From motivations and mapping to rules and ordering

Contemporary status scholarship in IR has many predecessors and relates to security in different and often contradictory ways. For those grounded in social identity theory and psychology, status is a distinct motivation that prompts states to pursue foreign policies that go against their security or economic interests (Barnhart, 2017; 2020; Larson and Shevchenko, 2019). Similarly, those that ground their theory in Thorstein Veblen’s sociology contend that status symbols are constituted by visible, reckless waste (Gilady, 2018) as opposed to prudent or rational utilities. Meanwhile, others draw upon classic political philosophers – for example Hobbes, Machiavelli, Thucydides and Rousseau – to posit that glory, honour or pride are timeless human passions (for example de Carvalho and Neumann, 2014; Gilady, 2017). These approaches differ in vocabularies and frameworks, but they share the assumption that states place an intrinsic value on their status in the international system: actors value status for its own sake. Since status re-emerged as a theoretical and empirical research agenda in the 2000s (Larson and Shevchenko, 2003; Wohlforth, 2009; Volgy et al, 2011), the dominant methodological modus operandi for these approaches has been to show how policies that make little sense from a conventional rational perspective, can readily be explained if one assumes status as a motivation. Status is thus usually juxtaposed with security and deemed a dangerous and irrational pursuit, one that states would be wise to forgo or at least temper. This strand of status research has quickly established how a great deal of international politics makes a lot more sense if one assumes big, small, middling, rising and declining powers are all partly driven by status concerns.

The problem with this agenda is not the lack of compelling evidence, but how the status/material interest⁴ binary curtails more sociological inquiries into the status hierarchy itself and focuses instead on parsing the motivations of the actors within it (Beaumont, 2024).⁵ Using the same conventional definition of status – social position in ranking defined by collective beliefs – it is possible to identify status hierarchies (and their consequences) while remaining ambivalent about whether any actor responding to the hierarchy in question is motivated by status or something else. To take an easy example, the Olympic games provides a paradigmatic example of international status competition: players (representing nation states) are ranked in a hierarchy of position based on their performance in various activities requiring skill. ‘Status’ will assuredly motivate some of those taking part, but it need not: some may compete for the material prizes (sponsorship, government funding), others to please their pushy parents; meanwhile, the state governments involved may not care about status themselves but recognize that their electorates do and invest accordingly (see Ward, 2017). Whatever the motivation for taking part, it has little to say about whether the status hierarchies that result from the games are indeed status hierarchies (collective beliefs about rank). What is interesting about the Olympics is not that it is a particularly important case, but that, because it is self-consciously designed to be a well-functioning status competition, the crucial constitutive features of a status competition are so visible: rules (Beaumont, 2024). Indeed, it is the rules of the game(s) that define a status hierarchy and status competition, not the motivation of players involved. At a minimum, this implies that beyond parsing variance in status motivation (see Renshon, 2017), we could potentially study other sorts of status competition through variance in the rules of the game. After all, although Olympic rules are institutionalized and therefore mostly stable, the rules in most international status competitions are not. The major advantage of studying status competitions through the rules of the game would be that it avoids trapping status research in the dastardly difficult quest to ascertain motivations.

While psychological theories of status assume it to be a distinct motivation that can be parsed from more conventional material motivations, the realist-inspired wing of status research emerging from 19th-century Realpolitik avoids this pitfall. This strand of scholarship posits status (or in its terminology, ‘prestige’) to be instrumentally valuable to states as a means to an end. That is, states do not care about status for its own sake, but because it helps them pursue other interests. The seminal work in this school is Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics (1981), in which prestige is defined as ‘reputation for power’. Although this conception is sometimes trivialized as merely an intervening variable, for Gilpin (1981: 31) the intervening it does is fairly crucial: ‘Prestige, rather than power, is the everyday currency of international relations, much as authority is the central ordering feature of domestic society.’ Prestige is ‘enormously important’ because ‘if your strength is recognized, you can generally achieve your aims without having to use it’ (Gilpin, 1981: 31). Those with high prestige can expect others to defer to them and accommodate their interests without the need for the use of force or even explicit threats. Put differently, being secretly powerful would be extremely inefficient in world politics because it would require a state to use, prove and thus exert resources to get its way. As the famous movie Dr Strangelove attests, even a doomsday machine cannot influence enemies’ behaviour if kept a secret. While the instrumentalist school has primarily been concerned with hierarchies of prestige narrowly defined in terms of reputation power, the instrumentalist logic can also be applied to other domains: wherever a state enjoys a prestigious position, that position may come with instrumentally valuable trappings that may provide part of the motivation for seeking it in the first place. Ultimately, this school posits that high status within a hierarchy of one’s peers can provide tangible benefits.

As this short discussion indicates, the Gilpin school of status research enables the way in which prestige – ‘reputation for power’ – is determined, is earned and informs world politics to be investigated without being tied to status as a distinct motivation driving anyone or any state seeking it. However, Gilpin’s initial theorization to some extent pre-structured and prematurely narrowed this agenda by asserting that ‘prestige was ultimately imponderable’ and could only be settled by war, which would then temporarily clarify the hierarchy of power. Hence, prestige scholarship has largely been preoccupied by studying how wars have been waged to retain or pursue status/prestige (see Mercer, 2017, for a critical discussion). For instance, Jonathan Renshon (2017) claims that states that suffer from a mismatch between material power and status recognition have been more prone to wage war to remedy their ‘status deficit’ over the last 200 years. Moreover, he suggests that waging war has generally proven effective at improving recognition and therefore is a rational strategy for a status-concerned state. Notwithstanding the debates about the empirical merits of this research (see Røren and Beaumont, 2019; Ward, 2020), taking inspiration from Gilpin, these works have generally paid less attention to how hierarchies of prestige are constructed, and even organized and maintained in peacetime, by establishing agreed upon public rankings of power and thus prestige.

While the API may indeed provide a useful window into the relative prestige of countries in Asia, Khong (2019: 122–3) remains uninterested in why particular indicators of military power become important or crucial as measure of status/prestige or why each indicator was weighted in the way it was. Moreover, and in line with the assumption of ‘mapping’ comparisons discussed in the introduction, he elides the potential ordering effects of picking one indicator (and thus one principle of comparison) over another, and presumes the existence of an invisible hierarchy of power and prestige that could theoretically be evaluated for accuracy. To reemphasize, there is nothing wrong with such philosophically realist efforts at mapping prestige, but it is also quite possible that such efforts may themselves influence and even co-constitute the status hierarchies they purport to measure.

Indeed, while the API is probably not yet sufficiently significant to have much in the way of ordering effects, as Kerrin Langer’s chapter in this volume reveals, power-mapping practices have been quite influential in structuring the competition for reputation for power (prestige). Indeed, Langer documents how early 20th-century great powers semi-institutionalized a ranking for assessing sea power in terms of number of battleships and tonnage that stood in as a workable and generally agreed upon proxy for power. By virtue of its conventional usage by other powers, this ranking could therefore provide not only a map of the material capabilities of other states, but a reasonable proxy for reputation for power (prestige) as well. Hence, what this metric may have lacked in terms of utility for assessing outcomes in war (it elided the value of submarines, for example), it made up for in providing a shared standard for assessing and thereby ordering the hierarchy of prestige, thus serving the purpose of indicating who should defer to whom without recourse to war. The downside, of course, was that these rules structured and thereby enabled an intense arms race in battleships, and due to its privileging of their number and tonnage as rules of comparison, an ostensibly excessive number of heavy and highly costly ones.

Studying the rules of status competitions

The previous section has undertaken a ground-clearing exercise. It has shown how psychological approaches to status use an analytical strategy that relies upon establishing status as an intrinsic motivation, distinct from security and other material motivations. It then identified how Gilpin’s conception of status as instrumentally useful provided an alternative that could escape this binary (status/material motivations). However, Gilpin-inspired approaches have largely eschewed studying how reputations for power are co-constituted by comparative practices that pretend to merely map. Yet, as Langer in this volume illustrates, these mapping practices can and do influence the object of their assessments by providing a conventionalized – and thus well-shared – understanding of what counts as power. The following section sets out to show how we can study both the social construction of mapping practices and understand how and why they can generate ordering effects. This can be done by marrying the Gilpin’s instrumentalism with an analytical focus on the rules governing any given status competition and on how and why these rules are liable to become conventionalized in public rankings. For the first I draw upon Onuf’s unfortunately overlooked chapter on standing in World of Our Making, before turning to Esposito and Stark’s theorization of why even inaccurate rankings serve useful purposes for status assessments.

To begin, let us first sketch out Onuf’s theorization of the rule-governed nature of interests, which can enable us to differentiate the rules governing status comparisons from other kinds of comparison. For Onuf, at the highest level of abstraction there are only three possible interests and these align with three possible grounds of comparison: what he calls internal, binary and global comparisons. The first, internal comparison, should be immediately familiar as the liberal preference for absolute gains and what Onuf calls an interest in wealth. Though by ‘wealth’ he does not mean just money, but anything of value one can desire and enjoy more of: money, love, knowledge or anything else. For Onuf (1989: 266), this involves comparing ‘any state of affairs in which other people’s attributes, preferences, choices count only as a resource for or obstacle to choice’. For instance, a husband wishing to decide whether to eat porridge or a croissant for breakfast will need to order his preferences, whether it be via taste, cost, health or some other concern. To make this order he needs some kind of rule of comparison, otherwise his preference will be random. What makes this internal, for Onuf, is that others only feature in the comparison as an obstacle or a resource: the husband’s partner may pay (provide resources) for or oppose or endorse one or other breakfast, but that has no necessary relationship to the ordering of preferences in the first place; what others prefer need not be taken into account. Onuf’s second ground of comparison is binary, which Onuf labels interest in security. Here, the grounds for comparison are associated with a realist understanding of relative gains vis-à-vis a single opponent. Here, clearly, one cannot know how much one needs without comparing oneself with the significant other on the relevant criteria.

Finally, and most pertinently, Onuf theorizes that concern for standing must always be founded upon global comparison. By ‘global’ Onuf means a comparison with more than one other entity, rather than one that is global in the geographic sense. This mode of rationality can be understood as analogous to an Olympics: one seeks to do better than the other(s) at a given game with the ultimate goal of being best. Like binary comparison, this mode of rationality is necessarily relational: one cannot aim to be better or best at something without reference to one or more other participants. However, unlike binary comparison, this mode of rationality requires the construction of a ranking system: ‘The set, or whole, then consists of a series of positions occupying a complete and transitive ordering: first place, second place … last place. Furthermore, the places in such an ordering come with cardinal values. … Only now can she say: I want to be best’ (Onuf, 1989: 267). While also relational, unlike binary comparison, global comparison does not involve wanting what the other has in a zero-sum game, but to want to do better than others in some socially valuable thing(s). In order to say that state X is number one in power, democracy or fly-fishing, one needs to have some criteria: is it most tanks or missiles, most fish or biggest fish that matters? Moreover, in order for the hierarchy to be a social hierarchy and for one to be able to plausibly strategize to move up and avoid moving down, some degree of intersubjective agreement on those rules of comparison will be required. Hence, Onuf explicates how any status hierarchy – defined by collective beliefs to do with rank – necessarily depends upon some shared understanding of the rules of comparison. If there were no rules underpinning high/low status, one would not know how to compete for it (Onuf, 1989: 267) and status seeking would be a crapshoot.

Onuf allows us to rephrase the question facing status researchers: ‘How can we ascertain collective beliefs?’ to ‘How are the rules governing “collective beliefs” about rank formed? How do these “collectives”, whoever they are and wherever they may be, construct their ranking system?’ The difficulty of this task for any single individual may at first make the researcher despair; how can we empirically investigate how these people construct their systems for global comparison. But it is precisely the difficulty involved in constructing a ranking – selecting the right rules or gathering the evidence – that gives rise to the shortcuts provided by society. We tend not to do it ourselves but instead outsource the task and rely upon conventions, that is, socially standardized modes of comparison: for instance, GDP is a widely accepted means of ranking states according to wealth or development, even though many if not most of those using it would agree that it is an imperfect measure. If one simply wanted accuracy, one might be tempted to develop one’s own bespoke system of comparison that departed from the convention. Yet, utilizing a bespoke ranking system in a world where others respond to and act on the basis of the conventional ranking is potentially costly: for instance, if other states use tonnage to assess naval power while one state cleverly pioneers a ranking based on submarines, that state’s cleverness may lead it into avoidable conflict as others seek to exploit its apparent weakness by conventional standards. It pays to follow the herd in other words, and public, conventionalized rankings provide a window into the herd’s collective beliefs.

Indeed, Esposito and Stark (2019) highlight the broader social function of public rankings (rather than to accurately map reality), which can account for the persistent popularity of inaccurate rankings. For them (2019: 4), public rankings are not popular because they adequately describe the ‘independent world (for which they are inevitably flawed …)’ but because they ‘provide an orientation about what others observe’. Indeed, they contend that public ranking systems – especially conventional ones – are best understood as social technologies that allow us to ascertain – or second-guess with confidence – audience beliefs. While Esposito and Stark do not make the link explicit, they provide grounds for believing that international rankings – when conventionalized – operate as a window into collective beliefs about a state’s status in the phenomenon that the ranking purports to measure. Moreover, if the herd’s assessment can help or harm the rankees, then they would have a Gilpinian interest in pursuing a position in that ranking even if they know it to be inaccurate. Hence, from a status perspective, when mappers debate the accuracy of widely recognized power rankings, they miss the point: it is not the accuracy of the measure but the extent of its use – where, by whom and for what purpose – that makes it valuable for ascertaining ‘collective beliefs’ about rank. Ultimately, Onuf and Esposito and Stark provide a theoretical warrant for studying status hierarchies – and their effects – via the prevalence, contestation and conventionalization of concrete public modes of comparison and ranking.

The US’s SALT strategy: how status became security

To illustrate how public efforts at mapping objective hierarchies conventionalize the rules of comparison enabling actors to make educated and consequential guesses about status, I turn to the case of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). In particular, the case study explores the backstage process through which the United States determined its negotiating position from SALT I to SALT II and specifically how it determined which rules – grounds of comparison – to assess the nuclear balance by, and how and why it settled upon aggregate number of launchers. Besides practical reasons, the US side of the negotiation is selected because it provides a harder case for my approach: Russia’s status obsession is already well documented, whereas the US has received considerably less attention. Moreover, although I would argue that the high visibility, public salience and exclusivity of nuclear weapons makes arms control likely to become imbricated with status concerns, security scholars tend to contend that the high politics of arms control is dominated by hardheaded strategic analysis. Therefore, if the rules the US used to assess the strategic balance when forming their negotiating strategy were dictated by third-party audiences rather than their own strategic analysis, then it would help convince security scholars that similar processes could be at work in lower politics too.

SALT was premised upon the idea that the superpowers shared an interest in reducing the risk of nuclear war by implementing more stable force structures and reducing the costs of strategic arms racing that would leave neither side safer, only poorer. The SALT processes spanned a decade and three presidencies (Richard Nixon’s, Gerald Ford’s and Jimmy Carter’s) and initially seemed successful. ‘SALT I’ led to the signing and ratification in 1972 of the ABM treaty (Treaty between the United States of America and the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems), which limited each side to two anti-ballistic missile sites apiece, and the ‘Interim Agreement’ (Interim Agreement between The United States of America and The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Certain Measures with respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms), which froze for five years the level of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at 1972 levels. The SALT II process would eventually lead to the SALT Treaty (Treaty between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms), which limited both sides to 2,250 strategic nuclear missiles, and 1,320 missiles equipped with multiple re-entry vehicles (MIRVs). However, the SALT II Treaty took over six years and three US presidents to negotiate and, while it was eventually signed in 1979, it never reached the Senate for ratification because the administration cancelled the vote following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The conventional story has it that SALT II was hamstrung by fears of cheating, a mutual obsession with letting the other side achieve relative gains and thereby enabling them to gain political or military advantages in crisis situations. If this were the case, we would expect that the negotiations strategy of the United States would use systems of comparison by which to assess dyadic outcomes: political (the ability to make the other side back down) or military (for example, the ability to ‘win’ a nuclear war).

In fact, during SALT I talks, as national security advisor to the president, Henry Kissinger strongly opposed demands for an agreement with equal numerical aggregates. He argued that not only did the various US capabilities that fell outside the agreement (MIRVS, forward-based systems such as bombers in Europe) offset any numerical disparity, but, given that the US lacked plans to build either new SLBMs or ICBMs, any freeze on the Soviet side would be to the US’s advantage. Kissinger would defend SALT I along similar lines throughout SALT II. Thus, it was better to limit the Soviets than do nothing; the US would make relative gains regardless of the perception of inequality. Ultimately, the military did not get their way: the interim agreement that emerged out of SALT I froze the SLBMs and ICBMs at levels whereby the US were permitted fewer submarine and land-based launches. Kissinger would see this result as a remarkable negotiating feat. As he put it, the US had not been ‘stopped’ from doing anything they had planned, while the Soviet’s build-up had been halted. In fact, Kissinger considered it ‘miraculous’ that the US had managed to limit submarines and ICBMs ‘when we had next to no chips’ (FRUS, 1972: 957). Here we can clearly see how Kissinger’s concern for relative gains did not necessarily mean being allowed more launchers than the Soviets under the treaty or even the same number, but was calculated relative to what would have transpired without a treaty.

Note the role of the Jackson Amendment here in providing a plausible window into how domestic audiences would assess the balance and therefore a window into how the US reputation for nuclear power among domestic audiences would be affected by the agreement. It was named after the hawkish senator, Henry Jackson, who had publicly spoken out against the SALT I Interim Agreement’s provisions, arguing that the freeze froze the United States into a position of ‘sub-parity’ and would put the United States at a disadvantage (New York Times, 1972). Jackson thus sought to attach a Congressional understanding to the interim agreement. The Jackson Amendment, as it became known, demanded that any future SALT agreement must have ‘equal numbers of intercontinental strategic launchers taking account of throw weight’.

While the amendment itself was non-binding and the government would later consider breaching it, by accepting the amendment, they legitimated the criterion of aggregate number of launchers as a means of comparing the nuclear powers arsenals in SALT II, and therefore of how equality should be assessed. Hence, despite its inadequacy as a measure of nuclear balance, which Schlesinger and other advocates of equal launchers freely admitted backstage (for example, FRUS 1974b: 332; FRUS, 1974c: 374), it served the purpose that Esposito and Stark (2019) attribute to public rankings: providing an ‘orientation about what others observe’, in this case what, or perhaps how domestic audiences would assess the outcome of a future strategic arms limitation treaty. Indeed, Jackson’s amendment was frequently used as a reference point and evidence for gauging how domestic audiences would assess a treaty (see FRUS 1974a: 364; 1974b: 330).

However, numerical equality was not the only grounds of comparison the administration expected the domestic audience to use to assess SALT II, the fallout from SALT I led them to believe it was how their allies would assess the treaty. For instance, during his backstage campaign for prioritizing numerical equality in launchers, Schlesinger recounted a conversation he had had with the Japanese minister of defence about SALT I, as evidence for why equal aggregates were crucial: ‘He asked me why we accepted an unequal agreement in 1972. I answered him that we had a technological advantage. But this is to point out that the perception is there in third parties’ (FRUS, 1974a: 364). But, Schlesinger went on, it was not only the Japanese, ‘there is a problem of appearance in Europe. The agreement is perceived as unequal’ (FRUS, 1974a: 364, emphasis added). Backing up Schlesinger, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) frequently emphasized the importance of perceptions of equality rather than the importance of equality per se. As the backstage debate surrounding how to assess equality heated up, Schlesinger expressed the priority of diplomatic and political advantages even more bluntly. For instance, rounding off his contribution to one acrimonious National Security Council (NSC) meeting on SALT II he argued that ‘[on] the question of equal aggregates, it is politically and diplomatically crucial. Perhaps, it is the most critical feature. We can live with an increase in instability, but it would be difficult not to come up to their level’ (FRUS 1974a: 367, emphasis added). Finally, Presidents Ford and Nixon both also raised concerns about how various audiences would interpret any deal that did not appear equal. At an NSC meeting in 1973, President Nixon asserted that the US must take into account how SALT ‘appear[s] to other countries, since this is what affects our foreign policy’ (FRUS, 1973: 50, emphasis added).

Hence, between SALT I and SALT II equality in aggregates became a priority in the negotiations and this was justified primarily in reference to how key audiences would assess the outcome of the treaty. As I have highlighted elsewhere (Beaumont, 2024), the prioritization of exact equality of aggregates, against their own strategic assessments, slowed down negotiations and removed a bargaining chip from both hawks, who aspired to limit the Soviet heavy bombers, and doves, who wished to achieve significant cuts in the arsenals.

Conclusion

The preceding discussion and vignette have sought to speak to the volume’s core theoretical concerns: how can comparative knowledge become salient in international security politics, and how and why should IR research foreground comparative practices? First, the vignette illustrated how public efforts at objectively mapping the nuclear balance – by counting launchers – could be turned into a rule for making educated guesses about the status implications of a potential SALT agreement. Indeed, as we saw, the Japanese foreign minister’s view of SALT I and the Jackson Amendment served as compelling evidence backstage to predict what rule of comparison domestic and international audiences would use to assess the nuclear balance in the wake of an agreement. They thus provided a plausible window into how the status implications of any treaty would vary according to how the agreement performed according to this rule of comparison. Second, the fact that equality in launchers only emerged as the key rule of comparison out of the backlash against SALT I indicates the value of historically investigating how mapping practices become constituted as reference points for status. Conversely, it illuminates the danger of attempting to retrospectively use the same proxy for status across time and space, as some large N status scholarship has been wont to do (see Volgy et al, 2011; Renshon, 2017). Third, on the advantages of studying status through comparative practices, the chapter has argued that foregrounding how rules of comparison for status emerge, change or are contested enables us to study status dynamics without needing to parse security and status motivations. Indeed, although the US side’s eventual prioritization of equality in launchers was explicitly legitimated by reference to domestic and international audiences, this certainly does not rule out security as a motivation.⁶ Convincing their domestic audiences and allies that the US did not ‘lose’ as a result of the SALT II Treaty would be consistent with a motivation for security broadly understood. To paraphrase Gilpin, the US was merely maximizing the everyday currency of international politics.

Finally, this chapter also allows us to mount a defence of the dogmatic army general of popular imagination. Generals are always preparing to fight the last war, the old aphorism runs. As conservative as they are dogmatic, they prepare to attack on horses when they should practise sitting in trenches. This tendency is usually deemed at best inefficient and at worst tragic. Yet, the preceding analysis can shine a more sympathetic light on our imaginary generals. Deterring enemies requires they appreciate the implications of waging war. Maintaining allies requires they appreciate the potential of one’s military power. Indeed, deterrence and deference do not depend upon what would really happen in war. Instead, they are social outcomes: they depend upon what others expect would occur and this may not be the same thing. If your enemies and allies are preparing for the last war, then deterrence of the enemy and ally loyalty will require the prudent general to do so too. Indeed, although the US military and Secretary of Defense accepted that the relative aggregate number of launchers was a suboptimal means of assessing the nuclear balance and the treaty, they could not afford to ignore it because this was the system of comparison by which international and domestic audiences evaluated the military position. In short, the US generals had to prepare for the last war and the next war at the same time.