Dogs of War
Do Autocrats Need a Foreign Enemy? Evidence from Fortress Russia
Henry Hale & Adam Lenton
International Security, Summer 2024, Pages 9-50
Abstract:
Conventional thinking suggests that autocrats need enemies and thus have incentives to create them. Russia's Vladimir Putin is often thought to reap domestic legitimacy from belligerence. We examine multiple public opinion datasets collected in Russia that span Putin's presidency to confirm that he gains popularity from a sense of Western threat. But findings indicate that until 2021, these gains came primarily from a carefully cultivated domestic reputation for responding to threats with moderation instead of bellicosity. Our survey experiment further suggests that Putin wins as much support when he is prudent and cooperative as when he is hostile and aggressive. These findings add to evidence that Russia's full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine was not a war of domestic political necessity. They also help explain why Putin felt that he had to promote the invasion at home as a careful, limited, defensive act rather than something glorious for which the Russian population should fully mobilize. Even the most aggressive autocrats may still cater to public preferences for moderate foreign policy.
The Face of Soviet Espionage in the United States during the Stalin Era: Vladimir Pravdin, "Man of Truth"
Steven Usdin
Journal of Cold War Studies, Spring 2024, Pages 78-122
Abstract:
Vladimir Pravdin was a senior Soviet intelligence officer in New York and Washington, DC, during World War II. He oversaw some of the most important Soviet agents of the era, including Harry Dexter White, a senior official at the U.S. Treasury Department; Lauchlin Currie, the chief economic adviser to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt; and Judith Coplon, a U.S. Justice Department employee who provided intelligence on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Pravdin's cover in the United States was as an editor and then director of U.S. operations for the TASS news agency. In his capacity as a TASS executive, he developed relationships with numerous U.S. journalists, including Walter Lippmann. Pravdin was born in 1905 in London, and his real name was Roland Abbiate. His unusually adventurous life included serving a two-year sentence in the Atlanta penitentiary prior to his recruitment by Soviet intelligence, surveilling Leon Trotsky in Norway and Mexico, participating in the Spanish Civil War, and leading the assassination of Ignace Poretsky. His story illuminates the triumphs of Soviet intelligence in the United States during World War II, the failures of U.S. counterintelligence, and the unraveling of Soviet espionage in North America following the defections of Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley.
Pride and Prejudice: The Dual Effects of "Wolf Warrior Diplomacy" on Domestic and International Audiences
Weifang Xu
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
China has shifted its foreign policy from careful diplomacy to "wolf warrior diplomacy" (WWD). I argue that WWD increases the Chinese public's support for their government. However, foreign audiences are likely to view WWD as aggressive and threatening; as a result, WWD has dual effects, increased security for the regime at the domestic level and heightened tensions at the international level. To examine these hypotheses, I conducted preregistered parallel experiments, in which I presented identical sets of survey vignettes to Chinese and American citizens. The results show that WWD significantly increases the Chinese public's support for their government. However, this diplomatic rhetoric also antagonizes the U.S. public and bolsters their support for aggressive foreign policies toward China. These findings contribute to our understanding of the dual effects of authoritarian diplomacy in the global arena where national leaders face a trade-off between preserving domestic support and triggering international hostility.
Credibility, Organizational Politics, and Crisis Decision Making
Don Casler
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
When and why do foreign policy officials believe that it is important to fight for credibility? Conventional wisdom suggests that policymakers tend to care uniformly about how others perceive them. Yet this logic overlooks substantial variation in how officials prioritize credibility when weighing policy options. I argue that organizational identity affects the dimensions of credibility that policymakers value and their preferences on the use of force. Diplomats see the world from a reputational perspective, whereas military officials do so through the lens of military capabilities. During crises, diplomats match their advice to reputational considerations, while military officials attend to available capabilities. I examine these propositions via an original, vignette-based elite experiment involving over 250 U.S. national security officials and analysis of historical elite survey data. The findings demonstrate that where you sit shapes when you want to fight for credibility.
Elite-public gaps in support for nuclear and chemical strikes: New evidence from a survey of British parliamentarians and citizens
Michal Smetana, Marek Vranka & Ondrej Rosendorf
Research & Politics, August 2024
Abstract:
In this research article, we provide empirical evidence for the hypothesis that there are substantial elite-public gaps in attitudes toward the military use of nuclear and chemical weapons. We designed and preregistered an original survey investigating support for nuclear and chemical strikes in a hypothetical scenario and fielded it to representative samples of British citizens and parliamentarians. Our results provide strong empirical support for the elite-public gap hypothesis, with the parliamentarians expressing a significantly stronger aversion to nuclear and chemical use than the public respondents. These findings contribute to contemporary scholarly debates on the nature and strength of nuclear and chemical weapon "taboos" in world politics.
Does Russian Propaganda Lead or Follow? Topic Coverage, User Engagement, and RT and Sputnik's Agenda Influence on US Media
Yunkang Yang, Stefan McCabe & Matthew Hindman
International Journal of Press/Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Russian state propaganda outlets Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik are an important part of Russian foreign policy and key global sources of disinformation. Previous work has argued that they focus on exploiting social divisions among foreign audiences and worried that Russian propaganda may influence the broader media agenda. To date, though, there has been no comprehensive study of what RT and Sputnik actually cover, or any quantitative analysis of their influence on other coverage. We analyze 4.7 million English-language news articles from RT, Sputnik, and sixty-seven other news outlets linked to on Facebook from 2017 to 2021, articles that collectively generate 22.6 billion user interactions. Contrary to assumptions in previous studies, RT and Sputnik gave modest attention to US domestic politics, focusing instead on a set of geopolitical issues including the Middle East, armed conflicts, and international statecraft. Using a VAR model, we show that RT and Sputnik Granger-cause coverage on its high-priority issues across all categories of US media: center, left-wing, right-wing, and far-right. On domestic issues, RT and Sputnik follow center and far-right outlets instead of leading. Our study is an important corrective to earlier scholarship, which has overstated RT and Sputnik's engagement with US domestic issues and blurred the specialized roles different Russian organizations play in malign influence operations.
Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don't: The Assurance Dilemma in International Coercion
Reid Pauly
International Security, Summer 2024, Pages 91-132
Abstract:
Why do some coercive demands succeed but others fail? A dominant paradigm explains coercive outcomes by pointing to the credibility and severity of threats. The concept of coercive assurance is an understudied type of commitment problem in the coercion literature. It suggests that a coercer must assure its target that its threats are conditional on the target's behavior. Many scholars overlook coercive assurance, in part because they assume it is automatic. But assurance is a crucial component of any coercive process. Even highly credible and severe threats can fail when the coercer's assurance is not credible. A novel theory, the assurance dilemma, helps to answer the following questions: Why do targets of coercion fear unconditional pain? Why do coercers punish after receiving compliance? What is the relationship between threats and assurances in coercion? The actions that a coercer can take to bolster the credibility of a threat undermine the credibility of its assurance that it will not punish the target. Targets fear that punishment may be unavoidable and thus look for assuring signals before ceding to the coercer's demands. The case of coercive bargaining over the Iranian nuclear program demonstrates the logic and effectiveness of the use of assurance.
Women and Men Politicians' Response to War: Evidence from Ukraine
Taylor Damann, Dahjin Kim & Margit Tavits
International Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does war deepen gender inequalities in politicians' behavior or help erase them? We draw from the terror management theory developed in psychology to argue that the onset of a violent conflict is likely to push politicians to conform more strongly with traditional gender stereotypes because it helps individuals cope with existential fears. To test our argument, we use data on Ukrainian politicians' engagement on social media (136,455 Facebook posts by 469 politicians) in the three months before and after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and interrupted time series analysis, to assess the effect of conflict on politicians' behavior. We find that conflict onset deepens gender-stereotypical behavior among politicians in their public engagement. We also show that, consistent with our argument, gender biases among the public are magnified during war.
Does Public Diplomacy Sway Domestic Public Opinion? Presidential Travel Abroad and Approval at Home
Benjamin Goldsmith, Yusaku Horiuchi & Kelly Matush
Dartmouth College Working Paper, March 2024
Abstract:
Political leaders travel abroad to attend bilateral and multilateral meetings, engage in public diplomacy, and send signals of commitment or deterrence. However, their incentive to use this foreign policy tool depends on how it is received domestically. We leverage a powerful dataset of daily surveys administered by Gallup during the Obama administration to examine whether U.S. presidential trips abroad change domestic public approval. Specifically, we compare the presidential approval of 374,715 respondents interviewed just before or after each of Barack Obama's 51 diplomatic trips to 59 countries during his presidency. We find a small and short-term decrease in approval and increase in disapproval. We observe a similar pattern or no effect in more sparse monthly surveys available during the Bush, Trump, and Biden administrations. Our results suggest that contrary to the common assumption made by scholars and practitioners, it is unlikely that presidents can leverage foreign travel for an immediate increase in a key indicator of their success -- domestic public approval.
The Iron Dice: Fatalism and War
Dominic Tierney
International Security, Summer 2024, Pages 51-90
Abstract:
Leaders in international relations often exhibit fatalism, or the belief that events are guided by forces beyond their control. In some cases, fatalism may reflect reality, or be rhetoric to boost support. But there is also an important psychological explanation: fatalism can help leaders avoid responsibility for costly outcomes and protect their self-image. Fatalism is more likely: (1) in regard to bad outcomes versus good outcomes; (2) when war is seen as imminent versus far-off; and (3) in nondemocratic regimes versus democratic regimes. The concept of fatalism is central to philosophy, religion, medicine, sociology, and psychology, but has been neglected by scholars in international relations. Fatalism may be an important cause of war, especially when combined with a perceived window of opportunity. This research contributes to democratic peace theory by helping explain the lack of war between representative regimes. If elected leaders are less prone to extreme fatalism about war, democracies may have more room to maneuver in a crisis. I use case studies of the origins of World War I and World War II to probe the argument.
The Anatomy of Regime Change: Transnational Political Opposition and Domestic Foreign Policy Elites in the Making of US Foreign Policy on Iraq
Wisam Alshaibi
American Journal of Sociology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars attribute the causes of the 2003 US war in Iraq to threats to national security or declining hegemonic power. The dominant accounts, however, fail to clarify how Iraqi regime change emerged as official US foreign policy, despite policymakers' hostility towards such an objective throughout the 1990s. I highlight how the exiled Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein mobilized neoconservative policymakers to advocate for regime change. My account links transnational foreign policy lobbying to the epistemic structure of the field of foreign policy, emphasizing overlapping elite networks, epistemic fluency, and cultural fit as key factors driving the adoption of Iraqi regime change. Using novel archival records and interviews with the architects of US foreign policy on Iraq, I challenge the conventional accounts of the worst foreign policy blunder since the Vietnam war and contribute to research on the micro-politics of "big" policy change, the historical sociology of foreign policy, and transnationalism and state power.
The Coevolution of Networks of Interstate Support, Interstate Threat, and Civil War
Kyle Beardsley
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Interstate and intrastate conflicts are nested in broader networks of rivalry and cooperation and can be modeled as such. An intergroup security dilemma logic points to trade-offs states face as they cultivate "support groups"-receiving security assistance has the potential to attract aggression and subversion from other states. Hypotheses from this logic are evaluated using stochastic actor-oriented models treating support ties, interstate threat ties, and intrastate conflict as mutually constitutive. The results show that support groups with high military capacity but low levels of interest congruence are associated with higher propensities for interstate threat and intrastate conflict. Support groups with both high levels of interest congruence and high military capacity do not experience an increase in propensity for interstate threat or intrastate conflict. A novel finding emerges: the same types of support relationships that are associated with interstate threats also are associated with intrastate conflict.