Resolve in International Politics - Chapter 1

On January 12, 2010, an earthquake struck the island nation of Haiti, reducing much of the capital city of Port-au-Prince to rubble. In the days afterward, as the casualty estimates grew by the hundreds of thousands and the international community turned its attention toward rebuilding the ravaged country, pundits pontificated on the uphill battle faced by a country that had suffered as many man-made disasters as natural ones. Bob Herbert, writing in the New York Times, struck an optimistic note: the Haitians would succeed, he argued, because they had shown “resolve among the ruins.”1 Herbert is not alone in positing resolve and its synonyms—willpower, selfcontrol, dedication, tenacity, determination, drive, and so on—as a solution to political problems. The collapse of the Mubarak regime in Egypt has frequently been attributed to the resolve of the protesters in Tahrir Square (“their determination is unshakeable,” noted the editor of the Egyptian Daily News), while the same attribute has been used to account for the opposite event in neighboring Libya, whereMoammar Qadaffi clung to power despite months of NATO airstrikes and armed insurrection (“War is largely about willpower,” wrote an analyst for the DC-based Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “and Qadaffi currently holds the upper hand on this front”).2 When militants from the Islamic State regained control of Ramadi in May 2015 despite being outnumbered by Iraqi Security Forces, American Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter blamed the Iraqis’ defeat on their lack of a “will to fight.”3 Writing several years prior in The Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer dismissed prophecies of American decline by arguing that “decline is a choice” rather than “a condition,” and that the slide toward multipolarity can therefore