I need to spend time digging a bit more into IR scholarship just so I can be confident about this critique, but as a cultural historian looking in, all arguments about probable national actions and reactions that depend on reputation, prestige and credibility are really fascinating because those are treated as concrete, predictable and material dimensions of interstate relations, but all of them are deeply "cultural" and thus exceptionally subject to mutable and contestable interpretation, not just after the fact by scholars but *during* the actual course of events by state and interstate actors.
It seems to me that a lot of discourse about those qualities wants to establish a kind of rule rather like "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", that if you are careful to restrict the crying of wolf to times when there are actually wolves you will get the expected reaction from other villagers. But that requires all the other villagers to react according to some kind of rationality regarding wolves, e.g., they're not treated as variable in their own right, for their own reasons. Maybe in the real village, some of the villagers run for their lives if they conclude the wolf-cry is real. Maybe some lock themselves in their huts, or let their dogs loose, or immediately throw their chickens in the pot so that they'll get to eat soup later rather than let the wolves have a feast. Maybe some grab a torch, sure. Depends a bit on what they think of the wolf-crier--maybe everybody would be just as happy if the wolves got him, because he's the rich kid or he's the perennial fuck-up who always forgets to latch the sheep pen.
And maybe the kid who sees the wolves would just as soon the wolves got the villagers, so he just climbs a tree and shuts his mouth. Or he shouts wolf! all the time to get to the same end, hoping that some day they ignore him and then they'll be sorry while he sits in the tree watching. After all, he was already planning to go to the city someday anyway.
It's just that reputation and prestige are about the *meaning* of actions. To have predictable effects, you'd have to stabilize meaning at both ends and be sure there's no real semantic fluidity in between, which seems not like any moment in the history of relationship between states and polities ever in history.
I think this deserves a longer response, and one more informed by (for instance) your newsletter yesterday, but my gut reaction here is: a lot of social science is analyzing stable but temporary systems as if they were permanent orders of meaning and structure. But they're not! The whole idea of a permanent, integrated alliance like NATO is new, maybe even sui generis, and wouldn't have been feasible or even, really, imaginable--and it's not clear to me that it would even come back later in a similar form. (The pooling of sovereignty that NATO represents is somewhat haphazard, and I can envision a 21st-century version embracing something much more than an alliance, with truly shared military capabilities for instance, that would look like a post-Westphalian arrangement.)
The other part of this is that alliances and related phenomena, like tripwires, bear a lot of burdens. They have to signal to allies, they have to signal to publics, they have to signal to adversaries, and they have to signal to the international community. It's clear that the meaning of those signals is contextual: the risk of a nuclear conflict is much lower than it was in 1960, but higher than it was in 1997, and yet the device we employ remains the same.
So how can we theorize about moving targets? The best answer is probably to recognize that our answers are partial and contextual, not universal and timeless. That's one reason this project attracted me: there is no reason why Art 5 should apply to cyber. Really, there's none--the subsequent statements that any attack as damaging as a physical attack would trigger A5 do so against the spirit and text of the article. But on the other hand the NATO alliance was founded in an era in which a lot was agreed to without being written down, and it's also plainly apparent that a commitment without covering cyber would be a very weak instrument, so NATO *has to* cover cyber! But this is in turn a problem for theories of alliances that hold that explicit guarantees are what count. We get into this a lot more in the paper, but this is one reason I just think that our estimates of the effect size are a better guide than our colleagues'.
It also seems like an example of how theorizing in advance isn't just about studying what an alliance will do but actually potentially substantively interacts with the thought of the alliance. E.g., if you ask, "But does Article 5 apply if a nuclear accident in a non-member state that is the result of hostile action then drifts into a member state's territory?" or "Does Article 5 apply if a river that flows from a non-member state to a member state has its course changed or its waterflow restricted by a new dam in a non-member state" etc. then the very asking of that question may well spur the alliance to interpret its commitments in ways that were never contemplated before.
I think this is exactly right too. The deep history of this project involves thinking through these questions in a way that started with the 1895 Venezuela crisis and led to these sorts of experiments precisely because of the twists and turns of inquiry and theorizing.
I need to spend time digging a bit more into IR scholarship just so I can be confident about this critique, but as a cultural historian looking in, all arguments about probable national actions and reactions that depend on reputation, prestige and credibility are really fascinating because those are treated as concrete, predictable and material dimensions of interstate relations, but all of them are deeply "cultural" and thus exceptionally subject to mutable and contestable interpretation, not just after the fact by scholars but *during* the actual course of events by state and interstate actors.
It seems to me that a lot of discourse about those qualities wants to establish a kind of rule rather like "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", that if you are careful to restrict the crying of wolf to times when there are actually wolves you will get the expected reaction from other villagers. But that requires all the other villagers to react according to some kind of rationality regarding wolves, e.g., they're not treated as variable in their own right, for their own reasons. Maybe in the real village, some of the villagers run for their lives if they conclude the wolf-cry is real. Maybe some lock themselves in their huts, or let their dogs loose, or immediately throw their chickens in the pot so that they'll get to eat soup later rather than let the wolves have a feast. Maybe some grab a torch, sure. Depends a bit on what they think of the wolf-crier--maybe everybody would be just as happy if the wolves got him, because he's the rich kid or he's the perennial fuck-up who always forgets to latch the sheep pen.
And maybe the kid who sees the wolves would just as soon the wolves got the villagers, so he just climbs a tree and shuts his mouth. Or he shouts wolf! all the time to get to the same end, hoping that some day they ignore him and then they'll be sorry while he sits in the tree watching. After all, he was already planning to go to the city someday anyway.
It's just that reputation and prestige are about the *meaning* of actions. To have predictable effects, you'd have to stabilize meaning at both ends and be sure there's no real semantic fluidity in between, which seems not like any moment in the history of relationship between states and polities ever in history.
I think this deserves a longer response, and one more informed by (for instance) your newsletter yesterday, but my gut reaction here is: a lot of social science is analyzing stable but temporary systems as if they were permanent orders of meaning and structure. But they're not! The whole idea of a permanent, integrated alliance like NATO is new, maybe even sui generis, and wouldn't have been feasible or even, really, imaginable--and it's not clear to me that it would even come back later in a similar form. (The pooling of sovereignty that NATO represents is somewhat haphazard, and I can envision a 21st-century version embracing something much more than an alliance, with truly shared military capabilities for instance, that would look like a post-Westphalian arrangement.)
The other part of this is that alliances and related phenomena, like tripwires, bear a lot of burdens. They have to signal to allies, they have to signal to publics, they have to signal to adversaries, and they have to signal to the international community. It's clear that the meaning of those signals is contextual: the risk of a nuclear conflict is much lower than it was in 1960, but higher than it was in 1997, and yet the device we employ remains the same.
So how can we theorize about moving targets? The best answer is probably to recognize that our answers are partial and contextual, not universal and timeless. That's one reason this project attracted me: there is no reason why Art 5 should apply to cyber. Really, there's none--the subsequent statements that any attack as damaging as a physical attack would trigger A5 do so against the spirit and text of the article. But on the other hand the NATO alliance was founded in an era in which a lot was agreed to without being written down, and it's also plainly apparent that a commitment without covering cyber would be a very weak instrument, so NATO *has to* cover cyber! But this is in turn a problem for theories of alliances that hold that explicit guarantees are what count. We get into this a lot more in the paper, but this is one reason I just think that our estimates of the effect size are a better guide than our colleagues'.
It also seems like an example of how theorizing in advance isn't just about studying what an alliance will do but actually potentially substantively interacts with the thought of the alliance. E.g., if you ask, "But does Article 5 apply if a nuclear accident in a non-member state that is the result of hostile action then drifts into a member state's territory?" or "Does Article 5 apply if a river that flows from a non-member state to a member state has its course changed or its waterflow restricted by a new dam in a non-member state" etc. then the very asking of that question may well spur the alliance to interpret its commitments in ways that were never contemplated before.
I think this is exactly right too. The deep history of this project involves thinking through these questions in a way that started with the 1895 Venezuela crisis and led to these sorts of experiments precisely because of the twists and turns of inquiry and theorizing.