← New Books Network
New Books Network
Gustav Meibauer, "The No-Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy: The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument" (Policy Press, 2025)
00:48:30
Loading summary
Transcript29 lines
- [00:01]
Experian Narrator
It's okay not to be perfect with finances. Experian is your big financial friend and here to help. Did you know you can get matched with credit cards on the app? Some cards are labeled no Ding Decline, which means if you're not approved, they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today. Applying for no Ding Decline cards won't hurt your credit scores. If you aren't initially approved, initial approval will result in a hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores.
- [00:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Experian.
- [00:30]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Gustav Meibauer about his book titled the no Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy. The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument, published by Bristol University Press in 2025, examining, well, really what the title suggests, no fly zones have been a big thing in US policy for quite a number of presidential administrations. Succession. They're one of the types of things that the US government talks about and sometimes does that makes the front pages is the subject of a lot of debate in politics and mainstream media. And yet when you actually look at when it's been done and what it was meant to achieve and what it actually achieved, the record is not great. So why does this keep coming up as an option? It's a really interesting and obviously quite important question, so I'm really looking forward to having this discussion. Gustav, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you.
- [02:35]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
Well, thank you so much for having me, Miranda. Just perhaps to quickly introduce myself, my name is Gustav Maibauer. I'm an assistant professor in international relations at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. I was previously a postdoctoral fellow and a PhD student at the London School of Economics. And I'm really, really pleased to be here. Talk about the book.
- [03:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm very pleased to have you here. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin story of the project? Why did you decide to write the book? What questions are you asking in it? How did you develop it?
- [03:10]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
All right. I mean, there's two parts to this. Part number one is that this book, at least in a considerable part, is still based on my PhD dissertation, which I did at the London School of Economics. And that dissertation developed out of the 2011 no fly zone over Libya. Back then I was a graduate student in Switzerland and was tasked with writing an academic essay on a question of international security and picked up on this curious phenomenon of the no fly zone and still developed it out of that. And the other is really that what spurred me to rewrite, rethink and really redevelop this PhD dissertation into this book as the more recent developments around a potential no fly zone over Western Ukraine in March 2022. So right after Russia had invaded Ukraine, President Zelensky came to and gave speech in front of the House of Congress and pleaded for a no fly zone and said, you know, quoting Martin Luther King, smart politician that he is, saying, I have a dream. My dream is that you protect the sky over Ukraine. And I thought that was curious. Again, why ask for that specifically? So there were some tactical reasons, clearly, but why mention this particular tool in front of Congress? My supposition then in the book, as well as that Zelensky knows about the curious sort of entanglement and the particular role that the no fly zone has played and continues to play in U.S. foreign policy and in U.S. foreign policy debates. And that really spurred me to rethink how we can develop that think about this type of entanglement. Right. As you said, no fly zones have been used in four major cases and then seriously considered in a couple more, which I to write about in the book. And again, as you said in your introduction, in none of These cases where it was actually user was particularly successful in terms of its purported sort of objectives, conflict management, protection of civilians. And in some others, scholarly literature suggests it was sort of downright detrimental. So this is really an interesting phenomenon to look at in terms of also what it may tell us about sort of underlying political dynamics of foreign policy in the US in general.
- [05:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, there's definitely a whole bunch of things to pick out there once that kind of question is put on the table. Is there anything further we need to understand though before we go into your answer to those questions about kind of what a no fly zone is, what they're meant to be able to do, how they're meant to actually function?
- [06:14]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
Yeah, absolutely. So part of the motivation for this book was to really think seriously about the sort of the political dimension of this tool. But the tool itself, the instrument of the no fly zone is primarily and sort of on the surface a military strategic sort of tool or thing and an instrument that the US and other states may use in terms of statecraft. It's usually defined fairly straightforwardly I think, as pretty much what the name suggests. So a physical area of one state patrolled using air power of another. Quoting a scholarly definition that I employ here from Andrew Bernard. So a no fly zone involves regular air sorties, patrolling. There's a slight difference in terms of how it's installed over a target country. So this can either be done by sort of preventative suppression, right? Basically you shoot a barrage of missiles at anti aircraft systems, radars and so on and so forth so that the target country can't actually fly over its own territory or the territory that the no fly zone marks out. Or alternatively you can persuade the target basically to stop using or not using its aircraft via threat of punishment or a bit of both. Right. Either way, what this does sort of at the military tactical everyone is it denies airspace, it can in principle provide air cover from above for either friendly forces or for civilians, and it can at least in principle deter sort of escalation of conflict. Right. I mean what they're meant to achieve here, at least in theory is formally then two things, right? Conflict management by preventing escalation by creating buffer zones between warring parties and the protection of civilians in conflict areas from above. Fundamentally, my books rests on the argument that no fly zones are not actually primarily used for these aims though, Right. Their primary function in my argument is political. They're meant to make a political problem go away. And that's really, I think, the switch here that we're thinking about not as A lot of policy literature, a lot of strategic studies literature, is thinking the no fly zone, but rather thinking about the no fly zone as a solution to political problem, not a primarily strategic or military problem.
- [08:59]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely helpful to clarify because all of those sort of different lenses and levels are needed to make sense of why they keep being used when the sort of tool based aspects of it don't necessarily seem to quite be matching up. So if we want to add in another lens to our discussion, obviously theory is often used to examine these sorts of entanglements. So do you want to tell us a bit about the theoretical lenses that you apply here?
- [09:25]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
Yes, that's right. So the theoretical apparatus that I developed to get at basically why this tool is repeatedly used in circumstances that I think politicians at the time could conceivably know, or in fact did know, it wasn't particularly well suited for, is one that allows us to interlink what I call systemic or international drivers of state behavior with domestic unit level sort of intra administrative factors which together create this political problem that the no fly zone is used to get out of. The theoretical lens that I use here is called neoclassical realism. It is based on the assumption that state behavior is primarily and at the end of the day, a product of external drivers. These could be threats, these could be constraints or incentives emanating from the international or geopolitical environment that a state faces. But these drivers are neither clear enough in most circumstances, nor do they provide, again, in most circumstances, circumstances, a sense of what exact tool or instrument or policy states should employ to deal with problems emanating out of this environment. And so what then happens is that within administrations, or so my theoretical argument goes, there is considerable debate around the types of implications that these constraints and incentives emanating out of a systemic environment actually have for foreign policy. So long story short, decision makers look at the types of environments that they find themselves in and then try to deduce, interpret, perceive what it is that the US or any other state for that matter, can and should be doing when faced with a particular crisis or problem. And this type of debate, I argue, is basically structured in sort of two categories. One is around sort of general ideas of the place in the world, perhaps that the US has its role, should it be leading, should it be restrained, should be prudent. And on the other hand, a question around the ways in which the means with which it should do something in the international. And that often centers around questions of technology, for example, of costs and risks. The problem here is that these types of deliberations over what the US can or should be doing and how are, especially in environments that are sort of uncertain and ambiguous, really really quite tricky and really, really often quite lengthy and sort of time intensive and a bit annoying generally, is my sense. And so perhaps naturally, decision makers are looking for easy ways out of this conflagration of complicated factors and debate. I outlined the conditions under which these types of dynamics produce, the types of quick fixes, these incremental muddled solutions that I suggest. No fly zones are particularly emblematic of what this does theoretically is it combines material factors. So threats, constraints, incentives emanating out of the systemic environment and ideational, discursive, sort of belief based factors that elites in the White House and the Pentagon and so on operate with to make sense of these material drivers. This combines at the level of IR theory realist approaches with insights from constructivist and cognitive psychological approaches.
- [14:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right, that is a very helpful set of tools there that we can apply. But I want to make sure that we don't stay just in theory land. Let's see what we can do with that theory and the other background you've given us for the project by looking at some of the cases. So if we go to the early 1990s in Iraq, how can we understand the no fly zone in this instance being one of these examples of what you've just mentioned, kind of more of a political sort of stopgap to a messy problem rather than a military solution.
- [14:37]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
Right. So I mean in terms of background, the type time period that we're looking at here, and this is sort of important for applying the theoretical apparatus, which is, I'm going to go into it briefly, is one in which the Soviet Union is about to collapse. And there is a sense in which the United States now has considerable leeway to employ to project power abroad. And in a sense, the 1990 Persian Gulf War in response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, can be seen as a first example of this new leeway, this new opportunity for the US and its allies to shape the world, including in regions in which it would have previously not been possible because of the Soviet Union's involvement, to do things, for example, such as military intervention. Now the military intervention did happen. The Persian Gulf War reversed Saddam Hussein's invasion into Kuwait. And then in early 1991, the spirit was very much to get the boys back out of Iraq after a job well done, right? Although Bush himself thought about this job as not perhaps complete, given that Saddam Hussein remained in office. And that would be called Saddam Hussein remained in office. He very quickly, in early 1991 cracked down quite hard against two near simultaneous rebellions in northern and southern Iraq against the Kurds and the Shiite minority in southern, the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Shiite minority in southern Iraq. And that crackdown, I think the magnitude and the violence of that crackdown, one caught the Bush administration by surprise a little bit. And two, because it came so closely after the, the US's and their allies intervention, military intervention against Saddam Hussein. And this created an additional problem because news media were basically still there and they, so they got sort of, you know, prime spots to Saddam's brutality, saw, you know, masses of refugees huddled against the mountains of northern Iraq in increasingly horrible sort of circumstances. And this creates a real problem because there's really strong pressure now to do something right against, I mean, given that we were now witnessing the horrors of an impending sort of humanitarian catastrophe all the way back home on the nation's screens. And so here the problem then becomes that you want to do something quickly, but that something needs to not be too costly, right? It should buy you some time, but you want to really strenuously avoid basically rolling back the intervention, saying, okay, well never mind boys that we just got back home, you now go back in. So this is a vexing problem. You need to do something that sounds like it does things and sort of can sort of assuage and ease and perhaps ease the pressure a little bit back home. And this, I argue is really the moment that the first no Fly zone is born. It evolves out of overflights that are happening over northern Iraq and southern Iraq as well anyways, so called combat Air patrol. It also evolves out of the necessity to protect humanitarian airdrops that are tried. The suggestion is that it really worked sort of politically in the sense that indeed the no fly zone was implemented. It was the thing that decision makers in the White House could agree on relatively quickly. It didn't really help on the ground, but also kind of didn't hurt. And it did ease this pressure that I've just been talking about for a short while. It bought some time until it then had to indeed be replaced, we could now perhaps say entirely predictably by a much larger humanitarian effort that the Bush administration at the time of course had wished to avoid. So it's a really mixed bag in the sense that as I argued before, it doesn't really achieve much of this sort of the purported objectives in terms of civilian protection at the time, but it does, I think, embed in decision makers minds, the sense that there are things that can be done quickly at relatively low cost that can help at least create the semblance that the US Is leading, that there's action, that something is being done.
- [19:58]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that makes sense then. Even if it didn't work for all of its purposes, it worked enough that it kind of remains on the table as a tool potentially to be used going forward. So if we move forward, then in time to think about kind of the next time it was really discussed in Bosnia. Can you tell us about the sort of political dimensions of the no fly zone here? In the book you talk about it in terms of some of the politics you've just been mentioning with Iraq, but there's also really a strong domestic US Electoral element, is that right?
- [20:29]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
Yes, that's spot on. So Bosnia, I mean, in terms of timeline, these cases almost overlap. So we're talking Iraq, early 1991 for the north and then for the southern one, we're talking late 1992. And Bosnia and the Bosnia no fly zone also sort of almost emerge in parallel. There's indeed some sort of almost cross fertilization between the southern Iraqi no fly zone and then the no fly zone that's being debated over for use over Bosnia. In Bosnia you have a similarly, if not more complex conflict theater that at least sort of in principle based on strategic theories should be even less suitable for no fly zone. There are some tactical reasons here. There are reports of barrel bombs being used by Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia and so on. So there is some rationale by which a no fly zone could conceivably do stuff. And the political problem here, again is that Bosnia really poses a weird conundrum to US Foreign policy, both for the Bush administration, the outgoing Bush administration, and then later the Clinton administration. They're both concerned and then on occasion also do really care about Bosnia and the humanitarian situation there. So don't want to imply that, but they're also, and I think sort of fundamentally annoyed, for lack of a better word, with this problem, with this Bosnian problem. And again, I guess I'm abbreviating, exaggerating a little bit for effect. But the Bush administration basically tries really hard to ignore it, to ping it back to the Europeans generally just wants to focus on other things in part also on the 1992 election. And then at the time they're really sort of strenuously trying to avoid first having the Norfolson debate in the first place and then really enforcing it because they do agree to a monitored no fly zone, which basically means that they're checking whether the Bosnian Serbs in particular are using air power to kill civilians, basically. And this sense of trying to avoid things Clinton, the Challenger in the 1992 election, really latches onto. And that's a bit surprising because Bush has just come out of two massive foreign policy successes, the Persian Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet or the management of the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as Bush also has sort of personal expertise and a genuine interest in foreign policy. So it's not the obvious thing they attack him on, but Clinton does when it comes to Bosnia. And he uses this desire to avoid Bosnia on the Bush administration's behalf to paint a picture of a sort of a hesitant and a tired and an indecisive administration.
- [23:37]
Marshall Poe
Right.
- [23:37]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
Clinton's whole argument on Bosnia during the election is that the US Needs to do more. And that creates or makes the problem, the exact same problem that the Bush administration faced even worse. Because now he has, as part of his platform, committed to some sort of leadership on Bosnia. So once he comes into office, right. They're realizing that what this leadership or what this doing more would actually look like is really unclear. Far from certain. The Europeans, I think, at the time, would be all for American boots on the ground. But I think this was a saying that Clinton, for a variety of different reasons, not least bad experiences in the recent past, at the time, wanted to avoid. So the only thing that the Clinton administration, after some sort of considerable, almost scholarly debate on this issue, the only thing that they could really agree on is to enforce the no fly zone, sort of. And what's interesting here is that in contrast to the bush administration in 1991, Iraq, this is also the only thing that they can really agree on for the next years or so. So despite Clinton's pledge to do more on Bosnia, what happens is that this more is really one tiny little thing that really doesn't particularly help on the ground. In fact, there's arguments that it's downright detrimental to conflict management in Bosnia, and that's it. And it really takes a considerable change in context around 1994, 1995, to change the US foreign policy calculus in Bosnia.
- [25:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really interesting to understand, especially given the kind of dynamics between Bush's record and Clinton's record and sort of who had experience with what. So thank you for adding that piece of it, particularly to the discussion. From what we've said then so far with Iraq and with Bosnia, it could seem like the picture is that sort of a no fly is Politically useful in a lot of different situations. And obviously elections happen pretty regularly, campaigning seasons are long. So it could even almost seem like this is sort of a go to actually more often than we see it happening. I mean, I came into this book thinking, oh yeah, we do hear a lot about new fly zones. Honestly, after reading the first few case studies, I'm like, wait, maybe we should be hearing more about it if it's sort of serving all these different political purposes. So when are they not used? When are they discussed and then decided against?
- [26:18]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
So yeah, so this is a really interesting sort of follow on question. I think that sort of follows logically from both the type of empirical phenomenon that you've also observed as well as the argument that I present in the first two cases of the book right now. Number one, I think it is important, you're spot on to remind us that crises and problems are often complex and uncertain and decision makers are more often than not disagreeing, even within administrations, disagreeing on what the exact solutions should be. So in that sense, asking why we don't see if the no fly zone is such an attractive sort of silver bullet to these types of dynamics, why we don't see it more often. And this is indeed something that I try to tackle both at a theoretical level as well as then empirically by looking at two cases, specifically the Kosovo case and then the South Sudan Darfur case, where no fly zones were at least on the table. So they were debated as options but then not used. The second thing to remind us of before we go into the argument here is that there are different pathways for non use, right? So one potential pathway, for example, could be strong presidential leadership. You just have a president that doesn't really allow this sort of disagreement within elite circles to fester in the way that it might produce a null fly zone to sort of extricate yourself out of. So it could be that you have a president who just bangs his fist on the table and says this is what we're doing. An alternative pathway is that nothing is done, nothing at all. And indeed The South Sudan DE4 case might be an instance of that. So then what's the argument for why no fly zones did don't happen? The argument boils down to the theoretical apparatus that I outlined before. And what I focus on here is tightening systemic conditions essentially. So in cases where no fly zones are on the table and they're not used, I argue that different administrations realize that they're really important constraints like in Sudan or in Syria, or incentives like incossable that make the government want or the administration want to do either less or more basically right away, and they sort of agree on that. There's then greater sort of clarity over the stakes and the interests within the case, so to say in South Sudan. Oh, we should probably start chronologically. In Kosovo, what we see is that United States allies can play a really important role here. I think the, the allies in Kosovo managed to quite successfully tie this case to something that at the time was of great interest to the United States, namely NATO credibility and cohesion. And it is really this, I think, that persuades the administration at the time to not use a no fly zone, but rather opt for a more aggressive sort of coercive course of diplomacy and then an air campaign relatively quickly in Sudan, south start of in South Sudan, in Darfur, what we see is that in consecutive administrations the problem becomes one of cost really quite quickly. The sense that while the US could conceivably project air power into South Sudan and Darfur, it comes with such problems in terms of cost, in terms of implementation that are simply not considered worth it against US interests in the region and in the particular conflict. This is a little bit surprising against especially the Bush administrations, I think, and then later the Obamas as well, claims that genocide was happening in the region. Now genocide as a term should in principle spur the US into action. But here, even that sort of, at the level of rhetoric, even that rhetoric is actually not, I think, enough to mask the calculus in the United States, in consecutive United States governments. That South Sudan therefore is basically, for lack of a better word, not worth it. Finally, a final caveat on this is that clearly the no fly zone is by no means, even though it takes on a considerable role in US foreign policy post 1990 is by no means the only instrument of American statecraft that we can conceivably attribute this sort of quick fix, incremental character to the solution to a festering political problem. But it is, I think, as you noticed, a really quite powerful sort of quite influential example that really, I think, helps us illustrate this sort of core dynamic that's at the heart of quite a lot of US foreign and security policy for the better part of three decades.
- [32:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really interesting because it is, as you said, such a key part consistently through administrations. Right. We're not just talking about, oh, in the immediate post Cold War or, oh, it's just a 90s thing, like it keeps coming back. So you mentioned Obama there just briefly and I would definitely like to now turn towards his administration because obviously by the time we get to 2011 with Libya, where your project started, a lot has changed from the early 90s where we started talking about this in terms of US foreign policy, in terms of the world, in terms of geopolitics. So we still have a no fly zone being talked about at this point. And in fact used. Is it similar at all in terms of the factors that drove Bush and Clinton, for instance, to use a no fly in the early 90s? Is it still the same sort of calculus and dynamics in 2011?
- [33:03]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
Yes, fundamentally, I think the answer to this is yes, you're right that a lot of things changed. I think the two most obvious ones that I think concern us here are one, I mean a fairly rapid but slowly noticed change in the wider geopolitical environment, specifically with the rise of China, that at the time starts to concern, or has started to concern the Obama administration. 2011 coincides with the pivot to Asia speech with a desire to disentangle U.S. assets from the Middle east to move them to the Asia Pacific. So that is one change. And the other is that in 2011 we come out of sort of a bunch of fresh memories of US intervention, specifically connoted with the so called global war on terror and then the Afghanistan and Iraq interventions. At the same time, my argument is that really not all that much changed when it comes to the politics of tool choice and intervention in 2011. Right. I suggest that we still see in 2011 basic evidence for the same decisional dynamics at play that we've seen for the earlier cases. Now, before I continue one, because I was talking about evidence just now, one thing to note is that of course, the evidentiary landscape for 2011 is significantly worse than for 1991 and 1992. And this has something to do with declassification periods and the ability to access the types of archival material that I work with here. But what we do know from the Obama White House on 2011 suggests that we're still looking at sort of a couple of days and weeks in March 2011 where the administration is really struggling with basically either going all in or staying out of the message. And it is again this fundamental disagreement within the administration over what to do and how to do it that we see play out that bogs them down, that frustrates and annoys them, that makes them look for quick fixes and silver bullets to extricate themselves from this particular political mess. Now, it is notable in 2011, perhaps just as it was for the Kosovo case, that the allies, the Europeans, as well as some regional Allies of the United States play a really important role here in multiple ways. First in 2011, by not quite dragging the Okama administration along, but certainly pushing quite hard for a no fly zone to be implemented in March, and then, for lack of a better word, because of a lack of capabilities, making the US stay to basically fill up and stopgap the effort, as is the allied effort over Libya. In short, the allies just didn't have the munition, the jet fighters. Yeah. And the necessary logistics to sustain the novice by themselves. And this makes the Obama administration's so called leading from behind strategy basically disappear really very quickly. So again, international constraints in 2011 as well as incentives I think remain fairly unclear even against the changes that I've outlined. There's leeway, there's indeed pressure, considerable pressure to do something, but really nothing too much. Predominantly, I think the term is here for fear of another Iraq. So you end up, just as before, with a sort of an awkward compromise. Right. One that you sort of fairly quickly actually, and again, perhaps predictably, have to turn into a much more aggressive air campaign that ends up pursuing regime change in Libya.
- [37:32]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, there really are quite clear parallels then between those two instances of the no fly zone. What about the electoral politics dimension of it? If, for example, we've talked about the Clinton Bush election campaign in the 90s, if we move to looking at Clinton versus Trump in 2015, 2016, no flies were talked about in that electoral scene too. Do we see similarities as well in terms of how the question of a no fly zone is being used for domestic political purposes?
- [38:04]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
I think yes. But since we were on the notion of change, we also see, I think, a trajectory that the no fly zone seems to be on in terms of US electoral discourses. I think one key insight from the book, which as I said, centers on the politics of foreign policy and tool choice, is that suggesting no fly zones and actually implementing them basically over time become two separate things. So I think regarding Bosnia, where we've talked about electoral politics in the 1992 election on behalf of Clinton, demanding the no fly zone to be enforced was a fairly serious policy position that the Bush administration itself was also sort of grappled with. And it became a problem for Clinton because they realized that it wasn't doing the thing that they said it would be doing, namely managing conflict in Bosnia. But in 2015 and 16, I think that sort of, that the foreign policy, the no flies on suggestion is basically a serious policy position that's basically out of the window. So a no flies on Over Syria at the very least past 2015, when Russia openly intervened in Syria was not a realistic option. And that's given the stakes of potential escalation with Russia even accidentally. And my argument is that, and I think you can see this in the evidence that I put forward that different politicians suggesting a no fly zone in the 201516 election knew this. And I think this goes specifically for Hillary Clinton, but then also a bunch of others also on the Republican side that keep chiming in with these no fly zone suggestions in the full knowledge that that was basically a non starter then and now. So we talked about change here and this trajectory then and now. I think the mechanisms underlying this are basically the same. So my supposition, my guess, my hunch is that politicians suggest no fly zones, especially when prompted. Right. Madam Secretary, what is your position on the Syrian conflict? Because saying a no fly zone would be a good idea makes you, for lack of a sort of better term, sound smart and precise and competent and like you know what you're doing. And so you're not saying I don't know, Syria is a very difficult problem. You say enforcing a no fly zone would really help managing this conflict and protect civilians effectively in this conflict zone, in the full knowledge that that's not been the case historically. And your military advisors and your electoral advisors are probably telling you that that's not how no fly zones work. So suggesting a no fly zone basically becomes a way to signal expertise and competence and leadership to those voters who care for these things in terms of foreign policy. So the no fly zone slowly over time, although it has always had that element, I think it takes more of that over time. This symbolic, this discursive function, it's becoming shorthand for signaling more than really strategy. So it's more about electoral politicking rather than actual policy solutions.
- [41:32]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And given that electoral politicking is kind of almost always constantly happening, that could be part of the answer for why this keeps coming up. But what does this help us perhaps pay attention to going forward? Given that we're probably going to keep hearing about no fly zones in the future. Based on your research, what should listeners be paying attention to in terms of those debates? What does this mean for the future of no fly zones?
- [41:57]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
I think there are three contending factors to consider here. One, I think actual no fly zone use and implementation is, and this partially based on my theoretical apparatus, going to become less likely in the future. This is because what we see, I think in the near and possibly medium term future in international politics writ large is a return to what other scholars have called great power competition. So the US's focus is increasingly pulled toward competition with China and to a lesser degree Russia as a sort of a key disruptive international order. Now, against these nuclear armed adversaries, you do not intervene, right? You do not, or you try to avoid the possibility of a shooting war. And that for the purposes of the no fly zone, means that no fly zones, because they have clearly, were they to be implemented against another great power, clearly have the escalatory potential to potentially end in nuclear exchange range, are mostly out of the window. Now that sounds like no fly. The time of the no fly zone is over. At the same time as I think there are two, two trends that may make us think that no fly zones, at least suggesting them, is going to stick around. One is that the international environment, especially in an age of potential great power competition or return a great power competition, is continuing to be uncertain, possibly even more so and more complex than we've seen for much of the 1990s and the early aughts. And so that tightening budgets on the part of the United States and overlapping crises make looking for quick fixes such as the no fly zone to vexing political problems even more attractive at the same time as within the United States. And this is the third trend, what we see is increased polarization, in particular a move of the Republican Party into the far right fringes, which makes it harder even, I think, within administrations to find the necessary consensus as to whether to intervene, for example, in conflicts in peripheral regions of the world, so Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia and so on. And because consensus is thus even less likely, that again might make it attractive to suggest these types of short term, largely symbolic policies in the search of electoral support.
- [45:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm curious now to see what comes next and have this information to guide that analysis for whatever might appear on the political stage. Is this something you are continuing to work on? Do you have a next or upcoming work or projects you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
- [45:16]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
Oh, absolutely, yes. I mean, I've continued working on the theoretical approach that underpins the book, but I continue to be really very interested in the political communication sort of aspects that we touched on. Right. So how leaders and publics talk about foreign policy, including in electoral contexts with a focus on American politics, but also, I think increasingly beyond. And that has led me to think a little bit more on what I think is a very exciting phenomenon around deception. Right. So we can see that there is sort of deceptive intent almost behind suggesting no fly zones past 2016. And that deceptive intent is that you want to shield, you want to hide that you're primarily suggesting no fly zones, not as an actual policy option, but as something cool to say that makes you sound smart and competent. And this has led me to thinking a little bit more about deception and deceptive communication on foreign policy and in international relations more widely. So that's the next project. I've just hired a fantastic postdoctoral assistant, and we'll have a couple PhD students working on it, and we hope to have first results soon. Perhaps another book to follow later down the line, which of course, I'd love to come back and discuss with you.
- [46:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that would be quite fun to hear about. And of course, best of luck to you and your team in the meantime. And while you are all off researching the new project, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the no Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy, the Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument, published by Bristol University Press in 2025. Gustav, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [47:03]
Dr. Gustav Meibauer
It was a distinct pleasure, Miranda, thank you. And Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual, but now we want you to feel it. Cue the emu music. Limu, Save yourself money today. Increase your wealth. Customize and save. We save. That may have been too much feeling. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Savings very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.