Jeffrey W. Knopf - Böcker

In 2012, US President Barack Obama stated that Syrian government usage of chemical weapons on its population would cross a red line that would require the US government to reconsider its approach to the civil war then underway in Syria. Syria subsequently used such weapons, creating a policy dilemma for the United States about how to respond to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's violation of the red line. In Coercing Syria on Chemical Weapons, Matthew Moran, Wyn Q. Bowen, and Jeffrey W. Knopf examine efforts by the United States, sometimes acting with France and the United Kingdom, to respond to Syria's possession and use of chemical weapons over the course of its civil war. In particular, they focus on US strategy, covering the presidencies of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, which relied heavily on coercion involving both deterrent and compellent variants of that strategy. As the authors show, policies directed at the ruling Assad regime in Syria attempted to deter chemical weapons attacks and to compel Syria into giving up its chemical arsenal with mixed outcomes. Drawing on existing literature on deterrence and coercive diplomacy to identify three propositions--involving credibility, motivations, and assurances--the book explains the mixed record of coercive success and failure and examines how effective coercive strategies were at different points and why. Deriving lessons from the most significant attempt in the post-Cold War era to deter use of a weapon of mass destruction, this book offers theoretical and practical lessons for both security studies scholars and policymakers.

In 2012, US President Barack Obama stated that Syrian government usage of chemical weapons on its population would cross a red line that would require the US government to reconsider its approach to the civil war then underway in Syria. Syria subsequently used such weapons, creating a policy dilemma for the United States about how to respond to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's violation of the red line. In Coercing Syria on Chemical Weapons, Matthew Moran, Wyn Q. Bowen, and Jeffrey W. Knopf examine efforts by the United States, sometimes acting with France and the United Kingdom, to respond to Syria's possession and use of chemical weapons over the course of its civil war. In particular, they focus on US strategy, covering the presidencies of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, which relied heavily on coercion involving both deterrent and compellent variants of that strategy. As the authors show, policies directed at the ruling Assad regime in Syria attempted to deter chemical weapons attacks and to compel Syria into giving up its chemical arsenal with mixed outcomes. Drawing on existing literature on deterrence and coercive diplomacy to identify three propositions--involving credibility, motivations, and assurances--the book explains the mixed record of coercive success and failure and examines how effective coercive strategies were at different points and why. Deriving lessons from the most significant attempt in the post-Cold War era to deter use of a weapon of mass destruction, this book offers theoretical and practical lessons for both security studies scholars and policymakers.

In this book, Jeffrey Knopf investigates domestic sources of state preferences about whether to seek cooperation with other countries on security issues. He does so by examining whether public protest against nuclear weapons influenced US decisions to enter strategic arms talks. The analysis builds on the domestic structure approach to explaining foreign policy, using it as the starting point to develop a new framework with which to trace the influence of societal actors. The book's finding that protest had a major impact suggests that prevailing conceptions of the relation between domestic politics and international cooperation need to be broadened. Existing approaches typically assume that state preferences are set by political leaders or powerful interests, thereby treating the rest of society only as a constraint on state action. In contrast, this book demonstrates that ordinary citizens can also serve as a direct stimulus to the development of a state interest in cooperation.

In this book, Jeffrey Knopf investigates domestic sources of state preferences about whether to seek cooperation with other countries on security issues. He does so by examining whether public protest against nuclear weapons influenced US decisions to enter strategic arms talks. The analysis builds on the domestic structure approach to explaining foreign policy, using it as the starting point to develop a new framework with which to trace the influence of societal actors. The book's finding that protest had a major impact suggests that prevailing conceptions of the relation between domestic politics and international cooperation need to be broadened. Existing approaches typically assume that state preferences are set by political leaders or powerful interests, thereby treating the rest of society only as a constraint on state action. In contrast, this book demonstrates that ordinary citizens can also serve as a direct stimulus to the development of a state interest in cooperation.

While policy makers and scholars have long devoted considerable attention to strategies like deterrence, which threaten others with unacceptable consequences, such threat-based strategies are not always the best option. In some cases, a state may be better off seeking to give others a greater sense of security, rather than by holding their security at risk. The most prominent use of these security assurances has been in conjunction with efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.Ongoing concerns about the nuclear activities of countries like Iran and North Korea, and the possible reactions of other states in their regions, have catapulted this topic into high profile. This book represents the first study to explore the overall utility of assurance strategies, to evaluate their effectiveness as a tool for preventing nuclear proliferation, and to identify conditions under which they are more or less likely to be effective.

International efforts to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—including nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons—rest upon foundations provided by global treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Over time, however, states have created a number of other mechanisms for organizing international cooperation to promote nonproliferation. Examples range from regional efforts to various worldwide export-control regimes and nuclear security summit meetings initiated by U.S. president Barack Obama. Many of these additional nonproliferation arrangements are less formal and have fewer members than the global treaties.International Cooperation on WMD Nonproliferation calls attention to the emergence of international cooperation beyond the core global nonproliferation treaties. The contributors examine why these other cooperative nonproliferation mechanisms have emerged, assess their effectiveness, and ask how well the different pieces of the global nonproliferation regime complex fit together. Collectively, the essayists show that states have added new forms of international cooperation to combat WMD proliferation for multiple reasons, including the need to address new problems and the entrepreneurial activities of key state leaders. Despite the complications created by the existence of so many different cooperative arrangements, this collection shows the world is witnessing a process of building cooperation that is leading to greater levels of activity in support of norms against WMD and terrorism.

Recent discoveries in psychology and neuroscience have improved our understanding of why our decision making processes fail to match standard social science assumptions about rationality. As researchers such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Richard Thaler have shown, people often depart in systematic ways from the predictions of the rational actor model of classic economic thought because of the influence of emotions, cognitive biases, an aversion to loss, and other strong motivations and values. These findings about the limits of rationality have formed the basis of behavioral economics, an approach that has attracted enormous attention in recent years.This collection of essays applies the insights of behavioral economics to the study of nuclear weapons policy. Behavioral economics gives us a more accurate picture of how people think and, as a consequence, of how they make decisions about whether to acquire or use nuclear arms. Such decisions are made in real-world circumstances in which rational calculations about cost and benefit are intertwined with complicated emotions and subject to human limitations. Strategies for pursuing nuclear deterrence and nonproliferation should therefore, argue the contributors, account for these dynamics in a systematic way. The contributors to this collection examine how a behavioral approach might inform our understanding of topics such as deterrence, economic sanctions, the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and U.S. domestic debates about ballistic missile defense. The essays also take note of the limitations of a behavioral approach for dealing with situations in which even a single deviation from the predictions of any model can have dire consequences.