Introduction

Policymakers, pundits, and scholars (with the exception, perhaps, of a few hard-core realists), widely acknowledge that power and influence are derived from more than just coercive military capabilities, but are exercised through networks of economic, political, and security interactions involving states as well as non-state actors. Influential states are able to effectively deploy a broader portfolio of instruments- of-influence to modify the beliefs and/or the behavior of other states. It is this ability that lies at the heart of effective statecraft—one that protects and promotes national interests—in today’s globalized world.

Despite the growing importance of relational power, the budgets of State Departments and Foreign Services of countries on both sides of the Atlantic have received substantial cuts these past few years. The Trump Administration’s budget for Fiscal Year 2018 includes plans to decrease the State Department’s budget by 30 percent. Departments of key European countries such as France and the United Kingdom have also been severely downsized in the aftermath of the Great Recession.5 These cuts are not only about the need to ‘balance-the-budget,’ but take place in the context of the wave of populist pro-sovereignty that has swept the political landscape of Western democracies in recent years. The concomitant societal backlash against globalization is further fueling political support to ‘take back national control’ and withdraw from international participation, as was clearly captured by Brexit and Trump’s America First doctrine. Whether the rise of this movement was caused by the ‘liberal order’ being ‘rigged,’6 or resulted from the failure of political leaders to properly explain the benefits of international participation to their constituencies, is a question we will not concern ourselves with here.7

Conspicuously absent in popular and scholarly debates is an understanding of what international influence is. Beyond anecdotal evidence or broad brushed descriptions of the utility of ‘soft,’ ‘smart,’ or ‘civilian’ power, there is simply neither a clear concept nor a systematic measurement of international influence derived from relational dependence.8 This lack of clear conceptualization drives a gap in measurement.

In this report, we seek to fill some of this conceptual and empirical gap. We present a set of highlights from the results of an in-depth analysis of a newly created dataset called the Foreign Bilateral Influence Capacity (FBIC) Index that measures the bilateral influence of states. The FBIC Index includes forty-two economic, political, and security indicators with over 200 million individual observations from 1963 to the present. The multidimensional, dyadic measurement of influence makes it possible to conduct a broader analysis of different aspects of international relations than traditional power, resource-based approaches.

Using the FBIC Index, we identify the key influencers in the international system and analyze the states that punch above their weight and those that punch below. We trace the rise of China, the long trajectory of decline of some European states, as well as the surprisingly strong performance of others, and we reflect on the very different positions of the United States and Russia in all of this. We expose regional spheres of influence and pay attention to the contested zones in the international system and the pivot states that reside there. Finally, we look at networks of influence in the international system and discuss their evolution over time.

With this report, we aspire to do more than just infuse foreign policy debates about the United States’ and Europe’s standing in the world with much needed conceptual and empirical clarity. We seek to bridge that gap between quantitative policy analysis and real-world policymaking, and we outline, if only preliminarily, what we consider quintessential elements of a grand strategy aimed at enlarging influence to protect and promote critical national security interests.

This report is structured as follows: it first defines the concept of influence in the FBIC Index with reference to the literature on power and influence and explains the methodological fundamentals of the Index’s construction. (The thirty-page annex to this report offers more detail.) It then turns to the empirical analysis along the lines just described, and it concludes with an assessment of the implications of our findings.

Conceptualizing Influence

The concepts of influence and power both feature prominently in international relations literature,9 but extant scholarship often fails to coherently distinguish them from one another.10 We conceptualize influence as a broader concept than power in international relations. The following section outlines our conceptual framing for the concept of influence in the international system.

In introducing our concept of influence, it is useful to distinguish and briefly discuss three schools of thought. The first views influence and power as synonymous and posits that the two concepts are indistinguishable.11 This perspective, originally spearheaded by Max Weber, views power and influence alike as objects exercised over “other persons”12—these are “the ability of an individual or group to achieve their own goals or aims when others are trying to prevent them from realizing them.”13 Prominent power theorists such as Robert A. Dahl, Steven Lukes, and David A. Baldwin have taken up this view, arguing that the concepts of influence and power simply refer to actor A’s capacity to get actor B to “do something that B would not otherwise do,”14 and that the concepts of influence and power can be used “interchangeably.”15

A second school of thought aligns with the first in its conceptualization of influence as a change which actor A brings about in actor B. However it differs in its view that power—far from being synonymous with influence—is a concept that denotes actor A’s ability to influence actor B.16 In this view, power is something which can be possessed while influence is something that can be exerted. Realist authors such as Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth N. Waltz hold this view and posit that a nation’s material capabilities play a key role in the state’s ability to modify the behavior of its peers.17

Finally, a third school of thought, which is adhered to by the FBIC Index, conceptualizes influence as a force that transforms into power when actor A actively (and successfully) utilizes it to modify the behavior of actor B. It posits that the relationship between power and influence is best captured as a hierarchy in which influence is the general concept, and power is the conscious manifestation of influence.18 It subscribes to the notion that an actor can possess influence by presiding over sources (whether natural, military, or relational), but contends that it does not hold power unless it has the capacity to successfully field its sources of influence towards achieving desired outcomes.19 This sentiment is clearly expressed by Dennis H. Wrong, who states that if actor A succeeds in altering actor B’s behavior “in the desired direction, then he clearly has power over B.”20

The exercise of influence results from an unspoken understanding (or promise) that state A can cut off state B if it fails to comply. Implicit influence may also manifest itself through co-optive means. In these cases, it derives from state attractiveness. State attractiveness is understood as a source of co-optive influence which compels third parties to go along with one another’s purposes “without any explicit threat or exchange taking place.” Because state B’s perception of state A’s “attractiveness” is dependent on a host of state-specific variables (e.g., its history with state A, culture of state B, etc.), it can be argued that ideational power—like its resource-based counterpart—also remains subject to relational context.

Because of the array of potential types of influence and its context specificity, the concept of influence is best expressed in terms of state A’s potential capacity to influence state B rather than through the analysis of actual outcomes. This is because state influence— though it may be exerted intentionally—can also lead to change that is “neither actively pursued nor beneficial to” the influencer,21 and partially because influence does not produce outputs which can be easily measured (or attributed) to actors at the dyadic level.

The FBIC Index facilitates a multidimensional understanding of influence in which both access to national resources and relational context are treated.22 This approach differs from other methods that rely on a resource-based model for measuring capacity to bring about change in other actors.23 The multidimensional approach posits that state influence derives partially from discrepancies in access to national resources24 and partially from relationally contextual factors, which, when combined, denote how effectively either side can leverage the national resources at its disposal to influence the other.25

In the context of interstate relations, we submit that influence derives from a combination of state access to national resources, and from relational, context-specific dynamics between countries A and B, including state attractiveness. National resources include economic, political, and security means. Within a dyad, asymmetrical access to these resources causes imbalances in dependency. Such imbalances allow state A to exert influence over state B both explicitly and implicitly. In cases where imbalances lead to influence being exerted explicitly, state A’s relative independence allows it to coerce state B because state A can credibly threaten to withhold from state B resources on which it depends. The implicit exercise of influence derives from the same dynamic, but results from an unspoken understanding (or promise) that state A can cut off state B if it fails to comply with unspoken wishes.

Measuring Influence: The FBIC Index

The Foreign Bilateral Influence Capacity (FBIC) Index is built upon the idea that two main factors affect the ability of states to exert influence in the international system. First, the extent of interaction across economic, political, and security dimensions creates opportunities for states to influence each other. Second, the relative dependence of one state on another for crucial aspects of economic prosperity or security creates opportunities for the more dominant state to cause the more dependent state to make decisions that they would not have otherwise made. We call these two sub-indices Bandwidth and Dependence.26

Bandwidth and Dependence

The Bandwidth sub-index measures the extent of the connection between two countries reflected in the volume of shared economic, political, and security interactions. All components of the Bandwidth subindex are shared, absolute measures that represent the size and number of connection points between two states. One way of thinking about this is as the “size of the pipeline” of potential influence through which a country can then direct actual influence towards another country. As the size of cross-border flows increases, so does the size of the pipeline that both states can use to potentially direct influence. The value of the Bandwidth sub-index is symmetrical, so in each year the value from country A to country B will always equal country B to country A. For example, total trade between countries A and B is one of our bandwidth indicators. For this sub-indicator the value for a given dyad in a given year will be the same whether a given state is considered country A or country B (this is not true for the next sub-indicator). See Table 2 for a description of the data sources used in the FBIC Index.

The Dependence sub-index measures the “strength of the flow in each direction” or the degree to which an ‘influencee’ relies on an influencer for crucial economic and security assets. We have not included any political indicators in the Dependence sub-index because our data does not include asymmetric political connections. The Dependence sub-index operationalizes relative indicators to measure the reliance one country in the dyad has on the other.

The contrast between Bandwidth and Dependence is expanded upon in Table 3.