Escalatory Behaviors and Credibility Concerns

• In Event: Poster Session: International Security Theory and Concepts

Abstract

An enduring puzzle in crisis bargaining is why policymakers often become locked into their uncompromising position during interstate conflicts. While audience cost theory provides a conceptual framework for explaining this puzzle, the empirical examination of the ‘locked-in process’ with observational data has been conspicuously absent. Building on existing literature on costly signaling and reputational concerns, this study investigates whether American policymakers, during the Kennedy administration, developed credibility concerns regarding defense commitments and reputational risks in response to their own and/or adversarial escalatory behaviors during two major conflicts, the Vietnam and Berlin problems. This project leverages declassified documents from the JFK National Security Files and employs Generative AI for binary classification to discern credibility concerns. Empirical analyses, using various model specifications, reveal that policymakers' credibility concerns are primarily triggered by their own public statements regarding defense commitments in the Vietnam case. Conversely, in the case of Berlin, these concerns were responsive to adversarial hostile actions and statements rather than their own public confrontations. The findings derived from examining these pivotal historical events underscore that policymakers' own costly public confrontations tended to lock them into an escalation path primarily during the early stages of a conflict, with less evidence of such entrenchment at later stages. This observation invites further empirical inquiries into the locked-in mechanisms in conflict escalation.

Author

• Azusa Katagiri, Osaka University