No Half-Measures? Coercion, Credible Reassurance, and Crisis De-escalation

• In Event: Deterrence and Coercion

Abstract

Fearon (1997) claims that in bargaining it is ineffective to send coercive signals of intermediate cost, because doing so merely reveals weakness: truly resolved actors would go all the way. Yet empirically, such half-measures are commonplace. To address this puzzle, this paper argues that half-measures are advantageous for reassurance and crisis de-escalation because they can signal willingness to compromise, which may not be possible to express openly because of domestic pressures to stand firm. We present a model of crisis bargaining in which a receiver is incompletely informed of a sender’s aims, and has incentives to initiate pre-emptive conflict if facing a highly-resolved type. Moderate senders therefore seek to avoid conflict by signalling their true type. However, they are constrained by their domestic audience, which will punish open concessions. In this context, half-measures are broadly supported, as long as the domestic audience is incompletely informed about the true cost of its government's coercive actions, which is quite realistic: the public observes that the state “did something,” but is not sure whether that something was a lot or a little. We illustrate the theory with a case study of the 1969 crisis over North Korea's downing of a US reconnaissance plane.

Author

• Erica D. Lonergan, Columbia University