Last week, Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Duncan Lewis predicted that more Australian jihadist fighters would return from Syria and Iraq and that managing them would prove a “polarising and dividing” issue:

Beyond the spectrum of public opinion, we can anticipate the effective and appropriate management of returning foreign fighters to be a polarising and a dividing issue in Australia… We have plans in place – they are currently being executed – to accept the return of foreign fighters, but it will be a polarising matter.

There has long been discussion of the potential terrorist threat posed by Australian jihadists returning from Syria and Iraq. So far, this has not been a major element of Australia’s terrorist threat. As I discussed in a recent CTC Sentinel article, the various attacks and plots Australia has experienced since September 2014 involved Islamic State (IS) supporters who had not left Australia. And the roughly 40 Australians who have returned from the region mainly did so before IS declared a “Caliphate” or targeted the West. These early returnees are not alleged to have been involved in terror plots.

However, the number returning is expected to increase in the near future. In February, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop spoke with US Vice-President Mike Pence about this, stating afterwards that such an increase is…

likely to be the consequence of military success in Iraq, for the example the retaking of Mosul…. That will mean that a number of foreign terrorist fighters will seek to flee from Iraq and the expectation is a number will seek to return home. We need to be prepared for that.

Bishop also discussed this with Indonesian President Joko Widodo during his recent visit to Australia.

In this post I outline some of the dilemmas involved in dealing with returnees, to help explain why it may indeed be the divisive issue that Duncan Lewis predicts. It covers why there is concern over returnees, what can be done, and makes some suggestions as to what should be done.

Why is there concern over returnees?

The concern is based on the well-founded idea that some Australians involved with jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq will be a serious terror threat on return. In past cases (such as the mobilisation to Afghanistan from the 1980s onwards) most returned foreign fighters did not end up becoming terror plotters, but a small proportion of them did, and were involved in deadly attacks such as the 2005 London bombings.

This has repeatedly been the case with jihadist returnees from Syria and Iraq. The November 2015 terror attack in Paris, which killed over one hundred, involved up to eight returnees. The March 2016 bombing in Brussels similarly involved returnees. Other attacks have also been perpetrated by returnees, as have many foiled plots.

However, it’s also important not to overstate the threat.

Australia is in a far safer position than Europe. Plots like those in Paris and Brussels were feasible because Islamic State had established a sophisticated underground infrastructure in Europe, enabled by various factors: Europe produced many more foreign fighters, has more porous borders, is geographically closer, and has greater strategic importance.

Australia has a much smaller number of potential returnees to worry about. Of those, some more might be killed or captured, while some others may choose to stay in the region or move elsewhere (such as Europe, the Caucasus or Southeast Asia) rather than try to return to Australia. Duncan Lewis noted that the number of returnees will likely be fewer than ASIO initially expected. Australia also has the advantage of having prepared for this for a few years, and being an island with few entry-points, making it hard for people to slip in unnoticed.

Nonetheless, if we do experience a surge in returnees, it will be a problem. Some could pose a direct terror threat and some could pose a security concern in other ways (such as forming new recruitment networks or inciting others). Most will have likely broken the law, but it may not be clear who poses the greatest threat and resources may be limited. This will create difficulty for those tasked with dealing with them, though they will have several tools available.

What can be done with returnees?

The Australian government will have the following options for dealing with them

1. Strip their citizenship. Khaled Sharrouf, a prominent IS fighter who bragged about war crimes, has had his Australian citizenship revoked. I disagree with this power for multiple reasons, but the law has passed (with bipartisan support and popular approval) so the Australian government now has this option, and will likely use it several more times.
2. Frustrate their return. In most cases, the Australian government will have cancelled their passports. To return to Australia, the suspect will need to gain a one-way travel document from an Australian consulate (presumably in Turkey). This is not likely to be a simple process, and authorities can use this to induce cooperation. It’s also possible that they will have broken the laws of other countries, and Australia may pass intelligence on to these countries to prevent the suspects returning.
3. Prosecute upon return. Prosecution will be a preferred option, but it will often be difficult to prove their involvement beyond reasonable doubt, which is why an estimated 40 Australians managed to return without being prosecuted. However, some of these suspected fighters (Mehmet Biber and Muhammad Abdul-Karim Musleh) have now been charged, as authorities have had more time to gather evidence.
4. Monitor and restrict. Authorities can closely monitor suspected returnees and take action if they engage in new criminal activity, terrorism-related or otherwise. They can also subject the returnees to special powers such as coercive questioning by the ASIO or the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, and Control Orders which place restrictions on a suspect’s liberty for up to a year.
5. Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). Some returnees might be suitable for CVE efforts, which refers to non-coercive efforts to prevent (or undo) involvement in violent movements. This could be conducted by the Diversion Team within the Australian Federal Police’s National Disruption Group. Most returnees would not be suitable, as the Diversion team does not deal with those “too far along the path of radicalisation for early intervention to be effective or presents an unacceptable risk to the safety of service providers”, but some of the children might be.

CVE approaches take many different forms, and have been used widely in European countries, sometimes for dealing with returnees. However, as I’ve mentioned in this Lowy paper, some of their approaches would not be possible in Australia (at least without adjustments) as they would be seen as too soft.

This raises another question, the “polarising and divisive” issue ASIO chief Duncan Lewis referred to, which is what should be done.

What should be done with returnees?

So the government will have a lot of tools for dealing with returnees, but how should they be used? Should all returnees be prosecuted, to the full extent of the law, where possible?

For the most part, yes, particularly as this would be consistent with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2178, because the national security risk is real, and because the Islamic State has rightly earned the world’s hatred.

However, there is also debate (mainly in Europe, given the scale of the problem) over whether returnees should be shown some leniency to make the problem more manageable (see here and here). There is no simple answer, but my view is that some leniency should be shown in individual cases, depending on:

1. Which group they joined. Was it a proscribed terrorist organisation like Islamic State or Jabhat al-Nusra (now Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, which leads the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham umbrella group)? Those who joined groups that came under the Free Syrian Army banner or Kurdish anti-IS groups may still have broken the law, but should not be treated as severely as those who joined IS or al-Nusra.
2. Whether they joined the group willingly. There may be cases where someone enters Syria with a vague idea of helping out in a humanitarian capacity but ends up being conscripted into an armed group. However, there could easily be cases where jihadists falsely claim to have been forced to join groups, so such claims should not be uncritically accepted. The “didn’t realise what I was getting into” argument is more plausible for those who travelled over during the conflict’s early years (2011-2013).
3. Whether they were children or adults. The younger they are (and some are extremely young), the less responsible they are for their actions. Child soldiers have often been rehabilitated and gone on to be outstanding citizens, including in Australia.
4. What role they played in the group. Was it a combat or non-combat role? Was it a major or minor role? Did they call for attacks outside the conflict zone? Did they engage in atrocities? Many Islamic State fighters have raped, tortured, murdered and mutilated people in Syria and Iraq. There should be no leniency at all for war criminals.
5. Whether they willingly cooperate with authorities. This is the most important factor. Those who do not cooperate (such as by providing intelligence or helping stop others from becoming involved) cannot expect to escape the full extent of the law. However, those willing and able to help should be given some leniency, particularly if there is a strong chance that it will saves lives.

So the potential surge of Australians returning after being involved with jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq will be a difficult problem, and has no single solution.

Generally, those who can be proven to have broken the law should be prosecuted. In most cases, any leniency should only come into play after they have been prosecuted (by taking it into account when sentencing). In a few cases, leniency should be an alternative to prosecution (such as for some of the children or those who become informants). And unfortunately in many cases prosecution will not be possible, leaving authorities with a range of imperfect options.

Intelligence services, police, prosecutors and judges will have to make these difficult judgements. Political leaders should make sure they have the flexibility to do so, by avoiding the temptation to announce some sort of blanket policy, no matter how “polarising and dividing” the issue becomes.

28-30 March (Sydney): Public Venue Security and Safety Summit 

30-31 March (Melbourne): Keyboard Warriors? Military operations in the Information Age – Opportunities and Challenges (free)

4 April (Canberra): Book launch for China Matters: Getting It Right for Australia (free)

4 April (Canberra): Book launch for The Long Road: Australia’s Train, Advise and Assist Missions (free)

4 April (Melbourne): States, Violence and the West – What al-Qa’ida means in Yemen, presented by Dr Sarah Phillips (free)

4-5 April (Canberra): Women and National Security Conference

6 April (Melbourne): Fighting Terrorism in Iraq, presented by the Honourable Dr Hussain Mahdi Al-Ameri, Iraqi Ambassador to Australia and New Zealand (free)

12 April (Melbourne): The Australian Intelligence Community – Its Governance Amidst Widening Demands, presented by Ashton Robinson (free)

19-20 April (Sydney): 2017 Safety, Security and Counter-Terrorism Forum – Uncover Evolving Threats, Protect Critical Infrastructure and Respond With Effective Crisis Communications

3-4 May (Canberra): Safeguarding Australia 2017 – The 4th National Security Annual Summit

12-13 May (Brisbane): War in the Sand Pit: conference on Afghanistan & Iraq

6-7 June (Brisbane):  Annual National Policing Summit – Strategy, Leadership and Modernisation within Crime and Terror Prevention

18 July (Canberra): Australian Security Summit 

26-28 July (Sydney): Security Exhibition & Conference

29-30 August (Canberra): 15th Annual National Security Summit – Policy, Surveillance & Interoperability

Yesterday, an alleged terrorist had a hearing at the Melbourne Magistrate’s Court. He had been arrested in a Victorian Joint Counter-Terrorism Team raid on 6 August. Counter-terrorism raids in Australia are usually directed against suspected jihadists, but this time the suspect was on the extreme right. Investigators said he had been:

linked to the far-right groups Reclaim Australia, United Patriots Front, Patriots Defence League Australia, the True Blue Crew and a ‘neo-Nazi, self-confessed militant group’ called Combat 18.

He allegedly planned to make improvised explosive devices and targeted left-wing activists. He was charged with Commonwealth terrorism offences and the allegations will all be tested in court.

After he was arrested, Justice Minister Michael Keenan noted that this was the first time terror charges had been used against someone on the extreme right.

I want to disentangle what is, and is not, new about this.

The alleged plot, if proven, would not be the first case of far-right violent extremism in Australia. To choose some recent examples, in 2010 self-described Combat 18 members fired shots at a mosque in Perth. In 2012 two Melbourne neo-Nazi skinheads were sentenced to jail for brutally assaulting a Vietnamese student.  In 2013 a former soldier and self-described neo-Nazi was jailed for weapons and explosives offences. Most recently, a reported white supremacist was charged for allegedly setting fire to a church, though again it’s important to presume innocence and wait to see what comes out in court.

However, what’s unusual about the arrest is that far-right violence in Australia doesn’t usually reach a threshold where terrorism legislation can clearly be applied. Someone with particular beliefs engaging in violence does not automatically become terrorism under Australian law. The law is quite specific and makes it hard to prove a terrorist act (or planning or preparation for one) because it depends on intentions.

In terrorism cases, the prosecution must prove beyond reasonable doubt that:

(b)  the action is done or the threat is made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause;

They must also prove that:

(c)  the action is done or the threat is made with the intention of:

(i)  coercing, or influencing by intimidation, the government of the Commonwealth or a State, Territory or foreign country, or of part of a State, Territory or foreign country; or

(ii)  intimidating the public or a section of the public.

A subsection then states that an act does not count as terrorism if it:

(a)  is advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action; and

(b)  is not intended:

(i)  to cause serious harm that is physical harm to a person; or

(ii)  to cause a person’s death; or

(iii)  to endanger the life of a person, other than the person taking the action; or

(iv)  to create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public.

So proving a terrorist act doesn’t only require evidence of someone’s actions but a lot of evidence about their intentions. This often requires the prosecution to present recordings of conversations between suspects, intercepted during long pro-active investigations.

The current case appears to be the first time, since terrorism offences were introduced in 2002, that authorities had the sort of evidence against a suspected far-right violent extremist that would enable terrorism charges. Usually they have been dealt with through other laws such as assault, weapons possession, and criminal damage.

In that sense, this is a new development. But this does not mean that the alleged plot, if proven, should be regarded as the first case of far-right terrorism in Australia.

First, there are many definitions of terrorism and there is no intellectual obligation to stick to purely legal definitions. There will always be political debate over what is and isn’t terrorism.

Second, some cases of far-right violent extremism before 2002 amounted to terrorism even though we did not have specific terrorism legislation at the time. For example, the first fatal terrorist attack in Australia this century was Peter James Knight’s attempted anti-abortion massacre in 2001. There was also the Australian Nationalists Movement’s wave of violence in Perth in the late 1980s, for which the judge said when sentencing:

It is, in my view, no overstatement or exaggeration to term your campaign of those months a terrorist campaign and again it is no exaggeration to say that in that period you waged a guerilla war against the public.

Another issue also makes the current case less of a remarkable development. The potential for renewed far-right terrorism in Australia had been apparent for a while, particularly as such activity had increased elsewhere.

In the early 2010s, far-right terrorism became a bigger issue in Europe. Prominent incidents included the murders of 69 people in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011, alleged Breivik-copycat attempts in Poland and the Czech Republic, the murder of two Senegalese street vendors in Italy by someone linked the far-right CasaPound. There was also the exposure of the National Socialist Underground, responsible for a murder spree across Germany from 2000 to 2007. In the UK, far-right extremist Pavlo Lapshyn murdered a Muslim man and bombed several mosques in 2013, and there was a reported extreme-right connection to the recent murder of popular MP Jo Cox.

There was a similar surge in the United States, with the most visible examples being the murders of six people in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin by a member of the neo-Nazi Hammerskins in 2012, of three people at a Kansas Jewish centre by a white supremacist in 2014, and of nine people in an African-American church in Charleston by white supremacist Dylann Roof in 2015. In October of this year, the FBI foiled an alleged terror plot by self-styled “Crusaders” to murder Somali immigrants.

Australia has traditionally experienced much less of this, but as such violence became more prominent in Europe and America, agencies expressed concern about the situation here. The ASIO annual report for 2010-2011 noted:

There has been a persistent but small sub-culture of racist and nationalist extremists in Australia, forming groups, fragmenting, re-forming and often fighting amongst themselves…. Local racist and nationalist extremists maintain links and draw inspiration from like-minded overseas extremists, and much of their rhetoric and activity is derivative, heavily influenced by developments overseas.

Of course, developments in Australia do not necessarily follow those abroad. ASIO’s next annual report concluded that:

Over the reporting period, the rise in right wing extremism in parts of Europe was not reflected, nor did it gain large-scale support, in Australia.

Unfortunately, that no longer appears to hold true. In the most recent Senate Estimates hearings, ASIO Director-General Duncan Lewis made that clear:

Senator  McKim: Mr  Lewis,  I  just  want  to  follow  up  on  my  last  question.  Would you say that the threat to national security from radical anti-Islamic groups in Australia is growing at the moment?

Mr Lewis: Yes, off a very low base. It has come off a low base. But it has presented, really, probably in the last 18 months or so. So, yes, it is, but I would not describe it as going up in any vertical way. But it has come off a low base and it is now more present than it was.

By “threat to national security” they would be referring to violence or the potential for violence (non-violent protest is not a national security concern under ASIO’s charter, and they are obviously not referring to national security threats like espionage).  This suggests that ASIO’s view is that the far-right violent extremist threat is not large but has recently become larger than it was.

What does all this tell us about this significance of this counter-terrorism prosecution?

Mainly, that it is only a new development in one sense. The use of Commonwealth terrorism offences against an Australian extreme-right activist is unprecedented.

However, terrorism legislation only covers a specific subset of violent extremism; usually that for which the authorities have enough evidence to prove a plan for life-threatening violence intended to intimidate a wider audience to further a political cause. That the legislation was never used before against anyone on the extreme right did not mean there was no potential threat.

Australia had experienced far-right violent extremism before, including quite recently. We experienced more of it, sometimes amounting to terrorism, further in the past. Far-right violence had escalated in Europe and America and many, including security agencies, were concerned it could escalate here.

For these reasons, while an Australian counter-terrorism prosecution against a suspected far-right extremist is a new development, it should not be a surprising one.

The new parliament will soon pass more national security (mainly counter-terrorism) legislation. This has happened every few months from late 2014, following the increased terrorist threat resulting from the Syrian civil war and the rise of the “Islamic State”.

Commonwealth Attorney-General George Brandis has popularised the term tranche for each of these new sets legislation. These tranches can be hard to keep track of, and generate a lot of controversy. So this post outlines the tranches so far, with a few thoughts on the debates about them.

Tranche 1: National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2014

The first tranche was mainly about implementing the recommendations of the 2012 national security inquiry, and most of it was reasonable. Some of the critical commentary was way off the mark, with unfounded claims that the bill would legalise torture and allow ASIO to monitor “the entire internet” with one warrant.

I only had a few objections to this bill. For example, it made sense to allow ASIO officers to conduct “special intelligence operations” (that is, to infiltrate terrorist cells without the fear that they could face prosecution for breaking laws in the process), but I objected to the disclosure restrictions in Section 35P which went beyond the AFP’s disclosure restrictions for controlled operations, but with less oversight.

The disclosure restrictions have since been eased, to some degree, following the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor (INSLM)’s inquiry into Section 35P.

Tranche 2: Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Foreign Fighters) Bill 2014

The second tranche was much more worrying. It introduced the declared area (or “no go zone“) offence, where Australians returning from declared areas in Syria and Iraq would have to prove they weren’t terrorists. The tranche also merged foreign incursions offences and terrorism offences together in a very blunt manner, and introduced new restrictions on speech.

However, this tranche also had bits I strongly agreed with (particularly relating to passports and foreign evidence) and bits I was wary of but acceptted (such as lowering thresholds for several existing powers like control orders, though this was done without adding the control order safeguards recommended in the COAG CT review).

Tranche 2.5? Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment Bill (No.1) 2014

This was quickly followed some small changes that were not announced as a “tranche”, because they were mainly about tweaking some of the previous tranche. So they could be considered a sub-tranche, and they mainly involved more adjustments to control orders and intelligence-sharing.

One problem with this tranche, which was fortunately fixed by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS), was that its initial draft would have removed some of the judicial discretion on control orders. Traditionally, a judge who approved a control order could scrutinise each proposed restriction on the suspect’s liberty and reject any restrictions that the police couldn’t sufficiently justify. Read the Harun Causevic ruling to see this process playing out.

The original version of this bill would have taken that discretion away, meaning that a judge could either say yes to a control order, accepting every restriction the Federal Police called for, or say no altogether. Fortunately the PJCIS rejected this, and the government accepted that, so each restriction on liberty can still be argued over in court.

Tranche 3: Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014

Then there was the third tranche, data retention. I wasn’t instinctively opposed to data retention but was largely sceptical, given the risks it carries for personal liberties, doubts that the data would be kept securely, the risks posed to press freedom and the poor record of data retention in some other countries.

I’m also sceptical of several arguments from the anti-data retention side, such as that no counter-terrorism or public safety benefits will result at all from it. The UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation’s latest report found benefits from bulk data collection(though that’s not quite the same thing).

But on the whole, I’m still unconvinced that the benefits will outweigh the risks.

Now that we have data retention, a big question is how to evaluate it. What sort of review could be done to examine the first year or more of data retention and test the arguments of each side? It would probably be too big for the INSLM, who’s job only goes for 60 days per year. We are due for another external review of Australia’s intelligence agencies (the Flood Review recommended one every five to seven years and the last one was in 2011), civil society groups could push for it to include an examination of what difference data retention has made so far.

Tranche 4: Australian Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Bill 2015

Next came the fourth tranche, the citizenship-stripping bill. For the first time ever, I was 100% opposed to a piece of national security legislation.

The PCJIS’s amendments have removed many of its worst aspects. The original draft could strip the citizenship of Australians within Australia who hadn’t been convicted of a crime, and listed “damage to Commonwealth property” as one of the offences that could result in this. It also may have had an evidence threshold lower than that of confiscating passports (it’s unclear, see pages 6-7 here).

Thanks to the PJCIS’s changes, the bill that ended up passing is not nearly as bad. However, it still allows for Australians suspected of terrorism (provided they are dual-nationals and overseas at the time) to lose their citizenship without being convicted, thanks to a “self-executing” clause. This obfuscating term caused a lot of debate in the PCJIS hearings and hid that a group public servants (which we know now will be in the form of the Citizenship Loss Board) will decide which dual-national Australians will lose their citizenship, without guilt being proved.

Within Australia, it can only be used against dual-nationals who have been convicted. However, even if the law is used only against undeniably genuine terrorists, I don’t see merit in it.

Tranche 5: Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment Bill (No.1) 2015

Then we had the fifth tranche, which we are still in the middle of. It mainly involves adjustments to control orders, such as lowering the age of who they can be used against (from 16 to 14) and allowing the use of secret evidence in control order proceedings.

When the PJCIS released its report on the bill, the government announced it would pass it. This then got put aside, presumably because the double dissolution election got in the way or because they were waiting for Part 2 of the INSLM’s report on control order safeguards.

On Thursday, Turnbull said that the bill’s new version would be presented soon. We haven’t seen it yet, but if the “special advocates” recommendations are implemented (so that the secret evidence can be challenged), I don’t find this tranche a huge worry in itself.

Tranche 6: indefinite detention?

There will soon be sixth tranche, which I’m deeply apprehensive about.

In August a COAG meeting of Attorneys-General agreed to introduce legislation to detain convicted terrorists who had served their sentences if they were deemed to pose an unacceptable risk. Their detention would be reviewed periodically, and could be indefinite. On Thursday Turnbull announced that these laws would be presented to Parliament soon, along with other changes.

So these are the tranches that we have had, or are about to have. Given the threat, several of the changes were justified. However, the overall trend is excessive and illiberal, and looks set to continue.

I recently went to the 50th anniversary conference for the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, which was a lot of fun.

The videos are all up on the ANU’s YouTube channel, but for convenience I’ve embedded them here, with the lists of speakers.

There were five sessions, all included below. I particularly recommend the talk by Evelyn Goh. Her question, about whether grand bargains between great powers are actually possible, is hugely relevant for Australia given growing tensions between the US and China. I’m sceptical of her argument (I’m pessimistic about grand bargains and consider the idea to be a huge gamble), but it’s an important position to debate. I also really liked Amy King’s talk, as economic aspects of security are something I wish I knew better. The talks about strategic studies as a field (of study and practice) by Peter Ho, Eliot Cohen, Hew Strachan, Amitav Acharya and Robert O’Niell are also great.

Also, some people have recently asked me if my PhD is in strategic studies, because I’ve had so many blog posts on strategic and military issues this year. It’s not. I’ve just taken a lot of interest in strategic studies this year, in part because it’s not part of my PhD, but also because the history of its contentious relationship with both the state and the academy fascinates me (which has obvious parallels with terrorism studies).

Session 1: Strategy and Power
Chair: Professor Michael Wesley

21st Century Strategic Order – Dr C. Raja Mohan

Economics and Strategy – Dr Amy King

Elements of National Power and Strategic Policy – Major General John J. Frewen

Great Power Grand Bargains: Myth or Reality? – Professor Evelyn Goh

Session 2: Strategic Thinking: Concepts and Challenges
Chair: Emeritus Professor David Horner

Old Wine in New Bottles? The Continued Relevance of Cold War Strategic Concepts – Professor Robert Ayson

Alliances After the Cold War – Professor Thomas Christensen

Nuclear Strategy After the Cold War – Dr Nicola Leveringhaus

Session 3: Strategy and Domains
Chair: Professor Joan Beaumont

The Return of Geography – Professor Paul Dibb

Maritime Strategy in Asia – Dr Euan Graham

The Evolution of Military Capability in the Indo-Asia-Pacific Region – Dr Tim Huxley

Session 4: Strategic Studies in Practice
Chair: Admiral Chris Barrie

Strategic Studies in Practice: The Australian Perspective – Professor Hugh White

Strategic Studies in Practice: The Southeast Asian Perspective – Mr Peter Ho

Training the Next Generation of Strategic Thinkers – Professor Eliot Cohen

Session 5: New Directions in Strategic Studies
Chair: Professor Daniel Marston

US Grand Strategy in the Post-Cold War Era – Dr Hal Brands

The Future of Strategic Studies: Lessons from the Last Golden Age – Professor Sir Hew Strachan

An Asian School of Strategic Studies? – Professor Amitav Acharya

The Future of Strategic Studies: The Next Golden Age – Professor Robert O’Neill

When Australia’s last Defence White Paper was released, Hugh White declared that “it’s time we talked about war with China”.

Hugh White has long been calling for discussion on this hopefully remote, but unfortunately real, possibility. And he’s absolutely right. I’m going to talk about it in this post, and highlight voices on this topic that I find valuable.

First, because I’ve enjoyed venturing outside my research area recently. Second, because the prospect of war in the Asia-Pacific poses a greater threat to Australia’s national security than terrorism. Third, because I recently listened to a Perth USAsia Centre podcast episode where Kim Beazley said something about this which really struck me.

In the episode, Beazley and others discussed the latest Shangri-La Dialogue. This is a summit in Singapore where representatives of Asia-Pacific governments, along with academics and other participants, discuss the region’s security and defence issues. Beazley said that Australia stood out by failing to attend the Dialogue. He speculated that this could have been because America has big expectations of Australia in the future, and that the government has hesitantly signed Australia up without bringing the public along:

We don’t understand how significant we are, and if we ever approach, mentally, a comprehension of that we run away from it. … So we weren’t there. We had officials there, but we did not have a minister there. That’s simply absurd………

The Americans arrived with messages for us. I have a fear that maybe that’s what we were trying to avoid. The American message for us was really quite strong. It’s the first time I’ve heard this expression, and that was ‘well now Australia is a global ally’ and we engage in a variety of activities around the globe. We have become, from the American point of view, the ally they want to deal with. Because we’ll commit. We’ll commit forces, we’ll commit diplomacy, and I think there’s a sort of, bit of a hesitancy now, in Australia, on that point.

Is that actually where we want to be? If you read the White Paper yes it is where we want to be. The White Paper mentions a priority of support for a global rules-based order, it mentions it as often as [US Secretary of Defense] Ash Carter did in his speech.  And that would seem to be logically the point of intersection, but there was no Australian there to give that definition. And we always get mentioned in American speeches, but not in a way that singles us out and actually puts us up, elevates us, in discussion, pretty much above most other American allies. [Emphasis added]

These increased expectations on Australia need to be understood in light of the possibility that war could break out with China. That dark prospect lurks in the background of all the discussions of a “global rules-based order”, that America, Australia and other countries are vowing to uphold.

(Ships from the American, Japanese and Australian navies in a joint training exercise)

Before going into Beazley’s comment, I need to set the scene. The “global rules-based order” refers to the current system of international law for resolving territorial disputes, which has come under challenge in the Asia-Pacific. Global economic power is shifting to the region (hence the Asian Century) and it’s strategic importance is growing with it. Asia-Pacific countries have increased their military spending, nationalism and territorial competition are growing, the United States is perceived to be in decline, and military tensions are flaring up.

Many of these centre on territorial disputes in the South China Sea, which caused some tense moments in the Shangri-La Dialogue this year. China had been militarily asserting a claim to territory claimed by the Philippines. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea at The Hague was considering the dispute, and was anticipated to rule in the Philippines’ favour. China was expected to reject this, and made that clear at the summit when Admiral Sun Jianguo declared “China will not recognize nor honor any award”.

The Philippines is not the only country China is making territorial claims against, hence Hugh White’s argument that this “is a contest over the future of the Asian order, and we should not for a moment assume that China is any less committed to building a new order than we are to preserving the old one.” Tanner Greer similarly expresses pessimism about the likelihood of China being bound by the Western-led “global rules-based order”:

The Chinese believe that our international order is a rigged system set up by the imperial victors of the last round of bloodshed to perpetuate the power of its winners. They use the system, quite cynically, but at its base they find it and its symbols hypocritical, embarrassing, outrageous, and (according to the most strident among them), evil. In their minds it is a system of lies and half-truths. In some cases they have a point. Most of their actions in the East or South China Seas are designed to show just how large a gap exists between the grim realities of great power politics and soaring rhetoric Americans use to describe our role in the region. …..

Wedded to this cynical vision of the current arrangements is an equally cynical take on the history of America’s imposed order. Beijing is well aware that if it decided to do to Tonga now what the United States did to Hawaii more than a century ago it would mean war. At the time the United States suffered nothing of the sort. Not that American wars were without their own rewards—the Americans claim island bases like Guam and Saipan as prizes won through conquest. China is not allowed to conquer its own prizes. It cannot fight wars to give its forces a new ports and bases; it is not even allowed build little artificial islands for the purpose.

Never mind that all of that strikes the Chinese’s ire happened generations ago. Anything this side of the Taiping is modern history for the Chinese. American attempts to deny that, to claim that the world should work differently now than it did when the American star first began to rise, simply prove that morality and sweet sounding words like ‘international norms’ are for the winners. All of that talk about being a responsible stakeholder is just a nicer way to say we plan on kicking down the ladder now that we have finished climbing up it.

In simpler terms, the Chinese equate “rising within a rules based order” with “halting China’s rise to power.” To live by Washington’s rules is to live under its power, and the Chinese have been telling themselves for three decades now that—after two centuries of hardship—they will not live by the dictates of outsiders ever again.

Tanner Greer quotes Bilahari Kausikan’s account of how these ambitions are tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s efforts to retain power:

China’s use of history to legitimise CCP rule and justify sovereignty claims gets us, I think, to the crux of the matter. For the past century, the legitimacy of any Chinese government has depended on its ability to defend China’s sovereignty and preserve its borders. But what are those borders? Can the CCP meekly accept the borders imposed on a weak China that has now, to use Mao Zedong’s phrase, “stood up” under communist leadership? China is not reckless but the CCP must at least give the appearance of recovering lost territory. Revanchism is an intrinsic part of the story of China’s “Great Rejuvenation”.

The lands lost to a weak China include what are now parts of Siberia and the Russian Far East, Mongolia, Hong Kong and Macau, and Taiwan, as well as the Paracels and Spratlys in the SCS. Siberia and the Russian Far East and Mongolia are now beyond recovery. Hong Kong and Macau reverted to Beijing’s rule almost 30 years ago. The US has made clear it will not support independence for Taiwan. Without US support, independence is impossible. With that core concern assuaged, Beijing can multiply the economic threads binding Taiwan to the mainland and bide its time, confident that irrespective of internal changes and how the people of Taiwan regard themselves, Taiwan’s long-term trajectory cannot run counter to China’s interest. Changing the status quo is not an immediate possibility but is no longer an urgent issue, although China still eyes Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party distrustfully and will never entirely forgo the option of forceful reunification.

That leaves the SCS territories to put some credible shreds of meat on the bare bones of the CCP’s version of history as it navigates a second and more difficult phase of reforms and tries to manage social and labour unrest at a time of moderating growth and a future when slower growth will be China’s “new normal”. The very insignificance of the territories in dispute in the SCS may well be part of their attraction to Beijing for this essentially domestic political purpose.

This is extremely plausible, and not unique to this part of the world (Curtis Ryan and others have described how regime insecurity drives foreign policies and conflict in the Middle East). Barry Buzan similarly links the Chinese government’s commitment to retaining power at home to its military assertiveness abroad:

As Jonathan Fenby has argued, the CCP remains unbendingly committed to remaining in power in perpetuity. Yet as knowledge, wealth, organization, information and connectivity spread through Chinese society, that society becomes increasingly diverse, opinionated, and able and willing to mobilise in its own interests.

The CCP increasingly, and correctly, feels threatened by this society, which it does not understand, and does not like. As a consequence, China’s domestic and foreign policies are extremely closely linked, with the insecurity of the CCP as the central concern (see work by Susan Shirk and David Shambaugh). ….

The CCP has successfully cultivated nationalism for several decades, and while it has drawn legitimacy from that, it has also become trapped it into a ratchet effect of strong foreign policy responses. Because of its domestic insecurity, the CCP cannot afford to look weak abroad lest it invite comparison with the decaying Qing dynasty during the nineteenth century and lose the mandate of heaven.

On that basis, we can predict, and indeed we can already see happening, that in the coming years China will become more nationalist, more xenophobic, and probably more assertive in foreign policy terms (on a more assertive Chinese foreign policy, see Yan Xuetong and Zhang).

The Chinese government rejects the accusations against it, and they could certainly point to many hypocrisies. They could argue that as the largest contributor to United Nations peacekeeping missions, and as a country that that didn’t invade Iraq without UN approval in 2003 or carry out regime change in Libya in 2011, it’s hypocritical for Western countries to call China a threat to global order. They could argue that as a country that provides aid to others with few strings attached, and whose imports have driven economic growth for many countries (such as Australia’s mining boom), it’s ungrateful of others to rebuke China for seeking increased military strength in proportion with its growing economy. They could also argue that Australia itself spurned international arbitration during its oil and gas disputes with Timor-Leste, and that China is not the only country that could be accused of making problematic claims in the South China Sea.

But there’s little doubt that China’s maritime claims have been more ambitious, and its actions more aggressive, than the other countries involved.

To assert its claims, China has been constructing artificial islands in disputed territory and building military bases on them. The Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative provides plenty of satellite photos of this. China has also been intruding into waters that unambiguously belong within other country’s Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), and provoking confrontations:

China has carefully—but aggressively—pursued its goals in Asia. It has seized territory (the Scarborough Shoal) from the Philippines and refused to withdraw  despite promising to do so.3 It stationed an oil rig in Vietnamese waters, and established an East China Sea air-defence identification zone without first consulting its neighbours. It has intercepted US aircraft and naval vessels in reckless  ways, thus risking a repeat of the April 2001 EP-3 crisis. The Chinese Coast Guard continues to  aggressively defend Chinese fishing vessels operating in the waters of Southeast Asian countries, like Indonesia.4

This  approach has spurred countries such as Singapore and the Philippines to seek closer military ties with the United States, when they had grown wary of such military ties not long ago (the Philippines closed US military bases in the 1990s). Even the Cold War enemy Vietnam is seeking military support from America. This does not mean that conflict is inevitable (the new Philippines government may well accommodate China), and it is not necessarily even likely. But the pieces are in place for a potential confrontation, and there’s a real possibility that things could get out of control.

China does appear to sternly reject the current international order, viewing it as a Western trap, while the US and others appear determined to maintain this order. Unless one or both sides change their approach, the region’s future could be bleak.

This is the context to understand Beazley’s comment in. He paints a picture of Australia becoming further embedded in the US alliance system, in which the US would have high expectations of Australia in any conflict with China. But he suggests that governments have done this without having brought the public on board.

Several other foreign policy observers have also pointed this out. The Lowy Institute’s Aaron Connelly wrote this valuable post arguing that US government officials, who deal mostly with their counterparts in Canberra, don’t realise that the Australian public (and businesses) largely don’t share the US government view of a threatening China. Indeed a recent survey showed that Australians are calm about China’s rise and see the prospect of war as unlikely. The United States Studies Centre’s Simon Jackman viewed this as “Australians taking the US relationship for granted”.

If America indeed has great expectations of us, to help enforce a global order that the Chinese government appears to have emphatically rejected, then the alliance certainly can’t be taken for granted. Either the government will need to temper America’s expectations in line with the Australian public’s, or the government will have to persuade the public that committing more to the alliance is necessary.

In the latest Quarterly Essay, Firing Line: Australia’s Path to War, James Brown similarly warns about the risk of war with China and highlights the gap between successive Australian governments’  integration into the US alliance system and public hesitancy. He argues that the government needs to more open than it has so far, so that an informed choice can be made:

Australia’s politicians, seldom comfortable discussing military strategic issues, did little to address the growing chorus of alarm. In fact, they did little to explain the measures agreed to with the United States at all. When Prime Minister Tony Abbott signed the Force Posture Agreement formalising the Darwin presence [of US Marines] in 2014, there was no accompanying attempt to explain to the public what it meant.

Brown ties this into a broader theme, arguing that Australia has limited public engagement with, and scrutiny of, military issues. He states that our defence community is more closed than that of America and some other democracies, and that it’s rare for politicians, journalists and academics to have deep military knowledge.

That said, there are signs of this changing: the increased public consultation behind the latest Defence White Paper, the Army’s “intellectual pivot” (a factor behind the rise of Australia’s online strategy-sphere), and the chorus of voices calling for more discussion of defence issues in this election.

But this could go much further. If, as Beazley worries, America does indeed have great expectations for Australia in the event of war with China, it certainly doesn’t appear to be in the public consciousness. It’s indeed time we talked about it more.

Kate Grealy and I will soon launch our side project.

I won’t tell you everything about it yet, but it will cover some similar themes to this blog (security issues and human rights), though with a wider range of topics and a greater focus on Southeast Asia. It will feature many interesting and well-informed people.

It’s been a lot of fun for us over the past few months, and we are pleased that we are just about ready to launch, which we will do on Thursday 9 June.

This is the second part of this post on security studies and strategic studies. Be sure to read that post first.

Rise of strategic studies

As discussed in the last post, security studies began in the 1930s with a group of Ivy League scholars in the United States. These scholars were concerned about the threat to liberal political order posed by totalitarian states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This emerging field came to overlap with the discipline of international relations (IR), which had developed in the UK, US, Europe and elsewhere after World War One.

By the end of World War Two, the relatively new concept of national security became a driving concern for the US government, which passed the National Security Act in 1947 as it prepared to confront the Soviet Union in what became the Cold War. The government, particularly the military, invested heavily in the social sciences as the country mobilised to face a new and powerful enemy. This investment helped the field of security studies to rapidly expand.

Within security studies, a stream developed that focused on military strategy, particularly on nuclear weapons. They were led by scholars concerned about how America could face a world where the next global conflict could be apocalyptic. Over time this would became a distinct field known as strategic studies.

Strategic studies never fitted neatly into any one discipline, as it included political scientists and international relations specialists, but also mathematicians, physicists, economists, and many historians. Nor was it a purely academic field. Some of its key figures were based in universities, but others were based in institutions such as the Rand Corporation (a think-tank created to conduct research for the military) and there was considerable crossover with government. The career of Thomas Schelling, an economist who worked for the US government from 1948 to 1953 on initiatives such as the Marshall Plan and went on to write influential books on arms control and game theory, exemplifies the eclectic nature of the field. More infamous, but less representative, strategic studies scholars included Herman Khan, a theorist of nuclear warfare who inspired the eponymous character in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

The field  focused on nuclear deterrence, making use of game theory and formal modelling. Their major concern was how to reduce the risk of nuclear war and control the arms race. At the same time, they were concerned with maintaining America’s military dominance. Whether there were tensions between these positions depends on one’s political stance. To these scholars, America’s military superiority and dominant global position reduced the prospect of global war, by discouraging Soviet and Chinese adventurism and reassuring allies, and therefore helped maintain international security. To their critics, America’s military dominance led to reckless actions and encouraged the global arms race, thereby undermining international security.

While nuclear deterrence was the field’s main focus, it was not the only one. When nuclear tensions began to ease after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, a few strategists turned to another dimension of Cold War confrontation: insurgency and counter-insurgency. Thriving insurgencies in Algeria and Vietnam, or failed insurgencies in Greece, the Philippines and Malaya, became the focus of study for this segment (a focus that would be temporarily revived in the mid-2000s). However, the failing counter-insurgency in Vietnam prompted a crisis in academic-military relations that would make strategic studies fall out of favour.

Turmoil in academia

Social change in the 1960s and 1970s ruptured the relationship between academia and state agencies such as the military.

The global context had changed since the 1930s and 1940s. The United States had become the most powerful country in the world. It had military bases across the globe. It provided military support to Western-aligned governments in most continents. It overthrew several governments (including democratically elected ones) that tried to move outside the Western orbit. By the late 1960s, it was deploying extraordinary levels of military force in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The idea of America as an embattled defender of freedom had a weaker hold on public, and particularly scholarly, opinion.

(students protesting outside the Pentagon in 1967)

As opposition to the war (and broader disquiet about America’s role in the world) grew, military involvement with higher education became controversial. Many academics felt that cooperation with the military and foreign policy arms of the state had corrupted the role of universities. One of the most prominent critics was MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky. His first book, American Power and the New Mandarins, focused heavily on academia. Social scientists were foremost among the “mandarins” referred to in the title. Those whose research was intended to assist the war effort in Vietnam were accused of having “the mentality of the colonial civil servant, persuaded of the benevolence of the mother country and the correctness of its vision of world order, and convinced that he understands the true interests of the backward peoples whose welfare he is to administer”.

Chomsky, as an anarchist, was among the most radical of the critics. But as Adam Elkus points out, you don’t need to share Chomsky’s politics to have had ethical problems with some of the academic-state collaboration that was happening. One social scientist, Samuel Huntingdon, was apparently involved in the Strategic Hamlets program which drove hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese peasants out of their homes. Another example is Henry Kissinger, who used his academic position to promote false claims of Soviet nuclear advantage (and that’s without getting into his future government career).

So it’s not surprising that opposition to research intended to assist military policy became widespread. Senator J. William Fulbright, an anti-war figure who came from a conservative tradition, similarly denounced the “military-industrial-academic complex”. Opposition grew, and had lasting effects:

The American university today would not accept what Chomsky took for granted in the 1960s. Anthropologists tend to be wary of working with the U.S. military in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sociologists are more inclined to identify with critics of American foreign policy than with its architects. MIT is more likely to teach courses in sustainable development than political development. There are precious few old mandarins left in the discipline of political science, let alone emerging new ones. One half of the evil axis identified by Chomsky is gone: work for any government agency, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency, and your chances of getting tenure will diminish with more than deliberate speed.

Fall of strategic studies

Strategic studies was one casualty of this rupture, and it gradually became a marginal field.

However, the political backlash was only one reason for its decline, and potentially an overstated one. The social sciences did not become dominated by “tenured radicals”, but they did experience a broadly leftward shift, resulting in discomfort with a field so closely identified with US military policy.

Another reason was that the easing of Cold War tensions with détente in the 1970s reduced the perceived need for the field, and there was also much disillusionment from the government end. Many government and military officials felt academia had provided useless input, if not interference, in matters that should be left to military professionals.

A further reason was strategic studies’ lack of a clear disciplinary home:

The main problem is not the pacifist or radical fringes of the academic world, despite the distaste they evince for a field they associate with support for U.S. policy. Neither groups has as much clout in political science as elsewhere in academia. The problem is that many in the liberal mainstream concede that strategic studies is legitimate, but when major war appears to recede as a prospect in the real world – as it did in the 1970s and again after the Cold War – they resist ranking the subject highly when their own fields’ priorities are at stake. Seen as legitimate in principle, strategic studies faces marginalization in practice when departments see it as a second-rate claim on their discipline.

That paragraph was written in the 1990s, but the field of strategic studies has not recovered since. Meanwhile, security studies went in a different direction.

Transformation of security studies

While strategic studies went through this drama, the broader field of security studies persisted and became even more closely integrated into the discipline of international relations. This was at first possible because the dominant IR paradigm (in the 1950s) of realism meshed closely with concerns of both security studies and strategic studies (which were not two clearly separate fields at the time).

That said, it was not always an easy fit. Edward Mead Earle had a strong distaste for the realism of E. H. Carr (mentioned in the first post), which contrasted with Earle’s idealised view of America. In addition, several realists opposed America’s Cold War posture and the Vietnam War. The most prominant was Hans Morgenthau, who drew parallels between the Vietnam War and Thucydides’s critique of the “Sicilian expedition” in 400s BC, an act of overreach that weakened the Athenian empire. This was consistent with his earlier realist critique of the Truman Doctrine. His objection was based on its universalistic nature; it committed the United States to fight any perceived communist threat, to anybody, in any part of the world, at any cost. Several other realists also critiqued America’s expansive ambitions and the Vietnam War, leading some of their hawkish critics to dismiss realism as a European import unsuited to an idealistic America. Nonetheless, both strategic studies and security studies were broadly compatible with realism.

Because security studies had a lot of crossover with international relations, the former gradually became closely integrated into the latter. Bazzy Buzan and Lene Hanson have shown, in great detail, how security studies went through a process of institutionalisation so that by the 1970s it had become a major sub-field within IR. As this occurred, security studies increasingly focused on international security (long an IR concern) and less on national security (which tended to be left to strategic studies, as the divide between the two fields gradually grew).

Then, the discipline of international relations changed substantially from the 1970s onwards. The realist paradigm came under challenge, not only from its historical competitor, liberalism, but also constructivism and other schools of thought such as Marxism, feminism and critical theory. The 2014 version of the Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) Faculty Survey Report, which received responses from 4,903 IR scholars in 32 countries, confirms this. Asked to describe the “paradigms or schools of thought” their work fell under, less than a fifth (18.7%) of respondents chose realism. Instead 23.13% chose constructivism and 26.73% selected “I do not use paradigmatic analysis”. Realist dominance died long ago.

As a result, the field of security studies transformed too, and adopted a greater focus on non-military aspects of security. This included issues such as economic interdependence, poverty, environmental degradation and oil dependence (particularly after the 1973 OPEC embargo), along with enduring debates on what issues did and did not belong within security studies. The field now covers issues such as human security, environmental security, and securitisation.

The remaining divide

So security studies has now become an integral part of international relations (and by extension political science), with a relatively secure position within academia. Unlike its first decades, the field now rarely focuses on national security or military strategy, to the point that the field is often just called “international security studies”.

In contrast, strategic studies focuses heavily on national security and the conduct of war, rather than the issues currently favoured by security studies. Compared to the “golden age” of strategic studies in the 1950s and 1960s, it is a marginal field today. This is partly because of its interdisciplinary nature and partly because the academy is less hospitable to military interests than it once was (traditional military history has been another casualty of this). The field experienced a temporary and mild resurgence during the 1980s, but has been on the back-foot since.

The clearest way to see the differences between the two fields is to look at the contents pages of two key textbooks.

The online table of contents for Oxford University Press’s major textbook on security studies looks similar to an international relations textbook, with chapters devoted to schools of thought such as realism, liberalism, constructivism and critical theory. It also has chapters focused on many types of security other than military security.

The online table of contents for Oxford University Press’s major textbook on strategic studies focuses instead on military strategy and national security. Some of its chapter titles, “Strategic Studies and its Critics” and “The Future of Strategic Studies”, allude to the field’s precarious position.

Hence the divide discussed by Rovner and Elkus. In the early Cold War years, security studies and strategic studies were not two clearly distinct fields, and were not spoken of that way. But a divide developed, and grew, particularly from the 1960s onwards. They are now two separate fields, with different focuses, approaches, and worldviews. They have also had very different fortunes.

Hello readers.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on an extremely fun side project with Kate Grealy.

Kate used to work for government in counter-terrorism and crime prevention, and for NGOs in Pakistan and Indonesia. She is also a musician and has just released a new EP.

What is our project? You will find out when we launch in late May or early June.

Get excited!

War on the Rocks recently published an article by Joshua Rovner on the academic divide between security studies and strategic studies. Adam Elkus wrote a follow-up article elaborating on the differences and identifying ways that the fields could find common ground.

Several people on Twitter and Facebook remarked that they were unaware that security studies and strategic studies were actually two different fields, which made me realise that this is more of a niche distinction than I had thought.

So this two-post series will provide a history of how security studies and strategic studies formed and became separate (and sometimes warring) fields.

This first post covers the period up to the 1950s, before the stark divide had developed.

A few caveats:

• I do not primarily identify with either field (except to the extent that terrorism studies might be considered part of security studies, broadly defined), so these two posts will have over-simplifications and possibly errors. Hopefully people in these fields will challenge or add to this short history.
• This history won’t cover the methodological issues raised in the War on the Rocks articles.
• This history will focus mainly on the United States.

International relations

To begin, we need to go back to before either security studies or strategic studies existed, and start with the discipline of international relations [IR]. Academic disciplines rarely arise from purely intellectual interest; instead they are influenced by wider political contexts and problems. The discipline of IR was established after the First World War, by scholars who sought to contribute intellectually to preventing global conflict, signified by the creation of Chatham House in the UK in 1920 and the Council on Foreign Relations in the US in 1921. As Fred Halliday notes:

Economics began as a reflection on problems of trade and the industrial revolution; sociology as a response to urbanization; political science in reaction to democratization and problems of governance; geography as a reflection on the rise of a world market and empire; psychology in response to a new awareness of mental illness. In the case of IR its academic origins lie in the response to World War One, as a reflection, mediate but engaged, on why the efforts of diplomats, lawyers, peace campaigners, industrialists, feminists, working-class leaders and the rest, were unable to stop the slaughter of 1914-18.

A particular intellectual approach, termed realism, gradually came to dominate the field. Initially the dominant theoretical approach was liberalism, strongly influenced by German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s ideals of international cooperation. However scholars who described themselves as realists challenged this approach, and emphasised international anarchy, the pursuit of power and the inevitability of conflict. A key realist text was E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Year Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, which was published on the outbreak of World War Two and seemingly validated by it. His 1946 preface to a republished version of the book accused the other theoretical approaches within IR of having “a glaring and dangerous defect… the almost total neglect of the factor of power”.

These aspects of the study of international relations – the desire to prevent global conflict, understand peace and war, and make sense of states’ competing pursuits of power – show that international security was a major focus of the discipline. But security was not initially considered a distinct field of study within the discipline, and there was no field of “security studies”. This only came about later, prompted by a largely separate academic development that occurred in the United States during this inter-war period.

(National) security studies

In the United States in the 1930s, an informal network of Ivy League scholars (such as Princeton’s Edward Mead Earle) began to create a distinct field of security studies. However, their focus was less on long-term notions of international security and more on national security. This was partly because their backgrounds were mostly not in international relations but in other disciplines (often they were historians). However, it was also because the 1930s were a less optimistic time for the democracies than the 1920s, given the Great Depression and the growing strength of totalitarian powers like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

This distinction between national security and international security implied different focuses of study. While international security implied efforts to prevent or manage global conflict between states, national security implied efforts to assist their own states to face the dangers posed by conflict, and to prevail.

However, it’s important to not treat national security and international security as entirely different focuses; for this network of US-based scholars in the 1930s they went hand-in-hand. These scholars feared that the totalitarian powers were undermining the “relatively stable international order” that previously existed, placing the United States at grave risk. In particular, Nazi Germany’s challenge to international security undermined America’s national security.

The notion of national security, being a broader concept than military defence, provided a way to understand the danger posed by Hitler, whose military forces did not pose an immediate physical threat to America. The Roosevelt Administration and the foreign policy establishment, including these scholars, saw the need to go to war with Germany in the late 1930s but much of the public was reluctant. Edward Mead Earle believed that “the isolationist tendencies of the public would melt away when it was presented with a well-articulated national security policy.” As it happened, Germany’s ally Japan made the job much easier by bombing Pearl Harbour. This brought America directly into the war, and set the stage for a new international order.

From this point on, the concept of national security became central to US policy:

World War II gave rise to the era of national security. This was an idea that would be institutionalized within American government and popularized in wider society. National security supplanted the more limited concept of “defense”. The disorder of the 1930s planted the seeds of an intellectual rediscovery of strategy as an intellectual discipline, and new weapons of greater range and lethality stoked fears in defense debate. Edward Mead Earle at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, along with Arnold Wolfers and Nicholas Spykman at Yale, led the academic embrace of the concept. But only after the United States formally entered the war did national security become an organizing principle for a new, complex bureaucracy. This would culminate in the creation of the Unified Command Plan of 1946 that placed large parts of the globe under geographically based military commands, and the National Security Act of 1947, establishing the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.

This increasing government focus on national security helped security studies to grow. It’s worth noting that there was initially only limited interaction between the discipline of international relations and the emerging field of security studies, given the national focus and disciplinary diversity of the latter. Earle in particular felt that much of the more optimistic IR scholarship had become redundant after the League of Nations had failed to uphold its mandate. However, there was certainly some overlap, particularly after the Second World War. The newly dominant IR paradigm of realism sat well with security studies, and many security scholars did focus on “the study of the nature, causes, effects, and prevention of war”, which was a key component of the IR agenda.

It would take time for security studies and IR to become closer. What happened first was the Cold War mobilisation, combined with the US government’s desire for increased academic expertise on national security. This was a boon for security studies and resulted in a distinctive research focus within it which would grow to become the field of strategic studies.

Rise of strategic studies

The imperative for scholarly focus on strategy (specifically on military strategy) was outlined in 1949 by Yale scholar Bernard Brodie. He believed that strategy was “not receiving the scientific treatment it deserve[d] either in the armed services or, certainly, outside of them.” With two nuclear-armed superpowers facing off, security scholars feared the next global conflict would be apocalyptic, so a greater government and scholarly understanding of strategy was considered necessary to avoid catastrophe.

These scholars were also concerned that a long struggle against a fearsome enemy could lead to the militarisation of society, at odds with the United States’ domestic traditions. They believed that a strong core of civilian expertise in military affairs was needed to avoid civilian deference to the military (other than in the more operational and tactical questions that were more likely to be considered a purely military domain). Later civilian officials came to appreciate alternative sources of strategic advice, because of frustrations with some generals like Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay.

The field expanded rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of the American boom in higher education, as the government and private institutes like the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations invested heavily in the social sciences. Like area studies, strategic studies benefited from the expectation that it would give the United States the edge in its competition for global influence with the Soviet Union.

Strategic studies at this time was effectively a component of security studies. Government support helped turn strategic studies into a field in its own right, and it’s future looked bright.

But this would change. After the Vietnam War, the close relationship with government would hinder the field’s acceptance within academia. Meanwhile the broader field of security studies would become much closer to the discipline of international relations and establish a secure position within academia.

These changes will be covered in the next post.

Update 1: The second post can be found here.