The Visibility of Extended Security Commitments and Reassurance Effects

• In Event: Nuclear Weapons and Military Alliances

Abstract

Visibility is believed to be one of the key tools of reassuring a client state—if a patron’s extended deterrent assets are more visible to a client’s foreign policy elites and population, such visibility will greatly reassure the client. But what factors create visibility? In this paper, we revisit the sources of visibility. Conventional wisdom suggests that visibility of alliance commitments is primarily determined by the scale and frequency of a patron’s military actions, but we emphasize that transparency and diversity of the patron’s military activities can be significant sources of visibility too. We conducted a survey experiment in Finland to test these claims. The findings show that in addition to size, diversity of a patron’s actions play an important role in generating visibility. This research deepens our understanding of the connection between visibility of extended deterrence and reassurance.

Authors

• Do Young Lee, University of Oslo

• Jiyoung Ko, Korea University