Baiting to Win: Offense-Defense Balances and Bait-and-Bleed Strategy

• In Event: Military Power and Strategy

Abstract

How does offense-defense balance affects states' choice of security strategy is a central theoretical debate between the offensive realists and defensive realists. How to manage risk and cost in exercising hard power is also a perennial challenge in the practice of national security policy. Yet the nexus of tackling these questions, the concept of bait-and-bleed strategy, is dismissed by its inventor John Mearsheimer, and remains an analytical backwater to this day.

This monograph creates a novel theory that explains the rational choice of the revisionist strategy of bait-and-bleed through the lens of offense-defense balance. An offense-dominant environment decreases the expected utility of bait-and-bleed strategy and its favorability compared to first-strike and blackmail. A defense-dominant environment increases the expected utility of bait-and-bleed strategy and its favorability compared to first-strike and blackmail. The auxiliary propositions of this theory also create a typology of bait-and-bleed strategy and explain why indirect baiting is more preferrable than direct baiting and why "Shadow of Honor” baiting is likely to be more effective than “Shadow of Fear” baiting but less than “Shadow of Opportunity” baiting. This research then tests the theory in two selected sets of cases: Soviet and Chinese bait-and-bleed efforts in the unfolding of the Third Indochina War, 1976-1979, followed by the British and Soviet bait-and-bleed efforts in the unfolding of WWII in Europe, 1939-1940. The rich insights from bait-and-bleed theory enable novel historical explanations of not only peripheral conflicts but also a world war. The bait-and-bleed theory also illustrates that the offensive realists got wrong in arguing that bait-and-bleed is implausible and offense-defense balance has little impact on states' strategic choices, yet the defensive realists also got wrong in believing that a defense-dominated international environment fosters peaceful cooperation.

Author

• Deye Kevin Li, The University of Chicago