Arms Control and International Security Papers

Volume I, Number 14 | July 30, 2020

To Tango Alone: Problems of Theory and Practice in the Sociology of Arms
Control, Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and Great Power Competition

purposive (or unintended) change too, and that in this
arena in which questions of war and peace can be very
much in play, the stakes for all concerned can be
extremely high.

It is our challenge to appreciate both of these aspects
at the same time.

It may be useful, in this respect, to draw some
inspiration from the 3rd-Century Indian philosopher
Nagarjuna, who can help us aspire to a via media between
(i) clinging blindly to constructs and (ii) imagining that we
can ignore them (or simplistically assume we can master
them) simply because they are mere constructs.
Nagarjuna’s most famous work, the
Mulamadhyamakakarika, is known for its emphasis upon
the concept of “emptiness,” a word he uses in a technical
(and not necessarily intuitive) sense. On one level, he
argues against the idea that anything has an intrinsic
essence — that is, some kind of self-existing, independent,
a priori “thingness” that makes it fundamentally separate
from and distinct from other things. Instead, Nagarjuna
believes that the things that we instinctively tend to take
for things, as it were, in some respects reciprocally cause
each other, and thus depend to some degree upon their
interrelationship in order to “exist.” As a result, nothing
has a truly independent existence, and all things are
therefore “empty.” (There is resonance here with
constructivist insights that the agents and rules of the
international system mutually constitute each other in
dynamic processes of interaction.)

Yet it is also critical to Nagarjuna’s construct that to
say things are “empty” — in his technical sense — is not to
deny them a meaningful existence either. In effect, things
are both real and unreal at the same time. In his
philosophy, it is important to be able to navigate
appropriately between conceptual levels: to understand
that things are fundamentally non-existent (in the sense
that they lack intrinsic essence) and to be able to engage
with them as if they were “truly” real where it is useful or
necessary to do so. Nagarjuna repeatedly comes back to
the distinction between ultimate truth and the “truth of
worldly convention,” which might also be thought of as

functional truth, between which we need to be able to
navigate as appropriate. This, to Nagarjuna, appears to be
a key to wisdom: “Without a foundation in the
conventional truth / The significance of the ultimate
cannot be taught.”14

Informed by this need to be able to operate on such
different levels at the same time, a policymaker alive to
the insights of constructivism might thus draw both upon
an understanding of the socially-constructed “unreality”
of the international community and upon the “reality” of
that social world’s de facto solidity. (With apologies to the
13th Century Japanese priest Dogen,is the progression of
policy insight may thus lead through an understanding of
the unreality of things and then ultimately back to an
appreciation of the ways in which they are meaningfully
real nonetheless.) And indeed, this seems to be what the
constructivist Peter Katzenstein suggested in 1996, when
he noted that a scholar must be able to operate on
multiple levels: for some purposes it remains “sensible to
conceive of states as actors with unproblematic
identities,” but for others, you will miss critical things
unless you “capture additional factors.”16

And what is true in this respect for the academician
surely also applies to the policymaker. After all, itis the
contingency and changeability — that is, the “unreality” —
of the features of our social environment that help give us
potential power as policymakers: if everything were
immutable, there would be no “space” in which
policymaking could hope to effect change. At the same
time, if those features had no solidity and consequence —
that is, no “reality” — there would be little reason to try.

Cultivating the capacity for such multi-level vision
may make us better policymakers, too. We can today
clearly see that it was a mistake to conclude from the
socially-constructed nature of our international world that
we could simply will it into alternative forms — as if we
were magicians casting a neoliberal spell — but it is still
our job as policymakers to effect what beneficial change
we can. We will be more effective in it if we can operate
within the constraints of the complex concretenesses of
the policy environment without losing a broader

1s Nagarjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Jay L. Garfield, translation and commentary) (New York: Oxford University Press,

1995), at 68 & 132-33,

1s See Dogen, “Mountains and Waters Sutra” (Arnold Kotler & Kazuaki Tanahashi, trans.), in Dogen, Moon in a Dewdrop (Kazuaki Tanahashi,

ed.) (New York: North Point Press, 1985), at 107.
1s The Culture of International Relations, supra, at 30.

13


Arms Control and International Security Papers

Volume I, Number 14 | July 30, 2020

To Tango Alone: Problems of Theory and Practice in the Sociology of Arms
Control, Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and Great Power Competition

This progress did indeed seem to validate the
constructivist insight both that “threat” is a socially
constituted concept and that dramatic changes can follow
from realignments of collective perceptions and
understandings. After the elimination of such “surplus”
nuclear weapons stocks had largely been accomplished by
the mid-2000s, however, the process ran up against the
limits still imposed by the continuing perceptions of threat
and national security need that still remained in a security
environment that was by then once again deteriorating.

Faced with the obstacles that thus arose to continuing
post-Cold War disarmament progress indefinitely, key
Western policy elites seem to have assumed they could
simply make up for the difference through pseudo-
constructivist ideational engineering. If countries still felt
aneed for at least some nuclear weapons, it seems to have
been assumed, this could be overcome if we showed
everyone else the way: further progress could be catalyzed
if the United States led the way to further cuts, setting off a
virtuous circle of willful Onufian world-remaking.

Such thinking seems to have underlain President
Obama’s signature speech in Prague in April 2009, in which
he situated his efforts to cut back U.S. nuclear weapons
capabilities in just such an effort to catalyze further change
in the international arena. “To put an end to Cold War
thinking,” he proclaimed, “we will reduce the role of

nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and
urge others to do the same.” Where we led, others would
follow - but this progress had to begin with the United

States: “we will begin the work of reducing our arsenal.”

It was, in fact, one of the striking characteristics of the
Obama Administration — even in its later years, at atime
when Russian revisionism was already obvious in Putin’s
invasion of Georgia and testing for a new nuclear-capable
cruise missile with a range that violated the Intermediate-
range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and at a time when the
PRC’s own military buildup was accelerating — was
Washington’s relative lack of concern for great power
competition, and its conviction that the United States
could still catalyze disarmament progress if it led by
example.

In 2013, for instance, President Obama doubled down
on his promise to lead global nuclear disarmament by
example, announcing his desire to negotiate “up to. a one-

from the level established in the New START Treaty.”

According to Obama, the United States was ready to
“reduc[e] our deployed strategic nuclear weapons by up to
allies to seek bold reductions in U.S. and Russian tactical

ink >

In fact, the Obama Administration all but refused to
address issues of great power competition in its nuclear
posture, focusing instead primarily upon the need to
prevent nuclear terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear
weapons, and upon nuclear security — an emphasis that
led to the convening of four high-profile “Nuclear Security
Summits” between 2010 and 2016. As for nuclear
weapons threats from “near-peer” competitors such as
Russia and the PRC, both of which were then dramatically
stepping up their nuclear modernization and efforts to
expand their arsenals, Washington then seemed to
assume that competitive dynamics could be short-
circuited if America set a good example in trying to disarm.
Even as late as January 2017, Vice President Biden
declared that despite Russia’s “counterproductive moves”

in the nuclear weapons arena, “American leadership on

To this end, it was a major thrust of U.S. policy to
bring about a situation in which the “sole purpose” of
American nuclear weapons would be simply to deter the
use of other nuclear weapons. As Deputy National Security
Advisor Ben Rhodes put it in 2016, “[w]e ... made it U.S.
policy to pursue the objective of making deterrence

According to Vice President Biden, the Administration had

This “sole purpose” ambition is telling. As former U.S.
Secretary of Defense William Perry explained it with
remarkable candor in 2009, a “sole purpose” nuclear
weapons declaratory policy is actually the same thing as a
“no first use” (NFU) pledge - though Perry preferred the
former phrase because, he suggested, “no first use”
sounds unappealingly weak to American ears. “Sole
purpose,” therefore, is really no more than “NFU in mufti

Nn ch dens


Arms Control and International Security Papers

Volume I, Number 14 | July 30, 2020

To Tango Alone: Problems of Theory and Practice in the Sociology of Arms
Control, Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and Great Power Competition

response to their own desires and priorities — and in
reaction to the conjunction, in the post-Cold War era, of
geopolitical unipolarity with integrationist neoliberal
triumphalism — arguably also seem to partake of a
pseudo-constructivist assumption that the social world
can be reconstructed to specification. This is not to
suggest that the decidedly illiberal elites in Beijing and
Moscow were actually inspired by (or even aware of) the
Western academy’s turn toward constructivist theory, but
it does at least suggest that non-Western elites also have
great faith in their powers of purposive societal
transformation.

1. People’s Republic of China

In fact, China has long had its own, pre-constructivist
traditions of trying to use ideational and linguistic
reconstruction as a tool for societal engineering. These
approaches draw upon Communist notions of exerting
social control in part through the coerced relabeling of
phenomena in ways supporting regime legitimacy
narratives and propaganda objectives, as well as upon
China’s Confucian tradition of the “rectification of names”
— in which information about roles and relationships is
encoded in descriptions (e.g., with the duties and
privileges of a “father” being considered inherent in that
term itself), and the lived social reality of things is in large
part constituted by acts of naming. Through this prism, in
an important sense, description is reality.

This has long made questions of terminology
fundamental not just in propaganda but also to successive
Chinese regimes’ legitimacy narratives and prospects for
continued control and survival, as well as in how Chinese
rulers have approached relations with the non-Chinese
world. The assumed role of ideational framing and
description in making things true also underlies the
importance PRC officials place upon controlling narratives
relevant to the image and nature of the CCP regime, both
at home and abroad. (Hence the insecurity and sensitivity
PRC officials display if others adopt the “wrong” discursive
constructions.) These issues have been of great
importance as the CCP regime works to maintain its own
control at home and achieve its increasingly self-assertive
strategic objectives abroad.12

Such Chinese dynamics, of course, date from
centuries before Michel Foucault described “discursive
structures” or Nicholas Onuf wrote of “sense-making and
world-making” in constructivist international relations
theory. Nevertheless, the CCP’s modern-day obsessions
with “discourse control” represent, in a sense, another
variation on the pseudo-constructivist project.

These ACIS Papers have already repeatedly explored
the modern PRC’s geopolitical agenda, so |’ll not belabor
the point here, except to note that the CCP’s vision is a
profoundly revisionist one that revolves around a

itil iT its birthright. These dynamics would
seem, therefore, to help validate the constructivist
theoretical project, inasmuch as this worldview has been
deliberately cultivated by CCP propagandists for many
years, weaving together pre-existing themes in Chinese
nationalist thinking with Leninist motifs from the Party’s
own Communist history. They have produced, however, a
socially-constructed identity with a revisionist agenda
starkly at odds with post-Cold War Western neoliberalism.

2. The Russian Federation

For its part, the Putin regime in Russia also seems to
have drunk from the pseudo-constructivist well in support
of its own geopolitical objectives. A form of ideational
reconstruction — fixated upon controlling and
reconfiguring how Russia sees itself and its role in the
world — has been a central piece of Vladimir Putin’s
project for perpetuating his own control, building up the
power of the state apparatus, and restoring Russia to a
position of power and status in the international arena. In
effect, therefore, writing a new story for Russia has been
central to Putin’s agenda and legitimacy narrative from
the outset.

modern form as, in effect, the official ideology of the

a2 See Christopher A. Ford, China Looks at the West: Identity, Global Ambitions, and the Future of Sino-American Relations (Lexington:

University of Kentucky Press, 2015), at 17, 85-94, 233-42, & 455-60.


Arms Control and International Security Papers

Volume I, Number 14 | July 30, 2020

To Tango Alone: Problems of Theory and Practice in the Sociology of Arms
Control, Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and Great Power Competition

permitted Iran to have them in the later years of the
arrangement.

Worse, the JCPOA actually impeded future efforts to
solve this very problem it had declined to solve, by
foreclosing the international community’s ability to use
sanctions to forestall the all but inevitable eventual
JCPOA-legitimated Iranian nuclear buildup. Nor was this
coincidental: it was structural, for the deal itself barred
reimposing nuclear sanctions on Iran to pressure it to
accept more enduring limits on its nuclear capacities.

Perhaps in a loose analogy to how the Clinton
Administration had reportedly agreed in 1994 to provide
nuclear reactors to North Korea on the basis of an
wouldn’t survive long enough to take delivery, the JCPOA

seems to have gambled on some kind of catalytic
transformation that would solve the longer-term
proliferation problems the Iran deal itself worsened not by
constraining or eliminating Iran’s threat capabilities but
rather by transforming Iran itself. The deal’s mere delay of
lran’s acquisition of nuclear capabilities may have seemed
to make sense through the prism of a pseudo-
constructivist conceit that the very act of reaching a
nuclear deal with Iran would lead to more general
improvements in the relationship as the parties learned to
trust each other. The deal, in other words, seems to have
been rooted in the idea that Iran’s eventual, JCPOA-
legitimated accumulation of nuclear capabilities would
not be threatening because by the time it occurred the deal
itself would have catalyzed an across-the-board
improvement in Iran’s behavior and relationship with the
rest of the world.

And indeed the Obama Administration does seem to
have expected that the JCPOA would catalyze
transformation. President Obama, for instance — picking
up themes he had earlier voiced upon coming into office,
when he offered an “extended hand” to Iran and called for
for partnership and commerce” — declared that the deal
would allow Iran “to move ina different, less provocative
direction.” Indeed, the JCPOA itself noted that its
participants “anticipate that fullimplementation of this

JCPOA will positively contribute to regional and
international peace and security.” (This impression is
accentuated by the fact that U.N. Security Council
Resolution 2231 (2015) imposed an arms embargo upon
lran with an expiration date of October 2020 — by which

point one imagines it must have been assumed it would no
longer be so threatening for Iran to have a full suite of
modern weaponry.)

Until July 2015, a build-up of Iranian nuclear capacity
had been deemed such a threat that sweeping
international sanctions were needed to pressure Iran to
come to negotiate a deal. With the JCPOA, however, that
very same buildup was redefined as non-threatening by
virtue of having been pushed a few years into the future,
presumably because it would then exist in the hands, as it
were, of a “different Iran” that had been domesticated by
the West’s engagement with it. Thus did pseudo-
constructivism help the proponents of the JCPOA
rationalize allowing Iran to have in 2030 what they
conceded it was absolutely essential that Iran not have in
2015.

C. China Policy

Some analogous dynamics were also visible in the
arena of great power competition. It was fundamental to
the Western policy community’s approach to China for
most of the post-Cold War period, for instance, that the
PRC’s authoritarianism could be “domesticated” if the rest
of the world welcomed it warmly enough into the
community of nations. Rivalry and competition, after all,
were social constructs. Especially since Western elites
assumed that their mode of governance was the natural
end-state for humankind — and that all others wished to
emulate us if they could — it was easy to assume that our
embrace would be transformative. It became Western
policy, therefore, to assist and facilitate the PRC’s rise as a
major power: by the act of showing such goodwill and
facilitating the growth of a Chinese middle class, we would
“socialize” Beijing into being the kind of “responsible
stakeholder” and cooperative partner we desired. In time,
in fact, the PRC would end up a liberal democratic state
like our own.

At the time, it was all but an axiom of the mainstream
China policy community in the West that the principal
danger to this happy future came not from Beijing’s
choices but rather from those in the West who warned that
the PRC’s rise might not be so salutary. It was
commonplace for China policy specialists to declare that
the surest way to make the PRC into an antagonist was to
think about it as one. Accordingly, those warning that the
Chinese Communist Party might have strategic objectives


Arms Control and International Security Papers

Volume I, Number 14 | July 30, 2020

To Tango Alone: Problems of Theory and Practice in the Sociology of Arms
Control, Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and Great Power Competition

And indeed the implications of an American “sole
purpose” (a.k.a. NFU) declaration would have been hugely
significant. Were it to be understood that the only purpose
of nuclear weapons is to deter the use of other such
weapons, this would have amounted to a renunciation of
nuclear deterrence vis-a-vis conventional military invasion
— that is, a wholesale repudiation of the U.S. “nuclear
umbrella” that has helped shield Europe and East Asia
from Soviet (later Russian) and PRC conventional military
power for generations. For that reason, | have argued, in
the current security environment,

For this reason, the Obama Administration’s
attachment to “sole purpose” theory may have been
another sign of its investment in pseudo-constructivist
thinking - specifically, the notion that the U.S. nuclear
“example” would have some kind of systemically
transformative effect. After all, at a time in which both
Russian and PRC conventional military threats were
growing, especially against U.S. friends and allies, such a
crypto-NFU policy would be hard to justify in the absence
of an assumption that Russian and Chinese threats would
attenuate if Washington showed the way to a more pacific
posture.

This assumption is especially remarkable in light of
the fact that Vice President Biden recommitted himself to
the “sole purpose” (NFU) dream even as late as January
2017 —a point subsequent both to Moscow’s invasions of
Georgia and Ukraine and to Beijing’s lawless assertions of
unilateral dominion over offshore resources and
accelerated militarization of disputed features in the
South China Sea, and at which conventional military
modernization in both Russia and the PRC was in the
process of building destabilizing “anti-access/area-denial”
(A2/AD) envelopes designed to degrade U.S. conventional
forces’ operational freedom of maneuver. This was indeed

a powerful signal of Western elites’ faith in their own
ability to transform the strategic environment by
exhortation and example.»

Even more dramatically, further along the political
continuum, the nuclear weapons “Ban” movement picked
up steam during this same period, drawing strength from
the expectations raised by President Obama’s “Prague
Speech” and the frustrations felt by many in the
disarmament community that post-Cold War reductions
seemed to be running out of steam. The resulting Treaty
on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which has
not received enough ratifications to enter into force,
represents perhaps the epitome of pseudo-constructivist
aspiration: a purported answer to the world’s continuing
problems of nuclear risk and geopolitical insecurity, but
one that deliberately forswears actual concern with
security and deterrence. It was, in effect, an undertaking
in geopolitical wish-fulfillment predicated upon the notion
that prevailing security conditions could be unthought and
then remade to order, if only enough people “reached
critical will” (as the slogan went) in desiring this with
sufficient fervor. The valuable constructivist insight that
the security environment was socially constituted and
could change, in other words, led disarmament
enthusiasts to the more tendentious conclusion that it
could be refashioned by diktat, and that in fact they could
therefore change things as they wanted.

B. Iran Nonproliferation Policy

Another arguable manifestation of pseudo-
constructivism appeared in 2015, with the nuclear
arrangement with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA failed to deliver in
critical ways, however, in part because it seems to have
relied upon facile pseudo-constructivist assumptions to fill
its own conceptual gaps. The most fundamental flaw of
the arrangement was that it actually didn’t prevent
precisely the problem that it had been the focus of f U.S.
policy for years to avert: Iran’s buildup of uranium
enrichment capacity and fissile material stocks in ways
that would facilitate rapid future weaponization. Indeed,
the deal actually legitimated these capabilities and

9 William Perry’s idea that NFU could be sold to Americans if repackaged as “sole purpose” theory is also tellingly pseudo-constructivist,
suggesting both a self-conscious effort to “remake” perceived U.S. national interest through creative relabelling and to conceal from the

public that one is doing so.


Arms Control and International Security Papers

Volume I, Number 14 | July 30, 2020

To Tango Alone: Problems of Theory and Practice in the Sociology of Arms
Control, Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and Great Power Competition

simplistically. The most important thing about social
construction that they overlooked is that it is social. The
processes of mutually-constitutive creation and re-
creation to which constructivist theorists called attention
are collective processes that happen organically in the
aggregated behavior of human social actors. These are
not dynamics easily monopolized by one particular group
or demographic, however well educated, well-heeled, and
well-intentioned it might be; they can be quite resistant to
being employed as a tool of one’s policy agenda.

Despite his apparent interest in the idea of “steer[ing]
the evolution of international society in certain
directions,” the constructivist scholar Alexander Wendt
seems to have glimpsed this from the start. He warned
years ago that efforts at socially reconstructive
engineering might perhaps have “unintended
consequences” as a result of fact that the international
environment suffers from “the problems of
‘heterocephaly’”1: — a term used by Max Weber to
describe systems subjecting key players to outside sources
of authority, but which here can be taken simply to mean
that the international “body” has many different heads.

And this is surely right, for to say that something is
socially constructed is to say that it represents the sum of
all the relevant attitudes, assumptions, preferences, and
behavioral choices of all the relevant “players” in the
system. It is very difficult for one element of a society to
steer such aggregated outcomes, remaking the rest of the
system in its own image; in social construction, as it were,
the other elements also “get a vote.” The agenda-focused
pseudo-constructivists of the post-Cold War period,
however, seem to have overlooked what constructivist
theorists in their shoes would surely not have forgotten:
that you cannot “socially construct something” by
yourself. To put it simply, as the saying goes, it takes two
to tango.

In practice, therefore, one must remember that while
it is true that social constructions are more malleable than
many people instinctively assume, and that they are
indeed capable of sometimes sweeping transformative
change, they are at the least neither easily nor predictably
so. As complex adaptive systems — and ones that are,
moreover, composed of unit-level human components
who themselves each possess a degree of agency and

11 Wendt, supra, at 376.

make choices of their own — outcomes in social systems

: we ive fi
definition extraordinarily difficult (or perhaps impossible)
to predict. All political systems are this way, and the
system of global geopolitical relationships is the largest
complex adaptive social system there is. It is therefore a
mistake akin to magical thinking to assume that any given
policy elite can smoothly “engineer” outcomes.

But Western policy elites either did not understand or
ignored such insights, drawing simplistically upon a
bowdlerized constructivism in assuming that where they
led, the rest of the world-system would perforce follow.
But it didn’t, for those elites had tried to tango alone.

In domestic jurisdictions, recent years have seen a
significant rise in Euroskepticism - not least leading to
Britain’s departure from the European Union - resistance
to the unfettered free movement of labor and capital
advocated by neoliberals, and a turn toward more
traditional, sovereignty-minded and inwardly-focused,
nationalism-infused policies in the countries of the West
themselves. This created challenges for the neoliberal
agenda.

For purposes of this paper, however, the most salient
“unintended consequences” of the pseudo-constructivist
project has been the role that this agenda seems to have
played in (a) helping both to catalyze aggressively
competitive and destabilizing countervailing behavior (as
important major non-Western players stepped up
mobilization against this agenda) and (b) delaying and
impeding Western responses to that competitive behavior
by non-Western players (as the West’s own policy elites
tried to cling to their dreams even as evidence of failure
mounted). Thanks to the conceptual overreach and the
ideologized inflexibility of that agenda, therefore, the ugly
and dangerous state-competitive environment of the
present day may well be worse than it would otherwise
have been, today’s threats harder to meet, and
tomorrow’s opportunities harder to seize.

A. Rival Constructions

There is an irony here, in that some of the steps taken
by the major non-Western authoritarian regimes in


Arms Control and International Security Papers
Volume || Number 14
July 30, 2020

fo Tango Alone: Problems of
Fheory and Practice in the
Sociology of Arms Control,
Nonproliferation,
Disarmament, and Great
Power Competition

by Christopher A. Ford

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms
Control and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-
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Arms Control and International Security Papers

Volume I, Number 14 | July 30, 2020

To Tango Alone: Problems of Theory and Practice in the Sociology of Arms
Control, Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and Great Power Competition

B. Reconstructed Rivalries

In the international arena, perhaps the biggest single
problem for the post-competitive agenda of post-Cold War
Western elites is that the two most powerful non-Western
powers turned out to have very different things in mind.
Nor was this coincidental. In fact, to the degree that this
Western agenda exemplified two things each of which was
anathema to the authoritarian oligarchies of the PRC and
Russia — namely, worldwide convergence upon a model of
liberal democracy, and a rules-based international order
at the fulcrum of which sat the United States during a
period of notable post-Cold War unipolarity — every step
forward for this Western agenda amounted to an
additional incentive for Beijing and Moscow to challenge
it. Thus, in a dialectical tension, did the “unintended
consequences” of Wendtian heterocephaly arise, as the

West’s post-Cold War triumph helped galvanize the grand
strategy of its challengers. One can thus see here both

some vindication of the insights of actual constructivist
theory and also a cautionary tale about what can happen
when a pseudo-constructivist enthusiasm encounters the
actual complexities of a socially-constructed world.

From the outset, as foreshadowed in Putin’s
December 1999 “Millennium Message” upon arriving in the
Kremlin, Russia was quick to leverage its relative
economic and military-technological recovery into a
vigorous anti-American competitive strategy during the
2000s and 2010s ~ a strategy explicitly premised upon
trying to relitigate many of Russia’s geopolitical losses,
and notably unscrupulous in the extravagant provocations
it has been willing to employ.

The Chinese situation is different in its details, but
leads to a similar result: an authoritarian regime in control
of a “near-peer” competitor of the United States has
constructed a national identity with a revisionist
geopolitical agenda and set itself on a clear course of
competitive confrontation. APRC characterized by its
“soaring ambition for global status, prickly and insecure
moralism, inflexible fear of admitting error, and tendency
to rationalize and valorize the use of force in self-
defense”is is now stepping out and flexing its muscles.

Scholars will no doubt debate for a long time precisely
what factors, and in what admixture, set Beijing and
Moscow upon their confrontational courses. For present
purposes, however, it suffices to observe two things.

+ First, while much of this revisionism was likely anyway
— as Russia regained its feet after its debilitating
1990s, as growing PRC power allowed Beijing to act on
long-held ambitions of geopolitical “return,” and as
both oligarchies invested in domestic narratives that
tried to make up for their lack of democratic
legitimacy by claiming to be uniquely able to deliver
power and status to the country as a whole — the
West’s neoliberal triumphalism was a special irritant
for these two regimes, helping goad the authoritarians
forward in challenging the post-Cold War order.

+ Second, these regimes’ social construction of anew
international environment of renewed competition
and confrontation has today left the post-Cold War
agenda of post-competitive neoliberal convergence in
tatters.

This competitive resurgence had predictably bad
effects upon Western elites’ post-Cold War arms control
and disarmament agenda. Despite the expectations raised
by President Obama’s Prague speech in April 2009 and the
unfocused utopianism of the TPNW, for example, the
return of great power competition, and the associated
Chinese and Russian nuclear buildups, have dealt a
tremendous blow to the world’s hopes for nuclear
disarmament. Making matters worse, the Kremlin’s return
to self-aggrandizing oppositionalism also led to a string of
Russian arms control violations that now stand as indicia
of untrustworthiness that will have to be overcome in any
effort to build a new arms control framework with
Moscow. (For its part, Beijing today shuns arms control
negotiations entirely, focusing instead upon rapidly

expanding and diversifying its nuclear arsenal.)

In the Middle East, despite the JCPOA’s ambition to
catalyze an improved relationship with Tehran, the JCPOA
turned out to have in some respects made things worse,
for Iran’s behavior actually deteriorated. Far from being
transformed by the catalytic power of Western
engagement, after the lifting of sanctions and a degree of

13 Christopher A. Ford, “Realpolitik with Chinese Characteristics: Chinese Strategic Culture and the Modern Communist Party-State,” in
Understanding Strategic Cultures in the Asia Pacific (Ashley Tellis, Allison Szalwinski, & Michael Wills, eds.) (National Bureau of Asian

Research, 2016), at 28, 28.

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Putin regime, such thinking draws heavily upon the 3. Islamic Republic of Iran

ae f : i
Russi A ; A t Osa Iran is a third example, for its regime has constructed
Russia’s salvation lying in Christianized fascism — and a domestic legitimacy narrative and sense of self-identity
whose name and work have been repeatedly invoked, around a highly ideologized conception of struggle against
referenced, and praised in recent years by many evil and corrupting outside forces — a social construction
senior Russian officials and politicians, including Putin of national, and in some respects religious, mission that
himself. has encouraged a destabilizing regional revisionism

entirely at odds with and in opposition to (albeit

“In this conception, Russia is a distinct civilization predating) the neoliberal elite agenda of the post-Cold
having a unique essence and spirit that is constantly War West. The Iranian regime’s Shi’ite Islamism is an
under threat from evil foreign forces, both physically ideational amalgam constructed over many years - often
and ideologically. These are threats against which quite deliberately, as a self-aware project of ideological
Russians must always be vigilant, and in response to engineering - first as a tool of political mobilization and
which it is necessary to organize politics along then as a mechanism of regime control.
egal check..... This narrative involves, and indeed “Within the broader universe of politicalslamism, the

A + . success in deploying the ‘imagination of collective

of which Mother Russia must be cleansed ; a iustif ination of

ticularly significant that the regime’s dark and ideology of clerical rule for a new revolutionary :
somewhat paranoid vision of the world is also republic. ...1ran’s political Islam has also long aspired
a longing for the status and sense of historical self- state, remembering its sometime historical role as one
importance that Russia felt during the tsarist period of the world’s superpowers and combining such
and during its decades of Soviet global reach. Not for nationalist recollections with Shi'ite themes of

hing, for instance, has Putin himself declared that religious redemption...’
if in Russian hi . — _
the collapse of the USSR: the 20th Century’s ‘greatest An account of all the ways in which this ideology has
global catastrophe.’ The modern Russian regime thus helped drive an aggressive Iranian agenda in the Middle
promotes a kind of global restoration narrative, in East for decades is unnecessary here, but Iran, too,
which its self-assertive authoritarianism provides the represents a sharp counterpoint to and contrast with the
vehicle for national or even civilizational West’s post-Cold War cosmopolitan liberalism.

All three of these regimes, therefore, have constructed

This dark and competitive agenda is certainly not the self-identities in the modern world that revolve in

optimistic neoliberal cosmopolitanism of post-Cold War important ways around opposition to and rivalry with the
Western elites, but it is a sort of purposive pseudo- Western liberal democracies, and especially the United
constructivism nonetheless. Russia under Putin engaged States. Their efforts at social self-construction seem in

in a deliberate and fairly explicit effort at ideational re- some respect to vindicate constructivist insights, but they
engineering all of its own, building a new, post-Soviet also represent ideational projects entirely at odds with the
narrative of self-identity grounded in existential threat actual agenda of post-Cold War Western elites.

narratives and geopolitical revisionism vis-a-vis the West
that forms a dramatic counterpoint to the Western
globalist agenda.

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other than China just taking its assigned seat at a
neoliberal global board meeting chaired by the United
States were simply told to be quiet, lest talking about
China as a competitor become a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”
The security environment would be kept benign by willing
it thus.

D. Sovereignty and the Nation-State

In fact, pseudo-constructivist policy instrumentalism
even seems to have gone so far as to have informed post-
Cold War aspirations to transcend the entire system of
state sovereignty. To be sure, one did not have to bea
constructivist to admit that the romanticized conceits of
19th century nationalists, in which essentialist
conceptions of ethno-racial identity were projected
backwards into the mists of antiquity, were ahistorical
nonsense. Nor did one have to be a constructivist to
understand that the nation-states often taken for granted
in recent centuries are to some degree contingent,
malleable, and — yes — socially constructed institutions.

Long before constructivist scholars emerged on the
scene, there was a powerful undercurrent of ambiguity
and anxiety in international politics, during the
decolonization struggles of the 20th Century, over who
constituted the relevant “self” entitled to “self-
determination.” (Nigeria, for instance, fought a civil war
over which “self” mattered, as a result of which there is no
country of “Biafra” today.) Many of the initial conflicts and
instability of the post-colonial world related in whole or in
part to contestation over the composition and territorial
extent of the “relevant self” that was to be privileged by
the modern state system.

It was not precisely a novel insight, therefore, to point
out the contingency and recurringly contested status of
the nation-state. Nevertheless, in the post-Cold War era
many Western policy elites seem to have taken this a step
further — moving from the more traditional policy agenda
of fighting over which “self” to privilege to a more radical
one of trying to overcome the received conceptual
framework of national sovereignty itself.

This was the era, after all, not just of the European
Union’s expansion to include many of the post-communist

states of Eastern Europe, but also of the deepening of the
EU through a succession of agreements that broadened
the range of issues subject to collective regulation from
Brussels and led to an increasingly far-reaching corpus of
Union law that took precedence over national rules.
Savants talked of “pooled sovereignty,” while in the
broader arena a global criminal court was established and
scholars debated the international community’s right to
protect citizens from their own governments. The tide
seemed, for a time, to be running very much against
venerable social constructs such as the nation-state.
Indeed, as Francis Fukuyama reminds us, in Europe,
sovereignty was deliberately diffused in order to “defang
nationalism.”10

Meanwhile, in society and culture, there arose anew
demographic of cosmopolitan elites, having points of
origin in many different countries but genuinely rooted in
none, perfectly comfortable moving and living wherever
opportunity might knock. For such subjectively global
citizens, borders and sovereignty might just as well
already have disappeared. And, in the pseudo-
constructivist enthusiasms of the era, it may indeed have
felt as if the rest of the world would soon follow their
footsteps. Across much of the Western policy community,
the period was characterized by widespread assumptions
that free flows of information, capital, and labor would
inexorably “t[ie] the world together into a single,

Ill, Running Aground

But much of this world-remaking turned out to be too
good to be true. It was not wrong to learn from
constructivists that the international structure and its
dynamics are socially constructed, historically contingent,
malleable, and subject to ongoing renegotiation. It was
more problematic, however, to conclude that because of
this social construction, Western policy elites have the
option of willing the world into different and more
congenial forms.

In their zeal to reimagine the communities and
dynamics of the world, the Western elites of the 1990s and
the early 21st Century seem to have misread
constructivism, or at least they read it selectively and

10 Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar,

Straus, & Giroux, 2014), at 554.


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policymaking community, for the constructivists
themselves sometimes suggested that their insights might
open up new possibilities for effecting change. Observing
that “every world is forever remaking itself,” for example,
Onuf raised the possibility that constructivist insights
might allow the further transcendence of traditional
structures and dynamics - including perhaps transcending
the idea of the “nation” itself.7 After pointing out that
constructivism might show how states could “transform”
international culture, Wendt also argued that such
awareness creates “a potential for self-intervention
designed to change the logic and bring international
society under a measure of rational control” through some
sort of “constitutional design, ‘engineering,’ or ‘steering’
to “design institutions that would steer the evolution of
international society in certain directions.”s

In the post-Cold War environment, in which sweeping
change had already proven itself possible and Western
policy elites appeared to be the masters of all they
surveyed, such suggestions seem to have been
intoxicating, being received as invitations to turn the
interpretive metatheoretical framing of constructivist
insight into an opportunity to engage in “world-making”
as a deliberate policy agenda. As applied in this way,
however, this gave rise to problems, not necessarily
because the theory was unsound, but rather because, in
effect, enthusiastic Western policy elites oversimplified
the constructivist insight and mistook its analytical
descriptivism for a playbook with which the world could
be remade to specification.

| do not mean to suggest, of course, that Western
policy elites of the new era were themselves constructivist
scholars, were well versed in the theory and its ongoing
development, or in many cases were necessarily even
aware that such a new approach even existed as a distinct
academic sub-discipline at all. In fact, were these leaders
actual constructivists, or better ones, some of the
problems that will be described herein might have been
avoided. As | will argue, a more genuine understanding of
constructivist insights can help leaders approach
policymaking with more perspicacity than Western
policymaking often displayed during the period of post-

7 Onuf, supra, at xix & 205.
s Wendt, supra, at 367 & 377.

Cold War enthusiasm — and indeed today | believe some
of this is now starting to happen.

The point is rather that some of the basic ideas that
found intellectual expression and were increasingly
refined by constructivist theorists in the academy — ideas
about the social construction of international reality, the
non-permanence of its central features and its potential to
undergo radical structural changes as demonstrated by
the end of the Cold War, and of at least the theoretical
possibility of deliberately transforming the environment as
a policy agenda — seem to have been held in some form,
implicitly or explicitly, by broad swathes of the policy
community during much of the post-Cold War era. These
assumptions were not necessarily expressed in explicitly
constructivist framings or accompanied by any particular
self-awareness as being constructivist. Nevertheless, as
we will see below, a striking number of policy initiatives
during the period seem indeed to bear the imprint of such
concepts — even if, as we shall see, they were only vaguely
and simplistically understood.

The resulting enthusiasm for ideational (and therefore
socio-environmental) reengineering — which I'll call
pseudo-constructivism, out of respect for the theoreticians
whom | doubt would have endorsed such simplistic
appropriation — had various manifestations in the post-
Cold War geopolitical arena. One can see its footprints, as
it were, in the policy choices of leadership elites in various
areas. This paper will focus upon how this played out in
arms control, nonproliferation, disarmament, and great
power competition.

A. Disarmament and Arms Control

In disarmament and arms control, it was certainly
possible to show progress in dramatically reducing
nuclear weapons stockpiles once the easing of Cold War
tensions enabled leaders to conclude that the large
arsenals they had accumulated during the period of
competition and confrontation were no longer necessary.
Asa result, the nuclear powers dramatically reduced the
size of these arsenals to the point that today, for example,
the American arsenal stands at a mere 13 percent or so of
its Cold War peak.


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perspective. We should avoid the example of Thales of
Miletus, who as Plato’s story goes, fell into a well because
he was unwilling to take his eyes off the stars long enough
to see what was in front of him. But we must not close our
eyes to those stars, either.

V. Walking the Via Media?

So how might it be possible for a policymaker to find
the kind of Aristotelian Mean that is needed — and that,
given the potentially existential stakes, is perhaps most
needed in the arena of arms control, disarmament, and
great power competition?

To recap the discussion above and draw it more
directly into policymaking, genuine constructivist insight
encourages us to avoid reifying and essentializing the
socially-constructed “things” of our international
environment — the nature and “rules” of the relationships
between them, the realm of what is (or is not) imaginable
in their interaction, and even the “given-ness” of the
actors themselves — while yet also accepting the
conditional, functional reality, the “stickiness,” and the
inertia associated with those same “things.” The former
allows us hope and provides a wellspring of optimism
from which to draw energy in trying to improve the world.
The latter helps reduce the risk that, in our enthusiasm for
change, we cause unnecessary harm: it encourages more
realistic expectations, it opens space for prudential
readjustment as events unfold and preserves the option of
recognizing and accommodating mistake or error, and it
helps us understand the likelihood (and perhaps mitigate
the impact) of negative feedback.

In this regard, it is worth remembering that thinkers as
diverse (in political terms) as the radical sociologist Alvin
Gouldner and the conservative commentator Thomas
Sowell have contrasted the ideological instrumentalism of
the modern elite intellectual class - a worldview in which
the world’s major problems can be solved by “public
projects of social reconstruction” guided by the right
policy experts - with a more “tragic vision” that is
suspicious of enthusiasm about the fundamental solubility
of every social problem, accepts that there are often “firm
limits on what politics can do,”17 and sees policymaking as

often consisting of “trade-offs rather than solutions.”is
But it is also clear that neither Gouldner nor Sowell
opposed change or rejected the possibility of ameliorative
progress; the “tragic” part of their vision lies merely in its
appreciation for human frailty and systemic complexity —
an appreciation that, | would submit, may in fact help
lessen the chance of genuinely tragic, unsought outcomes.
Such a worldview is the cognitive antithesis of the Western
neoliberal pseudo-constructivism we have been exploring,
yet also arguably the viewpoint more consistent with a
genuinely constructivist perspective.

It might surprise the reader to learn that much U.S.
policymaking today is, in fact, informed by some of these
insights. Nonetheless, from the perspective of the so-
called “T” family of bureaus at the State Department, one
could offer numerous examples:

+ In our approach to great power competition with the
PRC and Russia, it is explicit in our approach that
these relationships have both competitive and
cooperative aspects - aspects which we have to

A fAri
Mean. We must be competitive where their actions
demand response, but we also seek cooperation
wherever it remains available. We aim to
problematize our competitors’ strategies, but we also
make clear that we seek opportunities to work
together on shared interests.

+ — Inadministering national security export controls in
response to the challenges presented by the PRC’s
strategy of “Military-Civil Fusion,” we are explicitly
seeking to balance the importance of continued
cooperation with China for collective economic
benefit against the need to take countermeasures
against the theft and illicit diversion of sensitive
technology in support of Beijing’s geopolitical
revisionism. We seek a policy answer that “lies

+ Inresponse to the challenges presented by our “near-
peer” competitors, we are increasingly forward-

leaning in using arms transfers as a tool of

17 Alvin W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar, and Future of Ideology (New York: Seabury Press, 1967),

at 67, 71, & 79-84.

1s Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society (New York: Basic Books, 2011), at 95-96.

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Arms Control and International Security Papers Volume |, Number 14 | July 30, 2020
To Tango Alone: Problems of Theory and Practice in the Sociology of Arms
Control, Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and Great Power Competition

Arms Control and International Security Papers

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms
Control and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-
accessible format compatible with “social distancing” during the COVID-19 crisis.



Arms Control and International Security Papers

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To Tango Alone: Problems of Theory and Practice in the Sociology of Arms
Control, Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and Great Power Competition

foreshadow, let alone foresee,” what had occurred.2 In
response, the post-Cold War world rethought international
relations theory in order to explain things.

In the academy, the sub-discipline of “constructivist”
international relations theory thereupon came to the fore.
A pioneering generation of “constructivist” international
relations theorists emerged, starting with Nicholas Onuf,
who wrote about “sense-making” and “world-making” in
1989, and picking up speed with scholars such as
Alexander Wendt, Emanuel Adler, and Friedrich Kratochwil
during the 1990s. These thinkers offered a social theory of
international relations, in contrast to more traditional
assumptions that international politics was principally a
question of rational-choice behavior and decisions by
egoist actors pursuing (more or less) objective interests
and making utilitarian calculations within a (more or less)
fixed system of international structures. For them,
international actors, institutions, and structures were not
exogenous, a priori “givens,” but instead socially
constructed — and therefore necessarily not fixed in form
or function over time, and subject to ongoing dynamics of
contestation and renegotiation by participants in the
system, acting individually or collectively.s

The classic classroom illustration of this kind of
insight is Alexander Wendt’s famous observation that a
large number of British nuclear weapons is far less
threatening to the United States than even a handful of
North Korean weapons — not because of any
differentiation in their physical destructiveness or capacity
to be launched (i.e., factors related to the material
structure of the international system), but rather as a
result of how these two respective arsenals are situated in
the social context of international politics (i.e., its social
structure). This example points out the importance of that
context, demonstrating that there are highly salient
aspects of international relations that cannot be
understood without appreciation of their social
construction. In Peter Katzenstein’s account, for instance,
it became clear that “[w]hat scholars and policy makers

1996), at 2-3.

The Culture of National Security, supra, at 1, 10, & 25-29.

196, & 203.

consider to be national security issues is not fixed but
varies over time,” including “the state interests that
predominant explanations of national security often take
for granted.”

In some respects, of course, this approach to
understanding the social construction of international
order wasn’t really an international relations theory at all
— rather being, as Onuf realized, a conception that
situated international relations in a broader universe of
human social relationships, all of which functioned in this
way.s Despite this theoretical breadth, however, where
constructivism seems to have had the largest impact, was
in its original home of international relations theory.
There, it aspired to offer what Alexander Wendt described
as a new socially-constructed “ontology of international
life.”6

Il. Enthusiasm and Application

Irrespective of how broadly it could be said to apply,
this kind of thinking — which blossomed in scholarly
popularity during the 1990s — had consequences not
simply as a “mostly interpretive metatheory” in the
academy but even, in perhaps unintended ways, among
Western policy elites grappling with the new post-Cold
War environment. From the perspective not so much of
theory but instead of how some seem to have tried to
translate such insights into practice, constructivism
seemed attractive. Crucially, to many policymakers,
constructivism’s emphasis upon ideational factors, and its
conclusion that the architecture of our international
reality is not fixed but rather subject to change, have
seemed not only to explain the unexpected evaporation of
the Cold War and its associated rivalries, but also to signal
the possibility that the international environment could be
further transformed through a deliberate policy agenda.

To be sure, this jump, from description to
prescription, was not wild fantasy on the part of the

The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (Peter J. Katzenstein, ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press,

To observe that international relations, and its actors and institutions, are socially constructed, of course, is not to say that the physical
environment in which such construction occurs is socially constructed.

Nicholas Onuf, Making Sense, Making Worlds: Constructivism in social theory and international relations (London: Rutledge, 2013), at xxii,

Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), at 370-72.


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To Tango Alone: Problems of Theory and Practice in the Sociology of Arms
Control, Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and Great Power Competition

To Tango Alone: Problems of Theory and Practice
in the Sociology of Arms Control,
Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and Great Power

Competition

by Christopher A. Ford:

In this paper, Assistant Secretary Ford offers some thoughts on conceptual
currents in international relations thinking over the last generation that helped
both produce and lead to the failure of major elements of the post-Cold War
agenda in arms control, disarmament policy, and great power relations. This

paper, however, also explores how we may find a better path forward,
informed by a sounder understanding of some of these same currents.

This series of Arms Control and International Security
Papers has repeatedly addressed issues of great power
competition. This emphasis on great power challenges
derives from the 2017 National Security Strategy, and this
emphasis upon competitive strategy is perhaps the
signature contribution of the current U.S. administration
in foreign and national security policy. This paper
approaches this subject from a more theoretical
perspective.

This paper describes conceptual currents that

emerged in international relations theory early in the post-

Cold War period, then explores how Western leadership
elites of the period seem, in practice, to have
misunderstood or misapplied such insights in ways that
helped lead to the failure of the arms control,
nonproliferation, disarmament, and broader geopolitical
agenda espoused by those elites. Finally, it will examine

how it may be possible for leaders today to learn better
lessons for praxis by drawing in more nuanced ways upon
those same theoretical insights — and how some such
learning is already being put into practice in U.S. policy.

I. The Post-Cold War Revolution

For those who did not live through it as adults, it may
be hard today to appreciate just what an earthquake it
was for the decades-entrenched, world-risking rivalries
and bipolar geopolitical certainties of the Cold War to
come to an end. These changes presented challenges and
opportunities, for existing theories of international
relations had, it was felt, displayed their “inability to

1 Dr. Ford serves as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, and is additionally performing the
duties of the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. He previously served as Special Assistant to the President and
Senior Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Counterproliferation on the U.S. National Security Council staff.


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JCPOA-associated re-integration into the global economy,
lran was left empowered and emboldened, a more
dangerous regional actor than before. Not surprisingly,
the prospect of this Iran building up its nuclear capabilities
and positioning itself for potentially rapid future
weaponization was entirely unacceptable to the United
States. With putting pressure on Iran to agree to
permanent nuclear limits ruled out by the terms of the
deal itself, the JCPOA was thus doomed — and indeed,
Washington left the deal.

Almost across the board, therefore, the optimistic and
enthusiastic pseudo-constructivist post-Cold War agenda
of world-remaking had run into trouble by the late 2010s
— trouble catalyzed, in part, by the very progress that
agenda had seemed for a time to have been making.

IV. Re-thinking It Through

But | think it is possible to learn from constructivist
insights without replicating the self-defeating errors and
overreach of the post-Cold War generation. The starting
point for such lesson-learning should be to acknowledge
complexity, both in the colloquial sense (“It’s really
complicated!”) and in the more technical one associated
with Complexity Theory. An appreciation for the deep
complexity of the social environment teaches intellectual
humility — a humility somewhat lacking, it would appear,
in the agenda-focused pseudo-constructivism of the last
generation — as we try to plot a course forward. With such
humility, we may be able to admit the merit of
constructivist theory and learn things that do help us
advance a constructive agenda, yet to avoid the hubris of
imagining that the complex adaptive social system that is
our international environment can simply be willed into a
new shape merely because we wish it so.

As an example, we have tried to some degree in the
State Department to approach multilateral
nonproliferation diplomacy as being an exercise in
“storytelling.” What does that mean? To begin with, this
was in many ways a constructivist framing, inasmuch as

ae 5
done about it — are, in a sense, constitutive of
international politics.”

Through efforts at persuasive “storytelling,” we work
to expand the set of diplomatic partners available to us in
meeting proliferation threats by, in effect, reconstructing
their understanding of these challenges and the
opportunities available for their solution. What we do not
assume, however, is that such storytelling provides a
magic formula for change-making. Because diplomatic
engagement is a persuasive project, it is an endeavor in
which you may or may not actually succeed in changing
someone else’s mind or reshaping his perceptions, in
which your counterpart is also trying to do the same thing
to you, and in which both of you are also trying to
influence third parties, each of whom also has agency (and
most likely an agenda).

This complexity does not mean that one cannot be
successful, for skilled diplomacy can often do a great deal.
But it does mean that one should not oversell things, for in
complex adaptive social systems there is not necessarily a
linear or predictable relationship between inputs and
outcomes. We must remember the ways in which such
systems are (1) capable of responding to perturbations —
including the deliberate and purposive perturbations of
making foreign policy choices — by reconfiguring
themselves, but yet (2) generally fairly stable and resistant
to most perturbations and (3) notoriously unpredictable
about when perturbation-induced transformation will
occur and what the resulting new equilibrium will look
like. This is not an argument against attempting the willful
perturbations of policymaking, but it shows the need for
patience, resilience, self-awareness, and intellectual
humility in the policymaker.

To put it more abstractly, acknowledging the deep
reality of social construction may involve a seemingly
paradoxical juggling of the real and the unreal:

+ Itasks us to acknowledge the “unreal” quality of the
constructed social world around us — unreal in the
sense, at least, that its units and institutions do not
exist as entirely exogenous givens, but rather do so
only conditionally and temporarily, through endlessly
renegotiated ongoing dynamics of becoming.

+ Yet this insight into “unreality” must also be tempered
with an appreciation for the stubborn reality of our
social world, in the sense that its elements possess a
sort of inertia that can make them quite resistant to
our efforts at reconstruction, that other participants in
its contested dynamics of “becoming” can effect

12


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competitive strategy, as well as a means to boost the
dynamism and resilience of the United States’
National Security Innovation Base. Yet this, too,
represents a balance, for we subject all transfers to
detailed cost/benefit assessments, and refuse them
where we judge they will undermine stability,
contribute to proliferation, or undercut the security of
key Allies and partners.

+ With respect to the challenges presented by Iranian
proliferation, we are unwilling to bet the
nonproliferation farm on Tehran’s miraculous self-
transformation in return merely for our “outstretched
hand.” Instead, we are working, through our pressure
campaign, to give the Iranian regime concrete reasons
to negotiate with us on enduring solutions for the
nuclear problems left unaddressed by the JCPOA.
(We’re not there yet, of course, but already our

ide eff f .
- f -

+ Inthe arms control arena, as the fate of the
Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty makes
clear, the United States is demonstrably willing to
walk away from agreements when they fail to protect
our security interests or are flagrantly violated by
other parties. Yet as the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review
emphasized, we also seek to negotiate new arms
control frameworks that are effective, increase
security and stability, and in which our counterparties
live up to their obligations. Most obviously, always
mindful of our obligations under Article VI of the NPT,
we are today pursuing negotiations in good faith on
effective measures to avert a nuclear arms race, and

are leading the world in calling for “next generation
arms control” with Russia and China.

+ With respect to disarmament, we have recognized
that genuine friends of disarmament “need to take the

contemporary weapons possessors, and should prize

deep engagement on the issue of disarmament
‘conditions.” To this end, based upon our review of
the failures of much of the post-Cold War
disarmament agenda, we have embarked upon the
“Creating an Envi for h Di »

(CEND) initiative to restructure global disarmament
discourse in more constructive directions. Through
CEND, we are working to find pragmatic and
functionally-oriented opportunities for dialogue and
forward movement that build upon global
disarmament hopes, but that channel this energy
more usefully, through long-overdue attention to
today’s real (and worsening) problems of security and
stability.

+ Meanwhile, for so long as nuclear weapons must
continue to exist, we work to preserve the capabilities
needed to deter aggression and to prevent nuclear
proliferation by friends and partners who, without our
“nuclear umbrella,” might feel they need such
weapons themselves in the face of increasingly
aggressive revisionism by Beijing and Moscow.

These policies are not necessarily radical departures
from past U.S. policy. But perhaps that, too, is part of the
point. A genuinely Nagarjunan approach - or at least one
informed by a Gouldnerian or Sowellian “tragic
perspective” - should presumably be leery of sweeping
reformulations aspiring to steer policy in dramatic new
directions on the strength of policymakers’ conviction that
they suddenly have unique insight into a new “Right
Answer.” Yet such an approach would not shy away,
either, from new initiatives seeking to take advantage of at
least the possibility of socially re-constructing better
answers to contemporary problems.

VI. Conclusion

Hopefully, this paper will stimulate further thought
and reflection. A hard look at these issues can encourage
breadth of perspective and intellectual humility as we
work to balance (1) the need to maintain security (which is
grounded in an appreciation for the unavoidability of
“conventional truth”) with (2) the aspiration to transcend
the need to maintain security in all of the uncomfortable
and demanding ways that are required by today’s security
environment (which is grounded in the higher reality of
social construction, and its potential for transformative
change). As policymakers struggle to find such a path,
they deserve our support and encouragement.

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