Conclusion

Arguments and Primary Findings

Inadvertent expansion is territorial expansion that is planned and executed by actors on the periphery of a state or empire, without the necessary authorization of leaders in the capital. In chapter 1, I argued that inadvertent expansion is a process that tends to unfold in two basic steps. The first step is what I referred to as “unauthorized peripheral expansion.” This occurs when state and nonstate actors on the periphery of a state or empire plan and execute instances of territorial expansion, without the authorization or support of leaders at home in the capital. The second step is what I referred to as “subsequent central authorization.” This occurs when these peripheral actors, having claimed foreign territory without the authority to do so, present leaders in the capital with their claims as a fait accompli, and these leaders are then forced to decide whether to accept or reject the territorial claim.

The theory of inadvertent expansion presented in chapter 1 made three central arguments. First, that the most important explanation for unauthorized peripheral expansion is the degree of control leaders in the capital have over the periphery. Unauthorized peripheral expansion is best understood as a principal-agent problem, where diverse preferences between the capital and the periphery, and information asymmetries favoring the latter, help create the conditions for peripheral actors to engage in unauthorized expansion. When leaders in the capital have the ability to regularly monitor the behavior of their peripheral agents—typically, though not exclusively, in the form of rapid communications technology—unauthorized peripheral expansion is much less likely to occur. In contrast, when leaders in the capital lack the ability to regularly monitor their peripheral agents, unauthorized peripheral expansion will be far more likely. Thus, the first step of inadvertent expansion is crucially about control. It should be most likely to occur where centralized control is at its weakest.

The second key argument in the theory of inadvertent expansion is that the very act of unauthorized peripheral expansion changes “the facts on the ground” and thereby alters the strategic calculus facing leaders in the capital. Peripheral expansion generates constraints on central leaders, pressuring them to consider retaining the territory when they otherwise would not, and it does so for three basic reasons. First, unauthorized peripheral expansion often sinks the costs of acquiring the territory in question. Because these peripheral agents have already irrecoverably expended the costs of expansion on behalf of the state or empire, leaders will tend to see withdrawal and relinquishment as a wasted opportunity. Second, unauthorized peripheral expansion will frequently generate domestic political pressure on the leaders to support their own agents and nationals, regardless of their insubordination or unscrupulousness. Leaders may be influenced by political, military, or imperial elites in and around the capital, or the public at large may become aware of events on the frontier and rally to the cause of their conationals, putting pressure on the leaders. Third, unauthorized peripheral expansion tends to engage the state or empire’s prestige, honor, and reputation in a way it simply was not engaged before. Once a territory has been partly or wholly acquired, it often appears difficult, if not impossible, to back down and relinquish the claims without an unacceptable stain on the national honor. Thus, unauthorized peripheral expansion tends to generate constraints on leaders and encourage territorial retention.

The third central argument of the theory of inadvertent expansion is that leaders’ ultimate decision to either accept or reject the territorial fait accompli is crucially conditioned by the geopolitical risk associated with doing so. When there are expectations of significant geopolitical risk associated with acquisition—in the form of crippling economic isolation, armed conflict with a regional power, or encroaching on the interests of a rival great power—leaders will be far less likely to accept the fait accompli and retain the territory. In contrast, when there is little perceived geopolitical risk associated with acquisition, these leaders will be far more likely to accept the territorial fait accompli, thereby completing the process of inadvertent expansion.

These arguments were supported with a variety of different kinds of empirical evidence. Chapter 2 focused on the broad patterns of strategic and inadvertent expansion over the past two hundred years. It presented data on great power territorial expansion from 1816 to the present and included three central findings. First, that inadvertent expansion is a surprisingly general phenomenon, occurring in nearly one-in-four cases of territorial expansion by the great powers. Second, that cases of great power territorial expansion are significantly more likely to be inadvertent when the territory in question lacks a connection to the global telegraph network. And third, that cases of great power territorial expansion are significantly less likely to be inadvertent when they involve considerable geopolitical risk. These last two findings remain strong and significant even when controlling for a number of important potentially confounding variables, including the passage of time, the distance from the capital to the territory in question, whether the expansion took place as part of a broader conflict, whether the expansion took the form of annexation rather than conquest, and the strength of the great power’s institutions, its regime type, and its relative power.

Chapters 3–7 then presented a series of paired comparative case studies of successful and failed inadvertent expansion in the history of great power politics. Chapter 3 presented two cases of the United States in the American South. In the case of Florida, a lack of control by Washington over its southern frontier allowed Andrew Jackson to independently claim Spanish Florida for the United States. And a combination of domestic political pressure and expectations within the Monroe administration of only modest amounts of geopolitical risk encouraged it to retain Jackson’s territorial claims in 1819. In the 1836–37 case of Texas, by contrast, the desire to avoid what was seen as a likely war with Mexico pressured the administration of then-president Andrew Jackson to pass up the opportunity to acquire the newly independent republic, despite domestic political pressure to the contrary.

Chapter 4 presented two cases of Russia on the Central Asian Steppe. In the case of the Khanate of Kokand, a lack of control by St. Petersburg over its peripheral agents enabled Mikhail Cherniaev to independently conquer the cities of Chimkent and Tashkent. The absence of geopolitical risk associated with this acquisition, as well as honor concerns among Russian leaders, led to the retention of these Kokandian territories in 1866. In the case of the Ili region, by contrast, a similarly unauthorized territorial claim by Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman was turned back by St. Petersburg in 1881, after a nearly ten-year occupation. Despite the emergence of both domestic political pressure in St. Petersburg and honor concerns among Russian leaders, fear of war with China over the distant territory was enough for them to relinquish the territorial claim.

Chapter 5 presented two cases of France in the Southeast Asian region of Tonkin. In the first case, occurring in 1873–74, a lack of control by Paris over its peripheral agents allowed François Garnier to independently claim Tonkin for the French Empire. However, after his death, Paris would return the territory to local Vietnamese authorities due to concerns over the potentially adverse reactions of Germany and the United Kingdom. In the second case, occurring in 1882–83, a similar lack of central control enabled Henri Rivière to, again, claim Tonkin on behalf of the empire without authorization from Paris. In this case, however, a combination of honor concerns and few expected geopolitical risks associated with retaining the territory by French leaders resulted in Tonkin’s acquisition. While French leaders consistently downplayed the risks of Chinese intervention, they were ultimately mistaken, and war with China would, indeed, result. Yet, the expectations and resultant behavior of leaders in Paris were consistent with the theory of inadvertent expansion.

Chapter 6 presented the comparative cases of Japan in Manchuria and Italy in the port city of Fiume. These two cases were noteworthy in that it was pathological civil-military relations, rather than rudimentary communications technology, that led to a lack of control by these capitals over their peripheral agents. In the Japan case, the independence of the Kwantung Army vis-à-vis Tokyo allowed it to launch the invasion of Manchuria in September 1931. Domestic political pressure in this case was particularly grave, leading to the fall of one prime minister (Wakatsuki) and the later assassination of another (Inukai). And, while concerns of geopolitical risk were initially very high among leaders in Tokyo, over time these concerns dissipated, leading to the territory’s retention by March 1932. In the Italy case, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s unauthorized conquest of the port city of Fiume was aided and abetted by much of the Italian military, against direct orders from leaders in Rome. Yet, despite significant domestic political support for the conquest, leaders in the capital quickly decided to reject the territorial fait accompli out of concern over the harsh reactions of France, the United Kingdom, and, most important, the United States.

Chapter 7 was the final empirical chapter of the book, presenting two cases of Germany in East Africa. These two cases were also noteworthy, in that they presented the book’s only two cases of inadvertent expansion via territorial annexation, the previous cases having all consisted of armed conquest. In the first case, a German colonial organization led by Carl Peters annexed a number of territories in what would later become German East Africa. And the absence of geopolitical risk associated with these annexations, along with domestic political pressure in Berlin, led the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck to retain the territorial claims in 1885. In the second case, by contrast, Peters’s unauthorized annexations through Kenya and Uganda would ultimately be rejected by Kaiser Wilhelm II in Berlin in 1890. Despite domestic political pressure to the contrary, concern among German leaders regarding a potential conflict with the United Kingdom over the territory encouraged relinquishment.

In sum, the theory of inadvertent expansion was given strong support using both comprehensive quantitative data as well as a variety of historical comparative case studies. The quantitative analysis and nearly all of the cases suggest that inadvertent expansion is well characterized as a principal-agent problem, with the delegation of authority from the capital to the periphery leading to a loss of control and unauthorized peripheral expansion. It is also clear that the very act of peripheral agents engaging in unauthorized expansion helps generate constraints on leaders, which make relinquishing the territorial claims difficult. In all cases of inadvertent expansion presented, sunk costs, domestic political pressure, or honor concerns emerged to constrain leaders’ freedom of choice regarding the territory. Finally, the data analysis and all cases support the idea that geopolitical risk is a crucial factor in leader decisions about whether to accept or reject their agents’ territorial claims.

Contemporary Relevance

The last documented case of inadvertent expansion by the great powers was nearly a century ago, with Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria. The global spread of rapid modern communications technology—from the telegraph to the telephone, to the internet—has meant that central governments are much better able to monitor and control the behavior of their agents around the world. Similarly, the past few decades have seen the steady ascendancy of civilians over militaries in governments worldwide. According to data on military participation in government, the share of active-duty military in cabinets worldwide averaged around 12 percent in 1975 but had declined to around 2 percent by 2008. Among the major powers, this figure averaged between 2 percent and 3 percent between 1965 and 2008.1 Thus, with both technology and civilian ascendancy increasing the control that central governments have over their agents on their borders and beyond, there are far fewer opportunities for inadvertent expansion than there once were, particularly among the world’s most powerful and technologically advanced states.

However, inadvertent expansion is not entirely a relic of the past. Despite its historical nature, the phenomenon is contemporarily relevant in at least three important ways. The first has to do with the role inadvertent expansion may have played in the broader decline of territorial conquest. It is a well-documented research finding in international relations scholarship that large-scale territorial conquest has declined dramatically since 1945.2 According to the “Territorial Change Data,” there were 210 instances of conquest and annexation between 1816 and 1945—a rate of 1.6 per year; yet there were only 26 such instances after 1945—a rate of just 0.4 per year.3 Among great powers, the decline is even starker. According to the data I presented in chapter 2, there were 254 instances of territorial expansion by the great powers from 1816 to 1945 but just 4 from 1946 to the present. These figures notwithstanding, it is important not to overstate the extent of this decline. As Dan Altman points out, and as I make clear regarding my own data in chapter 2, the existing expansion data typically only include successful cases of expansion, not both successful and failed expansion attempts. Altman examines conquest attempts from 1918 to the present and shows that smaller-scale conquests, what he refers to as “land grabs,” have continued, suggesting more evolutionary change than dramatic decline.4 Yet, it remains the case that large-scale conquest by the great powers has become exceedingly rare. Why might this be?

There are many plausible explanations for the decline of large-scale conquest. For example, the advent of the nuclear era in 1945 meant that states could pay significantly higher costs for engaging in territorial expansion, especially onto the territory of nuclear states and their close allies.5 Economic globalization and a shift toward knowledge-based economies has also meant that many of the benefits of conquest can be acquired through much less costly means, such as trade and investment, and that extracting economic gains through occupation has become far more difficult.6 The emergence of a territorial integrity norm—the idea that force should not be used to alter state borders—has also likely played a role in this decline.7 And some also argue that the emergence of international law regulating conquest and conflict has itself contributed to this decline.8 Yet, it is also noteworthy that as global communications technology has improved, and as states have become more centralized in their foreign policy decision-making, an important historical pathway to territorial expansion—inadvertent expansion—has been largely closed off, particularly among the world’s most powerful states. And, while it is difficult to determine the precise extent to which the decline in great power inadvertent expansion contributed to the broader decline of conquest, it is unlikely that it played no role whatsoever.

A second point of contemporary relevance is that inadvertent expansion has not completely disappeared, particularly among the weaker smaller states. According to data collected by Dan Altman and Melissa Lee, approximately one-in-five conquest attempts since 1950 may have involved militaries acting without orders from their civilian superiors.9 For example, in April 1983, Nigerian forces under the command of General (and later president) Muhammadu Buhari seized several islands on Lake Chad from Chadian government control, against the orders of the civilian president Shehu Shagari.10 About a year later, in June 1984, the commander in chief of the Thai army Arthit Kamlang-ek ordered the conquest of a handful of disputed villages along the Laotian border, apparently without authorization from Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda.11 And, in January 1995, Ecuadorian forces helped ignite the Cenepa War with Peru by establishing a “defensive” perimeter in the disputed Cenepa River Valley—again, without having been authorized by Ecuador’s civilian president, Sixto Durán-Ballén.12 There are other examples, but the essential point is clear: inadvertent expansion remains a problem, particularly among small states and in developing-world contexts. Under these conditions, central government authority is often relatively weak, control over parts of the state apparatus can be fairly loose, and civil-military relations can be pathological.

A third reason the theory of inadvertent expansion remains relevant to contemporary international politics is that, while the great powers engage in far less territorial expansion than they once did, decentralized foreign policy decision-making structures still exist and increase the risk of inadvertent crises and conflict more generally. For instance, in recent years the Russian government has made extensive use of semistate private military companies such as the Wagner Group in military operations in Syria, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Mali, Mozambique, Libya, and, especially, Ukraine.13 In one particularly high-stakes incident in February 2018, Wagner forces and their Syrian allies ended up in a firefight with about forty US Army and Marine special forces in Eastern Syria, leading to somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred casualties among the Russian mercenaries.14 China has also regularly employed armed civilian fishing vessels known as the Maritime Militia to collect intelligence, provide logistical support, and protect and pursue its territorial claims in the Yellow, East, and South China Seas.15 Clashes of the Maritime Militia with the Japanese Coast Guard around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in September 2010 and with the Philippine Navy around Scarborough Shoal in April 2012—two US treaty allies—also illustrate the risks and stakes involved in their use.

To be clear, in none of these instances is there clear evidence that these semistate forces were operating without the knowledge or authorization of the central government.16 In fact, in the Wagner Group in Syria case, there is at least some evidence to suggest that the Russian government was aware of and may have even authorized its operations.17 However, the shadowy existence of such actors, and the sometimes-murky lines of authority under which they operate, clearly creates the potential for unauthorized action on their part. And it does not take much imagination to envision how, in an interstate crisis involving these kinds of actors, domestic political pressure and concerns over national honor could effectively bind the hands of civilian leaders.18

Consider, for instance, the Donbas War. This is part of the broader war between Russia and Ukraine, which broke out in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in April 2014 and is ongoing at the time of writing. The Donbas War was set in motion when a forty-four-year-old former intelligence and military officer by the name of Igor Girkin—otherwise known as “Strelkov” or “Shooter”—crossed the border from Russia into Ukraine on April 12, 2014, with fifty-two lightly armed volunteer personnel. Once across the border, Girkin and his makeshift force linked up with some anti-Kyiv militias, captured an armory and claimed a few government buildings in the city of Slovyansk, and began to fan the flames of the insurgency. Militias quickly sprang up in towns and cities across the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of eastern Ukraine, and when the self-proclaimed “People’s Republics” of these two regions declared their independence from Kyiv in May 2014, Girkin was made their defense minister.19

While much remains to be learned about what transpired in these early months, many believe that Girkin was acting without authorization from the Kremlin in Moscow. According to historian Mark Galeotti, Girkin “was acting not just without orders when he led a rag-tag collection of gunmen across the Ukrainian border in April 2014, but seemingly against them.”20 This interpretation is shared by journalist Anna Arutunyan, who argues that in entering the Donbas, Girkin was “defying orders, not carrying them out.”21 And Girkin himself even claimed to be personally responsible for the outbreak of the war, telling a Russian newspaper in November 2014 that he was “the one who pulled the trigger of this war.” “If our unit hadn’t crossed the border,” Girkin continued, “everything would have fizzled out. . . . I take personal responsibility for what is happening there.”22 It is also noteworthy that Moscow initially seemed reluctant to get involved.23 Its primary aim of acquiring the Crimean Peninsula had just been achieved in March and at very little cost. The Donbas seemed like a costly diversion. However, given that the spark of conflict had already been lit by Girkin, leaders in Moscow felt bound to support him. According to Arutunyan, Putin likely felt that “if he backed away entirely, he would show weakness to the Americans and to his own nationalists.”24 Therefore, the Russian government deployed approximately 6,500 forces into eastern Ukraine in August 2014.25 Russia remained mired in this hybrid war from this point until its leaders decided to dramatically escalate with the broader invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. According to United Nations’ estimates, from the beginning of the Donbas War until the end of 2021, Russia suffered 6,500 killed and 16,200 wounded.26 And all of this for a conflict it seemingly did not choose to initiate and likely felt hard pressed to extract itself from. Thus, while the outcome of inadvertent territorial expansion by the great powers has become less likely, the basic logic of the argument remains relevant in contemporary great power politics.

Theoretical Implications

The theory of inadvertent expansion and the evidence presented in this book have three important implications for international relations theory. The first has to do with how we understand a considerable portion of territorial expansion by the great powers. As discussed in this book’s introduction, most theories of territorial expansion in international relations see these decisions being made by leaders in great power capitals and based on strategic assessments of cost, risk, and relative power. And even the theories that focus on the nonstrategic drivers of territorial expansion—such as those focused on domestic political regime type, leader psychology, and status seeking—still tend to see the most important decisions being made by leaders of powerful states. As is clear from the theory presented in chapter 1 and the evidence in the chapters that followed, the theory of inadvertent expansion does not completely jettison the role of state or imperial leaders when it comes to key expansion decisions. After all, it is only leaders in state or imperial capitals who have the ability and authority to decide whether to accept the territorial faits accomplis presented by their wayward peripheral agents. However, the initial impetus and decisions for expansion come from these peripheral actors, and their actions place important constraints on leaders that often effectively force them to go along. The theory of inadvertent expansion, therefore, is an important reminder of the regular influence of relatively peripheral, mundane, “everyday” actors in the process of foreign policy making. “The international system,” note Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink in their classic book on transnational activism, “is made up not only of states engaged in self help . . . but of dense webs of interactions and interrelations among citizens.”27 Put even more pointedly, Eric Grynaviski notes that the “consistent focus on political elites in contemporary scholarship, at the expense of individuals who live far from nations’ capitals, means focusing on the agents who react to, instead of initiate, change.”28 The repeated occurrence of inadvertent expansion in the history of great power politics puts in stark relief the surprising influence of small and seemingly insignificant actors on the decisions made at the highest levels of the world’s most powerful states.

The second theoretical implication has to do with how we understand state strategy. A significant portion of international relations theory depicts leaders as forward-looking and strategic actors with the ability to proactively direct state bureaucracies to meet their security needs and achieve their national interests. As two important representatives of this approach, David Lake and Robert Powell note that the “strategic-choice approach assumes that actors make purposive choices, that they survey their environment and, to the best of their ability, choose the strategy that best meets their subjectively defined goals.”29 The theory and evidence presented in this book clearly does not question leaders’ ability to make strategic decisions. After all, in cases of inadvertent expansion, state and imperial leaders often make decisions by carefully weighing the relative costs of domestic political punishment and international geopolitical risk. Yet, the evidence in this book does depict national security policy as frequently made in an ad hoc manner, as haphazard, as reactive rather than proactive, and as chasing events rather than shaping them. As Richard Betts so succinctly puts it: “Strategy is not always an illusion, but it often is.”30 Despite the evidence of strategic decisions made at the individual level, the research presented in this book has uncovered a significant number of important historical cases in which broader notions of state strategy are fairly tenuous. Given such important and abundant nonstrategic state behavior, perhaps it is worth considering that, in many instances, strategic behavior will be less deliberate and more like what Henry Mintzberg and James Waters refer to as “emergent strategy,” consisting of patterns of behavior realized despite, or even in the absence of, intentions.31

The third implication for international relations theory has to do with the idea of state unity. Large and important bodies of international relations scholarship assume that the state is a unitary actor, approaching the world and making policy decisions as a cohesive, integrated whole. As Kenneth Waltz famously argues, states “are unitary actors who, at a minimum, seek their own preservation and, at a maximum, drive for universal domination.”32 And, while he recognizes that it is a large and potentially problematic simplification, Charles Glaser, too, “assumes that states can be envisioned as unitary actors.”33 For Waltz, Glaser, and others, the assumption of state unity is clearly a theoretically fruitful one. And it is even a decent depiction of how national security policy is sometimes made.34 However, the arguments and evidence presented in this book show the important limits of the state unity assumption. States and empires are complex, sprawling, bureaucratic bodies made up of thousands of organizations and individuals with varying authorities, interests, risk tolerances, and capabilities. It is true that, even in the theory of inadvertent expansion, final decisions are made by key representatives of the state based on their calculations of geopolitical risk. Yet, to ignore the critical role played by actors on the periphery in initial expansion decisions—and the way their actions subsequently bind the hands of central state representatives—is to miss much of what goes on in these cases. In short, a great deal of territorial expansion by the great powers simply cannot be understood without relaxing the assumption of state unity. And, if this is true in as high stakes and as consequential a policy area as territorial expansion, then it is likely true in most others.

Policy Implication

The arguments and evidence presented in this book also have one important policy implication. This is that they should lead foreign policy practitioners to be cautious in how they interpret each and every behavior they see another state engage in. “A common misperception,” Robert Jervis notes in his classic work on the subject, “is to see the behavior of others as more centralized, planned, and coordinated than it is.”35 This tendency is frequently on display in how national security leaders and the media discuss state foreign policies with an almost exclusive focus on their leaders. Note, for example, how in a February 2022 speech at the White House on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US president Joseph Biden argued that “Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war,” as if the invasion had been decided on and was even being carried out by Russia’s leader himself.36 Similarly, media headlines often use a leader’s name as a stand-in for the government as a whole, such as “Trump Drops Mother of All Bombs” or references to “Xi Jinping’s Zero-Covid Policy.”37 Clearly, states frequently act in a coordinated, cohesive way when making foreign policy decisions—it is not all chaos, all the time. Yet, this book has uncovered, explained, and exhaustively catalogued one crucially important historical phenomenon—inadvertent territorial expansion—where such assumptions would be wholly misplaced. A clearer understanding of the nature of inadvertent foreign policies, and the conditions under which they are most likely, will reduce the tendency for misperceptions to drive foreign policy decision-making. And this, it is hoped, will help us avoid the potentially gravest and costliest misunderstandings in world politics.