IR Grand Theory and High Fashion

I am teaching a course on the International Relations of Central Asia. The course is half IR theory and half practical application to the particular region where I am living and teaching. This is the first time I am teaching the course in my last semester at Nazarbayev University.  I have enjoyed re-reading many of the papers that I haven't engaged with closely since my graduate school days.  The last three weeks we have looked at realism, institutionalism, and the debates between them during the mid 1990s.

One of my students came to me to talk about the readings.  They are hard to understand and put in context for many students who are not used to reading about theory at this high level. The students are particularly drawn to two papers that I assign by Mearsheimer.  The first was written right before the collapse of the Soviet Union that offers grave predictions for the security of Europe (Mearsheimer 1990).  The second is a Foreign Policy piece from 2014 that is an "I told you so" paper about the reasons for Russia's invasion of Ukraine (Mearsheimer 2014). Students are very interested in the back and forth nature of the papers and the passion which dominated the debates.  They were also unsure whether these debates really matter in the long run.

While talking to the graduate student I had a thought strike me. These debates are very similar to the dynamic of the fashion industry that is shown in the film "The Devil Wears Prada."  I hadn't watched the movie in a decade, but I remembered the scene where Meryl Streep's character cuts Anne Hathaway's character down to size after she scoffs at the passion with which the group is putting together an outfit for the cover of the magazine.

The gist of the speech is that powerful people making decisions in rooms like the one they were in influence the everyday fashion of those that don't really think about it.

I showed the above clip to my class and then made the analogy concrete.  The great debates that took place between the Mavens of the intellectual world are very similar to the choices of a fashion editor.  They set the terms of the debate, and set the tone for what is studied and how. Those who are "in the know" in the industry know that they need to know and understand the trends, the history, and the balance of power between the elites sitting in powerful rooms setting trends.

My own training and inclination is to be more open about theories and methods.  I'm a pluralist by training and inclination.  However, my training also took seriously the idea that the Great Debates shaped the study of international relations.  My advisor, Cameron Thies wrote a paper on this (Thies 2012) that directly examined how the discourses of realism built an academic community.  The elites in this case debate to reinforce the status hierarchy and to maintain boundaries.  Like any other elite-driven profession or endeavor (really all of human endeavors), the role of elites is very important.

I think that I understood all of this implicitly for a long time, but the inspiration to compare IR theory to the fashion industry helped me to think more clearly about the ways in which I produce and consume academic information.  And to think much more about how I teach that information to my undergraduate and graduate students.
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Mearsheimer, John J. 1990. “Back to the future: instability in Europe after the Cold War.” International Security, 15(1):5-56.

Mearsheimer, John J. 2014. “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,” Foreign Affairs 93:1-12.

Thies, Cameron G. (2002) Progress, History and Identity in International Relations Theory: The Case of the Idealist-Realist Debate. European Journal of International Relations 8: 147–185.

Arms and Civil War Intervention

The complexity of civil wars and intervention has been on my mind a lot lately.  I tend to look at everything through the lens of arms sales, and this is a really "good" time to think about these issues. Arms sales are in the news a great deal because of the ongoing proxy war in Yemen and the role that Western weapons are playing in that conflict as they are deployed by the different sides, especially by the Saudis.

In addition to proxy wars in Yemen and Syria, Libya is also the site of continued fighting.  Earlier this week, government forces found US weapons in the hands of rebel forces. There is an ongoing investigation about the source of these weapons, but it appears at first blush that they were originally sold to UAE (LINK). This would be a violation of the terms of sale to UAE and of the UN arms embargo to Libya in general, so it's a pretty serious issue.

I have a graduate student who is working on an MA thesis about outside intervention in civil wars, and she sent me an article from Brookings about this phenomenon. The article itself is about the analogies that we use to discuss wars and how analogies and history are weaponized and politicized to make different points, and that they take on a shorthand meaning to represent a certain viewpoint about intervention: think Munich vs. Vietnam as an analogy. Toward the end of the article there is a sentence that stood out to me and got me thinking about arms sales and civil war intervention:

"The proxy war problem highlights that, for the United States, ending civil wars is not merely a question of political will, but also a question of capacity. It is true that the US military is the most powerful in the world, but it is not the case that US military intervention will always tip the balance toward peace." 

 I thought about this in terms of two papers by Kalyvas and Balcells (2010, 2014) and how they have examined the "technologies of rebellion" and their effects on the outcome of civil war. They find that conventional war (fought with technology on both sides) leads to deadlier wars, but wars that are shorter in duration and with longer-lasting outcomes.

One way to think of this is that intervention on the part of the US government may not require physical intervention. Intervention in terms of providing equipment may be enough to tilt wars.  This brings me back to some of the research on arms transfers that took place at the height of the Cold War. Arms sales from the US and USSR to the third world were a deep concern because of the idea that these weapons may have been fueling conflict in many areas of the world.

There are a lot of normative and empirical pieces to unpack when thinking about intervening in civil conflicts. The role that arms can play (on both sides) is one that still needs to be explored more systematically.

The Turkish Kerfuffle - F35 and S-400 Missiles in Competition

It may be too dramatic to call the kerfuffle over S-400 missiles a fight for the soul of Turkey.  I am not a Turkey expert, but I think that Erdogan's victory over the military after the "coup" of 2016 took Turkey down a new security path that may be hard to come back from. Many articles have discussed the issue of the S-400 missile and the US decision to exclude Turkey from the F-35 project as a consequence.  A recent article in War on the Rocks helped me to think through my own position on this issue more clearly.

The author of the article, Ray Rounds, makes a number of interesting points about the ineffectiveness of arms as instruments of foreign policy - especially in terms of specific policies.  This ineffectiveness has been at the heart of the finds that Richard Johhnson and I found regarding human rights and arms transfers.  We published a piece in ISQ last year that tried to tie democratic states' stances on human rights to their policy actions in terms of arms transfers.  We found that the actions of these democratic states does not match their rhetoric in any meaningful way.  We have other work under review that tests this proposition using dependence on arms as the independent variable to test whether or not dependence on democratic suppliers can spur states to better human rights records.  The spoiler answer to that particular question is that it does not.

With that in mind, the argument that arms embargoes are more costly and harmful is thought-provoking.  It is especially useful for helping to develop clearer theories of arms transfers in international relations more broadly - my long-term project and personal white whale.

Arms exports are best used for maintaining or strengthening relationships while limiting adversary access to client states; a tool of nuanced influence, not outright coercion. In fact, threatening to withhold arms sales to coerce a state into changing its behavior often has the opposite effect, leading clients to diversify their arms sourcing instead of shifting course. 

This idea that arms create and strengthen relationships, and cannot simply be used instrumentally to get a particular policy or outcome at a desired time is interesting and nuanced.  It also tracks with my own theoretical leanings to think that arms sales are part of the fabric of international relations precisely because they are a currency of relationships.  They are a currency precisely because the transfer of arms represents the transfer of coercive capabilities that forms the basis of an anarchic world.  In terms of Wendt (1992) arms are a big piece of the anarchy that states are making.

Rounds lists a number of states that have moved to diversify their arms suppliers because of US restrictions, delays, and hesitance in supplying them with weapons over the course of a number of year:

Egypt is one example above; but others such as Venezuela and even tiny Kuwait — frustrated at years of U.S. approval delays — have significantly diversified their arms acquisitions. In other words, with the money and options available to Saudi Arabia, and few other producers showing a stomach for a full embargo, it is not unreasonable to believe that the Saudis might significantly diversify their arms acquisitions over time in response to a U.S. embargo.

In the case of US and Turkey, the refusal of the US to consider Turkey for Patriot Missiles (and some technology transfer and manufacturing offsets) was one of the main factors in influencing Turkey to move towards the Russians.  That move has now jeopardized further cooperation in defense and arms for the F-35, a project that may have kept Turkey in the US/Western orbit for 30-40 years or more. 

Military Aircraft Decisions - News Roundup

Pakistan and China are working on a joint fighter project to reduce Pakistan's dependence on Western arms imports. From the article:

The FC-1/ JF-17 Thunder is a joint Chinese-Pakistani project that aimed to reduce Pakistan’s dependence on western firms for advanced fighters, by fielding a low-cost multi-role lightweight fighter that can host modern electronics and precision-guided weapons. It isn’t a top-tier competitor, but it represents a clear step up from Pakistan’s Chinese MiG-19/21 derivatives and French Mirage III/V fighters. This positioning addresses a budget-conscious, “good enough” performance market segment that the West once dominated, but has nearly abandoned in recent decades.

 This reminds me of Caverly and Kapstein's (2012) article in Foreign Policy about the wisdom of the US moving to a model that builds "good enough" weapons that are more attractive for export.  The US has plenty of issues with Pakistan, but in terms of building long-term relations with countries, having them locked into your weapons systems seems to be a good one. 

Airbus sold the C295 to the Ivory Coast.  The Ivory Coast operates a very small air force (two transport planes and 3 helicopters) but are now purchasing from Europe.  The other aircraft are old Soviet aircraft, so this represents a shift to new suppliers, which is an interesting development.

In other decision-news, Singapore has chosen US-made F-35s as the next generation fighter rather than French or Chinese aircraft.  Singapore has a modern military and operates a lot of US equipment already, and decided to stay with the US in terms of upgrading its fighter fleet.

It took Singapore more than five years to make a decision on which planes to buy as they had to look carefully at specifications and what was needed, said Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen in a Facebook post. 

"Our agencies will now have to speak to their US counterparts to move the process forward," Ng said, adding it could be up to a year before any planes are purchased 

The F-16s are due to be taken out of service in around 10 years' time, meaning it was time to acquire their replacement and begin training pilots, he said.

The timeline is interesting.  A ten-year horizon to plan and implement the next generation of aircraft (and a five-year decision timeline) really locks states into relationships in ways that deserve further exploration.
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Caverley, Jonathan, and Ethan B. Kapstein. (2012) Arms Away. Foreign Affairs 91: 125–132.

Why Arms Sales are Complicated - Purchaser Edition

I have spent a lot of time in the past decade researching arms transfers. There are a few of us who study this particular subfield of international relations/economics and sometimes I wonder if there is a really a lot more to say about the subject.  Then I read a bit more and realize that we are really only scratching the surface in terms of the complexity of the subject matter of arms sales.  I am working on some projects now that work to better integrate arms transfers with wider research in IR and that has me thinking more about the motivations of importing states.

I think that many of the models of arms sales think mostly of supplier considerations. There is a lot to commend in thinking of models of how states use arms as a foreign policy tool. Richard Johnson and I published an article last year in International Studies Quarterly (LINK) where we tested whether major democratic arms suppliers take human rights into consideration in their arms sales. Despite some evidence for this a decade ago (Blanton 2005) in the US context, it doesn't appear that human rights are really a major driver in states' decision-making.  That is important information to know, but rather than simply knowing what does not motivate sales, we need to think about what does.

It is often said that the end of the Cold War signaled a shift from a sellers' to a buyers' market in terms of weapons.  There is some truth to that, but states do not usually simply purchase arms "off the rack." The considerations for states in terms of replacement parts, continued supplies, ammunition, training, etc. especially for complex weapons systems also plays a role.  In other words, this is not simply an economic transaction.  Arms sales by their nature are political - and they often involve top-level government involvement in making the deals.  This is especially true of the most complex weapons systems - combat aircraft and ships.

Caverly and Kapstein (2012) argued a few years ago that the US was making a mistake focusing its research and development and arms sales policy on selling the most complex equipment. Their argument was that many states needed cheaper, reliable arms and that the US would push customers towards rivals (Russia and China) by focusing only on the latest generation of equipment.

I thought about that when I read a recent post in The National Interest that discussed Taiwan's decision to stop seeking access to the US F-35 fighter.  Taiwan's strategy has been to collect the most advanced weapons system that it could in order to deter potential future Chinese aggression.  The authors suggest that a better strategy would be one of denial that relies on abundant cheap resources such as anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to make any potential aggression costly. Rather than going toe-to-toe in terms of quality, to beat the Chinese by using multiple cheap technologies.  The strategic consideration of customers (especially for those that are allies) will do a great deal to determine the types of weapons required. This is to say nothing about budgets and the finite resources that states have to acquire weapons.

A second complication that I have been thinking about is one that came up in an article about India's attempt to upgrade its own air force.  Internal politics of this deal have been extremely heated and complicated.  The Indian supreme court refused to get involved in a case about Modi's deal to purchase French Rafale fighters. Modi changed the terms of the deal - abandoning the licensing and construction of aircraft in India in favor or purchasing aircraft built entirely in France.  Licensing, financing, and other considerations along with long-standing political cleavages and battles within purchasing states can also seriously affect the ability of a state to sell arms, and limit the types of equipment (and therefore the number of potential suppliers) available.

All this means is that there needs to be more work that examines qualitative details of arms sales from both the purchaser and seller perspective. Our quantitative models of arms sales need more accurate inputs and theories to become more reliable.  I am looking forward to an exciting year of digging into arms sales details.

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Blanton, Shannon Lindsey. (2005) Foreign Policy in Transition? Human Rights, Democracy, and U.S. Arms Exports. International Studies Quarterly 49: 647–668.

Caverley, Jonathan, and Ethan B. Kapstein. (2012) Arms Away. Foreign Affairs 91: 125–132.

Johnson, Richard A. I., and Spencer L. Willardson. (2018) Human Rights and Democratic Arms Transfers: Rhetoric Versus Reality with Different Types of Major Weapon Systems. International Studies Quarterly 62: 453–464.

Some Links about Russian Arms

My own thinking about arms is grounded, primarily in my own experience in the Army and a lifelong proximity and love of aircraft.  I don't think a lot about the Navy, but I should.  The past few weeks have provided a number of interesting articles about the Russian navy and arms acquisition and manufacture, which have many applications for I think about the problem of arms in general. 

The first link is to a story about the sinking of the dry dock and damage to Russia's Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier.   The story highlights the importance of infrastructure for both building and servicing military equipment. In addition to the need to think about infrastructure, is a discussion about the shift in strategy and acquisition to favor small ships over a large blue-water navy. For states with arms production capability, the acquisition process is still tied to strategic priorities and bureaucratic politics. This is an issue that has been explored with a bit of depth in the US case and its often dysfunctional arms acquisition process. Opening the black box of other states and understanding what drives the purchasing decisions beyond economic necessity is an under-explored area in the literature on arms transfers.

A two-part article on the Russian Defense Policy Blog discusses the issue of nuclear submarines in the Russian fleet.  Part I of the article is basically a translation of an article that ran in the Russian press that asks hard questions about the priorities of the Russian fleet. Part II of the article provides more commentary on the primary arguments in the original piece. The gist of the piece is that the focus on nuclear subs with a capability that lags behind the US is starving the entire fleet of necessary resources that could provide stronger strategic value.

An interesting question to ask here is how the priority to export weapons interferes with or enhances the strategic capabilities of states.  Jonathan Caverley and Ethan Kapstein have written about this in the US context. They advocate updating the arms acquisition in the US to favor "good enough" weapons that can be exported as well rather than simply focusing on building the top of the line systems. When the state is both dependent on exports for reasons of status and economics (as I found in my dissertation), how do strategic priorities shift?  How can the state allocate resources efficiently under conditions of competing priorities?

In the case of Russia does chasing great power status and a posture that follows the Soviet Cold War allocation of naval resources (in terms of aircraft carriers for power projection and nuclear submarines for nuclear deterrence) harm its ability to meet its new strategic demands and realities?


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Caverley, Jonathan, and Ethan B. Kapstein. (2012) Arms Away. Foreign Affairs 91: 125–132.

Politics, Relationships, and International Arms Transfers

Arms transfers and the politics and relationships that surround them are everywhere when you are tuned in to them.  I know that I suffer from an extreme case of selective attention in the case of arms transfers, but I find them fascinating to think about.  I am constantly surprised both by how much we think about arms transfers in terms of human rights and foreign policy, but how little we actually think about the strategic logic of transferring coercive capabilities between states.  It is an area that is deeply in need of theorizing, and that is what I've taken as my central research task.

This week I had a few stories pop up in my news feed that reinforce the social and political nature of arms transfers.  The first one is one that I find very fascinating - it is the case of Turkey ordering S-400 missiles from Russia.  The original sale is problematic from the point of view of NATO since the S-400 is designed to shoot down NATO aircraft.  The symbolic move of Turkey away from NATO suppliers to Russia also signaled some deeper trends in the fracturing relationship between Erdogan and the West as a whole. 

I wrote about that sale in more detail earlier this year on this blog (LINK) and focused on the aspect that this particular sale may be an interesting case of a leading indicator that can be used to predict a state's alliance and ideological affiliation in the future.  One aspect that I didn't think of was the current state of Russian-Western relations and the fact that Russia faces sanctions.  The US is telling Turkey along with Saudi Arabia and Qatar to back out of the purchase of these missiles from Russia or face the threat of sanctions themselves. LINK

In terms of the sanctions regime, it makes sense that explicitly military goods would be at the top of the list of sanctioned goods.  The fact that these arms are being considered by US allies is potentially troubling in and of itself in terms of what it may mean about the strength of trust between these states and the US in terms of security guarantees.

The second story that caught my eye was the potential for Ukraine to jointly produce armored vehicles with Thailand (LINK).  An article by Vucetic and Tago (2015) that I recently discovered (via Twitter) does a very good job of outlining the trade-off between autonomy and efficiency in the acquisition of arms.  It is most efficient to purchase arms off the shelf, but that leaves a state vulnerable to pressure from the selling state (which is the subject of the first part of this post).  It is costly and inefficient from an economic standpoint. 

What I found fascinating was the description of the meeting between the delegation from Thailand who came to Kyiv as part of bilateral talks between the nation.  The talks between the delegations are about strategic partnerships.  One way that is being considered to increase that partnership is to go into the business of arms together. One aspect of arms transfers that has been interesting to me since I started researching them 8 years ago is the high level of discussions that are involved in these purchases and how often heads of state or with cabinet/department level heads. 

The building of relationships through the transfer of weapons often seems to be part of an elaborate trust exercise.  I love the idea of Suchman and Eyre (1992) and their institutional logic of arms transfers, but I think that the social aspect of states bargaining and building relations based on arms tells an even deeper and surprising story.  It's a story that I'm happy to keep chipping away at.

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Suchman, Mark C., and Dana P. Eyre. (1992) Military Procurement as Rational Myth: Notes on the Social Construction of Weapons Proliferation. Sociological Forum 7: 137–161.

Vucetic, Srdjan, and Atsushi Tago. (2015) Why Buy American? The International Politics of Fighter Jet Transfers. Canadian Journal of Political Science 48: 101–124.

Arms, Social Theory, and Entanglement in the Long-Term

A recent story about Bulgaria’s dilemma in upgrading its MiG aircraft illustrates the difficulty of moving out of a long-term arms relationship. The issue is that Bulgaria is part of NATO, but that its aircraft are out of date.  Bulgaria can’t afford to change its total air force.  There are numerous costs involved in such a potential shift, both directly and indirectly.  Direct costs include the cost of purchasing new aircraft and paying for training for pilots of the new versions of aircraft.  Some of the indirect costs are the loss of expertise and experience that are necessary for competence in war-fighting.

Since MiGs are Russian-made, to upgrade them usually requires Russian involvement.  In this case, the Bulgarian government is considering using a Polish firm which upgraded Polish MiGs a few years ago when Poland faced a similar dilemma.  In this case, Bulgaria can bypass potential issues by using an ally country.

What if Poland was not an option?  The relations between Russia and the West have changed dramatically over the past decade.  A decade is not a long time in the life-cycle of a major conventional weapon like a fighter jet or tank.  Changing suppliers is hard - even when the geopolitical environment has been fundamentally altered.

What can this episode teach us about the arms-buying relationship?  First of all, the decision about suppliers is one that cannot be taken lightly by states - especially states that have real security needs.  Secondly, once that decision is made, it is quite sticky, and that has consequences.  These consequences are visible across a number of different domains. 

In terms of security, purchasing arms from a supplier makes it harder to fight against that supplier later.  This is due to the intimate knowledge that the supplying country will have with the strengths and weaknesses of the system due to firsthand experience.  It likely means (in the case of aircraft) that battles will hinge on the better trained military, and the resource imbalance that leads to exports vs. imports should normally provide an advantage here to the exporting rather than the importing state.

Also important in terms of security are the technological issues of supply of replacement parts, a maintenance program and the ability to upgrade equipment on a reasonable schedule.  Exporting states will have the advantage also in updating and improving the performance of the weapon system.

There is also another potential strategic advantage to the selling state.  The move to a new supplier is a potential indicator of future intentions or at least the assessment of the state about the potential for conflict in the future.  This offers an early warning advantage to the state providing arms.  It can also offer a first mover advantage in terms of conflict.

Even if a move from one supplier to another is not the result of strategic fears in the short and medium terms, the shift in relationships can be a powerful indicator about the status of the relations between the supplying and recipient states.  The sale of arms between states is a gamble always because once a state acquires weapons they can only be eliminated after the passage of a long amounts of time or through costly war. 

Because I am interested in the social relationship that is created and maintained by arms sales, such demonstrations of both interdependence and vulnerability provide fascinating insights into the potential mechanisms for studying and understanding interstate relations more completely.

On the Margins - Research Topics and "Selling" your work in Academia

Today I received a desk reject for a paper that a coauthor and I wrote.  The paper is a good one and it does something that we don't think any other scholars have done.  We didn't sell that point well enough, apparently, and the editors decided that our paper didn't fit the scope of their journal.  That is fine and good, and a real part of academia.  I understand that.  However, I am beginning to see a pattern that I had not noticed before when I was less confident in my own work.

Arms transfer research is not mainstream in terms of "big topics" in international relations.  I understood that when I picked the topic.  There is interest in the subject, but it ebbs and flows. Big work in big journals often ignores the more nuts and bolts empirical work of studying patterns in arms flows when they discuss how arms effect international relations.  A good example of this is the recent work by Yarhi-Milo and colleagues building on work by James Morrow about the choice that states have in providing arms or making alliances.  The paper is excellent and the empirical case studies do a great job of illustrating their larger point - that arming protege states is an option for patron states who don't want to be obligated by a formal alliance.

The theory is about great powers - and specifically great powers who are interested in extended deterrence.  This is a limited set of states. The use of case studies in this work is very appropriate. However, ignoring the work that has looked at arms transfers as a general pattern and its findings is a blind spot that is not caught by editors or reviewers.

When work that is grounded in the empirical patterns of arms sales between all states attempts to address wider theories of IR, however, the standards are much different.  That is the case with the paper that was rejected.  The paper addresses an issue that is simply taken for granted or assumed away in the broad literature on international relations - the existence of arms sales by states that are not great powers.  The desk rejection will allow us to "re-frame" the paper in a stronger way and send it back out.  That's not the main issue.  The issue is the difference between how this paper was dealt with and a paper by the same coauthor and I who wrote about arms and human rights and had the paper accepted at International Studies Quarterly.

That paper was accepted because of its relationship with human rights, not because of the arms aspect itself.  Work is also more accepted when it deals with the normative issues of arms control.  In this sense, arms work is not only marginalized, it becomes politicized because work that does not fit into "acceptable" categories may not even make it past the first gate-keepers. 

From a career standpoint this is something that needs to be considered.  In a publish or perish environment, the lack of outlets for work on the margins can either move people away from a topic, or lead them to study in ways that conform to conventional wisdom rather than challenging that work and its assumptions. This is a subtle way in which bias can creep into academic work, and which weakens overall knowledge and the process of creating it.

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Morrow, James D. (1993) Arms Versus Allies: Trade-Offs in the Search for Security. International Organization 47: 207–233.

Yarhi-Milo, Keren, Alexander Lanoszka, and Zack Cooper. (2016) To Arm or to Ally?: The Patron’s Dilemma and the Strategic Logic of Arms Transfers and Alliances. International Security 41: 90–139.

How Fundamental are Arms to State Identity?

This is what I am thinking about all the time as I work on revising my dissertation into a book with a coherent theory.  My dissertation was an "exploration" using a foreign policy framework.  I am glad that I wrote the dissertation that I did because it allowed me to try a lot of things, to fail at most of them, but really to think about the topic of arms transfers in a way that is becoming more helpful to me now that I am more intellectually equipped to handle it.

Two articles from Radio Free Europe came across my reader this week and are stuck in my brain. I am writing my theory section of my book now and I am focusing on the ways that state identity is shaped by arms.  My larger project is about the power of arms to shape the roles that states take on in the international system - and the power that exporting states have in shaping the role of subordinate ore less powerful states.

And its a great time to be an arms research scholar because the issues of arms seem to be more prominent in discussions of international relations and foreign policy.

The first article is about Vladimir Putin's recent address to Russian legislators. During his two hour speech he discussed the new weapons that are in development - weapons aimed at defeating the US in a nuclear war. I'm not an expert on nuclear deterrence, but I seem to remember that first strike capability is quite useless if the other side can retaliate.  We are returning to the MAD MAD world, which is a disappointing development.  The interesting thing is that none of the weapons touted are ones that are useful in the kind of wars and conflicts that Russia is involved in (Syria, Ukraine) or will likely be in.  These weapons, and Putin's focus on them are meant to project an image of power.

The second article is about four Western powers (France, UK, Germany and the US) issuing a statement condemning Iran's export of weapons to Yemen in face of an arms embargo on that nation during its civil war. Russia vetoed a UN resolution that would have formally condemned Iran. Two things from this story stick out to me.  The first is that Iran is doing what other states do - using arms to socialize and support its allies.  The fact that they are doing it contrary to an embargo is the issue, but the action is one that is repeated hundreds of times a year.  All the states on the list export arms to other states - including to states that have poor human rights records.

Jennifer Erickson has written extensively about arms treaty compliance.  The increasing polarization of the world and the collapsing foundations of the liberal world order in the face of constant attacks by revisionist and non-liberal powers (I'm looking at Russia here) will mean that arms sales will be another arena for ideological and material competition in ways that hearken back to the Cold War.

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Erickson, Jennifer L. (2015a) Dangerous Trade: Arms Exports, Human Rights, and International Reputation. New York: Columbia University Press.

Erickson, Jennifer L. (2015b) Saint or Sinner? Human Rights and U.s. Support for the Arms Trade Treaty. Political Science Quarterly 130: 449–474.

Erickson, Jennifer L. (2013) Stopping the Legal Flow of Weapons: Compliance with Arms Embargoes, 1981–2004. Journal of Peace Research 50: 159–174.

Lo, Bobo. (2008) Axis of Convenience: Moscow, Beijing, and the New Geopolitics. London: Chatham House.

Lo, Bobo. (2015) Russia and the New World Disorder. Brookings Institution Press.

The complexity of Arms Sales

A recent article about India's pursuit of advanced aircraft illustrates the complicated world of arms transfers.

The article itself is correcting some misinformation that India was going to purchase the F-35 and open up some joint manufacturing facilities for the aircraft there.  It turns out that initial inquiries into the possibility of F-35s in the future was confused with a current bid for the purchase of F-16 fighters.  India is looking to upgrade its aircraft but is in the bidding stage with both Saab and Lockheed Martin.

In both cases, the Indians will open factories to perform final assembly.  Such licensing and joint production is common.  F-16s are manufactured in Turkey under a similar agreement, for example.  The F-35 is a unique program because it is being built on licensing and co-production from the very beginning with partners all over the world.  It is a complex and collaborative endeavor that relies on pre-existing alliance ties and mutual trust and support. 

India is not approved for the purchase of the F-35 at this time.  The authors of the article noted that the issues of technology transfer that are more acute with this particular advanced aircraft.  The components are more advanced and there is a real worry that the technology could fall into the wrong hands.

For me this article is fascinating because it touches on so many of the complex and fascinating aspects of arms sales that I have been thinking about for the past few years.  The first is the importance of relations and relationship building.  There is a great deal of high-level negotiation that takes place for these arms deals - because they must be approved (in the case of the US) by the State Department working with the Department of Defense.  It is not just a mater of defense firms going out and making sales.

The complexity of licensing and production deals is another aspect of arms transfers that is unique.  There is an incentive for many states to build their own capacity while they purchase weapons systems.  This makes sense from a realist perspective of anarchy and fits with the logic of internal balancing outlined by Morrow (1993).  States don't want to be too dependent on arms imports because it limits their own actions.  States that wish to play a more independent role in international relations will avoid becoming too dependent on a supplier.

Even if the production facilities are mainly symbolic, they offer some work, build native capabilities, and establish the state as being less dependent than a state that simply imports finished arms. My current thinking about arms is about the ways that they are used to socialize states, and the use of licensing deals is an avenue that needs to be explored in more depth.
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Morrow, James D. (1993) Arms Versus Allies: Trade-Offs in the Search for Security. International Organization 47: 207–233.

State Interests and the Business side of Arms

How do we measure the impact of non-state actors on state policy? I ask because I am generally curious.  I am curious because the answer that question is essential to understanding the complexity of the issue of arms in international relations. I think that the disconnect between the firms that produce weapons, and the states that regulate their sales and purchase them is one of the biggest barriers to really building general theories of arms transfers.

My most recent work on arms transfers relies on a constructivist/role theoretical framing of the state as a corporate actor.  The state has interests and acts deliberately (not always rationally, but deliberately) to advance those interests. Personifying states and accounting for the effects that come through the interaction of these agents is not necessarily new.  However, trying to account for many moving pieces beneath the surface and how they interact to produce the actions and outcomes we can see is still necessary for some degree of understanding.

How does this all relate to arms sales?  Well there are two stories that appeared in my reader this week that have made me think about this issue more deeply than I have for years - probably since I was drafting the first chapter of my dissertation six years ago.

The first story is about the struggles of the Italian defense firm Leonardo.  The firm was recently renamed (previously it was Finmeccanica) after it had troubles with scandals.  Now it is having trouble with orders and generating revenue, and its stock has plunged.  This particular line from the article really jumped out at me:

Leonardo, Europe's largest maker of military hardware after BAE Systems and Airbus, said it hoped to return to "sustainable growth" over the next five years thanks to a new sales strategy, accelerating orders, strict cost control and a better financial strategy.

I wonder about the model for sustainable growth in a defense firm that operates independently. It also operates in an environment where government (both Italian and EU) control over exports can limit the potential sales of the firm. Others have studied this economic paradox regarding arms before - and the original SIPRI arms classifications of hegemonic, industrial, and restrictive supplier accounted for the government policies regarding arms.  Italy is an industrial supplier.  It needs to sell arms in order to support internal business.

The tension is that the Italian government and the EU code restrict arms exports. In deciding how to allow firms to operate and to sell weapons, governments are faced with choices about what the most salient state interest is.  Is it to have a strong defense industry (or any industry) and to generate employment and exports, or is it to operate "responsibly" on the world stage?

The set of choices for state interests is also not simply a dichotomous choice between native industrial capacity and responsible action.  State interests in alliances and other relationships, security for client states, preferences for regional leadership in areas outside their own, or simply state prestige can affect the state's desire to control arms outflows.

That brings me to the second article.  This is a follow up to my post from last week about Trump's new "Buy American" plan.  The United States is sending a State department official to a defense expo in Singapore to promote the sale of US weapons - especially aircraft and missiles.

Whether it is misguided or not [and I am not convinced either way], the Trump administration has determined that it is in America's interest to sell weapons.  The export, balance of trade, and American manufacturing arguments will play well domestically and I think that is one of the primary drivers of the policy. However, the international implications of expanding arms sales could be just as significant - and those implications could be either positive or negative.  US arms purchases can signal greater cooperation with states in the future.  It can signal a willingness by states to improve their own defense capabilities.  Such a signal may make the US more willing to extend further security guarantees, or negate the need for the US to provide the majority the security for particular states or regions (Yarhi-Milo et al 2016).

Whatever the reason for the new emphasis, the outcome will likely be more arms sales.  Researchers will certainly be looking at the effects of those transfers in the years to come.
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Yarhi-Milo, Keren, Alexander Lanoszka, and Zack Cooper. (2016) To Arm or to Ally?: The Patron’s Dilemma and the Strategic Logic of Arms Transfers and Alliances. International Security 41: 90–139.

How do Arms Sales and Human Rights Work?

Two separate news stories in my reader last week have caused me to think about how states really think about human rights and arms transfers.  If you are inclined to think that arms sales should be responsible and that states should have to account for their behavior in order to procure more coercive power, then these two stories might make you happy. As someone who thinks a lot about the underlying premise of arms sales, these stories make me happy in other ways.

They are evidence, or at least confirmations, that the ways that I am thinking about arms sales is fruitful.  That is heartening, since I picked back up my book manuscript (dissertation) this past month and have been furiously cranking out new words, new ideas, and updates in a bid to have the book written by the end of this year. I won't spill too many words here about my new ideas (they're awesome, trust me), but I do want to outline how many (most?) states are responsible in their approach to arms sales.

The first story comes from RFE/RL and is a discussion of Hungary's bid to ease arms export sanctions to Belarus. They want to ease restrictions on some spare parts and gun parts. The EU put arms sanctions on Belarus in 2010 after government crackdowns.  It has eased off on sanctions in other areas after Belarus has improved its human rights record.  I am working on a paper that compares Kazakhstan and Belarus, so I have recently looked at Belarus's arms imports.  They don't really have a lot of sources for supply in the first place.

Imports to Belarus (1991-2016) [1]
Exporter	Years	Total Value	Percent
RUS	9	748	93.3
UKR	5	52	6.5
CHN	1	2	0.2

Up until last year only Russia, Ukraine, and China have provided to Belarus post independence (in terms of major conventional weapons).  The types of weapons that Hungary is asking for might not make it onto this list at all.  

The second story is about Germany and Hungary, two NATO allies. The German government and members of civil society have called for Germany and other states to stop supplying arms to Turkey because of their recent foray into Syria.  Germany has strict laws against supporting ongoing conflicts and providing arms to human rights abusers, and so the chance that Turkish troops could target civilians in their operations is the cause of this concern.  

***

These stories tell me two things.  The first is that states do try to be responsible, and that human rights matter.  The second thing that it tells me is that aggregate numbers of weapons may not tell the whole story.  In the case of Turkey, for example, the sale of tanks (the weapons system that Turkey wants Germany to upgrade) took place from the 1980s through the 2000s.  In an aggregate study without very careful research design, it could appear that Germany doesn't take human rights or conflict involvement seriously when it comes to providing arms to other states. This is an issue that I think has crept into the arms transfer literature as it has tried to account for state choice.  Aggregate data may not be the best way to do that.  

Richard Johnson and I have a forthcoming article in ISQ that looks at this type of aggregate data, and the picture that we find is not rosy.  It may be, however, that we are simply looking a the wrong thing in the wrong way to find the answers we want.  To our credit, we make this point.  Our study was meant to replicate earlier studies in ways that tried to at least take into account a more nuanced picture of decision-making.  Our attempt used this same kind of aggregated data, however.

The takeaway for me is that we need more work on the fundamentals of arms sales.  We need a variety of work that looks at both macro trends and micro decision-making.  Both types of work need to be guided by theory in ways that it simply isn't now.

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1. Source: SIPRI TIV values (www.sipri.org).  Total value is Millions of USD.

Russia and Burma - Arms Sales in the News

My last post, on the unsurprising turn in US foreign policy regarding arms sales outlined part of the arguments that I am developing about the underlying reasons for arms sales by states.  A story on the RFE/RL website the next day has got me thinking again. It is not always easy defending arms sales as a practice.  As a practice, arms sales may seem to justify policies and regimes which engage in ugly activities.  Those activities may be directed at neighbors, or at their own population.  Arms are fungible to the extent that once states have them, they can be used as the recipient state sees fit. 

Russia is planning on selling advanced fighter aircraft to Burma (Myanmar), which is in the midst of an ethnic cleansing crisis. The US has condemned the sale, saying that the military is conducting this ethnic cleansing.  This sale by Russia has a bad appearance.  A state's military is directly involved in an ongoing campaign that is violating human rights - and causing death and suffering on a large scale. The question that I had after reading this was whether or not the US condemnation of Russian sales are hypocritical.

Richard Johnson and I in a forthcoming ISQ article break down arms sales by type to examine the hypothesis that democratic states do not sell arms to human rights abusers.  Our theory is that many weapons are not that useful in violating human rights (arms are only partially fungible), and so states will make deals for certain types of weapons with states that are human rights violators.  Our paper is an observational study where we look to establish broad patterns.  We find that there doesn't seem to be discernment across weapons systems (except for land-based vehicles sold by the US) for any of the major democratic arms suppliers (US, Britain, Germany, France).  In general, states sell arms to human rights violators.

In a follow up study, we should examine whether or not the military of those states are involved in repression, or if there are other state actors.  The reason that this distinction would be important, is that if the military is viewed as being professional, and outside of the internal repression apparatus, there may be an expectation by supplying states that the weapons sold will not, in fact, be used for repression (or that there is a low likelihood that they will be). The US position on Burma may be a reflection of this view.  The military is involved in the repression, and therefore all arms sales should be banned until the situation is clearer.

In this case, the US position seems less like hypocrisy, and more like a nuanced policy that engages with the dual nature of arms.  States have a monopoly on violence, and that violence can be turned inward.  However, the consequences to the international system of states where there is not a monopoly of violence (weak and failing/failed states) can ultimately lead to worse outcomes. The sale of arms is part of this complex interaction.  Russia's actions seem to be driven more for a need to establish any kind of influence with any state that will have them.  Putin as salesman in chief needs wins, and he'll take them even if it leads to the loss of life by others.

Salesman in Chief - An unsurprising Development in Arms Transfers

One of the most fascinating pieces of news about arms sales came out in a Reuters story a few days ago. The gist of the plan is that the Trump administration has a plan for the diplomatic and military apparatus to make the sale of arms a priority.  It's part of the "buy American" plan to increase manufacturing capability within the US.

President Donald Trump is expected to announce a “whole of government” approach that will also ease export rules on U.S. military exports and give greater weight to the economic benefits for American manufacturers in a decision-making process that has long focused heavily on human rights considerations, according to people familiar with the plan.

This is a real shift in the recent policies of the United States in terms of seeking to be more limited about which states received US arms.  Richard Johnson and I have a paper coming out in ISQ soon that looks at whether or not this rhetoric on human rights has any real substantive effects on arms sales by major democratic suppliers (hint: it does not - with a few caveats).  Our study is a follow up and expansion of Lindsay Blanton's 2005 work that looked at US arms sales only [1].

I am not surprised by this development. In my 2013 PhD thesis[2] I examined US and Russian decision-making on arms sales.  I found that both states were reliant on foreign sales to some degree. Russia has had - and this increased under Putin - a strategy of arms promotion at all levels of the state for a long time.  It is surprising how often Putin's name comes up when new arms deals are announced.  He is Russia's salesman in chief when it comes to arms sales.

The US move to an open policy of arms sales promotion makes sense under two common assumptions about arms sales.  The first assumption is about economics - and apparently that is the argument that is being made to justify this shift in foreign policy.  It is expensive to develop new weapons systems.  It is expensive to maintain manufacturing for spare parts.  Having external customers keeps production going, and provides partial relief for development costs.  It provides employment (which is particularly important in defense industries that can affect Congressional races where they are concentrated), and it ensures domestic manufacturing capability into the future. 

During the Cold War both the US and the Soviets could sustain their arms development because of the large internal market for weapons and the sizes of their military economies in general.  The end of the Cold war changed the imperatives for both states.  Russia felt this need first, and more acutely.  The United States needed arms sales more after the contraction of the armed forces during the 1990s.

The second assumption about arms sales that supports this development is the idea that arms purchases and sales are part of relationship building between states. This is a connection that has not been explored too deeply by arms scholarship. My current book project, which adapts and expands my dissertation examines these relationships more closely. Trump is a businessman in a business that is dominated by personal relationships. It seems natural that he would want to have a policy that reflects those preferences.  The fact that he is focusing on the sale of arms highlights to me the importance of arms sales to state identity. Arms sales are still not "sexy" like conflict and other types of security studies, but the more we see such fascinating real-world examples of their importance, the more likely that academics will pay more attention.
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[1]  Blanton, Shannon Lindsey. 2005. "Foreign Policy in Transition? Human Rights, Democracy, and U.S. Arms Exports." International Studies Quarterly 49: 647–668.

[2] Willardson, Spencer L. 2013. "Under the Influence of Arms: The Causes and Consequences of Arms Transfers." PhD Thesis. University of Iowa. Link

Turkey and Russian Missiles

In December, word leaked that Turkey was buying S-400 systems from Russia.  There are a number of aspects of this sale that are both interesting and troubling. There are two very interesting aspects to me of this deal.  The first is that the sale was apparently concluded based on personal conversations between Erdogan and Putin.  I am fascinated by the personal involvement that state leaders have in the sale and transfer of weapons systems.  It is an area that is very under-researched, and one that I am working on in various ways in my own research on arms sales.

The second fascinating aspect of this sale for me is the potential that this sale has as an indicator of future alliance moves by Turkey.  This article (Link) by RFE-RL has a good write up of the problems that such a move has for NATO and future inter-operability of systems.  The news over this past weekend (January 19) that Turkey had launched an offensive against US-Backed Kurdish fighters in Syria also indicates that Turkey may be moving more closely into alignment with Russia on security matters in the region.  Neither of these things is good for the strength of NATO and the future of NATO-Turkish relations.

I am fascinated by this potential of arms sales as a bellwether for state relations and policy.  In the policy world, there is a great deal of need of and desire for accurate indicators.  This is the problem of strategic intelligence and planning.  How can we know what is planned by both adversary and ally?  That is the first step in determining what our own plans and reactions can be. Looking at arms sales as a leading indicator for alliance shifts seems to be a promising direction for research.

Complicating the Turkish story, however, is a follow up story that appeared just a week (Jan 7, 2018) after the RFE-RL (Dec. 29, 2017) story on Turkey's purchase of the missiles.  It is a Reuter's story about the signing of an agreement between Turkey and Eurosam, which is a French-Italian missile firm to develop surface to air missiles jointly.

Russia will not sign agreements to allow for the transfer of its technology, and so Turkey is going to continue to pursue its own missile program.  The issue of dependence on supplier is more acute with Russian and Turkish deals since the two countries have a long history of antagonism toward each other.

All of this is to say that although arms transfers may not be the sexiest topic in international relations, there are plenty of interesting things that are happening, plenty of puzzles, and plenty of unexplored stories for those that are interested.  And enough material that hopefully those of us that are interested can help others see the importance of this topic.

Thinking about Teaching

This blog post from "The Professor is In" writing for "The Chronicle of Higher Education" is meant to provoke thought from job applicants.  The question asked is about how a candidate would redesign a major.  I was not asked that question in any of my job interviews, but a year and a half out of graduate school, and 2 months into my new job at Nazarbayev University I was asking my colleagues how we should number new courses we were offering in the spring.

That question led down a rabbit hole of discovery and confusion about the major as it had been designed (hastily) four years earlier before there were students and with only one or two faculty members had been hired.  It was a curriculum designed with good intentions (dual tracks for political science and international relations) and a capstone course requirement.  However, the curriculum didn't reflect some key realities of our situation.

First of all, our students all wanted to major in "International Relations" because that was something that translated into the local context - even if what they learned was different from diplomacy and history that constitutes such majors in local universities.  "Politologia"[1] just didn't translate.  The capstone courses had no guidelines, and scheduling hadn't been thought of, so not all of our senior majors were going to be able to take these classes - the ones they needed to graduate.  The undergraduate curriculum also hadn't accounted for the need for professors to split time between undergraduate and graduate teaching with the creation of a standalone MA program at the beginning of the 4th year - the same year I joined the department.

Using examples from our partner university - Wisconsin at Madison - and programs I was familiar with, I redesigned the curriculum to maximize flexibility for faculty and students.  We had some discussions as a department about what we wanted our students to master, and made decisions about requiring both research design and qualitative methods and quantitative methods for all of our majors.  We also had to make decisions about elective courses that could be dual-listed for MA and BA students.  In the end the curriculum changes were significant, but not necessarily revolutionary. 

Kelsky outlines the basics of an undergraduate curriculum in the social sciences, and it matches quite closely with what we did with our renamed major Political Science and International Relations (PSIR):

• (100 level) Introductory courses to acquaint students with the vocabulary and contours of the discipline.
• (200 level) methods courses that help students know the questions that can be asked, and how they can be answered.
• (300/400) courses where students think about knowledge production, debates, and more complex issues within the discipline.

The curriculum was approved by our school Teaching and Learning Committee, and took effect at the end of my first year.  In a few months our seniors will graduate - the first full cohort to graduate under the new standards.  In that time our department has grown and we've added majors, but the curriculum has weathered the storm.

I guess the moral of this story is that things worked out well.
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[1] Политология the Russian word for political science, but still not political science like we understand in the US context.

Venezuela Needs Help!!!

"Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has called on Russia and the Vatican to help fend off what he described as a U.S. "military threat," and said he will soon go to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin." Link

 After Trump stated that the US would consider force to intervene against the Madura regime, he has called on Putin the "man of peace" to help protect the country from the US.  I was curious about how much Venezuela already relies on Russia for its security needs and so I downloaded the SIPRI data for arms transfers from 2000-2016.

Source: SIPRI

The short story is that Russia is already ensuring Venezuelan security through arms transfers.  The other largest exporter (nearly $1 Billion in arms) is China.  It's always interesting to see the way that material realities are reflected in rhetoric and vice-versa. 

Fighter Aircraft Sales and the Involvement of the Chief Executive: More Questions than Answers

One of the key questions within the academic literature on arms transfers is simply “why”.  Why do states transfer coercive capability to potential rival states?  The answer to this question is not easy, and there appear to be as many answers to the question as there are states that sell arms.  Explanations for arms sales typically boil down to economic imperatives or state interests. These are good explanations as far as they go, but even if we assume that these are the two main pressures that states face to sell arms, the degree to which one is more important than the other is still on the table.

My own beginning in the literature was launched with an assumption that arms sales by powerful states are used as a deliberate foreign policy tool.  I used the SIPRI classifications for exporters and assumed that the US and Russia (as heir to the Soviet Union) as hegemonic suppliers would be deliberate in their use of arms sales to enhance their foreign policy goals.  I found that this was not the case in either the US or Russia.  Russia is more dependent on arms sales - for a number of reasons that I won’t go into here - than is the US, but that arms sales are still driven by economic and other special interests in the US context.

What is surprising, is the fact that arms sales are an issue that make it onto the agenda of state executives and in meetings between heads of state. In today’s post, I am interested in a number of news articles detailing the sale of aircraft [1] by Russia and the United States.

The first article is mundane.  It describes the delivery of 4 refurbished F-16 fighter jets to Indonesia by the United States. The article describes the process of refurbishment and the means of delivery, and then notes that this is part of a sale of 16 fighters to the Indonesian government.  This article is most interesting when contrasted to the next article.  This article describes a letter sent by two Senators to the Trump administration arguing that the US should sign an agreement to allow F-16s to be produced in India.  The Senators argue that the deal is important to protect American jobs and the capability of producing a weapons system that is vital to the US arsenal.  (The US has almost as many F-16s in its arsenal - 1000 as India has fighter aircraft 1050 - and India has the world’s 4th largest capacity).  

This argument is interesting to me, because it assumes that the President will become involved in brokering deals with other states on behalf of private firms.

The third article is interesting because it examines the communication between different branches of the US government, but in the opposite direction. This article describes the Trump administration’s intention to allow the sale of F-16s to Bahrain reversing the Obama  administration decision that had stopped the sales because of human rights concerns.

The State Department originally notified Congress of the planned $4.87 billion sale last September during the Obama administration.
But it was pulled back because of the Obama administration's concerns that Bahrain had not made promised progress on human rights matters.
The decision by the new administration signals its backing for Sunni-led countries as counterweights to Shi'ite Iran's influence in the region.
Brian Dooley of Washington-based Human Rights First said separating the sale of the warplanes from human rights requirements would "encourage further repression" and create instability in Bahrain.

In my dissertation, I found that the US takes many considerations into view when selling arms, but that state security interests trump all the other considerations.  In this case, regional stability is more important than regime stability.  

The final article is one that describes the use of Arms as a deal sweetener by the Putin regime in negotiation with Serbia for a number of weapons systems.

Serbia is to soon receive six Mikoyan MiG-29 jets from Russia as a gift, Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said.
Vucic made the comment after a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who personally approved the transfer, Tass reported.
"President Putin will sign a decree in the coming days to transfer the planes to us," Vucic said. "Then, technical issues will have to be tackled: how to transport the planes, whether they should be disassembled into parts or one of the countries will provide its airspace for their flight. Of course, we favor the latter option because this is faster.

Putin has shown a willingness to be involved in bargaining for arms transfers.  He may be considered the arms saleseman in chief because many of his meetings with foreign leaders result in new arms deals being signed.  I am not sure, still, what to make of this behavior from a state and its leader, but I am very interesting in thinking through these issues for a long time.

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[1] Aircraft because that is the latest project I’m working on with one of my coauthors.

Intelligence in a Trump Presidency

The election of Donald Trump has generated plenty of interesting talking points for pundits, political scientists, and everyday people. I am mostly fascinated by the interpretation of his actions by the media.  It is an interesting time to be a social scientist.

One recent area that has received a lot of attention lately is the apparent feud between the President-Elect and the intelligence community.  This issue has come to a head because of the Russian hacking accusation and scandal. In a recent article in Politico, there is a discussion of the issue in which Trump accuses the intelligence community of playing politics because the Top Secret briefing he is supposed to receive has already been leaked to the media.

"How did NBC get 'an exclusive look into the top secret report he (Obama) was presented?'" Trump tweeted Thursday. "Who gave them this report and why? Politics!" 

The network says a senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed leaked details of the report first published in the Washington Post, which states that U.S. intercepts captured Russian officials congratulating themselves on Trump's election win, citing U.S. officials. The overall report makes the case that Russia intervened in the election, NBC News reported. 

The president-elect is set to meet with intelligence officials on Friday, when he is expected to be briefed on evidence uncovered by the Russian hacking probe. Trump has repeatedly questioned intelligence agencies' conclusions that Russian operatives were behind several cyberattacks during the 2016 presidential race.

The accusation that intelligence is politicized is not a new one. Remember the ink that was spilled about the Bush Administration pressuring the CIA to provide evidence of Iraqi non-compliance with WMD? Goodman (2003, 62) attributes the failure of strategic intelligence to a politicization of intelligence at the CIA under Director Casey in the 1990s, and which he noted continued under Robert Gates:

Casey and Gates were directly responsible for the CIA’s poor analytical record in dealing with Soviet issues throughout the 1980s, from the failure to foresee the Soviet collapse to the revelation that CIA clandestine officer Aldrich Ames had been a Soviet spy for nearly a decade, altogether the greatest intelligence failure in the history of the agency until the terrorist attacks in 2001. In an unguarded moment in March 1995, Gates admitted that he had watched Casey on ‘issue after issue sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued’. There has never been a better definition of politicization by a former director of central intelligence.

Loch Johnson (2003, 659), the father of modern intelligence studies, also weighed in on the issue of politicization of intelligence in a piece about theories of strategic intelligence had this to say:

Beyond these basics, a theory will have to take into account the most significant inadequacies of intelligence, including its periodic irrelevance and lack of timeliness, the frequent unwillingness of policymakers to accept reliable information (often a function of pathologies in the relationship between the producers and the consumers of intelligence), and the risks posed to democracy by the politicization of information.

His definition of politicization comes at the information presentation stage of the intelligence process.  The larger issue, and one which seems to be more frequently applicable today, is the leaking of intelligence information (which may be politicized in the Johnson context first) to the media.

News that Trump wants to shake up the intelligence community may cause them to lash out, but NPR has a great story about how the CIA has lost these battles in the past.

This particular agency battle will be one that should be interesting to watch unfold over the coming months and years.
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 Goodman, Melvin A. 2003. "9/11: The Failure of Strategic Intelligence." Intelligence and National Security, 18(4): 59-71.

Johnson, Loch K. 2003. "Preface to a Theory of Strategic Intelligence" International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 16(4): 638-663.