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No abstract

There has not been much formal or empirical research on the impact of Cold War-era arms transfers on regional subsystems, and the work that has been undertaken is inconclusive: arms transfers appear, in some cases, to promote stability, but in other situations they are shown to be destabilizing. This study confronts the issue directly by developing and testing both stability and instability models of Superpower (U.S. and USSR) and third-country arms transfers. The models examine the effects of exported arms on the political and military relationships between three sets of rival importers-India-Pakistan, Iran-Iraq, and Ethiopia-Somalia-during the 1950-1991 period. Tests of the models with recently released arms trade data reveal that the weapons shipments of the U.S. and USSR were profoundly destabilizing, while those of third parties generally had little impact on subsystem political and military relationships. An intriguing exception to these patterns is the weapons transfers of the PRC, specifically to Pakistan: these are found to have lessened the military imbalance between Pakistan and India, suggesting that the PRC's reputation as an irresponsible exporter deserves further review. This paper examines the impact of Cold War-era arms transfers on Third World rivalries. It concentrates on particular elements of a fuzzy systems model that had been developed previously (Sanjian, 1995(Sanjian, , 1998 to study the consequences of U.S. and USSR arms transfers on the India-Pakistan political and strategic subsystem. Prior tests of the model indicate that it was constructed properly, which is at once both gratifying and disturbing. It is gratifying to find that the model captured the effects of Superpower arms transfers, but disturbing to discover that a model so cynical should be that accurate. According to the model, U.S. and USSR arms transfers contributed to either the onset or the perpetuation of hostile political relations and imbalanced military relationships between rival importers. The Superpowers did not necessarily seek those outcomes; they were merely the costs of their pursuit of other objectives. What the U.S. and USSR wanted to achieve were patron-client dependency relationships, and each used arms transfers to discipline its partner for behaving badly: suspending arms shipments to the client for securing excessive amounts of arms from third parties, or any arms at all from the opposing Superpower. All of this is what the model proposed, and all of this is what seems to have happened in the India-Pakistan case.

This article develops a fuzzy set model of group decision-making and then applies the model to the debate that took place between the NATO states in 1989 over whether to modernize the alliance's short-range nuclear missiles or negotiate a force reduction agreement with the WTO. The NATO partners decided what to do at their May 1989 Brussels summit. From among four discernible courses of action - x1 = modernize, x2 = negotiate, x3 = modernize and negotiate, and x4 = neither modernize nor negotiate - the alliance agreed to negotiate ( x2) with the WTO. It is the organization's path to this decision that is conceptualized as being fuzzy. The sixteen NATO allies' individual preference orderings of the four alternatives are first determined via a content analysis of reports on their discussions. These preference orderings are then used to define a fuzzy group preference relation describing the extent to which each alternative is preferred to the others by the entire alliance. Derived from the fuzzy group relation is then NATO's optimal preference ordering (which, at Brussels, was ( x2, x4, x3, x1)) as well as the organization's fuzzy level of agreement for that ordering (a very weak .56). Subsequent analysis also reveals that the group's optimal preference ordering was the reverse of the United State's preference ordering at the outset of the summit and identical to the preference ordering of Germany. The implications of this outcome for future NATO decisions are discussed.

This paper presents a fuzzy systems model of the effects of U.S. and USSR arms transfers on the political and strategic relationships between India and Pakistan during the period 1951–1976. The relationships between the importers are represented in the model by two system transformation equations. These equations stipulate that changes from t to t+1 (where t = one year) in the political and strategic relationships between India and Pakistan will be functions of those actors' relationships at t and U.S. and USSR arms transfers during the same time period. The political and strategic relationships between India and Pakistan are represented in the model by fuzzy variables: one variable identifies the degree to which there is political cooperation between the importers; another measures the degree of military balance. The model is tested by using COPDAB and SIPRI data on political relations, the military balance, and arms transfer inputs at t to predict the fuzzy levels of cooperation and military balance between India and Pakistan at t+1 (for every year of the 1951–1976 time frame). Pearson product-moment correlations between, on the one hand, the predicted levels of cooperation and military balance and, on the other hand, observations on those variables at t+I are r = .77 (for cooperation) and r = .75 (for military balance).