Intentional Costs? How Great Powers Utilize IOs

Abstract

Channels of Power: The UN Security Council and U.S. Statecraft in Iraq. By Alexander Thompson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. 261 pp., $39.95 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-4718-1). Why do great powers so often seek to gain the blessing of international organizations when considering the use of force in international politics and when their resources allow for unilateral or more flexible coalitions (p. 2)? Although constructivist and rationalist explanations for states’ use of IOs have helped elucidate, respectively, IO normative and bargaining effects, Alexander Thompson argues that these approaches fail to theoretically address when and under which circumstances states will activate the IOs (p. 9). According to Thompson, states use different IOs at different times and for different ends, a strategic calculation that demands viewing IOs as an element of “statecraft,” or “the strategic exercise of power and influence by states” (p. 9). Considering the international politics of the last eight years in regard to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, this perspective deserves thorough exploration and theorizing, and Thompson provides solid ground upon which to build the effort. Thompson's central thesis in Channels of Power is that IOs are vessels of “strategic information transmission” on matters of international security in that leaders of coercing states can use IOs to “signal benign intentions” to the leaders and publics of non-targeted states (p. 5). In so doing, coercing states indicate their willingness to be potentially constrained in the execution of the coercion in exchange for political legitimacy. The implication of this thesis is that, in the modern political context, IOs impose a legitimacy cost to coercers, but working through IOs is the most efficient means of communicating non-threatening policy intentions to third-party foreign leaders and their publics. Foreign publics …