Keren Yarhi-Milo

Tying Hands Behind Closed Doors: The Logic and Practice of Secret Reassurance

Private diplomacy and secret agreements among adversaries are major features of international relations. Sometimes secret reassurance has resulted in cooperation and even peace between longtime adversaries. Yet rationalist theories consider private diplomatic communication as cheap talk. How do we explain this gap between theoretical expectations and the empirical record? I offer a theory that explains how, why, and when a leader may convince an enemy that his private reassurances are credible even when they are not costly to undertake. I also account for the conditions under which recipients of such reassurance infer the leaders benign intentions from these secret interactions. I claim that leaders engage in secret reassurance with the enemy when they face significant domestic opposition. The adversary can leverage the initiators domestic vulnerability by revealing the secret reassurance, thereby imposing domestic punishment on the initiator. Further, by entering into private or secret negotiations and offering their adversary such leverage, initiators generate “autonomous risk” that exists beyond their control. I evaluate this theory against two empirical cases. The first case looks at Richard Nixons secret assurances to the Chinese leadership in 1972. The second examines the secret negotiations between Israeli officials and the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization that ended with the signing of the Oslo I Accord in 1993.

Covert Communication: The Intelligibility and Credibility of Signaling in Secret

ABSTRACT Can states credibly communicate their intentions through covert policy tools, despite the absence of credibility-enhancing publicity? Most extant research suggests covert action and secrecy in general are uniquely uninformative and often used as an alternative to signaling. Yet episodes such as Richard Nixons secret bombing of Cambodia suggest that leaders have used covert action to convey intentions and coerce adversaries. This article builds a theoretical framework for understanding signaling in the covert sphere, developing reasons why states find covert communication both intelligible (that is, the basic intended message is understandable) and credible (that is, the message is believable). We argue that two target audiences—local allies and strategic adversaries—tend to observe covert action and that the costs and risks incurred by initiating and expanding covert action credibly convey resolve. We assess our arguments empirically through careful process tracing of a set of nested covert interventions by Soviet and American leaders in conflicts in Angola and Afghanistan. Drawing on a trove of recently declassified material, we assess intentions and inferences related to covert signaling. We find that both strategic adversaries and local partners observed and drew inferences about resolve. Covert lethal aid programs thereby served as a credible indicator of resolve through three mechanisms we identify in the paper: sunk costs, counter-escalation risks, and domestic political risks. These findings have important implications for the study of coercive bargaining, secrecy, and reputation. They also shed light on an important policy tool contemporary policymakers will likely use, suggesting the kinds of effects covert action has and elucidating the basic interpretive framework needed to communicate messages with new methods like covert cyber attacks.

To Arm or to Ally?: The Patron's Dilemma and the Strategic Logic of Arms Transfers and Alliances

How do great powers decide whether to provide arms to or form alliances with client states? This “patrons dilemma” revolves around a decision about how to best provide security to clients without becoming entrapped in unwanted conflicts. Strong commitments worsen the risk of entrapment, whereas weak commitments intensify fears of abandonment. This traditional alliance dilemma can be addressed through the provision of arms and alliances. Great power patrons primarily make such decisions on the basis of two factors: first, the extent to which the patron believes it and its client have common security interests; and second, whether the patron believes that its client has sufficient military capabilities to deter its main adversary without the patrons assistance. Patrons assess the degree of shared threat and the local balances of capabilities in determining whether to support their clients with arms, alliances, or both. As demonstrated in the U.S. provision of security goods to Taiwan and Israel during the Cold War, this strategic logic explains how great powers manage the patrons dilemma.

Tying Hands, Sinking Costs, and Leader Attributes

Do costly signals work? Despite their widespread popularity, both hands-tying and sunk-cost signaling have come under criticism, and there’s little direct evidence that leaders understand costly signals the way our models tell us they should. We present evidence from a survey experiment fielded on a unique sample of elite decision makers from the Israeli Knesset. We find that both types of costly signaling are effective in shaping assessments of resolve for both leaders and the public. However, although theories of signaling tend to assume homogenous audiences, we show that leaders vary significantly in how credible they perceive signals to be, depending on their foreign policy dispositions, rather than their levels of military or political experience. Our results thus encourage international relations scholars to more fully bring heterogeneous recipients into our theories of signaling and point to the important role of dispositional orientations for the study of leaders.

Arms, Alliances, and Patron-Client Relationships

In “To Arm or to Ally?” Keren Yarhi-Milo, Alexander Lanoszka, and Zack Cooper present an elegant and powerful theory that explains conditions under which a great power (in their case, the United States) offers a client state arms, an alliance commitment, or both.1 Their article does not give due attention, however, to what motivates a patron to provide security assistance to clients in the arst place—especially its desire to inouence its clients to obtain concessions in military, political, economic, and other policies.2 Below I explain how Yarhi-Milo, Lanoszka, and Cooper’s conceptualization of key variables inadvertently plays down the role of inouence-seeking in U.S. policy. First, Yarhi-Milo, Lanoszka, and Cooper’s conceptualization of arms transfers does not reoect the wide range of ways in which a patron can support a client and the signiacant differences among the types of arms transfers with regard to buying inouence. Their conceptualization of arms transfers, in which “a state gives another state weapons to augment its military capabilities” (p. 95), “covers multiple methods of provision, including sales, grants, and loans” (p. 97). As they discuss at the beginning of the article, however, the United States spends large sums of money on security assistance worldwide, a signiacant portion of which is spent on things other than U.S. arms (p. 91). Israel, for example, has been allowed by the U.S. government to use about

The Logic of “Offstage” Signaling: Domestic Politics, Regime Type, and Major Power-Protégé Relations

This paper explores the question of how major powers signal support for their proteges. We develop a theory that explains why major powers show support for some proteges using highly visible “frontstage” signals of support, while supporting other proteges through less visible, but nonetheless costly, “offstage” signals. From an international strategic perspective, it is puzzling that major powers do not always send the most visible signal possible. We argue that this can be explained by considering the domestic environments in which the leaders of major powers and proteges operate. Focusing particularly on the United States as we develop our theory, we argue that the US will prefer to send offstage signals of support for more autocratic proteges for several reasons. First, sending frontstage support signals for autocracies would expose US leaders to charges of hypocrisy. Second, frontstage signals of support for autocracies face an impediment to credibility because of the public backlash in the United States that overt support for dictators could generate. Third, many autocratic proteges would be reluctant to accept a frontstage signal of support from the US because it could undermine their regime stability. We test our theory in a data set that records various support signals sent by the United States for other countries between 1950 and 2008, finding strong support for our expectations. We also find evidence of the causal mechanisms posited by our theory in a case study of relations between the US and the Shahs Iran.