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The Gadfly Doctrine's avatar

Traditional chain-ganging/press-ganging misses how modern conflicts spill beyond formal alliances into global markets, as Susan Strange foresaw (States and Markets, 1988; The Retreat of the State, 1996). Escalation is now shaped by replenishment deterrence: non-belligerents are targeted for sustaining an adversary’s logistical, financial, or informational supply lines. Corporations and friend-shoring networks create alliance-like exposure, shanghaiing neutrals into conflict.

Iran exemplifies this: by threatening energy flows, fertiliser, and U.S.-linked financial networks, it expands the battlefield into global replenishment systems thus implicating far more actors than alliances alone.

Paul Musgrave's avatar

IPE has a lot to teach IS!

John Quiggin's avatar

When Australia needed its hegemony in 1942, we were left in the lurch. Unfortunately the lesson we learned was "find a better hegemony", rather than "be self-reliant"

Paul Musgrave's avatar

great and powerful friends, not great and *reliable* friends

John Quiggin's avatar

For Canada, this assumption ended with the Chanak crisis (1922 IIRC). Australia has never escaped it though we switched from UK to US in 1942

Paul Musgrave's avatar

Australia's well-publicized intervention in the US-Vietnam conflict reads very differently in this regard.

John Quiggin's avatar

Also Iraq and Afghanistan and unqualified endorsement of the current Iran war