| Summary: | For more than a century, nations have engaged in defense diplomacy to cultivate mutual understanding and mitigate conflict. A subset of defense diplomacy is strategic engagement, defined as peacetime defense diplomacy between nations that are actual or potential adversaries. Strategic engagement is defense diplomacy which leads to the establishment of instruments that allow otherwise adversarial states to manage their relationships with the ultimate goal of diminishing the risk of interstate conflict. Strategic engagement extends well beyond official and unofficial dialogues, involving defense attachés, exchange of military personnel, ship visits, and other activities. The purpose of this study is to analyze three cases of strategic engagement extending from the 20th century to the present, in order to elucidate the factors which contribute to success or failure of strategic engagement in preventing conflict. The study employs an inductive framework inspired by Alexander George, utilizing structured, focused comparison of strategic engagement in the following three cases: U.K.-German defense diplomacy prior to World War I, U.S.-Soviet defense diplomacy during the Cold War (with emphasis upon the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement and the U.S.-Soviet Standing Consultative Commission), and post-Cold War U.S.-China defense diplomacy. These case studies represent potential adversaries ostensibly attempting to avert interstate conflict, albeit with divergent results. Existing literature and the major theoretical paradigms do not adequately explain the role of defense diplomacy in preventing interstate conflict between adversarial nations. Based upon archival, literature, and personal interview research, I argue that defense diplomacy can mitigate the risk of interstate conflict between potential adversaries. The lessons learned from this dissertation can be employed to discern the significant elements conducive to achieving a successful outcome of strategic engagement and avert conflict or even war.
Keywords: Diplomacy; Defense Diplomacy; Military Diplomacy; Military-to-military relations; Strategic engagement
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