Routine reminder: I speak for myself and not my employer.
What’s a reputation for resolve? The summary below will lay out the technical definition, but the short version is that those calling for more coercive action (be it military or economic) backing up U.S. threats and red lines regularly cite reputational benefits that will go beyond the immediate incident. Alternately, those believing in the importance of reputation for resolve may simply argue for making more limited use of threats and red lines, as is outlined below. This ties into a variety of related concepts; reputation in general, deterrence, and credibility all tie together to the concept, but the biggest controversy lies in the resolve component.
The Foreign Entanglements show on Blogging Heads TV recently had a debate on the matter that I summarize below because I think that you often can learn more of the strengths and weaknesses of each side when they actually talk to one another. To more succinctly summarize the discussions, I’ve grouped arguments thematically rather than by when they occurred in the video. For a literature review going in, check out the blogging heads link or this Drezner piece from a few years back.
Mercer’s Deterrence Theory:
Deterrence is based on credibility/reputation which has three parts:
- Power: What a state’s capacity is. What forces or tools does it have available and how costly is it to use them? In general the United States is the highest capacity state in the world, but it varies from case to case. When it comes to Iran or Russia, Europe has more economic tools available.
- Interest: How much does the country care about this issue? The United States does not have a high interest in Libya or Syria, but fought a war in the former case and not the latter. By comparison, free travel of oil through the Straits of Hormuz is considered a high interest of the United States.
- Resolve: Whether a country’s leadership seems likely to use its power to assert the interest in question. In poker terms, does the county’s leadership have a tendency to bluff?
Critiques to a reputation for resolve
Going back five years or so, the resolve portion of that triad has faced substantially more skepticism from academic political scientists. Farley was defending the strong critique, not just that a reputation for resolve is not applicable as the situation varies, but that it is not even well enough understood to be a useful concept. Farley argues that the reason for this is that we cannot predict how actions that send messages will be received. There's too many moving parts. Specifically, had the U.S. bombed Syria without overthrowing Assad, this might have been viewed as a result that failed to demonstrate resolve.
Debating the examples
Farley countered that we we have not seen a reputation for resolve in practice. Our red lines against Iran include, for example, mining the Straits of Hormuz. These have not been pressed and what we have done in Syria has made no difference. The reason for this is that we obviously have greater interests at stake in Iran. On the other hand, red lines often do not work when our interests are weak; for example, our red line in Syria did not work even though we had just deposed Qaddafi in Libya.
Gartenstein-Ross argues resolve when your interests are highly involved is different than when they are peripheral. He outlined the reputation for resolve as relevant in two categories 1) where U.S. interests are low but a clear threat is made, 2) where U.S. interests are directly involved but the situation is messy. He argued that Syria was reacting not to Libya but instead the lack of U.S. response to Iran's support of insurgents that killed Americans in Iraq and Assad's allowing foreign fighters to transit through Syria to Iraq.
Farley argues that we have no real visibility into the Assad regime; one could tell a competing narrative that the U.S. would be interested in payback when an opportunity arose due to the weakness of his regime. This leaves reputation for resolve as a variable without predictive content. Gartenstein-Ross agreed that the Assad regime would consider both stories. This is a case of acting with incomplete information.
Farley points to Cold War history, saying that if academics and historians can't establish a how a reputation for resolve works with the extensive archives from the Cold War, then policymakers should be extremely careful about making any decisions on the basis of a reputation for resolve.
How to implement academic humility
Gartenstein-Ross laid out that he believes that reputation for resolve is a case where the academics are experiencing a bias towards variables they can measure. In one example, for a time the statistic-oriented baseball fans undervalued fielding because there wasn't a good way to report on it, unlike hitting. Leaving out an important variable could then lead to an undervaluing of certain players and worse performance for the team despite a more scientific-seeming approach. Gartenstein-Ross specifically believed that academics were prone to make this mistake and believed they made the same error when discounting the specific religious content of belief systems in militant organizations.
Farley replies that practitioners are not acting in a theory-free zone; they are operating with theories that come out of Cold War deterrence theory and Thomas Schelling. They continue to operate with this Cold War understanding because that's where they gained much of their experience. Those with the strongest and most visceral feel of reputation and resolve were old Russia hands. Academics should be humble, but that humility encourages tearing down previous academic theories that are now obsolete. It is possible that we will find a way to show the impact of reputation for resolve in the future, but in the absence of such evidence we should not expend blood and treasure to maintain a reputation for resolve.
Gartenstein-Ross says that the two views are not necessarily irreconcilable. He is not arguing for expenditure of blood and treasure to maintain a reputation for resolve. Instead, when things are not in our interest, we should be very hesitant to make any sort of threat if we are not willing to fulfill it. By this means reputation can be obtained, and we should use this mechanism.
The utility of bluffing and a reputation for resolve
Farley queries whether this means Gartenstein-Ross wishes to take the bluff away from the United State's strategic toolkit. He further charges that many of those who say we should have acted in Syria are doing so on the basis that we could better bluff our way through Crimea. Farley raises the example of the Chinese air identification zone. In that instance, the U.S. flew B-52s, planes that you cannot possibly overlook, through the zone and China did nothing. Similarly, he says that Putin has effectively deployed bluffing on multiple occasions.
Gartenstein-Ross stands by his view and argues that the Chinese bluff was counterproductive. During the unipolar moment in the 1990s we had a high ability to bluff. However, our relative decline over the past thirteen years have weakened our ability. He finds the U.S. bluff on Syria to be outmoded thinking much as Farley argues that the reputation for resolve is outmoded. Bluffs are now more likely to be called, both because of the reduced capability and because of the vicious circle of he reputation for resolve because bluffs that are called.
Gartenstein-Ross then returns to the Iran example in pointing to the utility of a reputation for resolve. The U.S. has a variety of red lines with respect to Iran. Some are clear, like the Straits of Hormuz. However, there are subtler moves regarding the nuclear program where a reputation for resolve can matter. Reputation for resolve is not as important for the bluff, or the big policy areas and matters of war and peace, but for subtler decisions it plays a bigger role. He says that while he's more skeptical than Farley of political science's ability to truly measure something like the reputation for resolve and thinks Farley overstates a legitimate critique, he believes that it's something that should be better understood.
My own thoughts
Gartenstein-Ross argues the more limited case for reputation for resolve and I think to really judge that debate we’d have to get into the literature on bluffing. That said, it is important to remember that in the specific case of Syria, tons of chemical weapons were removed from the country and their existing facilities were demilitarized. There are allegations of continued use of chlorine gas and continued atrocities by the Syrian government are indisputable, but the significant quantity of weapons and facilities destroyed is a boon in its own right.
What’s more telling is that the Gartenstein-Ross’s limited case for a reputation for resolve points to greater restraint when U.S. interests are low. He repeatedly argued that President Obama’s mistake was setting the red line, not in failing to enforce it. While he noted that our reputation for resolve was diminished by failing to engaged in unspecified retaliation against Iran and Syria for aiding insurgents in Iraq, he did not lay out any positive mechanisms by which to increase our reputation for resolve. If spending blood and treasure are off the table and limited strikes will make little difference, than wherefore complaints from other commentators about the President’s policy in Ukraine? U.S. sanctions have slowly been ratcheted up. European allies have been slower to act, but due to greater connections with Russia their actions have had greater effect.
What about complaints from allies?
This debate did not touch on one source of complaints of ill-resolve: those from U.S. allies. Gripes have been made in public and in private. Vehement critiques of resolve like Daniel Larison do not dispute the existence of such complaints but instead argue that they play to Washington’s pride and insecurity. I don’t doubt that some of that goes on, but I think some of the behavior may have a less harsh interpretation, namely allies bargain about who should bear the burden of common interests. Matt Yglesias gives an example of how this works in European debate over sanction policy:
The biggest gas importer is Germany, which would rather see someone else's ox gored. Angela Merkel has been talking up the idea of a ban on the export of military equipment to Russia. Conveniently, Germany doesn't have a big outstanding weapon sale to Russia. But France is scheduled to sell advanced Mistral naval vessels to Russia. Much of the international community wants France to cancel that deal, hurting the Russian military and the French economy while leaving others unscathed. Meanwhile, from the French viewpoint a better countermove might be for the UK to seize Russian funds and property squirreled away in London.
It’s not that France, Germany, and the UK doubt one another’s resolve, they’d just genuinely prefer that someone else pay the bill and no doubt can come up with compelling normative reasons why this is so. Rather than applying the deterrence-elated concept of reputation and credibility writ large to allies, I would argue that we should apply a range of appropriate tools, such as collective action problems to negotiation theory to security dilemmas. This is not to say that complaints from allies are merely bluffs and puffery – the current alignment of the Middle East in particular is genuinely unstable - but that their use of the word credibility should not dictate our choice of intellectual framework.