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This chapter considers two crises between the United States and Iraq. In the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War, the United States adopted coercive strategies which threatened the survival of Saddam’s regime and the Iraqi state. These crises test the limits for what coercion can achieve and examine the tradeoffs between coercive and brute force strategies. In both crises, U.S. administrations chose coercive strategies they did not intend to have succeed in order to then implement the brute force strategies they preferred. These two crises thus provides insight into the key questions addressed by this book as to why the United States so often chooses coercion, why coercion so often fails as weak states resist, and, knowing this, why the U.S decision makers still prefer coercive strategies.

This chapter considers why powerful states issue high level demands of weak states. Given a high probability of victory a powerful challenger must expect high level concessions to prefer coercion to brute force. When demands threaten the sovereignty of the weak state, however, it is likely to resist. The unitary actor assumption for the weak state is relaxed to also consider the survival concerns of its regime and regime leadership. Rationally, a powerful challenger should not coerce when demands threaten a target’s survival. However, when the costs of coercion are low and when there is uncertainty whether the target will concede then it may make sense to coerce while preparing for war. Also, if the external costs for adopting a brute force strategy are high, then first having the United Nations Security Council issue coercive resolutions may decrease the diplomatic and political costs for later going to war.

This chapter introduces the question of why the United States so often fails to coerce weak states. Coercion is defined as the threat of force or restricted use of force to convince a target to comply with a challenger’s demands. In asymmetric interstate conflict a powerful challenger chooses between accommodation, brute force or coercion. The chapter includes a table and summary statistics for the thirty asymmetric crises between the United States and weak states since World War II. The chapter considers conventional non-rational and rational explanations for coercion failure and introduces an alternative explanation based on a weak state’s survival concerns. The chapter concludes by reflecting on why the United States would knowingly make coercive demands that threaten survival and offers an explanation based on the desire to lower the diplomatic and political costs of going to war.

This chapter describes the decline of the communist party and its attempts to salvage major disasters, such as the Chernobyl fallout. Unlike in the preceding decades of communist rule, when they could supplement a Marxist interpretation of their conditions with references to looming threats to national security, Cold War tensions, and economic perils, the credibility of these rationales had faded. This is not to say that opponents of significant change were equally disadvantaged in other parts of the communist world. In the case of China, the chapter highlights, the regime managed to defend its rule. But China's leaders faced a different type of party crisis and responded with a different remedy—the use of brute force—that neither the Soviet Union's leader nor his Eastern European allies dared to implement. Otherwise, the need for the vanguard that had made sense in its original European and Russian contexts vanished.

This chapter summarizes the book’s main argument that the United States, because of its power advantage, has an incentive to make large coercive demands of weak states that if conceded threaten the survival of the state, the regime or its leadership. Due to international norms to first seek negotiated settlements prior to war, the U.S. has an incentive to go to the UN and adopt a coercive strategy the U.S. does not believe will, or does not want to succeed, to obtain justification and support for a brute force war. Alternative explanations based on non-rational behavior, uncertainty, and commitment problems help to explain why crises arise and why coercive diplomacy fails, but does not provide insight into when coercion is likely to succeed or fail. The book concludes with implications for U.S. foreign policy.

This chapter analyzes existing literature on counterinsurgency and other approaches to internal conflict to build a foundation for the compellence theory of counterinsurgent success. Today's Western policy prescription for insurgency is based on the good governance approach. In this view, good governance is necessary to defeat insurgency because it is bad governance that causes insurgency. Greater representative governance and more public goods will build broad popular support for the government, attract civilian cooperation against the insurgency, and marginalize the insurgents. The chapter argues that counterinsurgency campaigns backed by great powers succeed when the counterinsurgent government forms a coalition with rival civilian and military elites who cooperate in exchange for personal or group gain, and when the government uses the resources provided by the new coalition to cut the flow of support to insurgents, most often by targeting civilians with brute force to control their behavior, as well as targeting the insurgency directly. The compellence theory considers counterinsurgency as primarily a domestic political process of violent state-building.

Non-violence was necessary in Gandhi’s self-practice, and is neither a technique nor an instrumentality but an ontological imperative, which could be seen in the context of Gandhi’s need and ability to hear his inner voice. Gandhi had found that violence was an impediment in the realization of truth, and that it took him away from his self, and thus from his capacity and means to perceive truth. As the act of beholding the divine guaranteed a state of perpetual immaculateness, and since the human body was an active impediment to such revelation, only a regimen of spiritual exercise enabled one to hear what Gandhi termed as the true inner voice, the unfailing guide in the most difficult moments of his life, pointing out to him the path to duty.

The 1940s witnessed the appearance of a handful of scientists who, defying the specialism characteristic of most of 20th-century science, strode easily across borders erected to protect disciplinary territories. They were people who, had they been familiar with the poetry of the Nobel laureate Indian poet–philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), would have shared his vision of a “heaven of freedom”: …Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls. … Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), logician, mathematician, and prodigy, who was awarded a PhD by Harvard at age 17, certainly yearned for this heaven of freedom in the realm of science as the war-weary first half of the 20th century came to an end. He would write that he and his fellow scientist and collaborator Arturo Rosenbluth (1900–1970) had long shared a belief that, although during the past two centuries scientific investigations became increasingly specialized, the most “fruitful” arenas lay in the “no-man’s land” between the established fields of science. There were scientific fields, Wiener remarked, that had been studied from different sides, each bestowing its own name to the field, each ignorant of what others had discovered, thus creating work that was “triplicated or quadruplicated” because of mutual ignorance or incomprehension. Wiener, no respecter of “narrow domestic walls” would inhabit such “boundary regions” between mathematics, engineering, biology, and sociology, and create cybernetics, a science devoted to the study of feedback systems common to living organisms, machines, and social systems. Here was a science that straddled the no-man’s land between the traditionally separate domains of the natural and the artificial. Wiener’s invention of cybernetics after the end of World War II was a marker of a certain spirit of the times when, in the manner in which Wiener expressed his yearning, scientists began to create serious links between nature and artifact. It is inevitable that this no-man’s land between the natural and the artificial should be part of this story.