Interdependence explains why states absorb provocations they could answer

The argument

Proponents of this position begin from what the theory actually claims. Interdependence theory does not say that states have stopped competing, or that force has been abolished. It says that where states are linked to one another through many channels at once, and where those links carry real value, the calculation a government makes before reaching for coercion changes. The cost of punishing another state no longer falls only on that state. It falls, in some measure, on the firms, lenders, workers and consumers of the state doing the punishing. That mechanism, proponents argue, explains a pattern that an account built only on relative power struggles with. States that possess overwhelming military advantage over a trading partner frequently decline to use it, and do so repeatedly, in situations where a purely competitive logic would predict escalation. They issue protests, they bring cases, they impose narrow measures, and they leave the broader relationship intact. Interdependence theory reads this as rational rather than as weakness or as luck: the asset at risk is the relationship itself, and the state contemplating force owns part of that asset. The theory also explains the shape of the restraint, which proponents treat as the stronger evidence. Governments in this condition do not respond to provocations by doing nothing; they respond by selecting instruments that insulate the valuable channels from the dispute. Sanctions are carved out, exemptions are negotiated, and the sectors that matter most are protected first. On this view, the care with which states separate what they are willing to damage from what they are not is itself the theory operating in plain sight, and it is a regularity that a model of the system as pure rivalry has no reason to expect.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the pattern is real but the explanation is not established. Restraint between heavily linked states may simply reflect the ordinary absence of any issue worth fighting over, in which case the theory is explaining the quiet rather than the structure. They add that carefully carved-out measures are as consistent with a government managing its own domestic lobbies as with any reasoning about mutual cost. The deeper objection is about scope: the cases in which the theory looks strongest are those where nothing vital was at stake, and an account of the geopolitical system has to explain the moments when something was.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The cost to a state's own firms and consumers is diffuse and easy for a government to pass on, while the gain from coercion is concentrated and politically visible, so the calculation need not run the way the theory assumes. [Rejecting P3] Declining to use military advantage against a trading partner is overdetermined; nuclear risk, alliance obligations and the absence of any war aim worth pursuing all explain it without reference to commercial linkage. [Rejecting C] A regularity consistent with the theory is not a regularity explained by it, and restraint in disputes where nothing vital was at stake is the weakest possible evidence for a claim about the structure of the system.