not). Thus, if both states are purely security-seeking, the situation is analogous to the stag hunt described above, and "there are a number of arrangements that could permit cooperation," limited only by the difficulties in coordinating actions due to uncertainty and risk-aversion. In this case, there is a security dilemma, but it is not acute because cooperation should be able to forestall a cycle of mutual armament.

If, however, states are "greedy" (i.e., they value expansion), the ordering of preferences changes. Greedy states will prefer unilateral disarmament to mutual disarmament because it allows them to pursue expansion or force concessions from other states. When one or both states are greedy, the situation is analogous to the prisoner's dilemma, rather than the stag hunt, and cooperation is much more difficult to achieve. In this case, however, there is not truly a security dilemma because the source of conflict lies in the greed of one or both states.

The true challenge of the security dilemma comes from the fact that a state cannot know whether or not its opponent is greedy. Thus, the challenge of the security dilemma is not simply resolving the game of either stag hunt; it is the challenge of determining whether the situation resembles stag hunt or the prisoner's dilemma. Cooperative strategies that work well for the stag hunt may prove catastrophic if the opponent is actually greedy, limiting the chances of cooperation. Further exacerbating this problem is the difficulty of projecting future intentions. As Jervis writes, "even if the other state now supports the status quo, it may become dissatisfied [i.e., greedy] later." Because states have no reliable way to signal that their intentions are peaceful and no way to prove that their intentions will remain peaceful in the future, the security dilemma operates acutely, and moves by one state intended to increase its own security will almost certainly provoke countermoves by others, reducing the security of all. This is the basis of what Jervis calls the "spiral model", in which a series of escalating attempts to increase security may eventually give rise to war.