Thomas J. Christensen - Worse Than a Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia

Thomas J. Christensen

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2011 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Christensen, Thomas J., 1962
Worse than a monolith : alliance politics and problems of coercive diplomacy in Asia /
Thomas J. Christensen.
p. cm. (Princeton studies in international history and politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-14260-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-691-14261-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. AsiaForeign relations1945-2. AlliancesHistory20th century. I. Title.
DS35.2.C47 2011
327.5dc22

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Minion
Printed on acid-free paper. $$
Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book has been several years in the making. The research and writing process was interrupted by many other research projects, two family moves, and a public service leave during which I served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. The views expressed in the book are purely my own and do not represent the views of the U.S. government or the U.S Department of State. Certain sections of the book are culled from articles that appeared in the journals Asian Security (vol. 1, no. 1, January 2005) and International Security (vol. 23, no. 4, spring 1999).

For comments and research assistance, I am grateful to David Bachman, Gary J. Bass, Yan Bennett, Chen Jian, Chen Zhiming, Ja Ian Chong, Milton Esman, Taylor Fravel, Aaron Friedberg, Lily Fu, Michael Glosny, James Goldgeier, Avery Goldstein, Steven Goldstein, Todd Hall, Hope Harrison, Yinan He, Serene Hung, Samuel P. Huntington, Robert Jervis, Alastair Iain Johnston, Peter Katzenstein, Carl Kaysen, Andrew Kennedy, Jonathan D. Kirshner, Li Danhui, Li Hong, Adam Liff, Jennifer Lind, Liu Dongsheng, Oriana Mastro, Niu Jun, Barry Posen, Lucian Pye, Alan Romberg, Stephen Peter Rosen, Robert Ross, Richard Samuels, Randall Schweller, Adam Segal, Shen Zhihua, Jack L. Snyder, Christopher Twomey, Stephen Van Evera, Lynn White, Allen Whiting, Xu Xin, Dali Yang, Suisheng Zhao, two anonymous reviewers, the department of Politics at Princeton University, the faculty and fellows at the Security Studies Program at MIT, the helpful staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives in Beijing, and my many students in Chinas Foreign Relations and International Relations of East Asia at Cornell, Princeton, and MIT. Chuck Myers at Princeton University Press has been an enormous source of ideas, encouragement, and editorial suggestions. It is easy to see why the press is a leader in the field. Linda Truilo and Terri OPrey did a very fine job editing the final manuscript for the Press. I also thank the independent editor Jennifer Camille Smith for offering expert advice even when she was very busy and for motivating me to move this from draft manuscript to final product. I am grateful to the Smith Richardson Foundation for financial support for my archival research in China in 2004. I apologize to all of those many people who helped me over the years but whom I neglected to mention here.

The book is dedicated to my family: my wife, Barbara Edwards, my daughter Theresa, and my son, William. They have been a fountain of joy, support, and inspiration, especially while I was away from home in Washington wrestling with some of the policy issues discussed in the latter part of this book.

It should seem obvious that the more united and organized ones enemies, the worse ones own lot. This book makes the counterintuitive assertion that this need not always be the case. Poor coordination, internal mistrust, and intramural rivalry in enemy alliances can be dangerous for ones own side because such internal divisions make engaging in successful coercive diplomacy with those enemies more difficult. During all-out warpure competitions of brute forceinternal divisions and lack of coordination within the enemy camp are clearly to ones advantage. But such wars are the exception, not the rule, in international security politics. More commonplace is coercive diplomacythe use of threats and assurances in combination to influence the behavior of real or potential adversaries. In such instances it is often more difficult to achieve ones goals at acceptably low costs and to limit the duration and scope of existing conflicts when an adversarial alliance is ill formed, in flux, or internally divided than when it is well organized and hierarchically structured.