Brute Force Applied By States
Uncertainty is a major driver of conflict in international relations: It can work in both ways. If the committed country has a reputation for sometimes, unpredictably, reacting where it need not, and not always collaborating to minimize embarrassment, loopholes may be less inviting. If one cannot get a reputation for always honoring commitments in detail, because the details are ambiguous, it may help to get a reputation for being occasionally unreasonable. If one cannot buy clearly identifiable and fully reliable trip-wires, an occasional booby trap placed at random may serve somewhat the same purpose in the long run (Schelling 48).
Competitors seek to coerce each other through threats. What and how much can one gain through bluffing and manipulating? What risk is worth taking? How can one evaluate the risk involved in the course of action? The consequences nations face in front of uncertainty are not straightforward, but involve a guessing game, allowing nations to manipulate risk.
If there were no uncertainty about what would and would not set off the violence, and “if the nations were to avoid overstepping the boundaries, then everyone would have to live within the rules set up by its adversary”. But one’s actions are not always rational, the borders and thresholds are not always fully reliable (Schelling 92).
The purely “undiplomatic” is concerned with enemy strength; relatively measure by one enemy opposing another. On the other hand, the coercive “power of hurt” is the exploitation of enemy wants and fears by attempting to structure the other’s motives. With strength, nations can dispute objects of value; with brute force, they can destroy them.
While certain situations that involve brute force may be possible, having the whole world function under brute force is inherently impossible, and hypothetically, if it were, it would be chaotic. Yes, brute force succeeds when used, but there are consequences. The threat of damage or more violence to come may have more of an impact than an actual attack. In order to exploit a capacity for “hurt,” one needs to know what an adversary treasures most. The success of coercion depends on finding a bargain, focusing on the actors’ interests, while brute force depends on the strength of the opponent. Coercion requires knowledge wary enough to point out an enemy’s desires: one must identify what their opponent’s wants and how much he will endure before parting with it. Following the premise of brute force, if all states were to engage in it, there would be no boundaries between these states. There would be no uncertainty because states could attack whenever they wanted without analysing what the opponent treasures the most.
Further, a world of brute force would be impossible because there are a set of norms in the international system that one must follow. More than it being chaotic, above all it would be immoral and a violation of the international norms if states were to engage in brute force. A brute force world would bring fear to the population, and render all people submissive to its government, because if they do not comply, they can be killed. With that in mind, a brute force world removes any type of meaningful risk and uncertainty, because a state directly attacks instead of coercing a nation into doing what it wants. There are not any benefits that come of out brute force, all it brings forth is damage, followed by an unbalanced system. Moreover, a brute force world is hard to imagine because governing together is a case of collective intentionality, then commitments and forums together should lead to collective self-restraint and actions consistent with the commitment (Mitzen 33). Further, not all of the nations’ actions result from genuine choices. States often act habitually rather than consciously weigh alternatives. For some, this suggests that the default model for action should not be the rational actor but the sociological one, who spends most of her time simply enacting norms of the social environment. There is always going to be a norm regarding war and brute force, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.
War has always involved uncertainty, but with today’s technology and the balance of power, it is hard to imagine a war occurring, and that the only way it could potentially happen is through uncertainty, which is why a world with brute force is unfathomable. For Schelling, to understand the world is to perceive the order behind its seemingly impenetrable complexity; to understand the world is to see how things fit together. His goal, in short, is clarity, which is why uncertainty leads to conflict.
To visualize this, let us take terrorism as an example. From a terrorist organization's viewpoint, suicide attacks are designed to achieve specific political purposes: to coerce a target government to change policy, to mobilize additional recruits and financial support, or both. Terrorism is a strategy, the same is true for suicide terrorism. Suicide terrorism is supposed to show credibility to the public that there will be more attacks in the future. Because of this, modern suicide terrorism can be linked back to the concept of international coercion. For states, the instrument of choice would be air power and economic sanctions, while for terrorist groups, it is suicide attacks.
A government versus terrorist group scenario highlights a contrast between brute force and deterrence strategies. When a government weighs the benefits of using force against the costs of diplomatic and material concessions to states whose assistance is required to punish terrorist militants and financiers, it may decide that the price is too high. The possibility of deterring future terrorists, however, provides a strong additional incentive. Thus, a deterrence approach implies an even more aggressive policy than a brute force approach if deterrence is unsuccessful in a particular case.
