I found an interesting article (http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1010)
recently concerning Colombia’s plan to purchase 24 Fkir Israeli fighter planes in order to update their military arsenal. I believe this development is a particularly interesting example to analyze as we study Balance of Power/ Threat Theory in a regional context and the problems inherent in the theory. Are we truly witnessing a regional Balance of Power movement based on Hard Balancing or simply an increase in Colombia’s domestic fight against insurgent groups in the country such as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FARC).
When one attempts to apply these recent developments into the theory’s “offensive intentions” category, any sort of bellicosity between the two states seems highly unlikely. Colombia and Venezuela are –mutually- each others second largest commercial partner after the United States. They are economically interdependent, to the point that today President Uribe called for “placing commercial interests and historical ties at the forefront of the relationship [between the two states]” calling Venezuelan’s brothers. This would therefore be in direct confrontation to Jervis’s statement which argues that in order for cooperation among status-quo states to decrease, war must be profitable for the winner. I fail to see how any sort of confrontation between the two countries would be profitable for the winner, be it Venezuela or Colombia.
One nevertheless could argue that if Venezuela was the initial purchaser of arms, then Colombia is simply reacting to an increase in her neighbor’s offensive capability. But is this really true? In response to the “threat assessment” category under which this would fall, one can turn to the declarations by the Minister of the Defense of Colombia who recently stated that the arms modernization “should not alarm anyone, we are not amplifying our capacity, we are simply re-placing some very old elements for newer ones… it is just an equipment turnover” based around the fight against the FARC.
Therefore, if one ignores Chavez’s war rhetoric, one must recognize Colombia’s fight against domestic insurgent groups, namely the FARC and Paramilitary groups, which for the past few decades have continually undermined the domestic stability of the Colombian state and people. It would seem therefore that there is a domestic internal orientation towards the arms purchases. Consequently, the traditional conception of T.V Paul as to “hard balancing,” could not be applied to this situation as the arms purchases are not “an effort of balancing in the prevention of war” but a domestic arms layover.
These arguments aside, there are a series of arguments which would be interesting to explore concerning bandwagoning within a uni-polar world which has seen the growth of possible challengers to the status-quo of the Untied States. The Fkir airplanes carry U.S technology, and their sale must have been permitted by the U.S State Department and Air Force. This is particularly interesting as Venezuela was denied F-16 replacement parts by the United States and therefore was forced to purchase Sukhoi aircraft from Russia in order to modernize their fleet. Are we in a way witnessing larger Balance of Power shifts in the world? Are the two countries serving as proxies in a regional confrontation for something much larger? Perhaps, although this argument falls considerably short when one notices that the largest trading partner of both countries is the United States, it undoubtedly would be worth exploring. However, I find that once having applied the theory’s categories to the conflict the real possibility of hard or soft balancing between these two states in expectation of some sort of war is highly unlikely. What we are witnessing is how domestic political preoccupations, especially in Venezuela, have transferred themselves onto the world stage; only time will tell how this recent events develop.
Guille Ne
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