Week 5 Memo

Alex HUANG 1155100775

In response to Owen’s democratic peace theory, although he did improve the theory by
providing a causal theoretical mechanism and by incorporating the importance of
perceptions, the theory does not appear as convincing to me especially on the part of liberal
democracies’ tendency towards conflict with illiberal states. Owen assumes that illiberal
states are unenlightened so they are dangerous and seek ends other than life and
prosperity, as opposed to liberal democracies being reliable, pacific, and trustworthy. And
because of this unenlightened nature, liberal democracies are always uncertain of illiberal
states intentions and are more prone to adopt military means to settle an issue. Simply
assuming states who do not hold liberal ideas are dangerous does not provide much
explanation on how the theorists arrive at this assumption and can be misleading at times. In
the case of U.S. involvement in the 1990-1991 Gulf War, one could observe that the
assumptions on characters of liberal democracies and illiberal democracies are not
necessarily true. Saddem Hussein was painted by the liberals as an irrational aggressor. But
if one takes a closer look at the facts, the decision by Hussein to invade Iraq was mostly out
of serious national security concerns. Iraq’s national economy was on serious decline after
its war with Iran, and Kuwait was making the matter worse by overproducing oil, exceeding
the quotas set by OPEC and drove down world oil prices and reduced Iraq oil profit, further
constraining the already drained Iraqi economy. Hussein tried to resolve the issue through
diplomatic means, but Kuwait only agreed to reduce them to the barest minimum. So
Hussein finally decided to wage war on Kuwait. Before invading Kuwait, Hussein
approached the United States to find out how it would react. U.S. ambassador April Glaspie
expressed that America has no opinion on it and it has no special security or defense
commitments to Kuwait. Although the U.S. did not directly agree with Hussein’s invasion
plan, it did unintendedly provide a greenlight. Once the war started, the U.S. retreated from
its previous statement, and used the justification of Iraq’s violation of international law to
intervene militarily. First, the false and oversimplified characterization of illiberal states is
shown to be a possible reason that drives liberal democracies to engage with them militarily,
but it could have been avoided if one assessed the situation in a realist lens. Such
characterization could even be said to be contributing to self-prophecy of the theory.
Assuming illiberal states are unpredictable and dangerous, liberal democracies have a
tendency to use military force simply based on that assumption, hence more conflicts
between them, reinforcing the false assumption of the hostile nature of illiberal states.
Second, as unpredictable and dangerous illiberal states are to liberal democracies, the
United States, a liberal democracy, is unpredictable and unreliable to Hussien as well. It is
puzzling why the U.S. did not at least try to deter Iraq when the U.S. obviously knew its
intention to invade Iraq, and opted for military intervention once the war was waged. The
conflict between the U.S. and Iraq was not due to the normative or structural differences
between the states, but instead, in this case, U.S. confusing behavior. Democratic peace
theory could be useful in partially explaining why there are less conflicts among liberal
democracies, but simply accounting the presence or absence of liberal ideas and democratic
institutions for peace or conflicts among states is misleading. There is obviously a
correlation, but not necessarily a causal-relationship.

Another point that I would like to discuss is that neoliberal institutionalists countered
neorealists’ understanding that relative gains are more important than absolute gain, citing
U.S. foreign policy of active promotion of economic recovery and development towards
Europe and Japan. Neoliberals find that the relative gain concept does not accurately
describe the then U.S. foreign policy. But I hold a different opinion. The reason why the U.S.
was eager to assist Europe and Japan’s recovery from WWII was largely due to the fact that
a growing U.S. domestic economy needed a healthy Europe and Japan market to support it.
The U.S. needed an outlet. Having sufficient overseas markets to support its domestic
market, the U.S. then can further develop its economic power which can later translate into
its military power. Put in simple words, Europe and Japan gained from the U.S. assistance,
but the U.S. could gain more. There was definitely relative gain consideration involved in the
thinking of U.S. foreign policy, but at the same time absolute gains were acquired by Europe
and Japan as well. Win-win situation was achieved in this scenario, three parties all got what
they needed, but the U.S. did not leave out relative gain consideration. Ensuring one’s
relative gain does not necessarily means preventing others from gaing, but instead is to
make sure one could gain more than others. And as one can see, emphasizing on relative
gains does not always result in a zero-sum game.

Lastly, I found it useful to synthesize realist and liberal theories in order to explain state
behavior and international relations better. From previous weeks’ readings on realism to this
week’s liberalism, I found out that relying on one school of thoughts’ explanation is often
insufficient or not entirely accurate. Copeland’s ​Economic Interdependence and The Future
of U.S.-Chinese Relations ​provides a good example of taking elements from both realist and
liberal arguments to create a theory of more explanatory power and accuracy.