Peter Viggo Jakobsen

Denmark positioned itself as the largest global Ukraine donor measured as

percentage of GDP during 2022–2026 in order to restore its battered status in

NATO and enhance its own security. Denmark had used disproportionate force

contributions to international operations very successfully to create frontrunner

status in NATO and Washington and contribute to international security in the

1990–2014 period. However, unwilling to spend more on defence and meet

NATO’s new capability goals designed to counter the rising Russian threat,

after 2014 Denmark lost its high status in the Alliance. This made it an obvious

choice to use Ukraine donations in the same way as force contributions to

restore Denmark’s standing in the Alliance and improve its national security.

Denmark can be expected to maintain its high level of support in the years to

come because it is the most effective way to enhance Danish and European

security in a world where American support in the event of a Russian attack on

NATO no longer can be taken for granted.

I Nyt fra Ukraine får du et unikt indblik i, hvordan 15 eksperter personligt oplevede optakten til Ukraine-krigen og natten, hvor den brød ud den 24. februar 2022. De fortæller, hvad der skete i “maskinrummet” i Folketinget, i Udenrigsministeriet, på redaktionen og på ambassaden.

Bogen bringer dig helt tæt på de eksperter, som har dækket og formidlet Ukraine-krigen for danskerne i nu 1000 dage. Ved at læse deres personlige fortællinger får du en dybere forståelse for krigen og dens indvirkning på verden og et bud på fremtiden – samt et indblik i, hvilke overvejelser eksperterne gør sig, når de skal formidle krigen til danskerne.

This chapter examines the resort to humanitarian intervention in the unfolding post-hegemonic, multipolar and regionalized world order with Libya, Côte d’Ivoire, Syria and Mali as the main cases. It argues that humanitarian crisis management at the United Nations Security Council is shaped by the underlying fundamental institution of great power management and the associated practices of concert, soft balancing and hard balancing, which are back as real options after the end of US hegemony. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that great power agreement on humanitarian intervention and the legitimacy of such steps depends on the initiatives and involvement of regional organizations. In the African context, the regional organizations typically seek to align humanitarian principles with concerns for state building. This indicates that humanitarian intervention has become post-hegemonic, rather than obsolete.

Book chapter on ‘Coercive Diplomacy: Countering War-Threatening Crimes and Armed Conflicts’. Nowadays states rarely resort to war to defeat each other or to address war-threatening crises and armed conflicts. Instead, coercive diplomacy has emerged as their strategy of choice when persuasion and other non-military instruments fall short. Coercive diplomacy involves the use of military threats and/or limited force (sticks) coupled with inducements and assurances (carrots) in order to influence the opponent to do something it would prefer not to. States use coercive diplomacy in the hope of achieving their objectives without having to resort to full-scale war. This chapter presents the strategy of coercive diplomacy and its requirements for success and shows how states have employed it to manage crises and conflicts during the three strategic eras that the world has passed through since the end of the Cold War. 

Over the course of the last decade, Russia and China have emerged as the foremost competitors to US American supremacy. In their attacks on Western primacy, these competitor states target the very foundations of the Western order and its underlying understanding and practice of war. Their actions aim to exploit the Western distinction between peacetime and wartime embodied in the existing normative framework for war by remaining below the threshold of war. This gray area between war and peace as distinct conditions is what gives this form of conflict is name: gray zone conflict. Gray zone conflict creates a fundamental problem for the West because it limits the Western ability to use its superior military force against adversaries not playing by Western rules. This chapter analyzes these challenges, investigating why the West has difficulties responding to conflicts in the gray zone between peace and war and what the West can do to address these challenges. It shows gray zone conflict as clash of different temporalities: the strict Western distinction between war and peacetime on the one hand and the more comprehensive approaches by Russia and China that purposefully exploit said distinction on the other.

This chapter presents the analytical framework that will structure the empirical analysis of Denmark’s evolving relationship with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It summarizes the main findings and assesses their implications for the future Denmark–NATO relationship. The collapse of the USSR fundamentally changed the interaction and the relative importance of the three drivers shaping Denmark’s NATO policy. The Danish fear of abandonment increased, the fear of entrapment disappeared and status-seeking emerged as a policy objective in its own right. The new Danish NATO policy was highly appreciated by the Alliance, and Denmark was increasingly praised as “role model” by the US and other NATO members with respect to force contributions, force transformation, and the comprehensive approach to conflict management operations. Denmark sought to obtain the American security guarantee in NATO on the cheap, and managed to meet the new American and NATO demands for increased involvement in out-of-area conflicts while cutting defense spending by engaging in radical force transformation.

This chapter shows how the re-emergence of military threats to Danish and NATO security since 2014 forced Danish decision makers to rethink their military strategy. The article captures the process in a case-study of the formulation of the Defence Agreement 2018-2023, which increased defence spending for the first time since 1990 and initiated the process of creating a more balanced force structure tasked to deter Russia and undertake stabilisation operations at the same time. The Defence Agreement resulted from the interaction of three explanatory factors or policy drivers, which have shaped Danish military strategy making since the 1990s: (1) The need to maintain the American security guarantee in NATO without undesirable entrapment, (2) a determination to obtain it on the cheap and (3) a desire to maintain “core ally” status in NATO and “best ally” status in Washington D.C.The Defence Agreement 2018-2023 attempted to strike a balance between these conflicting objectives. The increase in defence spending was driven by the desire to maintain Denmark’s position as core member of the Alliance and a close friend of the United States. This desire and the interest in maintaining NATO’s security guarantee led Denmark to invest in the military capabilities that NATO’s capability reviews and the Danish military leadership recommended. However, the conflicting interest in keeping defence spending as low as possible led to a decision to keep defence spending well below the 2 percent of GDP demanded by NATO and President Trump. To shield Denmark from criticism and maintain its status in the Alliance and in Washington, the political parties behind the defence agreement pegged Danish defence spending to the same level as Germany, the Netherlands and Norway. When this triggered harsher criticism from the United States than expected and Germany and the Netherlands increased their spending, the Danish politicians followed suit and pledged to spend 1.5 percent of GDP on defence in 2024.The contradicting political desires for keeping defence spending to a minimum and for establishing the effective and relevant military forces required by NATO and the United States has produced a military strategy that balances on a knife-edge. It is stretched in terms of both personnel and equipment with no margin for unforeseen contingencies or increased demands from NATO or the United States. If the level of tension between Russia and the United States increases in the Arctic or continued destabilization of Europe’s southern flank creates a need for additional capabilities or a long-term military contribution, the political decision makers will need to increase spending or integrate the Danish Armed Forces further with key allies.

The peace operations literature suffers from a narrow focus on battlefield deterrence. It ignores the need to deter actors beyond the battlefield from supporting the combatants using force, and analyses the use of military threats and force in peace operations in a vacuum without taking into account the other instruments that deterring actors employ simultaneously to influence the combatants, combatant allies, combatant supporters and bystanders that undermine deterrence in peace operations. Since most peace operation forces lack the capacity and willingness to threaten and use force in accordance with the requirements stipulated by rational deterrence theory, influencing actors beyond the battlefield is more important with respect to deterring violence than the military efforts undertaken by peace operation forces to deter combatants from using force or to compel them to stop doing so. Accordingly, this chapter develops a new analytical framework that will enable peace operation theorists and practitioners to targets all the actors that undermine deterrence on the battlefield and beyond with all the tools at their disposal – persuasion, inducement and coercion. The framework will improve both theory and practice by providing a better understanding of the conditions under which peace operations can contribute to deterring and, if need be, compelling combatants from using force as well as identifying the tools that practitioners can employ to this end. It highlights that peace operations merely merely constitute the top of the deterrence iceberg, and that peace operation forces must be supported by other actors and tools to succeed with respect to deterring violence and facilitating conflict resolution.