Rivalry, Uncertainty, and Militarized Compellent Threats

Rivalry scholars have done much to explain how rivalries begin and how they end, but little explanation has been given to how rivalries are maintained over long periods of time. Existing theories treat maintenance as simply the absence of termination or the continuing presence of structural conditions that birthed the rivalry, but we argue that this is an unsatisfying conceptualization that does little to tell us what mechanisms keep rivalries going. We argue that rivalry maintenance is not a passive condition of nontermination. Rather, rivalries persist because uncertainty about an opponent's resolve periodically surfaces, and states eliminate this uncertainty by issuing threats designed to compel the enemy to make concessions on the underlying issue. States issue threats to signal their commitment to continue disputing the issue or to force their opponent to reveal their level of resolve. States must remain resolved if they do not wish to concede the issue(s) at stake. Rivalry maintenance is therefore a conscious decision by states to continue their rivalry in order to avoid granting concessions.

Nuclear Deterrence and Compellence

This chapter examines whether nuclear superiority matters for compellent threats. Drawing on the Militarized Compellent Threat (MCT) data set, the same data set used by nuclear irrelevance theorists, it finds that the nuclear balance of power is central to patterns of international coercion. Indeed, the evidence is clear and compelling in simple descriptive statistics. Since 1945, nuclear-armed states have issued forty-nine compellent threats against nuclear inferior states and zero compellent threats against nuclear superior states. For nuclear-armed powers, therefore, in this sample of data, nuclear superiority has been a necessary condition for even attempting compellence. Compellence may be more difficult than deterrence, as others have maintained, but this chapter demonstrates that engaging in nuclear compellence from a position of inferiority is even harder still. In short, nuclear superiority deters compellence.

Crisis Bargaining and Nuclear Blackmail

Do nuclear weapons offer coercive advantages in international crisis bargaining? Almost seventy years into the nuclear age, we still lack a complete answer to this question. While scholars have devoted significant attention to questions about nuclear deterrence, we know comparatively little about whether nuclear weapons can help compel states to change their behavior. This study argues that, despite their extraordinary power, nuclear weapons are uniquely poor instruments of compellence. Compellent threats are more likely to be effective under two conditions: first, if a challenger can credibly threaten to seize the item in dispute; and second, if enacting the threat would entail few costs to the challenger. Nuclear weapons, however, meet neither of these conditions. They are neither useful tools of conquest nor low-cost tools of punishment. Using a new dataset of more than 200 militarized compellent threats from 1918 to 2001, we find strong support for our theory: compellent threats from nuclear states are no more likely to succeed, even after accounting for possible selection effects in the data. While nuclear weapons may carry coercive weight as instruments of deterrence, it appears that these effects do not extend to compellence.

The Illusion of Democratic Credibility

Do democracies make more effective coercive threats? An influential literature in international relations argues that democratic institutions allow leaders to credibly signal their resolve in crises, thereby making their threats more likely to work than threats by nondemocracies. This article revisits the quantitative evidence for this proposition, which we call the “democratic credibility hypothesis,” and finds that it is surprisingly weak. Close examination of the data sets most commonly used to test this hypothesis reveals that they contain few successful democratic threats, or indeed threats of any kind. Moreover, these data sets' outcome variables do not properly measure the effectiveness of threats, and therefore yield misleading results. The article then reassesses the democratic credibility hypothesis using the Militarized Compellent Threats data set, a new data set designed specifically to test hypotheses about the effectiveness of coercive threats. The analysis indicates that threats from democracies are no more successful than threats from other states.

Goliath's Curse: Coercive Threats and Asymmetric Power

States typically issue compellent threats against considerably weaker adversaries, yet their threats often fail. Why? Expanding on a standard model of international crisis bargaining, I argue that a theory of reputation-building can help shed light on this puzzle. The model casts reputation as a strategic problem, showing that challengers issuing compellent threats have incentives to anticipate the reputation costs that target states incur when appeasing aggressors. If challengers can recognize these costs and offset them with side payments or smaller demands, then even reputation-conscious targets will acquiesce. I argue, however, that military strength contributes to information problems that make challengers more likely to underestimate their targets' reputation costs and insufficiently compensate them. In this way, military power can undermine the effectiveness of compellent threats. The logic is illustrated by the 1939 Russo-Finnish crisis, and the argument's implications for the study of coercive diplomacy are explored.