The Dynamics of Conflict and Diplomacy in Asia

Abstract

The Dynamics of Conflict and Diplomacy in Asia Prashanth Parameswaran (bio) Though the observation attributed to Winston Churchill that "to jaw-jaw is better than to war-war" is often quoted by officials today to express a preference for peace over war as separate outcomes, the complex interactions between diplomacy and conflict are still far from fully understood.1 In The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime, Oriana Skylar Mastro offers an insightful treatment of the important but underexamined question of what drives warring parties to pursue diplomacy. Mastro argues that calculations about strategic costs—specifically, interpretations of weakness on the part of the enemy ("adverse inference") and how the enemy may change its strategy in response to that interpretation ("strategic capacity")—drive the extent of willingness on the part of states to talk to the enemy. Mastro's original framework for explaining wartime diplomatic posture provides a useful window into how states calculate the costs of conversation during war and generates clear and specific predictions for testing against alternative explanations. The four main cases examined in the book—China in the Korean War, China in the Sino-Indian War, India in the Sino-Indian War, and North Vietnam in the Vietnam War—proceed clearly, with keen attention to various decision points within these conflicts as well as to how they affect the timing and conditions for continuities and changes in diplomatic postures. The clearly defined case selection criteria Mastro adopts upfront does leave out some episodes of conflict in Asia during the Cold War, including the India-Pakistan conflicts and the Sino-Vietnamese War. But the four episodes examined in the book do nonetheless represent significant and diverse cases, with variation in regime type, relative capabilities, [End Page 174] and diplomatic posture while also controlling for regional effects and international conditions by restricting the cases to a twenty-year period (p. 31). The additional explorations of the United States in both the Korean War (pp. 56–60) and the Vietnam War (pp. 122–24) are also useful in extending the argument, even if the level of detail provided is much less than in the four primary case studies. Overall, the book makes a persuasive and nuanced case for the explanatory power of the costly conversations thesis in these four episodes and three wars. While Mastro's wartime diplomatic posture framework itself initially draws a clear distinction between low and high strategic costs and a dichotomy between open and closed diplomatic postures, the exploration of the cases themselves repeatedly acknowledges the complexity that is evident to those familiar with these dynamics. This includes China's hedging of its bets even as it moved to an open diplomatic posture during the Korean War (pp. 49–51) and the limited openness that India displayed during the Sino-Indian War even as its behavior still fit the definition of a closed diplomatic posture (p. 95). The book also engages with alternative explanations thoroughly in each of the four cases. As Mastro herself acknowledges, other accounts do place greater weight on the role of rationalist, ideational, domestic, and international factors in aspects of each case, which is no surprise given the involvement of outside powers in all three wars as well as the role of dominant personalities such as Mao Zedong and Jawaharlal Nehru. The book's approach of isolating and then testing alternative explanations against the evidence utilized has value in this respect, even if disagreements are likely to persist over important aspects, such as the extent to which internal politics implicitly shaped Nehru's decision-making during the Sino-Indian War or the inextricable link made in some accounts between domestic and international considerations in Mao's "continuous revolution" during the Korean War.2 For the most part, Mastro makes a convincing case that these other factors played a supporting but not dominant role in specific decisions that affected continuities and changes in wartime diplomatic posture. The book also raises questions about how the argument could be further tested. For instance, although the strategic logic of the costly conversations thesis may not be time-bound, more recent cases could help test the [End Page 175] argument in contemporary settings...