Risk-free Coercion? Technological Disparity and Coercive Diplomacy

One of the contemporary arguments made in support of fielding revolutionary military technologies is that technological dominance not only decides the outcome of major wars, but enhances a nation's coercive power in dealing with low-end threats. Currently, a new generation of technophiles claims that unmanned and robotic systems are revolutionizing warfare, increasing the ability of advanced states to coerce states and societies that lag behind. Yet historically, technological dominance at the tactical level has a mixed record when projected into the diplomatic realm. The article analyzes the effectiveness of low-risk, over the horizon coercion from an historical viewpoint, assessing the effectiveness of gunboat diplomacy, air policing, and the ‘Tomahawk diplomacy’ of the 1990s. The author claims that the historical record indicates that gunboat diplomacy, air policing, and over the horizon coercion is more problematic than commonly portrayed, with the boundaries between coercive diplomacy and sa...