War and diplomacy on the world stage: Crisis bargaining before third parties
| Author | Scott Wolford |
| Published date | 01 April 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629819893025 |
| Date | 01 April 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2020, Vol.32(2) 235–261
ÓThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629819893025
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War and diplomacy on the
world stage: Crisis bargaining
before third parties
Scott Wolford
Department of Government,University of Texas, Austin,TX, USA
Abstract
I analyze a three-actor model of crisis bargaining with two key features. First, diplomatic opposi-
tion raises the costs of war, but an informed state can avoid it by conveying restraint to a sup-
porter. Second, the means of conveying restraint may fail to convince an enemy tempted to risk
war of the informed state’s willingness to fight.I derive three results. First, war is more likely when
third parties believe the informed state to be generally restrained. Second, the threat of opposi-
tion that modestly affects the costs of war discourages risky bluffing. Third, the threat of opposi-
tion that substantially raises the costs of war can lead states to mask a true willingness to fight,
securing diplomatic support at the priceof an elevated risk of war despite the availability of a cred-
ible signal. Building diplomatic coalitions to prevent balancing can simultaneously make credible
communication that avertswar both easy and unattractive.
Keywords
bargaining; communication; diplomacy;war
1. Introduction
States can struggle to convince each other of their willingness to wage war, because
when communication is cheap nothing stands in the way of bluffing. Bidding up
the political costs of backing down from a threat (Fearon, 1994; Schultz, 1998) or
expending resources on military mobilization (Lai, 2004; Slantchev, 2005) can dis-
tinguish those states willing to fight from bluffers. Yet fully separating threats
Corresponding author:
Scott Wolford, Department of Government,University of Texas,158 West 21st Street, Station A1800,
Austin, TX 78712, USA.
Email: swolford@austin.utexas.edu
appear to go unmade even when they are available (Fearon, 1997; Russett, 1963);
leaders infrequently stake their political survival on crisis outcomes or engage in
substantial military mobilizations (see Sechser, 2010; Snyder and Diesing, 1977;
Snyder and Borghard, 2011), instead making ‘halfhearted’ or ‘watered-down’
threats that fail to clarify an ultimate willingness to fight (Byman and Waxman,
2002; Papayoanou, 1997; Wolford, 2014b). But why would a state that truly is will-
ing to fight make an ambiguous threat when a credible one is available? Why toler-
ate an unnecessary risk of bloody conflict?
Explanations for ambiguous threats often restrict attention to how threat strate-
gies affect the outcome of the current crisis. They include changing public support,
the provocative effects of clear threats, and the risk of emboldening one’s allies
(Fearon, 1997: p. 84); preferences for flexibility (Snyder and Diesing, 1977; Snyder
and Borghard, 2011) or surprise (Slantchev, 2010; Trager, 2010); and the need to
placate cost-sensitive coalition partners (Wolford, 2014b). Yet these explanations
overlook the reputation incentives at play in many crises, where the relevant third
parties are worried about what today’s crisis reveals about a disputant’s likely
behavior in future crises, and whether that makes one of today’s disputants worth
balancing against. For example, observers of Japan’s rise to empire at the turn of
the 19th and 20th centuries, major and minor powers alike, worried about future
confrontations after the First Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars (see Paine,
2003, 2017). On a smaller scale, the great powers used diplomacy to limit Serbia’s
gains after twin victories in the First and Second Balkan Wars (Stevenson, 1997),
lest it gain a platform from which to grow more assertive. More recently, Iraq’s
neighbors in the wars of 1991 and 2003, countries in Central and Southeastern
Europe during NATO interventions in Yugoslavia, and much of East Asia during
the Korean War, viewed great power military actions through their own fears of
future confrontations with contemporary belligerents. These reactions suggest that
states involved in disputes and wars have strong incentives to convince third parties
of their restraint in using force, lest they provoke costly balancing responses.
However, that cuts against the incentive to convince an opponent of a willingness
to fight (Fearon, 1995; Morrow, 1989), because the very actions that can convey
resolve in today’s crisis (e.g., large military mobilizations) may also convey a will-
ingness to bear the costs of war tomorrow, provoking costly balancing responses
in today’s crisis.
Exploring this strategic tension requires integrating a theory of crisis bargaining
under asymmetric information with theories of reputation-building and balancing.
As such, I analyze a three-player model of crisis bargaining in which an informed
state faces two uncertain audiences: an enemy and a third party. An enemy that
believes the informed state willing to fight today offers good terms, but a third
party that believes it to be aggressive, that is, willing to fight today and tomorrow,
may use diplomatic opposition or ‘‘soft balancing’’ (Kelley, 2005; Paul, 2005) to
raise the informed state’s costs for waging war. The informed state would like its
enemy and the third party to hold divergent beliefs, but both audiences draw infer-
ences from the same public actions during the crisis. There are three key results.
First, war is most likely when the informed state enters the crisis with a reputation
236 Journal of Theoretical Politics 32(2)
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