Horns of a Dilemma

The 2016 presidential election was a milestone in modern American politics, not only for the surprising victory of a candidate whom many pundits and observers had considered unlikely to win, but also for the degree to which foreign powers attempted to influence the electoral process and outcome. In this week’s Horns of a Dilemma, we hear from Emily Harding, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and formerly the deputy staff director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Harding details the committee’s broad-reaching bipartisan investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. She discusses interactions with the concurrent FBI investigation, as well as the ways in which the outcomes of the Senate investigation helped to make the 2018 midterm elections and 2020 presidential election more secure against the types of interference that occurred in 2016. This talk was jointly sponsored by the Clements Center for National Security and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas, Austin. The talk was delivered outdoors due to COVID mitigation policies, so listeners will notice some wind noise, which we have done our best to minimize in post-production. 

In the 1950s, researchers at the RAND Corporation ran two different wargames exploring questions of nuclear strategy. Both were named the Cold War Game, known to the participants as COW.  One, run by the Mathematics Analysis Division (MAD), abstracted questions of the ethics of nuclear war in order to seek reproducible results. The other, run by the Social Sciences Division (SSD), reflected concerns over the ethics and implications of nuclear weapons, resulting in less-certain outcomes. The history of these games sheds light not only on nuclear strategy, but also on the balance between logic and emotion in national security decision-making. Doyle Hodges, executive editor of the Texas National Security Review (TNSR), talks with John R. Emery, the author of Moral Choices Without Moral Language: 1950s Political-Military Wargaming at the RAND Corporation, which appears in Vol 4/Iss 4 of TNSR.  This issue is a special issue dedicated to the legacy of Janne Nolan, a founding member of the TNSR editorial board who passed away in 2019. 

With the fall of President Ashraf Ghani's government and the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces, most of Afghanistan is now under the control of the Taliban. In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, we are joined by Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors at Brookings, and by Scott R. Anderson, a visiting fellow in governance studies at Brookings, a senior editor and counsel for Lawfare, and a senior fellow with the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. Felbab-Brown and Anderson discuss the outlook for the Taliban as they seek to shift from insurgency to governance.  The discussion covers questions of formal legal recognition, as well as questions of legitimacy and capacity for governance. Our guests explain why exercising power as the government of Afghanistan is likely to be more challenging for the Taliban than defeating the previous government was. As Dr. Felbab-Brown observed, "it's much easier to be an insurgent than a governor."

Being an editor involves saying “no,” quite a bit. 85 percent of submissions to both the Texas National Security Review and War on the Rocks never make it to publication.  At the recent Clements Center Summer Seminar on History and Statecraft in Beaver Creek, Colorado, Doyle Hodges, executive editor of TNSR and chief publishing officer of War on the Rocks, and Megan Oprea, managing editor of TNSR, spoke to the assembled students about how to be in the 15 percent that do wind up in our pages. The question of how to write clearly and persuasively for policy audiences is asked frequently by students and practitioners alike. Doyle and Megan decided to reprise their talk for this episode of Horns of a Dilemma. 

Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. The repetition of patterns of events and responses is one reason that scholars and policymakers often turn to the past for insight into how to best deal with contemporary events. It is also why classic works of history and strategy — such as Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War — have become classic and remain relevant. In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Dr. Paul Edgar, associate director of the Clements Center at the University of Texas, Austin, goes 1,000 years before Thucydides to find enduring lessons as told in an inscription on a statue from the 15th century BCE.  While the names of the rulers and powers may not be familiar, Edgar illustrates how the themes of strategy, alliance, and statecraft in great-power competition are familiar and relevant to power struggles today. This talk was recorded at the Summer Seminar on History and Statecraft, sponsored by the Clements Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and held in Beaver Creek, Colorado.

The history of nuclear weapons is, thankfully, largely a history of things that haven’t happened.  Since 1945, nuclear weapons have dominated strategy and statecraft, but they have not been used after the first two bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Professor Frank Gavin of Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, and Chair of the Texas National Security Review editorial board, discusses the history and politics of nuclear strategy and statecraft.  His talk is both wide-ranging and specific. Gavin examines the big issues related to nuclear weapons, and the paradoxes of strategy that possession of nuclear weapons creates — such as the fact that the only way to ensure that these terrible weapons are never used is to appear to be credibly poised to use them.  This talk was presented as part of the Summer Seminar on History and Statecraft sponsored by the Clements Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and held at Beaver Creek, Colorado.

Two weeks ago on Horns of a Dilemma, Professor Jim Goldgeier of American University and the Brookings Institution joined Ambassador Alexandra Hall Hall to discuss the thematic connections between the choice in the early 1990s to add new members to the NATO alliance and Britain’s choice in 2016 to leave the European Union.  In last week’s episode, Professor Goldgeier expanded on the history, politics, and consequences of NATO expansion and enlargement. This week, completing the cycle, Ambassador Hall Hall discusses Brexit. Ambassador Hall Hall speaks from personal experience as the senior British diplomat for Brexit issues in the United States, a position from which she ultimately resigned, leaving the British diplomatic corps out of principled disagreement with the way in which the Brexit narrative was being played out.  This event was recorded at the Summer Seminar on History and Statecraft sponsored by the Clements Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and held in Beaver Creek, Colorado.    

In last week’s episode of Horns of a Dilemma, we heard Professor Jim Goldgeier of American University and the Brookings Institution and former British Ambassador Alexandra Hall Hall discuss the thematic connections between the addition of new NATO members after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the dynamics that ultimately led to Brexit.  In this episode, Professor Goldgeier goes into more depth on the promises that were or weren’t made to Soviet and Russian leaders by NATO and Western leaders in the turbulent period between 1991 and 1993.  As Goldgeier explains, even the language used to describe these events — whether “enlargement” or “expansion” — carries shades of meaning that continue to resonate today.  This event was recorded live at the Clements Center Summer Seminar on History and Statecraft in Beaver Creek, Colorado, and sponsored by the Clements Center of the University of Texas, Austin.

The admission of new NATO members from the former Soviet Union and Warsaw pact marked an expansion of European multilateral institutions.  The growth in membership of European institutions continued until 25 years later, when Britain decided to withdraw from the European Union.  In a session recorded at the Clements Center Summer Seminar on History and Statecraft in Beaver Creek, Colorado, Professor Jim Goldgeier and Ambassador Alexandra Hall Hall examine what common themes connect these two events, exploring question of identity, trust in institutions, and the use (or misuse) of history.

American security policy has made use of tripwire forces for many years.  One of the most prominent examples cited is the case of Berlin: As Thomas Schelling famously described the logic, the small garrison of US soldiers stationed there during the Cold War weren’t militarily capable of defeating the far-larger East German or Soviet forces nearby but, the East Germans or Soviets would be deterred from attacking because any attack would result in the deaths of that small US force, drawing America into a conflict. Our guests today, Professor Dan Reiter of Emery University and Professor Paul Poast of the University of Chicago, argue that Schelling was wrong. Their article, “The Truth About Tripwires: Why Small Force Deployments Do Not Deter Aggression,” in Vol 4, Iss 3 of TNSR, argues that deterrence relies almost exclusively on the military value of force deployment, so small token deployments are unlikely to deter a determined attacker.  They illustrate their argument with two cases from the Korean peninsula, and a counterfactual example from World War I.