Gunboat Diplomacy turns to Air Power Diplomacy in the Resurgent East-West Divide
See The Simons Foundation's Disarming Arctic Security page for briefing papers on military policies and practices in the Arctic region by Ernie Regehr, Senior Fellow in Arctic Security at The Simons Foundation.
Gunboat Diplomacy turns to Air Power Diplomacy in the Resurgent East-West Divide
January 20, 2015
Fighter aircraft probes of Arctic air defences, expanded surveillance and reconnaissance flights, and long-range nuclear bomber patrols seem once again to be the lingua franca of east-west diplomacy. And “East-West relations” is itself once more a term of art in global affairs as Moscow, Washington, and Brussels take up their quarrels and rely increasingly on military gestures do the talking for them. The ostensible point is to communicate strength and resolve, but there is an unavoidable subtext of impotence in posing threats you never want to carry out.
Military symbolism is now literally in full flight. In the dominant western narrative, Russian flights are provocative and dangerous; in the east it’s the reverse, with NATO the provocateur. From Europe to the Arctic to North America, over land and sea, air power diplomacy has taken centre stage.
Russian fighters buzz Canadian frigates in the Black Sea and pose dangers to civilian air traffic over the Baltic Sea. Russian strategic bombers patrol the Beaufort Sea, and NORAD jet fighters are scrambled on cue. US reconnaissance aircraft patrol the Baltic Sea and Baltic States in range of Russian borders, jumping from 22 such flights in 2013 to 141 in 2014 according to Russian Air Force officials. NATO flights near the border of Belarus and near Russia’s Kaliningrad region are said to have doubled over the past year, exceeding 3000 in 2014.
In the 1990s a US Naval War College paper hyped air power as “the new gunboat diplomacy,” arguing it offered greater deployment speed and flexibility and a more credible threat inasmuch as the risk of casualties is kept low for any state wielding the air power. “Gunboat” or any kind of military “diplomacy” is basically the threat, or use, of limited military power in a situation other than war. Some threats are latent – like peacetime naval deployments to show the flag, routine strategic bomber patrols, or, in the context of current East-West tensions, the steady eastward expansion of NATO. Others are more immediate and active – like military operations designed, not to directly engage, but to intimidate an adversary into changing its behavior in the context of a particular crisis.
The point of active air power “diplomacy” is to communicate resolve and unwavering commitment to protecting the particular interests deemed to be at stake. There is realist logic to it when the context is a major imbalance of power – when the state threatening the air power can be fully confident that it can make good on the threat without risking any serious retaliatory action. But that’s not remotely the case in the new East-West stand-off. Neither side can reasonably expect to take direct hostile military action against the other without retaliation and thus paying a major price. So why threaten to do what you at all costs do not want to do? Continue reading....