The Role of Leadership Beliefs in State Threat Assessments

Credibility in Crises: The Role of Leadership Beliefs in State Threat Assessments

By Julia Mary Macdonald

B.A. in History and Philosophy, December 2002, University of Otago B.A. (Hons.) in International Relations, December 2003, University of Canterbury M.A. (Hons.) in International Relations, August 2006, University of Chicago

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August 31, 2016

Dissertation directed by

Charles Glaser Professor of Political Science and International Affairs

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Julia Mary Macdonald has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of July 28, 2016. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Credibility in Crises: The Role of Leadership Beliefs in State Threat Assessments

Julia Mary Macdonald

Dissertation Research Committee:

Charles Glaser, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Dissertation Director

James Lebovic, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Committee Member

Alexander Downes, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Committee Member

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Dedication

To my parents, Cynthia and Graham Macdonald.

Acknowledgments

So many people have helped me through this long journey. My committee members have been a constant source of inspiration and support from the beginning of this project through to the very end. I first met Charlie Glaser during my M.A. degree in

Chicago and was awed by his incredible intellect. I was very fortunate that Charlie made the move to the George Washington University (GWU) just a year after I started the Ph.D. program, and I am incredibly grateful to have benefitted from his rigorous thinking, constructive feedback, and good humor at every step of this dissertation process. James

Lebovic has been one of my biggest champions and sources of support since I first met him in 2009. His faith in my abilities and constant encouragement to keep writing kept me afloat during many difficult times. Alexander Downes arrived at George Washington just as I was embarking on my dissertation prospectus. Alex quickly took me under his wing, provided invaluable professional guidance, and influenced the development of this project in profound ways. I feel incredibly honored to have worked not only with three great scholars, but also three wonderful human beings.

I have benefitted enormously from the collegiality and supportive environment found within the walls of the GWU political science department. Elizabeth Saunders has been a wonderful and generous mentor from my early years in the program and has never failed to respond to my regular requests for advice or feedback. She also served as the internal reader for this dissertation and provided invaluable comments at my defense, as did Jim Goldgeier. Caitlin Talmadge has also provided great support and professional advice over the past few years and I am very grateful for the opportunities that she has made possible. I feel very fortunate to have had two young, fearsomely smart women in

international security offer me their time and mentorship during such an important period of my life. I only hope to be able to provide the same service to other junior scholars in the future.

In addition to Caitlin and Elizabeth, I have had the good fortune of working with a number of outstanding faculty at GWU, including Stephen Biddle, Chad Rector, Joanna

Spear, Susan Sell, and more. These individuals all provided encouragement and support in different ways throughout the Ph.D. program and I thank them all. The GWU graduate students are unique in being both smart and wonderful people to be around. In my early years of the program I made fast friends with Amanda Alcorn, Daniel Nerenberg, Chana

Solomon-Schwartz, Seokjoon Kim, Inwook Kim, Jackson Woods, Rachel Whitlark,

Davy Banks, Joey O’Mahoney, Lisel Hintz, and Tristan Volpe. From prospectus writing groups to commiserating over glasses of wine, this group helped get through the first few years in Washington D.C. Alanna Torres-Van Antwerp was my partner in crime for so much of this journey and has been the best friend, roommate, and cheerleader that anyone could ask for, as has Luz, her amazing wife. I was incredibly fortunate that just as Alanna graduated, Jacquelyn Schneider joined the political science department at GWU. Her enthusiasm and unmatched passion for everything she does gave me a new lease on life.

She is in equal parts co-collaborator extraordinaire and best friend – the unicorn of academia.

In addition to GWU, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at

Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the Stanton Foundation have provided generous financial support. My time as a pre-doctoral fellow in the Security Studies

Program at MIT was one of the best of my life. Barry Posen, Vipin Narang, and Frank

Gavin provided great feedback and support during my first year in Cambridge. Vipin and

Frank especially have become wonderful mentors as well as my favorite international travel partners – a trend that I hope continues in the future. At MIT I also found a cohort of incredibly smart and welcoming students. Henrik Hiim and Alexander Lanoszka were fantastic colleagues, as were Reid Pauly, Cullen Nutt, Marika Landau-Wells, Alec

Worsnop, Catherine Worsnop, Amanda Rothschild, and especially Fiona Cunningham. I am particularly thankful to MIT for introducing me to Lena Andrews and Mark Bell.

Lena is one of the kindest and smartest people that I know and has been a constant source of encouragement during this last stretch of dissertation writing, while Mark has been the best British ally, squash partner, friend, co-conspirator, and colleague that I could ask for.

I am so grateful to both of them for their friendship and support.

At Belfer I was introduced to another new group of wonderful scholars and friends. Mike Poznansky, Evan Perkoski, Eliza Georghe, and Rupal Mehta in particular all provided helpful feedback but also some much needed fun during my final year in

Cambridge. During this time I also benefitted from the very helpful insights of Sean

Lynn-Jones, Steve Miller, Martin Malin, and Kelly Greenhill. Peter Feaver, Joseph

Grieco, and Joshua Rovner are also owed heartfelt thanks for providing feedback on earlier drafts of the dissertation.

I have many friends outside of academia who have suffered through this journey with me. My Kiwi friends in Washington D.C. have never failed to provide moral support and encouragement when my motivation was fading. I owe special thanks to Elena and

Richard Prendergast, Justine Arroll, Harry Smith, and Katie Ellena who generously opened their homes to me on countless occasions when I traveled back to D.C. They

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provided a much-needed escape from my academic world and constantly reminded me of the bigger picture.

As is often the case, the greatest thanks are owed to those closest to home. Peter has been my rock throughout the Ph.D. program, never wavering in his belief that I could finish. He has lived through every step of this process without complaint, sacrificing sleep, his weekends, and enduring long periods of long-distance in order for me to be able to achieve this goal. I am eternally grateful for his support, faith, love, and willingness to proof read countless drafts of my various papers and dissertation chapters.

I do not know how I would have done this without him.

My family means to world to me, and it has been hard living so far away from home for so long. My brother and sister-in-law have been tireless cheerleaders, supporting me even when it meant staying in the United States. I love them both dearly.

Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to my parents. Not only are they the smartest people that I know, but they also taught me from an early age to believe in myself and to have the strength to pursue my dreams. They inspired me to start my Ph.D., and their constant love, support, and encouragement drove me to the finish line. Better than the degree itself is the knowledge that I have made them proud. I thank them with all of my heart.

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Abstract of Dissertation

Credibility in Crises: The Role of Leadership Beliefs in State Threat Assessment

Why is it that some threats are considered credible by states during crises, while others are not? How do target states interpret coercive signals intended to establish threat credibility during these periods? These questions are central to both academic and policy debates about the effectiveness of coercive diplomacy. Yet despite their importance to scholars and practitioners alike, we lack good answers to these questions.

In this dissertation I argue that variation in leadership beliefs within a target state is key to understanding how threatening signals are interpreted during crises. Research within political science has shown that decision makers’ differing belief systems and assumptions about the world around them can hold important implications for political outcomes. I build on this research to argue that a target state’s prior interactions with an adversary determine its leader’s beliefs and expectations regarding the extent of that adversary’s interests and satisfaction with the status quo. Previous crises provide crucial information to target state leaders both about an adversary’s political objectives, and the costs that adversary is willing to absorb to achieve its goals. Taken collectively, this information – gleaned through ‘experiences of resolve’ – enables target state leaders to form beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests, and the ways in which that adversary will pursue its objectives in the future.

I argue further that the impact of a leader’s individual beliefs about an adversary once formed – and how “sticky” they are – depends on the target state’s threat environment, and in particular, the balance between internal versus external threats.

Leaders often face complex security environments and are forced to prioritize across

multiple threats to their regime. Since states have a finite set of resources, prioritization requires focusing the security apparatus of the state on those threats deemed most urgent, affecting budget decisions, the nature of training and the stationing of military forces, and most importantly the orientation of the intelligence community. Beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s interests thus feed into a target state leader’s understanding of his broader threat environment, helping to determine the chief threats to the regime, and dictating the focus of state security institutions. This process of threat prioritization and resource allocation impacts the quality and quantity of information available to leaders in crises, and helps to explain the conditions under which prior beliefs exert an influence on assessments of threat credibility.

I develop and test this theory through a comparative historical analysis of four carefully selected crises – the Suez Crisis (1956), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the

Falklands War (1982), and the Iraq Wars (1991-2003). The findings of this dissertation make important contributions to literatures on coercive diplomacy, foreign policy decision making, and recent work linking regime types to war.

Table of Contents

Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments ...... v Abstract of Dissertation ...... ix List of Figures ...... xiii List of Tables ...... xiv

1. Introduction ...... 1 1. Question and Importance ...... 1 2. The Argument ...... 3 3. Structure of the Dissertation ...... 7

2. A Cognitive-Institutional Theory of Threat Assessment ...... 9 1. Introduction ...... 9 2. Coercive Diplomacy and Target State Assessments ...... 10 3. A Cognitive-Institutional Theory of State Threat Assessment ...... 19 4. Threat Prioritization and Institutionalization ...... 33 5. Theory Extension: Different Types of Threats ...... 51 6. Alternative Hypotheses ...... 54 7. Research Design and Methodology ...... 62 8. Conclusion ...... 84

3. The Iraq Wars 1991 – 2003 ...... 86 1. Introduction ...... 86 2. Case Selection and Methodology ...... 87 3. Case Overview ...... 91 4. Theory and Hypotheses ...... 102 5. The Iraq Wars 1991-2003 ...... 124 6. Saddam’s Lack of Updating ...... 145 7. Alternative Explanations ...... 162 8. Conclusion ...... 169

4. The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 ...... 171 1. Introduction ...... 171 2. Case Selection and Methodology ...... 172 3. Case Overview ...... 175 4. Theory and Hypotheses ...... 183 5. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 ...... 198 6. Khrushchev’s Updating ...... 215 7. Theory Extension: Nuclear Threats ...... 229 8. Alternative Explanations ...... 234 9. Conclusion ...... 243

5. The Falklands War 1982 ...... 244 1. Introduction ...... 244 2. Case Selection and Methodology ...... 245

3. Case Overview ...... 250 4. Theory and Hypotheses ...... 256 5. Argentine Military Leaders’ Threat Assessment ...... 263 6. Argentine Leaders’ Lack of Updating ...... 275 7. Alternative Explanations ...... 288 8. Conclusion ...... 294

6. The Suez Crisis 1956 ...... 295 1. Introduction ...... 295 2. Case Selection and Methodology ...... 296 3. Case Overview ...... 299 4. Theory and Hypotheses ...... 307 5. The Suez Crisis of 1956 ...... 314 6. Nasser’s Updating ...... 326 7. Alternative Explanations ...... 339 8. Conclusion ...... 344

7. Conclusion ...... 345 1. Introduction ...... 345 2. Summary of Findings ...... 345 3. Implications of the Argument ...... 348 4. Limitations and Future Research ...... 352

Bibliography ...... 354

Appendix 1: ICB State Dyads with Repeated Crisis Interactions ...... 385 Appendix 2: ICB Repeated Crisis Interactions with MCT Threats ...... 397

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1 The Cognitive-Institutional Theory………………………………... 5 Figure 2.1 Predicted Outcomes……………………………………………….. 32 Figure 2.2 Leader Beliefs and Target State Threat Environment……………... 48 Figure 2.3 The Cognitive-Institutional Theory……………………………….. 49 Figure 2.4 Clarification of Dependent Variable………………………………. 68 Figure 2.5 Predicted Outcomes and Case Selection………………………….. 79 Figure 2.6 Beliefs Threat Environment (Case Selection)…………………….. 80 Figure 3.1 Map of Iraq………………………………………………………... 91 Figure 3.2 Saddam’s Beliefs and Threat Environment……………………….. 162 Figure 4.1 Map of Berlin 1961………………………………………………... 176 Figure 4.2 Map of Cuba 1962……………………………………………….... 180 Figure 4.3 Khrushchev’s Beliefs and Threat Environment…………………... 229 Figure 5.1 Map of the South Atlantic……………………………………….... 250 Figure 5.2 Argentine Leaders’ Beliefs and Threat Environment……………... 287 Figure 6.1 Map of the Suez Canal…………………………………………….. 299 Figure 6.2 Nasser’s Beliefs and Threat Environment…………………………. 339

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Summary of Hypotheses…………………………………………. 31 Table 2.2 Alternative Theories……………………………………………… 61 Table 2.3 Target State Leaders’ Perceptions of Resolve……………………. 71 Table 2.4 Cases and Coding on Key Variables……………………………… 83 Table 3.1 Saddam’s Perception of U.S. Resolve (Gulf War 1991)…………. 123 Table 3.2 Chronology of Lead-up to Iraq War (2003)……………………… 138 Table 3.3 Alternative Theoretical Predictions: Iraq Wars…………………… 168 Table 4.1 Khrushchev’s Perception of U.S. Resolve (Berlin Crisis 1961)…. 196 Table 4.2 Alternative Theoretical Predictions: Cuban Missile Crisis………. 241 Table 5.1 Anaya/Galtieri’s Perception of British Resolve (South Thule 1976) 262 Table 5.2 Alternative Theoretical Predictions: Falklands War………………. 292 Table 6.1 Alternative Theoretical Predictions: Suez Crisis………………… 343

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1. INTRODUCTION

1. QUESTION AND IMPORTANCE Coercive diplomacy is a notoriously difficult enterprise. To be successful, states must convince their adversaries that they are willing and able to employ force, without ever having to resort to such measures. Indeed, the difficulty inherent in convincing an opponent of one’s capability and resolve to employ military force has invited a large body of scholarship on the mechanisms through which states can make their threats more credible. Communication is more effective, the story goes, when states employ “costly signals” to convey their interests or resolve over a given issue. 1 Democracies, moreover, are often argued to have a particular advantage in generating these signals due to their unique domestic political structures and institutional constraints. 2

Yet despite the intuitive appeal of the costly signaling logic, the empirical record reveals substantial variation in the ability of states that employ these mechanisms to establish threat credibility. In the mid-nineteenth century, Turkey rejected a clear and

“costly” ultimatum by Russia leading to the outbreak of the Crimean War. In 1982,

Argentina’s dismissal of Great Britain’s public threat to use force over the Falkland

Islands led to war between the two countries. And since the end of the Cold War, the

United States has faced significant challenges in coercing a series of adversaries – Haiti,

Serbia, Libya, and more – despite its overwhelming military superiority and the public

1 Early discussions of costly signaling are found in Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); and Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, NY: Yale University Press, 1966). More recent examples include James Fearon, “Signaling and Foreign Policy Interests: Tying Hands versus Sinking Costs,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 41, 1 (1997): 68-90; Andrew Kydd, “Sheep in Sheep’s Clothing: Why Security Seeker’s Do Not Fight Each Other,” Security Studies 7, 1 (1997): 114-155. 2 See e.g. James Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,” American Political Science Review 88, 3 (1994): 577-92; and Kenneth A. Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Jessica Weeks provides a counter to this view in “Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve,” International Organization 62, 1 (2008): 35-64.

nature of its threats. In other cases, however, coercion has been more successful. In 1962, albeit after 14 days of crisis escalation, Khrushchev assessed the U.S. threat to use force over Cuba as credible. And just eight years later, effective coercive threats helped the

United States to avert a second missile crisis with the Soviet Union. 3

This dissertation seeks to understand such variation in the ability of states to establish threat credibility by focusing on how target states assess adversarial threats during crises. More specifically, I seek to understand how target states interpret coercive signals intended to establish threat credibility during these periods. While recent scholarship within International Relations (IR) has focused a great deal of attention on states during crises, this movement has been a somewhat one-sided affair. 4 As a result, we know a lot about the actions undertaken by threatening states in crisis interactions, but much less about how these efforts to establish credibility are perceived by the targets themselves. Yet understanding both how signals are sent and how they are received is crucial to building any theory of signaling, and to developing a comprehensive appreciation of the conditions under which coercive threats can be employed effectively in international affairs. 5

To address this issue I develop a theory that explains both how states determine the credibility of threats, and their likelihood of doing so well. Rationalist IR theory tends

3 See, for example, Sheldon M. Stern, Averting “The Final Failure: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2003). For further examples of empirical variation in target state assessments of threats see Jack Snyder and Erica Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound,” American Political Science Review 105, 3 (2011): 437-456; and Marc Trachtenberg, “Audience Costs: An Historical Analysis,” Security Studies 21, 1 (2012): 3-42. 4 Exceptions include Mark L. Haas, The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789-1989 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), and Keren Yarhi-Milo, Knowing The Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence Organizations, and Assessments of Intentions in International Relations ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 5 This builds on Jervis’s observation that “any theory of signaling . . . requires a careful investigation of how signals are perceived.” Robert Jervis, "Signaling and Perception: Drawing Inferences and Projecting Images," in Kristen Monroe (ed.), Political Psychology (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 299.

to focus on the latter of these two tasks by assuming that accurate assessments of threat credibility follow automatically from the engagement of various costly signaling mechanisms. Cognitive and organizational theories, on the other hand, have focused their attention on explaining how states determine the credibility of threats, and specifically describe instances in which states perform poorly at this task. These accounts are often highly descriptive, however, and tell us little about when we might expect to see cognitive biases and organizational dynamics resulting in sub-optimal outcomes. By bringing the focus of these two literatures together, this dissertation develops a theory of threat assessment to determine how states assess threats, and also to establish the conditions under which we might expect states to perform this task poorly (as recounted by cognitive and organizational theorists) and when we should expect them to do so well

(as assumed by rationalist scholars).

2. THE ARGUMENT The cognitive-institutional theory developed in this dissertation argues that variation in leadership beliefs within a target state is key to understanding how threatening signals are interpreted during crises. Recent findings in political science show that state leaders’ differing belief systems and assumptions about the nature of international politics are key to explaining foreign policy outcomes, yet disagreement exists over how these beliefs form, and the pathways through which they are expected to influence state behavior. For example, some scholars argue that a state’s past actions are

important in shaping other leaders’ beliefs about its future threat credibility, while others assert that past behavior is largely irrelevant to the process of threat assessment. 6

In the chapters that follow I claim that a state’s past behavior in crises is important to understanding other state leaders’ assessments of its threat credibility, but through pathways previously overlooked. I make this argument in two-stages. In the first stage, I build on existing literature to argue that leadership beliefs within a target state about the nature and extent of an adversary’s interests is key to understanding how threatening signals are received and interpreted. Specifically, I claim that a target state’s prior crisis interactions with an adversary provides crucial information to its leaders both about that adversary’s political objectives, and the costs that it is willing to expend to achieve its goals. Taken collectively, this information – gleaned through ‘experiences of resolve’ – enables target state leaders to form beliefs about the extent of that adversary’s foreign policy interests and the ways in which that adversary will pursue its goals in the future. These beliefs, if left unchallenged, can carry through into future crises and constrain leaders’ reception and interpretation of signals, with important implications for assessments of threat credibility.

In the second stage I investigate the conditions under which we should expect these prior beliefs to remain unchallenged and thus to exert the influences hypothesized in stage one. Cognitive and rationalist theorists alike agree that ‘beliefs matter’ and understand that leaders enter crises with prior expectations about their adversaries. What these schools disagree on is how fixed these beliefs are and the degree to which new information can alter leaders’ assessments. Whereas cognitive scholars view beliefs as

6 See e.g. Schelling, Arms and Influence ; Daryl Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005) . This literature will be reviewed further in the next chapter.

sticky and resilient, rationalist scholars assume that individuals will update as new information becomes available.

In light of these two competing frameworks, I seek to understand the conditions under which we should expect updating to occur. When might we expect leaders’ beliefs to change during crises? And when should we expect prior beliefs to have the most impact on threat assessments? I argue that the impact of a leader’s individual beliefs about an adversary once formed – and how “sticky” they are – depends on the threat environment of the target state, and in particular, the balance between internal versus external threats. Leaders often face complex security environments and are forced to prioritize across multiple threats to their regime. Since states have a finite set of resources, prioritization requires focusing the security apparatus of the state on those threats deemed most urgent, affecting budget decisions, the nature of training and the stationing of military forces, and most importantly the orientation of the intelligence community. Beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s interests thus feed into a target state leader’s understanding of his broader threat environment, helping to determine the chief threats to the regime, and dictating the focus of state security institutions. This process of threat prioritization and resource allocation impacts the quality and quantity of information available to leaders in crises, and helps to explain the conditions under which prior beliefs exert an influence on assessments of threat credibility.

Figure 1.1 The Cognitive-Institutional Theory

Stage O ne Stage Two Adversary Poses New Prior Threat Leader forms Threat Information Leader Threat Systemic Beliefs about Prioritization Processing Assessment Crisis Adversary

Finally, while leaders’ beliefs matter during peacetime, 7 I focus on periods of crisis for three reasons. First, a number of recent studies have focused on peacetime threat assessment and have discussed in some detail target state information processing over extended periods of time. 8 Despite this recent interest, however, there remains an important gap in the literature on target state assessments during times of crisis. Second, the time pressure on policy makers during these periods of crisis, and the need to make decisions quickly often with incomplete information, heightens the importance of prior beliefs. During such periods of uncertainty, these beliefs can help leaders make sense of the world around them by providing key decision-making heuristics and shortcuts.

Finally, the truncated nature of decision making during crises means that it often takes place at the very top levels of state bureaucracy, elevating the importance of state leaders in explaining decision-making outcomes. This project’s focus on leadership beliefs to explain variation in the reception and interpretation of interstate signals is thus particularly well suited to periods of “abnormal” politics that take place during times of crisis.

I develop this theory through a qualitative comparative historical analysis of four carefully selected crises: the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962); the Suez Crisis (1956); the

Falklands War (1982); and the Iraq Wars (1991-2003). In all of these crises, the leader in the target state is the predominant authority – an important scope condition for the project.

This case selection also provides interesting variation on regime type, incorporating militaristic, personalized, and single party states as targets of coercive threats.

7 On the importance of peacetime beliefs in state threat assessments, see Yarhi-Milo, Knowing The Adversary . 8 Ibid.; Haas, The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics .

In each empirical chapter, I test the theory against four alternative arguments for state threat assessments. The first alternative is Daryl Press’s current calculus theory which argues that states assess threat credibility on the basis of the balance of interests and capabilities in a crisis. 9 The second alternative is Mercer’s reputations theory. 10

According to this account, certain types of past behaviors can lead states to gain reputations for resolve that should bolster external assessments of their credibility. The third alternative is past actions theory, which claims that a state’s history of keeping commitments and following through on threats to use force will influence its credibility in the future. The final alternative that I consider is the democratic credibility thesis, which holds that democracies are able to deliver more credible threats than non- democratic states. 11 It follows that targets of public demands issued by democracies should be more likely to assess those threats as credible. In each case, I argue that the cognitive-institutional theory outperforms the alternatives, though it does not do so perfectly.

3. STRUCTURE OF THE DISSERTATION This dissertation proceeds as follows. Chapter 2 reviews existing literature on coercive diplomacy and threat assessments. It then presents the cognitive-institutional theory, the candidate alternative explanations, and outlines the empirical strategy for the subsequent four chapters. Chapter 3 provides an overview and analysis of the Iraq Wars from 1991-2003 and shows that Iraq’s prior interactions with the United States from the

Gulf War onwards, combined with the country’s domestic threat environment, played a

9 Press, Calculating Credibility. 10 Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 11 See e.g. Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences.” I also address Schultz’s variant of the democratic credibility thesis. See Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy.

central role in Saddam Hussein’s reception, interpretation, and ultimate assessment of

U.S. threat credibility in the lead up to the 2003 invasion. Chapter 4 examines the Cuban

Missile Crisis of 1962 and shows that the type of threat matters to target state threat assessments during crises. Specifically, this case shows that the increased risk of nuclear war generated throughout the crisis overrode Khrushchev’s prior beliefs about U.S. interests and forced the Soviet leader to update his assessment of U.S. threat credibility.

Chapter 5 turns to the Falklands War of 1982 and demonstrates that Argentine military leaders’ prior beliefs regarding Great Britain’s interests, combined with their preoccupation with domestic threats, led them to sideline and reinterpret signals in accordance with their expectation of low British resolve. Chapter 6 provides an analysis of the Suez Crisis of 1956 and shows that Nasser’s limited prior interaction with Great

Britain, combined with his relatively benign domestic threat environment, enabled the him to seek out a range of information that resulted in an assessment of low British threat credibility. Finally, Chapter 7 concludes the dissertation by summarizing its key findings, discussing the implications of this project for academic and policy worlds, and outlining opportunities for further research.

2. A COGNITIVE -INSTITUTIONAL THEORY OF THREAT ASSESSMENT

1. INTRODUCTION How do leaders assess the credibility of an adversary’s threat during an international crisis? More specifically, how do leaders interpret coercive signals intended to establish threat credibility during these periods of time? This chapter presents a cognitive-institutional theory of threat assessment, that helps us to understand both how leaders arrive at their assessments of threat credibility, and the conditions under which we should expect them to do so well.

In developing this theory, I argue that a state’s past behavior in crises is key to understanding other state leaders’ assessments of its threat credibility, but through pathways previously overlooked. Specifically, I claim that a target state’s prior crisis interactions with an adversary provides crucial information to its leaders both about that adversary’s political objectives, and the costs that it is willing to absorb to achieve its goals. Taken collectively, this information – gleaned through ‘experiences of resolve’ – enables target state leaders to form beliefs about the extent of that adversary’s foreign policy interests and the ways in which that adversary will pursue its goals in the future.

Leaders often face complex security environments and are forced to prioritize across multiple threats to their regime. Since states have a finite set of resources, prioritization requires focusing the security apparatus of the state on those threats deemed most urgent, affecting budget decisions, the nature of training and the stationing of military forces, and

most importantly the orientation of the intelligence community. Beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s interests thus feed into a target state leader’s understanding of his broader threat environment, helping to determine the chief threats to the regime, and dictating the focus of state security institutions. This process of threat prioritization and resource allocation impacts the quality and quantity of information available to leaders in crises, and helps to explain the conditions under which prior beliefs exert an influence on assessments of threat credibility.

The remainder of this chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 provides a brief review of IR scholarship on state threat assessments and situates this project within the existing literature. Section 3 and 4 present the central theory of the dissertation, synthesizing and then expanding upon recent research on leadership beliefs and foreign policy decision making. Section 5 extends the theory to see how it travels between conventional and nuclear worlds. Section 6 presents alternative hypotheses to the theory advanced in this dissertation, and Section 7 follows with a discussion of methodology and case selection. Finally, Section 8 concludes the chapter with a brief review of the four empirical case studies.

2. COERCIVE DIPLOMACY AND TARGET STATE ASSESSMENTS 2.1 The Dilemmas of Coercive Diplomacy Effective coercion requires convincing a target state to alter its behavior through the threat to use force; that is, by holding the threat of violence in reserve.12 Success in

12 This follows Alexander George’s definition of coercive diplomacy as "the use of intimidation of one kind or another in order to get others to comply with one's wishes. The general intent of coercive diplomacy is to back a demand on an adversary with a threat of punishment for noncompliance that will be credible and potent enough to persuade him that it is in his interest to comply with the demand." Alexander George and William Simons, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 2.

achieving this outcome thus rests on the credibility of a state’s coercive threat. 13 A coercive threat is an explicit demand issued by one state to another in order to either compel a material change to the status quo, or deter a state from making a material change to the status quo, backed by the threat to use force if the target does not comply. 14

In general, a state’s ability to carry out a coercive threat is deemed more credible if the threatening state possesses the military capabilities to inflict substantial costs on a target in an armed conflict, and the target state believes that the threatening state is willing to use its available military forces to carry out the threat should the target not acquiesce. 15

Thus credibility is a combination of both capability and the will to employ that capability should a threat fail to induce the desired behavior. 16

Since the relative balance of capabilities is often known prior to a given conflict and therefore considered public knowledge, the credibility of a threat often rests on the ability to convince an adversary of one’s willingness to carry out a threat of force.17 The willingness to carry out a threat rests fundamentally on the extent of a state’s interests in a given dispute. And while some state interests can be estimated prior to the onset of crises, the true risks that states are willing to run, and the costs that they are willing to suffer to achieve a given objective, are uncertain and subject to change during the course

13 Press defines credibility as “the perceived likelihood that the threat will be carried out if the conditions that are supposed to trigger it are met.” Press, Calculating Credibility , 10. 14 Schelling, Arms and Influence , 3; Robert Art and Patrick Cronin (eds.), The Art of Coercive Diplomacy (Washington, D.C.: USIP Press, 2003), 6. 15 See e.g. Glenn H. Snyder and Paul Diesing Conflict Among Nations: Bargaining, Decision Making, and System Structure in International Crises (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Paul K. Huth, Extended Deterrence and the Prevention of War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). This willingness to act is often called “resolve” in IR literature. 16 Note that I treat credibility as a continuous rather than a dichotomous variable. Thus threats are treated as more or less credible, rather than credible/not credible. According to rationalist theories, as new information becomes available during crises target state leaders will update their assessments of credibility along this continuum. 17 Schelling, Arms and Influence , 93.

of crisis bargaining. 18 This uncertainty around the nature and extent of state interests can make assessments of credibility extremely difficult.

Moreover, ascertaining the extent of another state’s interests is important not only in determining its willingness to carry out a threat of force, but also in assessing its willingness to act with restraint should the target state acquiesce to the coercer’s demands. 19 Indeed, if the target state views the demands of its adversary as unlimited, or fears their continued escalation even after the target state acquiesces, then it might rationally choose to resist a threat in order to avert greater losses in the future. In extreme cases, a target state might decide to act preventatively to avoid a worse situation from arising later. In this case it is not the willingness of the coercing state to carry out the threat that is in question, but rather its resolve to exercise restraint should the target agree to its demands. This element in the coercive calculation thus rests fundamentally on the ability of a coercing state to assure the target of its limited aims and its willingness to abide by the terms of a given agreement – that is, on its credibility for restraint.20

In sum, effective coercion requires that states solve both of these credibility problems: those of resolve and restraint. A coercing state needs to convince a target that is willing to carry out a threat should that be necessary to achieve its goals, and also that

18 On the other hand, the balance of military power tends to stay relatively stable during periods of crisis. 19 Interestingly, while the peacetime literature on effective deterrence focuses on the need for states to signal both resolve and restraint, the literature on crisis bargaining has focused almost exclusively on the importance of resolve in explaining threat effectiveness and has sidelined the problem of restraint and reassurance. On this point see Robert Jervis, "Psychology and Crisis Stability," in Andrew Goldberg et al. (eds.), Avoiding the Brink: Theory and Practice in Crisis Management (McLean, VA: Brassey's, 1990). 20 See e.g. Todd Sechser, “Goliath’s Curse: Coercive Threats and Asymmetric Power," International Organization 64, 4 (2010): 627–60. Sechser argues that a challenger’s superior military power can serve to exacerbate information problems in crises, making its threats less likely to succeed. If the target believes that the powerful challenger will exploit its gains and make additional demands in the future, then the target is more likely to resist due to the fear of suffering reputational costs. An abundance of military power, then, can be self-defeating in coercive diplomacy. Even when a challenger’s threats are credible and the balance of capabilities publicly known, fears about future intentions can motivate rational targets to fight losing wars to deter future aggression.

it is willing to exercise restraint should the target agree to its demands. 21 Uncertainty within target states over the extent of a coercing state’s interests can render this task extremely difficult.

2.2 Target State Threat Assessments Given uncertainty around the extent of other states’ interests, how do leaders assess the credibility of coercive threats? And what indicators do they use in arriving at these judgments? Existing theories within political science offer a range of answers to these questions. For many rationalist IR scholars, the key lies in the means by which states issue threats, and the type of signals that they employ in doing so. According to rationalist theories, communication in international politics is complicated by problems of asymmetric information and uncertainty in an anarchic international system. This uncertainty creates opportunities for all actors to exaggerate their interests, capabilities, and resolve, in order to secure better bargaining outcomes. States are thus incentivized to engage in bluffs or limited probes to convince adversaries to grant them concessions, undermining the quality of information in the international system. In order to overcome the problem of private information and to communicate effectively, states need to find means by which they can reveal their preferences (and identities) credibly and separate themselves from actors who are incentivized to bluff. States can do this, rationalist scholars claim, by sending “costly signals” of resolve; that is, signals that have some

21 In other words, a threatening state needs to reassure a target that if it changes its current behavior (in the case of compellence) or chooses not to act in an undesirable manner (in the case of deterrence) that no further punishment will follow.

costs or risks attached to them such that resolved states would be more willing to consider their use.22

Costly signals can include troop placements, military mobilizations, arming measures, engaging in limited conflicts and displays of force, or intentionally running the risk that an adversary will strike first. In addition to undertaking costly military action, state leaders can also generate costs by “tying their hands” through international institutions – such as seeking a time-consuming UN resolution 23 – and domestic political mechanisms. A number of scholars argue that leaders of democracies are especially capable of sending costly signals by engaging their domestic audiences through public threats to use force. 24 Once engaged, the audience has a stake in a successful resolution of the crisis and will act to sanction a leader that backs down. The fear of incurring audience costs thus makes democratic leaders more careful about issuing public threats, but when

22 See e.g. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict ; Schelling, Arms and Influence ; Fearon, “Signaling Foreign Policy Interests; and Andrew Kydd, Trust and Mistrust in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). For a broader discussion of signaling and communication in international affairs, see Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). Jervis writes that “signals . . . can be thought of as promissory notes. They do not contain inherent credibility. They do not, in the absence of some sort of enforcement system [emphasis added], provide their own evidence that the actor will live up to them” (18). The logic of costly signaling was first developed in research on the role of education in the job market, where acquiring an education was viewed as a costly signal of an applicant’s quality. According to Spence, “a signal will not effectively distinguish one applicant from another, unless the costs of signaling are negatively correlated with productive capability. For if this condition fails to hold, given the offered wage schedule, everyone will invest in the signal in exactly the same way so that they cannot be distinguished on the basis of the signal.” Thus, in order for highly qualified applicants to distinguish themselves from those less capable, they must undertake a costly action – in this case, acquiring additional education. Michael Spence, “Job Market Signaling,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, 3 (1973), 358. 23 See e.g. Alexander Thompson, Channels of Power: The UN Security Council and U.S. Statecraft in Iraq (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 24 The audience costs proposition has proven extremely influential, with a number of studies substantiating its claims. See e.g. Joe Eyerman and Robert A. Hart, Jr. “An Empirical Test of the Audience Costs Proposition,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 40 (1996): 597-616; Peter Partell and Glenn Palmer, “Audience Costs and Interstate Crises: An Empirical Assessment of Fearon’s Model of Dispute Outcomes,” International Studies Quarterly 43, 2 (1999): 389-405; Christopher Gelpi and Michael Griesdorf, “Winners or Losers? Democracies in International Crises, 1918-94,” American Political Science Review 95, 3 (2001): 633-647; Joe Clare, “Domestic Audiences and Strategic Interests,” The Journal of Politics 69, 3 (2007): 732-745; Alistair Smith, “International Crises and Domestic Politics,” American Political Science Review 92, 3 (1998): 623-638; and Michael Tomz, “Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Approach,” International Organization 61 (2007): 821-40.

they do so the political risks generated should send costly signals of resolve to adversaries and increase their states’ threat credibility. 25

Whatever the mechanism by which costs are generated, all of these rationalist theories share a common assumption: once costly signals are sent, credibility follows automatically and target states will update their threat assessments accordingly. As a number of scholars have pointed out, however, the empirical record reveals substantial variation in the ability of states to process information and in the effectiveness of these different signals.26 In some cases costly signals have effectively coerced opponents, but in many other instances states have failed to convince adversaries of their willingness to use force. Take for example the Russo-Finnish War of 1939. Russia issued a clear ultimatum and threatened to use force against Finland if it did not grant Moscow minimal territorial concessions. In addition to issuing a public ultimatum, Russian leaders mobilized troops on the border to further convince the Finnish leaders of their intent. Yet

25 Schultz also holds that democracies have an advantage in generating credible threats, although he advances a different mechanism to explain this outcome. The central difference between democratic and non-democratic institutions, Schultz argues, lies in their degree of “public contestation,” that is, the ability of parties or groups to openly and legitimately compete for political office. The openness of the democratic political system has important consequences for crisis bargaining behavior by making it difficult for democratic leaders to conceal and misrepresent state preferences during a dispute. At the international level, when democratic political elites are divided, this signals a lack of resolve to carry out a threat of force and serves to undermine the government’s credibility. When the opposition party has an incentive to support the government’s threats, however, it provides a united front and increases threat credibility. See Kenneth A. Schultz, “Domestic Opposition and Signaling in International Crises,” The American Political Science Review 92, 4 (1998): 829-844; and Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy . I return to this argument when discussing alternative explanations in Section 6. 26 Matthew Levendusky and Michael Horowitz, “When Backing Down Is the Right Decision: Partisanship, New Information, and Audience Costs,” Journal of Politics 74, 2 (2012): 323-338; Snyder and Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats”; Trachtenberg, “Audience Costs.” The democratic credibility thesis has been challenged not only empirically, but also on theoretical grounds. On this see Weeks, “Autocratic Audience Costs”; and Alexander Downes and Todd Sechser, “The Illusion of Democratic Credibility,” International Organization 66, 3 (2012): 457-89. On decision makers basing assessments on both costly and “cheap” signals of resolve, see Yarhi-Milo, Knowing The Adversary.

despite the clarity of the ultimatum, and the great disparity in power between the two countries, Finnish leaders failed to appreciate the severity of the Russian threat.27

In light of such empirical variation in threat effectiveness, a number of scholars have turned to look more carefully at the targets of coercive demands in order to better understand their assessment processes. Much of this literature focuses on determining what behaviors and indices other state leaders use in arriving at their assessments of threat credibility. Schelling, for example, was one of the first to highlight the importance of past actions in assessments of credibility. A history of carrying out commitments to use force can act as a costly signal of a state’s resolve and enhance the credibility of its future demands. Failures to follow through on prior threats, on the other hand, generate perceptions of irresolution that undermine future assessments of credibility.28

The importance of a state’s past behavior in establishing a ‘reputation for resolve’ has spurned a large literature in international relations. Huth and his co-authors present quantitative evidence in favor of reputational arguments, finding that states that adopt a conciliatory policy in crisis bargaining face significant costs in subsequent interactions with the same actor. 29 Lupton adds a twist to Schelling’s logic by arguing that it is a

27 See Albin T. Anderson, “Origins of the Winter War: A Study of Russo-Finnish Diplomacy,” World Politics 6, 2 (1954): 169-189; Sechser, “Goliath’s Curse.” On great power’s inability to coerce weaker opponents more generally, see Dianne Pfundstein, “Credibility is Not Enough: Resolve and the Effectiveness of the Unipole’s Compellent Threats.” PhD Diss., Columbia University, 2012; Phil Haun, “On Death Ground: Why Weak States Resist Great Powers. Explaining Coercion Failure in Asymmetric Interstate Conflicts.” PhD Diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010. 28 Schelling, Arms and Influence , 55-59. 29 Paul K. Huth and Bruce M. Russett, “Deterrence Failure and Crisis Escalation,” International Studies Quarterly 32, 1 (1988): 29–45; Paul K. Huth, D. Scott Bennett, and Christopher F. Gelpi, “Systemic Uncertainty, Risk-Propensity, and International Conflict Among the Great Powers,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 36, 3 (1992):478–517; Paul K. Huth, Christopher F. Gelpi, and D. Scott Bennett, “The Escalation of Great Power Militarized Disputes: Testing Rational Deterrence Theory and Structural Realism,” American Political Science Review 87, 3 (1993): 609–23. By contrast, Danilovic finds that the balance of interests in a dispute are a better predictor of extended deterrence success than reputation. Vesna Danilovic, When the Stakes Are High: Deterrence and Conflict Among Major Powers (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992).

leader’s, not a state’s reputation for resolve that matters in target state threat assessments. 30 Most recently, Yarhi-Milo and Weisiger have tested the reputation theorists’ claims and find that past action is closely connected to subsequent dispute initiation, and that the effects of reputation can be observed beyond the immediate circumstances of the previous disputes.31

Yet other prominent studies have found little evidence for reputation influencing target state threat assessments. For example Daryl Press’s book, Calculating Credibility , provides a damming critique of past actions theory. Press finds that a state’s track record of threat fulfillment does not influence assessments of its future credibility. Past actions do not provide information about resolve, he claims, because every situation is different.

Instead, leaders of target states assess threats as credible when the current balance of interest and power weigh in favor of the coercing state.32 Other scholars have presented arguments that support Press’s general conclusion. Tang, for example, argues that past actions cannot generate reputations for resolve due to the anarchic nature of the international system. 33 And Mercer claims that since an adversary’s decision to back down in a crisis is always attributed to situational characteristics rather than to

30 Danielle Lupton, “Leaders, Perceptions and Reputations for Resolve.” PhD Diss., Duke University, 2014. Kathryn Cochran’s dissertation also focuses on the importance of reputation but looks beyond crises to evaluate the reputational consequences of war fighting and war outcomes. Her evidence shows that states that perform poorly on the battlefield are more likely to be challenged by their potential adversaries. See Kathryn McNabb Cochran, “Strong Horse or Paper Tiger? Assessing the Reputational Effects of War Fighting.” PhD Diss, Duke University, 2011. 31 Alex Weisiger and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “Revisiting Reputation: How Do Past Actions Matter in International Politics,” International Organization 69, 2 (2015): 472-495. 32 Press, Calculating Credibility, 10. 33 Shiping Tang, “Reputation, Cult of Reputation, and International Conflict,” Security Studies 14, 1 (2005): 34–62.

dispositional features of the opponent, that reputations for irresolution will not form between adversaries. 34

In light of this continued debate, some scholars have moved away from the question of reputation in assessments of threat credibility and have incorporated insights from political psychology to explain variation in leaders’ reception and interpretation of coercive signals. According to theories of cognitive psychology, state decision makers can have all of the information necessary to make rational inferences about an adversary’s threat credibility, but they will often be unable to make these calculations due to motivated and unmotivated biases. 35 The existence of such biases, and the resulting misperceptions they generate, have been used to explain coercion failures in a number of international crises, including the Falklands War of 1982 and the Arab-Israeli War of

1973. 36 More recently, Yarhi-Milo has drawn on insights from psychology to show how unmotivated biases shape leaders’ assessments of state intentions during peacetime. Her research demonstrates that despite being “cheap talk,” messages delivered in person and through private face-to-face communication can provide leaders in target states with salient indicators of threat credibility. 37

34 Mercer, Reputation and International Politics , 65-69. A number of scholars have questioned the importance of reputation in crises. See e.g. Tedd Hopf, Peripheral Visions: Deterrence Theory and American Foreign Policy in the Third World, 1965–1990 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Snyder and Diesing, Conflict Among Nations ; Richard N. Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). 35 Motivated biases lead actors to treat incoming information and signals in ways that diverge from standard definitions of rationality for personal needs, and/or in order to avoid facing the full implications of painful decisions. Unmotivated biases, on the other hand, arise from the complexity of the informational environment and the limitations of our cognitive abilities. 36 Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, (eds.), Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). See also Robert Jervis, “Hypotheses on Misperception,” World Politics 20, 3 (1968): 454-79; Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); and Janice Gross Stein, “Building Politics into Psychology: The Misperception of Threat,” Political Psychology 9, 2 (1988): 245-271. 37 Yarhi-Milo, Knowing The Adversary , 20-23.

Taken collectively, these psychological theories cast doubt on a number of rationalist explanations of state threat assessments. Yet while these theories are useful in detailing the various limitations of target state information processing and describing cases in which we see these biases at work, few present generalizable findings that can be applied to a large number of cases. In stark contrast to rationalist theories that predict accurate threat assessments whenever a set of signaling mechanisms are employed, it is much less clear when we might expect to see individual-level variables impacting this process, and what the outcomes would be. 38 The following section outlines a theory that both synthesizes and expands upon existing theories in order to address some of these limitations.

3. A COGNITIVE -INSTITUTIONAL THEORY OF STATE THREAT ASSESSMENT I have argued thus far that signals – both “cheap” and costly – are key means by which states try to establish their threat credibility. We know little, however, about which of these signals, if any, are salient to decision makers in target states and are used to assess an adversary’s threat credibility. Since the accuracy of threat perceptions depends in important ways on the effectiveness of this processing activity, we need a better understanding of how these threats are received and interpreted by their targets.

In Sections 3 and 4 I develop a two-stage theory of threat assessment that seeks to explain which signals are salient to target state leaders during crises, and how the interpretation of these signals feed into assessments of threat credibility. In the first stage,

I build on existing literature to argue that leadership beliefs within a target state about the nature and extent of an adversary’s interests are key to understanding how threatening

38 Yarhi-Milo’s recent work on peacetime assessments of state intentions is one exception. I discuss her theory in more detail in Section 6.

signals are received and interpreted. What do leaders entering crises think about their adversaries? And how do these beliefs constrain their perceptions? In the second stage, I turn to target state leaders’ broader institutional environments to investigate the conditions under which we should expect these beliefs to remain unchallenged, and when we should expect rational updating to occur.

3.1 Leadership Beliefs and Past Actions Scholarship within IR holds that while military capabilities are often known by other states prior to the onset of crises, the extent of a state’s foreign policy interests and its willingness to resort to force are less easy to discern. This creates a dilemma for coercing states, since they need to convince the targets of their demands that they are willing to resort to force to achieve their objectives. Costly signals, as discussed already, are one means by which states are believed able to convey their foreign policy interests to one another in a crisis. 39

Yet most scholars agree that leaders do not enter into crises as blank slates and in fact often have formed beliefs about their adversaries’ interests prior to the onset of a given conflict. When referring to beliefs in this context, I simply mean those things that we hold to be true about the world around us, both in terms of how the world functions broadly speaking (i.e. whether relationships are peaceful or inherently conflictual) but also with respect to nature of the actors that we encounter and the characteristics we believe them to possess.40 In fact one of the key findings in political psychology over the

39 Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences”; Fearon, “Signaling Foreign Policy Interests.” 40 Jonathan Renshon, “Stability and Change in Belief Systems: The Operational Code of George W. Bush,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, 6 (2008), 822. Beliefs can be propositions about causal relationships or fundamental assumptions about the way the world operates, though I will be focusing on the former category of ‘causal beliefs’ in this chapter. Causal beliefs simply pertain to an individual’s beliefs regarding the relationship between cause and effect in the world around them. This is somewhat akin to the idea of

past half-century is that these individual beliefs are useful and necessary means by which leaders organize the world around them. In order to process the large quantities of information in the international system, leaders impose cognitive structures and maps on the world to help categorize events and make sense of new pieces of data. According to

Stein, “these beliefs and schemata are essential; without them, no individual could organize or interpret the enormous amount of information potentially relevant to any problem.” 41

The important organizing function provided by beliefs requires that they maintain stability over time and be somewhat impervious to change. Perhaps more important than their stability, however, is their processing function. In order to help individuals make sense of the world, beliefs act as filters through which perceptual processes operate serving to constrain and condition how and what leaders see.42 As a result of this process, individuals respond to subjective realities that are filtered through their own belief systems. 43

From Jervis, we know that leaders’ beliefs about the world around them arise from any number of sources – their education, cultural background, professional training, and more. Evidence indicates, however, that one of the most influential sources of belief formation is firsthand experience. 44 Beliefs and predispositions that grow out of a

instrumental beliefs identified by Alexander George in his operational code framework. See Alexander George, “The Operational Code: A Neglected to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision Making,” International Studies Quarterly 13, 2 (1969): 190-222. 41 Stein, “Building Politics into Psychology,” 249. See also Alexander George, Presidential Decision Making in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980). 42 Renshon, “Stability and Change in Belief Systems,” 822. 43 Kenneth Boulding, “National Images and International Systems,” in James N. Rosenau (ed.), International Politics and Foreign Policy: A Reading in Research and Theory (New York, NY: Free Press, 1969), 422-31; Ole Holsti, “The Belief System and National Images: A Case Study,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 6, 3 (1962): 244-52 44 Jervis, Perception and Misperception , 147 ; Yarhi-Milo, Knowing The Adversary , 16-20.

person’s experience with his or her own environment breed both a sense of familiarity and set expectations about the future. 45 For leaders especially, firsthand experience with another actor over an important issue can play a crucial role in shaping images and beliefs not only about the world around them, but also other states in the international system. These experiences “provide statesman with a range of imaginable situations and allow him to detect patterns and causal links that can help him understand his world.” 46

Indeed first-hand experiences of pivotal events can leave such large impressions on individuals that the images and beliefs they produce become extremely hard to overturn.47

3.2 Leadership Beliefs and Threat Assessments Existing literature thus tells us that firsthand experience with other actors in the international system over issues of high salience can result in leaders forming strong beliefs about both the nature of the world, and importantly for our purposes, other states in the international system. But what are the content of these beliefs, and how might they impact state threat assessments? Existing scholarship lacks a clear theory of how, and under what conditions, leadership beliefs impact target state threat assessments during crises.

In accordance with existing scholarship, 48 I argue that leaders’ experiences with other states, especially during periods of crisis and war, generate beliefs and expectations about the extent of those states’ foreign policy interests by revealing the lengths to which they are willing to go – and actions they are willing to take – to achieve their policy

45 Jervis, Perception and Misperception, 147. 46 Ibid., 217. 47 Ibid., 145-46. 48 See e.g. Jervis, Perception and Misperception , and more recently, Weisiger and Yarhi-Milo, “Revisiting Reputation.”

objectives. More specifically, and moving beyond existing arguments, I claim that the coercive tools employed by states and the means by which they choose to pursue their policy objectives during crises are crucial in shaping target state leaders’ beliefs about the extent of their adversary’s interests. 49 Crisis experiences generate these beliefs and expectations about other states’ interests by demonstrating the types of costs they are willing to bear to realize their goals thereby revealing the depths of a state’s resolve. 50

Indeed a state’s behavior during these periods of unrest is a key observable indicator of the extent of its privately guarded interests, and one that is difficult to manipulate given what is often at stake.51

Through firsthand experience in crises, leaders not only receive information about an adversary’s stated foreign policy objectives, but they are also able to observe the political behavior, financial expenditures, and military strategies that an adversary is willing to employ to achieve its goals.52 These observations in turn inform target state leaders perceptions and assessments of resolve. In terms of political behavior, for example, target state leaders are able to observe whether a coercing state issues public or private demands, and whether it decides to act in accordance with, or against, the wishes

49 International crises are characterized by two key conditions: (1) “a distortion in the type and an increase in the intensity of disruptive interactions between two or more adversaries, with an accompanying high probability of military hostilities, or, during a war, an adverse change in the military balance, and (2) a challenge to the existing structure of an international system – global, dominant, or subsystem – posed by the higher-than-normal conflictual interactions.” Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crises (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Michael Brecher et al., International Crisis Behavior Data Codebook, Version 11, http://sites.duke.edu/icbdata/data-collections/ (accessed May 12, 2015). I return to this defintion in Section 7. 50 David Edelstein, “Managing Uncertainty: Beliefs about Intentions and the Rise of Great Powers,” Security Studies , 12, 1 (2002), 3. According to Mercer, a state’s resolve is “the extent to which a state will risk war to achieve its objectives,” which in turn depends on one’s valuation of the stakes involved and the cost of fighting. Highly resolved actors are more willing to suffer the costs of fighting to achieve a desirable outcome in a political dispute. Mercer, Reputation and International Politics , 1. 51 On the difficulty in manipulating information and the importance of indices, see Jervis, Logic of Images . 52 As discussed in Section 2, perceptions of resolve play a crucial role in assessments of threat credibility. See Glenn H. Snyder, "'Prisoner's Dilemma' and 'Chicken' Models in International Politics," International Studies Quarterly , 15, 1 (1971), 99.

of its domestic population. Acting against the wishes of a domestic population may be perceived as a costly signal of resolve, for example, if target state leaders reason in ways expected by audience cost proponents. It may also be perceived as a sign of weakness if target state leaders believe that domestic populations have an influence over foreign policy decision making. A leader can also observe whether a coercing state seeks authorization through an international organization. Target state leaders may perceive such action as costly in terms of the time delay and effort required, but again also as a signal of restraint depending on the content of the resolution and the limited versus unlimited ends sought.53

In terms of military means, a target state leader can observe the type of military mobilizations taking place and whether that implies a human-intensive military strategy or one that relies more heavily on technology. Since military strategies that place citizens in harms way reduce domestic support for war and create the risk of political backlash – especially in democracies – a target state leader might infer greater resolve from a state that is mobilizing (or threatening to mobilize) its ground forces. 54 This stands in contrast to more technology-dependent strategies, such as air campaigns or the use of unmanned platforms, that try to limit a state’s own casualties. A target state also has access to the type of international authorization sought and whether the coercing state is seeking to build a coalition force – a potentially less costly strategy in terms of sharing the political and military burdens of action – or is planning to proceed unilaterally. Finally, in terms of

53 See e.g. Thompson, Channels of Power. 54 John E. Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1973), 60-62. Recent studies suggest that the relationship between war casualties and public opinion is more nuanced than that proposed by Mueller. See e.g. Christopher Gelpi, Peter D. Feaver, and Jason Reifler, Paying the Human Costs of War: American Public Opinion and Casualties in Military Conflicts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

financial expenditures, the target state is able to see whether the coercing state is choosing to unilaterally absorb the costs of economic warfare and/or the use of military force, or is trying to share the workload amongst its allies. 55

Thus by taking note of an adversary’s stated foreign policy goals during a crisis, and observing the types of resources that it is willing to expend and strategies it is willing to employ to achieve those goals, target state leaders form beliefs about the extent of another state’s foreign policy interests. By experiencing an adversary’s level of resolve in this way, target state leaders make assessments about the degree to which that adversary is satisfied with the status quo or is wanting (and willing) to overturn the existing order, and forms expectations about the ways in which that adversary will pursue those interests in the future.56 The beliefs that form as a result of these first hand experiences can then be reinforced over time by observing an adversary’s behavior in other crises around the world.

Assuming that these beliefs exist as theorized, how precisely do they impact future threat assessments? As discussed in Section 3.1, existing research shows that beliefs and predispositions serve to shape the reception of information in critical ways.

Because individuals are unable to process all of the information in the world around them, beliefs act as crucial lenses, helping both to filter and interpret incoming data. 57 Most importantly, individuals will tend to focus on incoming information that accords with their pre-existing beliefs and either discard information that does not conform to their

55 Pfundstein, “Credibility is Not Enough,” 60-63. Cochran refers to this type of information as information about “will,” though in the context of war specifically. Cochran, “Strong Horse or Paper Tiger,” 13. 56 Edelstein, “Managing Uncertainty,” 4. Of course leaders can also conclude that they are entirely uncertain as to the intentions of other states, but I argue that this is less likely in cases where states have interacted during serious crises or war. In these instances I expect the leaders to have formed relatively strong beliefs about the nature of the adversary. 57 Stein “Building Politics into Psychology,” 251.

expectations, or reinterpret that information in order that it do so. 58 This process not only helps decision makers deal with large amounts of information, but also stems from a need for cognitive consistency. Indeed, the desire to preserve the organizing function that beliefs provide means that decision makers are often insensitive to small manipulations in their international environments, and to the messages intended by other states. The complexity of the international environment and ambiguous nature of inter-state signaling increases the chances of this occurring by allowing for multiple interpretations of information in accordance with prior beliefs.59

The tendency to fit incoming information into pre-existing images becomes important when one considers that assessments of threat credibility often rely on interpreting incoming signals from other states. More specifically, it implies that some pieces of information will weigh more heavily – and be more influential – in determining leaders’ assessments and responses to threats than others, and that we can explain the relative salience of these signals by looking at leaders’ prior beliefs. For example, in cases where a leader has formed prior beliefs about another state through a previous crisis interaction and believes that state to be both satisfied with the status quo and unwilling to expend large amounts of state resources on revising the existing order, incoming signals – including those designed to establish threat credibility during a future crisis – will be filtered and interpreted in accordance with these prior beliefs. On the other hand, in instances where a state has absorbed significant political, financial, and/or military costs

58 As Jervis notes, “we ignore information that does not fit, twist it so that it confirms or at least does not contradict our beliefs, and deny its validity.” He adds “in everyday life, in the interpretation of other states’ behavior, and in the scientific laboratory, expectations create predispositions that lead actors to notice certain things and to neglect others, to immediately and often unconsciously draw certain inferences from what is noticed, and to find it difficult to consider alternatives. Jervis, Perception and Misperception , 143, 145. 59 Robert Jervis, “Deterrence Theory Revisited,” World Politics 31, 2 (1979), 311.

to preserve the status quo in the past, all attempts to convey threat credibility, such as public and private statements of resolve as well as troop movements, will be weighed heavily by a target state leader and perceived as genuine indicators of intent to act. In these cases, threats to preserve the status quo in the future will be assessed as credible and the target will likely acquiesce.

However, when a state has identified an interest in preserving the status quo in a previous crisis but has devoted few resources to achieving that outcome with adverse consequences,60 all signals – including those designed to establish threat credibility in future crises – will be perceived and processed differently. In these cases, signals of restraint and lack of credibility, such as public and international opposition as well as private disclosures, will be highlighted and seized upon, while costly signals of intent to follow through on coercive threats, such as troop movements and public statements to use force, will be reinterpreted or ignored. Because of this filtering and interpretation process, leaders in these target states will assess an adversary’s threat to preserve the status quo as incredible.

Finally, regardless of whether a previous threat to preserve the status quo has been carried out with few or plentiful state resources, any future threat to revise the international order will be assessed by a target state as incredible. In such instances, a target state leader will believe an adversary to be satisfied with the status quo and unwilling to spend resources overturning the existing international order. Coercive signals designed to convey the credibility of more revisionist aims, such as costly troop

60 Adverse consequences for the coercing state include not fully achieving specified objectives or failing to do so entirely. This is necessary since the coercing state might have been able to achieve its objectives with few resources.

movements and public threats, will therefore be reinterpreted or ignored, and signals of restraint and benign intent will weigh more heavily in the process of threat assessment.61

A similar logic holds for leaders who believe another state to have revisionist foreign policy interests based on prior interactions. In cases where a state has revisionist foreign policy objectives and has absorbed significant political, financial, and/or military costs to revise the international order in the past, incoming signals to establish the credibility of future revisionist threats will be filtered and interpreted with this in mind. In these situations, attempts to signal reassurance and restraint by a coercing state – such as public guarantees and referrals to international organizations – will be reinterpreted as malign or disregarded entirely, and signals of aggressive and revisionist intent – such as public threats and movements of troops – emphasized. In such cases, target state leaders will view these threats as highly credible, but will also likely see the adversary’s threat to use force as inevitable and lacking in restraint. In these instances, leaders in target states may feel forced to seize the initiative and take preventative military action in order to avoid a worse situation from arising in the future.

However, a state may also have demonstrated an interest in revising the status quo in a previous crisis, yet have devoted very few or limited resources to achieving this outcome with adverse results.62 Where a state has spent very few or no resources on trying to achieve its revisionist objectives in the past, all future signals – including those intended to establish the credibility of revisionist threats – will be sidelined and/or

61 Note that this is a probabilistic and not a deterministic statement. In other words, target state leaders in these situations should be more likely to interpret coercive revisionist signals as incredible. One can imagine, however, cases in which an adversary rapidly grows in power between two crises and thus its subsequent revisionist threats are assessed with greater credibility than this theory would expect. This shift would have to be substantial in order to override a target state’s prior beliefs, however, and as a result I expect such cases to be rare. 62 See footnote 60.

reinterpreted by target state leaders, and all signals of irresolution seized upon when making threat assessments.

The more interesting case arises, however, when target state leaders believe that another state is willing to expend some resources, but not all, to revise the existing order and achieve some foreign policy goals beyond preserving the status quo. This belief may arise from a prior experience of limited military action, for example, where the adversary was willing to bear some human and financial costs to achieve its goals, but was not willing to deploy large-scale ground forces or engage in a costly war for more expansionist outcomes. In these situations, signals that register a limited threat, such as public declarations and movements of military forces, will be assessed as credible, as will signals of reassurance and restraint. Leaders in the target state may acquiesce to these coercive demands given their credibility and the assurance of restraint, or they may choose to resist if the domestic political costs of conceding are higher than the adversary’s threatened response. However in cases where the threatened action exceeds the limited range of costs the target state believes an adversary is willing to expend, the revisionist threat will be assessed as incredible.

Thus if we assume that leaders’ beliefs are carried through into crises and remain unchanged during this period of time, we arrive at the following theoretical propositions and hypotheses regarding the impact of leaders’ beliefs on future threat assessments:63

Proposition 1: Prior crisis interactions provide information to target state leaders about an adversary’s political objectives, and the resources an adversary is willing to devote to achieving those goals, whether they be status quo, limited revisionist, or revisionist in nature.

H1 LR : Target state leaders who experience prior crisis interactions with an adversary that has revealed an unwillingness to expend political, financial,

63 LR and HR are short hand for the adversary being assessed as having low resolve or high resolve.

and military resources to achieve its political goals with adverse results will be assessed as having low levels of resolve.

H1 HR : Target state leaders who experience prior crisis interactions with an adversary that has revealed a willingness to expend significant political, financial, and military resources to achieve its political objectives will be assessed as having high levels of resolve.

Proposition 2 : When the adversary reemerges as a security threat and issues a coercive demand, coercive signals will be filtered in accordance with prior beliefs about the adversary’s political objectives (whether they be status quo, limited revisionist, or revisionist) and the costs expended by the adversary in past crises.

H2 LR : Where a state has failed to devote significant resources to achieving its political objectives in the past, signals of irresolution and restraint will be emphasized in target state leader assessments.

H2 HR : Where a state has previously devoted significant resources to achieving a given political objective in the past, all signals that establish the credibility of future threats will be emphasized in target state leader assessments.

Proposition 3 : This process of filtering and interpretation will shape target state leaders’ assessments of future threat credibility.

H3 LR : Where a state has failed to devote significant resources to achieving its political objectives in the past, threats to do so in the future will be assessed as incredible.

H3 HR : Where a state has previously devoted significant resources to achieving a given political objective in the past, threats to do so in the future will be assessed as credible.

H3a HR : Where a state has previously devoted significant resources to achieving a revisionist political objective in the past, threats to do so in the future will not only be assessed as credible, but also as lacking guarantees of reassurance and restraint.

Proposition 4: Any threat that exceeds the costs that a target state leader believes an adversary is willing to pay to achieve a given political objective (status quo, limited revisionist, or revisionist) will be assessed as incredible.

Of course these propositions and hypotheses are conditional upon a leader having experienced a past crisis interaction. In cases where leaders have not experienced such a crisis, beliefs held about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests should be

substantially weaker and are expected to exert a less constraining effect upon future

assessments of threat credibility. In practice, this means that these leaders should be open

to a range of information and for their threat assessments to account for, and adjust to,

changing circumstances as detected. In other words, these leaders will engage in the type

of updating expected by purely rational theories (see Section 4.4).

Table 2.1 provides a summary of the chief theoretical propositions and hypotheses developed so far:

Table 2.1 Summary of Hypotheses

P1 Prior crisis interactions provide information to target state leaders about an adversary’s political objectives, and the resources an adversary is willing to devote to achieving those goals, whether they be status quo, limited revisionist, or revisionist in nature.

H1 LR Target state leaders who experience prior crisis interactions with an adversary that has revealed an unwillingness to expend political, financial, and military resources to achieve its political goals with adverse results will be assessed as having low levels of resolve.

H1 HR Target state leaders who experience prior crisis interactions with an adversary that has revealed a willingness to expend significant political, financial, and military resources to achieve its political objectives will be assessed as having high levels of resolve.

P2 When the adversary reemerges as a security threat and issues a coercive demand, coercive signals will be filtered in accordance with prior beliefs about the adversary’s political objectives (whether they be status quo, limited revisionist, or revisionist) and the costs expended by the adversary in past crises.

H2 LR Where a state has failed to devote significant resources to achieving its political objectives in the past, signals of irresolution and restraint will be emphasized in target state leader assessments.

H2 HR Where a state has previously devoted significant resources to achieving a given political objective in the past, all signals that establish the credibility of future threats will be emphasized in target state leader assessments.

P3 This process of filtering and interpretation will shape target state leaders’ assessments of future threat credibility.

H3 LR Where a state has failed to devote significant resources to achieving its political

objectives in the past, threats to do so in the future will be assessed as incredible.

H3 HR Where a state has previously devoted significant resources to achieving a given political objective in the past, threats to do so in the future will be assessed as credible.

H3a HR Where a state has previously devoted significant resources to achieving a revisionist political objective in the past, threats to do so in the future will not only be assessed as credible, but also as lacking guarantees of reassurance and restraint.

P4 Any threat that exceeds the costs that a target state leader believes an adversary is willing to pay to achieve a given political objective (status quo, limited revisionist, or revisionist) will be assessed as incredible.

These hypotheses and predicted outcomes can be summarized in the following

2x2 table. In each box I have stated the value of the dependent variable of interest (threat credibility), but also the expected outcome in terms of a target state’s response to the threat. 64

Figure 2.1 Predicted Outcomes Based on a Target State Leader’s Beliefs about an Adversary

Level of Resolve

High Low Political Objectives

Threat Assessment: Credible but Threat Assessment: Limited also unrestrained threats credible but expansive threats incredible Revisionist

Response: Unlikely to concede Response: Concession to limited threats will depend on domestic costs of doing so.

Threat Assessment: Credible Threat Assessment: Incredible

Status Quo Response: Likely to concede Response: Unlikely to concede

64 Note that these are probabilistic expectations since there are other factors that may determine whether a state concedes or not irrespective of the credibility of an adversary’s threat. I return to this point in Section 7.

4. THREAT PRIORITIZATION AND INSTITUTIONALIZATION Of course one might accept that leadership beliefs matter in international politics, and yet still question whether they are truly influential in shaping state threat assessments.

In fact, cognitive and rationalist theorists alike agree that leaders enter crises with prior beliefs about their adversaries; their disagreement centers upon how fixed these beliefs are and the degree to which new information can alter leaders’ assessments. As discussed at some length already, scholars of cognitive psychology view beliefs – and especially those formed through firsthand experience over issues of high salience – as extremely sticky. The need for individuals to maintain rational cognitive consistency demands that they assimilate incoming information to their pre-existing beliefs and preserve these organizing images even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Indeed, this way of perceiving is often described as “boundedly rational” and helps to explain not only decision making at the individual level, but also that of organizations. 65 According to this view, then, we should expect that when leaders develop certain images of another country, that they would maintain those images even in the face of discrepant information. 66

Rationalist scholars on the other hand concede that leaders may enter into crises having miscalculated the resolve and/or capability of their opponents, but argue that costly signals issued during these periods generate new information that should force target state leaders to update their beliefs. Indeed, these scholars might add that in cases of threats to national security where there are clear incentives to “get it right,” that we

65 Intelligence agencies, for example, employ the same heuristic devices and shortcuts in formulating threat assessments. See e.g. Amy Zegart, Spying Blind: The FBI, CIA and Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 66 Jervis, Perception and Misperception , 145-46. Jervis notes that, “the impact of firsthand experience makes the person insensitive not only to changes in circumstances and actors over time but also to variables that change from one situation to another” (274). This implies that target state leaders’ beliefs may hold even in the face of leadership changes and shifts in foreign policy within the adversarial state.

might expect leaders to go to even greater lengths to collect new information and scrutinize their assessments to avoid catastrophe. At some point these signals should be so strong and information to exist in such large quantities that even leaders holding strong priors would be forced to adjust their beliefs.67

In light of these two competing views regarding the role of leaders’ beliefs in state threat assessments, the interesting question to ask is under what conditions should we expect each framework to hold. When should we expect leaders’ beliefs to change during crises? And when should we expect prior beliefs to have the most impact on threat assessments? It is here, I argue, that we need to look beyond leaders to the institutional environment in which they reside.

4.1 Processes of Institutionalization Leaders in all types of regimes – whether strong democracies, weak democracies, single party dictatorships, or military juntas – play a pivotal role in setting the security priorities of the state. 68 These priorities are in turn dictated by leaders’ threat perceptions, though admittedly the influence of leaders’ personal beliefs is more overt in some cases than in others. 69 The beliefs that leaders hold about the extent of an adversary’s intentions,

I argue, feed into broader perceptions of their threat environments and can become institutionalized in the security apparatus of a state over time.

What do I mean by institutionalization in this context? And of what exactly? By

“institutionalization” I simply mean that a leader’s beliefs and threat perceptions are reflected in the priorities and tasks of security organizations, including both intelligence

67 This is the standard Bayesian updating model that I will discuss in Section 4.4. 68 For example, in the United States the president’s security priorities are made public in the U.S. National Security Strategy. 69 The scope conditions for this project and the type of leaders that I focus on are discussed in Section 7.

agencies and the military forces. This may occur as the result of an explicit directive from above, or as a result of institutions responding reflexively to perceived changes in a leader’s priorities. Institutionalization can occur at different levels, moreover, with differing implications for state threat assessments. At the most basic level, leaders can orient the state’s security apparatus towards some threats over others, often necessitating a diversion of resources. For example, during the Cold War a key focus of U.S. security agencies was to understand the intentions of the Soviet Union, to anticipate its behavior, and to respond to challenges that the Soviets presented. The significant amount of resources devoted to this end indicated the privileged status of the Soviet Union in U.S. leaders’ national security priorities. At the end of the Cold War these agencies shifted their focus away from the Soviet Union to address the Clinton Administration’s new set of concerns. More recently, and certainly since 9/11, the majority of U.S. security resources have been devoted towards understanding, anticipating, and responding to the threats posed by terrorism and rogue state actors. 70

There is a second, more substantial way in which leaders’ threat perceptions can become institutionalized in the security apparatus of the state. This second pathway falls more in line with the standard definition of institutionalization, which is often used to apply to the creation and/or reorganization of governmental institutions. A leader can

70 Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 179. Michael A. Turner, Why Secret Intelligence Fails (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005), 51. One may question whether “reorientation” even constitutes institutionalization. Insofar as a leader’s own beliefs and priorities influence the activities of security organizations, however, I argue that “shallow” institutionalization is taking place. This also encompasses Thelen’s idea of “institutional conversion” or the repurposing of institutions for different ends. See Kathleen Thelen, “How Institutions Evolve,” in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (eds.), Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Ithaca, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 228-230. Since I am referring here mainly to the setting of priorities, I am not directly engaging literature on the politicization of intelligence agencies, which concerns the more nuanced interaction between political leaders and intelligence. For more detail on these arguments, see Richard K. Betts, Enemies of Intelligence (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2003); Joshua Rovner, Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); and Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails.

choose not only to redirect the attention of existing agencies towards new security priorities, but he or she can also establish new agencies and organizations to address new and emerging threats. By creating new organizational bodies, leaders can restructure the security apparatus of the state to reflect their threat priorities thereby embedding their individual beliefs in the state infrastructure. This constitutes a “deeper” understanding of institutionalization than the previous, and one that is expected to have a more discernable and long-lasting impact on state behavior beyond turnovers in leadership. 71

Of course calling this process “institutionalization” necessarily evokes images of large-scale upheaval every time a new leader comes to the helm. This is not necessarily the case however. In fact leaders often share similar threat perceptions and priorities – especially leaders of states with relatively stable threat environments. In cases where threat environments are not perceived to change drastically (for example, the United

States during the Cold War), leaders will likely have similar priorities, and security resources may remain focused on the same threats for extended periods of time. 72 I discuss this point in more detail in Section 7.

4.2 Threat Environments and Threat Assessments The question quickly arises as to how this process of institutionalization matters to state threat assessments. To make this connection clear, it is important to emphasize

71 According to Goldstein, “once ideas have influenced organizational design…the impact of ideas may be prolonged for decades or even generations.” Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane (eds.), Ideas & Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 20-21. Note that in both variants of institutionalization I am referring to institutions responding positively to changes in priorities – that is, the diversion of resources or creation of new bodies to focus on a given problem. I expect it to be less likely that leaders would explicitly direct organizations not to collect intelligence on a specific country or issue area. 72 Unfortunately the outcome of leaders sharing similar priorities and therefore not altering the focus of state intelligence agencies may be observationally equivalent to cases of institutional path dependence (see Section 4.3). As I note in Section 7, teasing out these cases requires looking not only at the stated priorities of new leaders when they come to power, but also establishing if any (failed) effort is made to alter the priorities of the security agencies, and the intelligence community in particular.

that although the security agencies of the state are of interest broadly speaking, it is the impact of leaders’ threat perceptions on the activities of the intelligence community that is most relevant to this project. This is because it is the explicit mandate of the intelligence community to analyze incoming information, pick up on patterns of behavior, and estimate threats – estimates that are then used by decision makers to formulate policy responses. 73 Thus while the focus of the police and military forces are important in responding to threats once they have been carried out, it is the role of the intelligence agencies to produce timely information that can help leaders formulate sound assessments of threat credibility.

The claim that a given leader’s beliefs influence the intelligence apparatus does not necessarily preclude updating during a crisis – indeed, in all states “intelligence analysts do work based on ‘requirements’ or ‘needs’ set at the policy level.” 74 What we want to know is how and when these processes of institutionalization matter most to target state leaders’ interpretation of their international environment, and to their subsequent threat assessments. It is here, I argue, that the nature of a leader’s security environment becomes relevant. Leaders often face a range of security threats varying in location and size that collectively comprise their security environments. In terms of location, leaders tend to face two broad categories of threats – external threats

(international) and internal threats (domestic) – both of which vary in intensity.75 Wars or intense periods of conflict with other states represent greater external threats, while

73 Yarhi-Milo, Knowing The Adversary , 9. 74 Turner, Why Intelligence Fails , 71. 75 On this categorization of threats, see Michael Desch, Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999), 12-13. On the relationship between threatening international environments and increases in state capacity, see David Lektzian and Brandon C. Prins, “Taming the Leviathan: Examining the Impact of External Threat on State Capacity,” Journal of Peace Research 45, 5 (2008): 613-631.

significant internal threats include large-scale mass mobilizations intended to undermine regime stability, as well as coup d’états.

In addition to facing varied security environments, leaders also have a finite set of resources to devote to these different threats. The reality of finite resources means that some trade-offs have to be made, with leaders prioritizing some threats over others in order to focus the state security apparatus on those deemed most urgent. Since threat prioritization is based to a large extent on a regime’s threat perception, and more often than not on that of an individual leader, the beliefs that a regime leader holds regarding the extent of other states’ interests and their benign versus malign intent can influence this prioritization process and help dictate the distribution of state resources. Such decisions include budget allocations, but also decisions around the training and stationing of military forces, the creation of new units, and crucially the focus of the intelligence community. 76 For although decision makers would like to know as much as they can, in detail, about virtually everything that concerns them, intelligence agencies – like all others – work under budgetary and personnel restraints that prevent open-ended intelligence gathering. 77

The question of how beliefs influence the distribution of finite security resources

– and their subsequent impact on threat assessments – is less important for leaders facing relatively benign threat environments comprised of very low level or no threats to their security, either from internal or external sources. In these cases there are few resource

76 On state threat prioritization and the difficulties in designing security apparatus to address all needs, see Caitlin Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 18. 77 Turner, Why Intelligence Fails , 68-69.

trade-offs that would be expected to impact processes of threat assessment – and threat assessments themselves should rarely be required.

These trade-offs are also less apparent when a leader assesses an external adversary to be the most serious threat that they face. A situation of high external threat can arise when a leader faces a relatively benign internal threat environment and feels secure in his or her position, but believes an external adversary to be highly resolved to achieve a given political objective that threatens the interests of the target state. In these cases, I expect the security resources of that target state – and especially the intelligence apparatus – to be focused externally on understanding and anticipating threats presented by that adversary. This might include domestic security agencies performing analyses of an adversary, but also efforts to expand intelligence networks overseas to better assess the nature of the threat. Thus while we might see evidence of the stickiness of leaders’ prior beliefs as expected by cognitive theories of threat assessment in the lead up to the crisis and even in its early stages, the probability of a leader being able to update these beliefs in the face of new information is more likely given the focus of the security agencies on the adversary in question.78

Of course in cases where a leader perceives multiple external threats to the state, he or she will be forced to prioritize among them based on prior beliefs about the extent of those states’ foreign policy interests. In these situations, the intelligence community will be diverted towards the external threat deemed most urgent (as above), and the target

78 Once again these are probabilistic claims regarding the likelihood of a leader updating with new information available. Of course it is always possible that a leader may not update due to extremely strong prior beliefs. The contention is merely that the chance of these beliefs being challenged (or confirmed) increases the more that new information becomes available.

state leader will be less exposed to detailed analyses of other external adversaries creating a permissive environment for prior beliefs to play a role in threat assessments.

The most challenging situation arises, however, when leaders perceive high internal threats to their security. Existing scholarship shows that when leaders perceive high internal threats to their survival, and especially when they are facing coup risks, that leaders will use all means possible to retain a grip on power with important implications for the distribution and arrangement of security resources. Literature on coup-proofing practices details the deleterious effects that these resource trade offs can have on a state’s military effectiveness. Talmadge, for example, documents the negative impact of coup- proofing promotion patterns, training regimes, command arrangements, and information management policies. 79 Deploying the state army far from the capital, reducing security force coordination, creating redundant units, internal spying, and promoting officers based on loyalty over merit, have all been shown to undermine the ability of armed forces to protect the state from external threats. 80 In these environments intelligence agencies can also become personalized, focused internally on monitoring the activities of the domestic population and rival elites, and much less concerned with more distant threats outside the border of the state. 81

79 Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army, 16-17. 80 Ibid. See also Stephen Biddle and Stephen Long, “Democracy and Military Effectiveness: A Deeper Look,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48, 4 (August 2004): 525-46; Cameron Brown, Christopher Fariss, and R. Blake McMahon, “Recouping after Coup-Proofing: Compromised Military Effectiveness and Strategic Substitution.” Draft Manuscript. August 24, 2014. 81 Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army, 19. In addition to diverting the resources of the intelligence agencies, leaders facing internal threats to their regime will also tend to organize the state’s police and armed forces to protect the regime from internal rather than external threats. These measures can include undermining the ability of security forces to coordinate, as well as the creation of special police units and intelligence branches to monitor elites. While these units are less directly connected to the process of state threat assessment, their focus on internal over external threats and their organization to address internal unrest may make these security organizations less aware of growing threats outside the state, and certainly less capable of defending the country from an external attack should one occur. The diversion of security resources that occurs as a byproduct of a leaders’ threat perception can therefore consume resources that

The deleterious effects of high internal threat environments on state security arrangements and subsequent assessments become most consequential when a leader faces a complex environment of both high external and high internal threats . In these cases, the proximity of the threat to the leader – and therefore its perceived urgency – often results in leaders prioritizing internal over external concerns with important consequences for the quality of external threat assessments.82 More specifically, when internal threats are prioritized over external threats, threat assessments are impacted through two key pathways: 1) through resource diversions and loss of expertise, and 2) through information pathologies that exist in domestically insecure regimes.

First, in cases where internal threats are deemed most urgent, intelligence analysts and military officers will be much less attuned to the activities of other states and focused more on the internal activities of troubling citizens and threatening elites. The ability to assess signals from the external environment will therefore be hampered due to the sheer lack of resources devoted to external concerns. For example, a lack of resources might mean that signals are simply not received at all by an intelligence community due to resource constraints and its focus elsewhere. Alternatively, a signal might be received but the intelligence community have too few resources available to provide a sophisticated understanding of the message. In this latter case, the process of prioritization impacts the

would otherwise be focused elsewhere, as well as undermining the ability of those agencies to perform effectively at other tasks. For more on the effects of coup proofing see Peter Feaver “The Why, What, and How of Civilian Control: Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 1995; James T. Quinlivan, “Coup- proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East,” International Security 24, 2 (1999): 131–65l; and Johnathan Powell, “Determinants of the Attempting and Outcome of Coups d’état,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 56, 6 (2012): 1017–1040. 82 Talmadge argues that high internal threats will nearly always trump external threats in urgency given the close proximity of regime insiders to the leader. “Logical deduction and the historical record both suggest that regimes will almost always prioritize protection against coups over protection against other dangers, even if other dangers are significant.” Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army , 19.

interpretation and analysis of intelligence, rather than the simpler act of data collection.

In short, when resources are finite and diverted elsewhere, external signals might not be detected at all, or signals might be detected and data collected but with little understanding of the context within which they appear.

Second, focusing security resources internally and/or establishing institutions to target domestic threats often results in organizational cultures that encourage certain informational pathologies. Leaders that have instilled a culture of loyalty and deference to deter internal threats, for example, will be much less likely to receive honest and contradictory advice – even when incoming information suggests it is necessary. 83 Thus even if an intelligence service had pertinent information at hand, a political culture focused on deterring internal threats to the regime may dis-incentivize individuals from passing that information on to the leader. 84

4.3 Does Regime Type Matter? There are two reasons why regime type might matter to the institutional argument developed in this section. First, some states are statistically more prone to internal threats than others. As a result, the importance of mixed threat environments and the degree to which the institutionalization variable should matter in preventing belief updating might correlate with certain regime types. In particular, research shows that states that are

83 Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray, “Saddam’s Delusions,” Foreign Affairs 85, 3 (May/June 2006). 84 Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army, 24. In sum there are three mechanisms through which prioritization impacts the information leaders’ receive, two as the result of resource limitations, and one as a result of political culture. When resources are finite and diverted elsewhere, external signals might not be detected at all, or signals might be detected and data collected but absent a broader understanding of the context within which they appear. Finally, signals might be detected and the broader context understood, but the information might not be available to the leader due to political concerns.

weakly institutionalized,85 such as weak democracies, personalized regimes, and military dictatorships, are particularly prone to coups and thus are more likely to face internal threats.86 Leaders in stronger, more institutionalized states, such as mature democracies and even single-party regimes, are less likely to face the same kinds of internal threats. 87

Of course, these states may have complex external threat environments requiring some resource trade-offs that impact a leader’s threat assessments. In these cases, the intelligence community may miss important signals from one adversary due to a leader prioritizing another external threat deemed more urgent. Absent the internal regime threat, however, I expect the impact of these trade-offs on security agencies to be less pathological in nature than those that occur as a result of domestic regime threats. 88

Second, lurking underneath the institutional argument is the question of the ability of leaders to make the institutional changes posited by this theory, and the long-term effects of these changes once made. For while it might seem relatively easy to move forces around to address changing threat environments, decisions to create new military

85 By “weakly institutionalized” I mean a “a political system in which a political elite as an informal network of persons, supplanting and perpetuating itself by cooptation, guarantees continuity and stability, while formal institutions of a constitutional order stand at disposition and might be dissolved or restructured at times of crisis.” Freidemann Büttner, “Trends towards Re-traditionalization in Egypt,” in Gustav Stein and Gustav Steinbach (eds.) The Contemporary Middle Eastern Scene: Basic Issues and Major Trends (Opladen: Leske Verlag, 1979), 113. O’Donnell and Schmitter state that an institutionalized regime is one in which its constitutent rules are “habitually known, practiced, and accepted” and its “real or potential dissents” so weak as to be “unlikely to threaten” it. Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 73. 86 See Barbara Geddes, “What Do We Know about Democratization after 20 years?” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999), 121-122, 130. See also Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army, 20-22. 87 Huntington notes that, “states with one highly institutionalized political party are markedly more stable than states which lack such a party. States with no parties or many weak parties are the least stable.” Samuel Huntington, Political Order and Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 91. See also, Geddes, “What Do We Know,” 115-144. 88 Again this is a probabilistic claim. Such trade-offs may still play some role in preventing belief updating – but less than I would expect in cases where internal threats to a regime exist.

units and divert intelligence resources create path dependencies that are hard to reverse.89

Again I expect that the less-institutionalized the state, the easier it is for leaders to exert an influence over security agencies, redirecting resources, creating new bodies, and having the state security apparatus reflect their threat perceptions. Leaders in stronger, more institutionalized states, such as mature democracies and even some single-party regimes, have less freedom to undertake these actions due to the bureaucratic hurdles and procedures in place to prevent such behavior. As a result, in more mature states there is less ability for leaders’ threat perceptions to exert such an immediate and far-reaching influence over the organization of the security apparatus. When they manage to do so, however, there is also a greater expectation of institutional path dependency than in more

“fluid,” less-institutionalized regimes, where previous decisions can be reversed more easily. Taken collectively, these observations imply that the institutionalization argument should hold more strongly (and thus leaders’ individual beliefs exert more of an influence) in less-institutionalized states where the balance of threats is weighted internally.

This discussion generates the following theoretical propositions and hypotheses regarding the impact of a leader’s security environment on the process of threat assessment: 90

Proposition 5 : Leaders in target states structure their domestic security apparatus based on their beliefs about the extent of adversaries’ foreign policy interests vis-à-vis other internal and external threats.

H5 LT : Target state leaders whose prior beliefs about the extent of adversaries’ foreign policy interests lead them to assess that adversary as less of a

89 On path dependency, see e.g. Paul Pierson, "Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics," American Political Science Review 94, 2 (2000): 251-267. 90 LT and HT are short hand for the adversary being assessed as high threat or low threat.

threat to their security than other internal or external threats will prioritize accordingly and devote domestic security resources to these other concerns.

H5 HT : Target state leaders whose prior beliefs about the extent of adversaries’ foreign policy interests lead them to assess that adversary as at least equal to, if not more of a threat to their security than other internal or external threats will prioritize accordingly and devote domestic security resources to addressing that external concern.

Proposition 6 : This process of prioritizing some threats over others impacts the availability of information to a leader in formulating assessments of an adversary’s threat credibility during crises.

H6 LT: Where target state leaders assess the adversary in question as less of a threat to their security than other internal or external threats and the security agencies are focused accordingly, there is a lower likelihood of new information arising during the course of a crisis and being incorporated into the target state leader’s threat assessment.

H6A LT : The lowest likelihood of new information arising during the course of a crisis occurs when target state leaders assess internal threats to be the chief threat to their security.

H6 HT : Where target state leaders assess the adversary in question as at least equal to, if not more of a threat to their security than other internal or external threats and the security agencies are focused accordingly, there is a greater likelihood of new information arising during the course of a crisis and being incorporated into the target state leader’s threat assessment.

Proposition 7 : The degree to which a state is institutionalized will impact the types of threats leaders face and their ability to shape the security apparatus to their needs.

H7: Leaders in less institutionalized states ( e.g. weak democracies, personalized regimes, and military juntas) will face more internal regime threats and be able to exert more direct influence over their institutional environments than leaders in more institutionalized states ( e.g. mature democracies and single party regimes).

To summarize the theory developed so far: in the first section I argued that leaders often hold beliefs about the extent of other states’ interests and ambitions and that these beliefs form more strongly in cases where leaders have had personal experiences and have interacted with other states over issues of high salience, such as international crises

or war. These beliefs, if left unchallenged, can carry through into future crises and constrain leaders’ reception and interpretation of signals in ways that influence assessments of threat credibility. In this second section I ask about the conditions under which we should expect these prior beliefs to exert the influence hypothesized in section one. Given the influx of new information that often arises during the course of crises, we need to know the conditions under which we should expect these beliefs to remain fixed, and when we should expect leaders to incorporate new information into their threat assessments.

Here I argue that the interaction between a leader’s prior beliefs about an adversary’s interests and the target state leader’s threat environment is important to take into account. Leaders often face complex security environments and are forced to prioritize across multiple threats to their regime. Since states have a finite set of resources, prioritization requires focusing the security apparatus of the state on those threats deemed most urgent, affecting budget decisions, the nature of training and the stationing of military forces, and most importantly the orientation of the intelligence community. Target state leaders’ beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests inform leaders’ broader threat perceptions and feed into a process of threat prioritization. This process in turn determines the focus of state security institutions with crucial consequences for the reception and availability of new information during future crises. This diversion of resources is most consequential for threat assessments where target state leaders’ beliefs lead them to assess an internal threat as being more acute than that posed by an external adversary. In these situations, security resources – and especially intelligence agencies – are focused on domestic threats to the regime, making

them less capable of: 1) receiving information; 2) providing a sound interpretation of any information detected; and 3) making information available to the leader. 91

As a result, the “cognitive” component of the cognitive-institutional theory developed in Section 3 is expected to hold most strongly in cases where leaders face complex threat environments and especially in cases where leaders prioritize internal over external threats. Internal threats are expected to emerge more often in less- institutionalized regimes, where target state leaders’ beliefs and perceptions are also more easily reflected in, and reinforced by, the security apparatus of the state. The cognitive theory will hold less strongly in more institutionalized states, and in all cases where the adversary is judged the chief and only threat to target state security. 92 In these instances, the security agencies – and especially the intelligence agencies – will be focused on the adversary and primed to receive new signals and information. Thus while a leaders’ prior beliefs might exert some influence in the lead up to and even in the early stages of a future crisis, there is a greater likelihood that new information will become available to challenge existing beliefs and push leaders to update their threat assessments. Figure 2.2 illustrates this process in a flow diagram.

91 See footnote 84 for further elaboration. 92 Again, this is less likely in less-institutionalized states where domestic threats are more likely.

Figure 2.2 Leader Beliefs and Target State Threat Environment 93

Leader has prior beliefs about external adversary

N Y

Beliefs exert no External threat constraining assessed as target influence on threat state's dominant assessment concern - Updating likely N Y

The final issue to address before moving on to the next section is whether this process of prioritization and institutionalization matters at all in cases where a leader holds strong prior beliefs. That is, even if target state leaders had new information available to them, could they not just select the pieces of information that accorded with their prior beliefs anyway? Of course this is always a possibility and is something to be attuned to in the course of the case analyses. But there are also two additional points worth making. The first is that even those within the cognitive psychology school believe that at some point, large amounts of discrepant information is sufficient to force individuals to update their beliefs. Thus while they may be “sticky,” there are situations in which the quantity of information is expected to have some impact on the content of

93 The first box in the diagram refers to beliefs based on prior crisis experiences.

individual beliefs.94 The second response, building on the previous, is to emphasize the fact that I am making probabilistic claims in this theory regarding the likelihood of a leader updating with new information available. And thus while a leader may not update in the face of incoming data due to extremely strong prior beliefs, the contention is merely that the chance of these beliefs being challenged (or confirmed) increases the more that new information becomes available.

The following flow diagram visualizes the theory so far:

Figure 2.3 The Cognitive Institutional Theory

Stage O ne Stage Two Adversary Poses New Prior Threat Leader forms Threat Information Leader Threat Systemic Beliefs about Prioritization Processing Assessment Crisis Adversary

4.4 Cognitive-Institutional Theory Versus Rational Theories of Updating At this point, one might be wondering about the relationship between the cognitive-institutional theory and rationalist theories of threat assessments. In fact, the cognitive-institutional theory accords with rationalist theories of learning to the extent that both expect past actions to feed into assessments of other states’ interests. 95 Where the two theories diverge is with respect to the role of new information, and how likely it is that new information will impact target state leaders’ beliefs. For rationalist scholars like Fearon, for example, all leaders within crises will incorporate the new information gleaned from crisis negotiations or military mobilizations into their threat assessments.96

94 Jervis, Perception and Misperception , 308. 95 Indeed, as we will see in the empirical chapters, the beliefs that form based on past ‘experiences of resolve’ appear quite rational. 96 James Fearon, “Signaling Versus the Balance of Power and Interests: An Empirical Test of a Crisis Bargaining Model,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 38, 2 (1994): 236-269; Jim Morrow, Game Theory for Political Scientists (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

According to rationalist (Bayesian) updating, information that runs counter to prior expectations about the adversary should lead to some belief change, or at least to lowered confidence in existing beliefs.

The cognitive-institutional theory, while agreeing that updating can occur under certain conditions, places more emphasis on the constraining role of beliefs than do pure rationalist theories in at least two ways. First, the cognitive-institutional theory expects beliefs formed through past interactions to exert a stronger effect than would be expected by strictly rationalist theories and to slow down processes of updating in all cases.

Second, it expects in cases of complex threat environments that processes of threat prioritization and institutionalization will reduce the amount of new information available to challenge leaders’ prior beliefs. This in turn creates a permissive environment in which leaders’ prior beliefs can play a stronger role in determining their interpretation of the international environment.97 The resulting threat assessment is not necessarily “irrational” given the allowance for prior beliefs in rationalist theories, the resource constraints faced by leaders, and the consequent lack of timely information available. Instead, these leaders are acting according to the expectations of bounded rationality where purely rational reasoning is limited by information availability, issue complexity, cognitive limitations, and time constraints. 98

97 If, however, leaders are not receiving any new information due to the focus of the security agencies then it is not so much leaders beliefs that are determining assessments of threat credibility as much as it is a lack of information available – a purely rational rather than cognitive story. I argue that beliefs matter more than this, however. For although the demands of prioritization in complex threat environments reduces the amount of new information available to leaders, intelligence agencies are unlikely to ignore all new data entirely. Instead, what this process does is limit the degree to which beliefs are challenged by discrepant data, and in doing so it provides a permissive environment in which prior beliefs shape the reception and interpretation of the information available. 98 See e.g. Herbert Simon, “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice,” in Models of Man, Social and Rational: Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting (New York, NY: Wiley, 1957); Herbert Simon, “Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning,” Organization Science 2, 1

5. THEORY EXTENSION : DIFFERENT TYPES OF THREATS In the previous section I laid out a general theory of target state threat assessment to explain how leaders form beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests, and the ways in which those beliefs might shape future assessments of threat credibility. The question arises, however, as to the generalizability of this theory across all types of coercive threats – and in particular, conventional military versus nuclear threats. Does the presence of nuclear weapons in crises influence target state leaders’ assessments in ways that differ from purely conventional threats?

Building on existing scholarship, I argue that the chief way in which nuclear threats operate differently to conventional threats is by drastically increasing the level of destruction facing target state leaders. 99 During purely conventional crises, coercive signals can be subtle, less escalatory, and threaten the incremental application of punishment. Nuclear threats and signals that explicitly express a willingness to risk nuclear war, however, should be highly salient to target state leaders given the possibility of immediate – and mass – destruction. 100 The fear of conflict escalation and war in these cases should instill such caution and fear in leaders that they revise their existing beliefs and update assessments of adversaries’ threat credibility.

The risk of nuclear war can be manipulated through a number of different signaling mechanisms, though two in particular stand out. Leaders can increase the risk

(1991): 125-134. Jervis also notes that interpreting information in accordance with prior beliefs is rational. “Intelligence-making in any sphere is impossible unless significant amounts of information are assimilated to pre-existing beliefs.” Jervis, Perception and Misperception , 145. 99 On the difference between the levels of destruction promised by nuclear versus conventional weapons, Schelling notes that: “It is not overkill that is new…what is new is plane “kill” – the idea that major war might be just a contest in the killing of countries, or not even a contest but just two parallel exercises in devastation.” Schelling, Arms and Influence, 23. 100 Schelling, Arms and Influence , 99-125. See also Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict; Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution ; and Robert Powell, “Crisis Bargaining, Escalation, and MAD,” American Political Science Review 81, 3 (1987): 717-35.

of escalation to nuclear war through military mobilizations and troops movements; and/or they can more explicitly threaten nuclear use through nuclear signals such as moving missiles or placing nuclear forces on high alert. Mobilizing forces and raising alert levels increases the chance that nuclear force will be employed purposefully, but also raises the risk of accidental war and the possibility of inadvertent escalation. 101 This is what

Schelling is referring to when he describes the “threat that leaves something to chance.” 102 On the coercive value of escalation risk, he notes that, “it is our sheer inability to predict the consequences of our actions and to keep things under control, and the enemy’s similar inability, that can intimidate the enemy (and, of course, us too).”103

Given this lack of control over the course of crises, escalatory signals issued by states in possession of nuclear weapons ought to be highly salient to leaders in target states and convince them of an adversary’s resolve regardless of cognitive and/or institutional impediments to updating.

Of course not all escalatory signals are created equal, and while nuclear alerts and missile movements clearly raise the risk of nuclear war, leaders may be oblivious to the nuclear dangers involved in conventional escalation. 104 If this is the case then conventional operations would not constitute a nuclear signal. Here I argue that whether conventional mobilizations count as “nuclear signals” or constitute a nuclear threat rests importantly on target state leaders’ beliefs about the relationship between nuclear and

101 On this point more generally, see Barry Posen, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 102 Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict , 187. 103 Schelling, Arms and Influence , 109. See also Scott Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Possessing nuclear superiority, moreover, may magnify a state’s coercive power. As Kroenig argues, states with larger nuclear arsenals may be able to gain greater coercive leverage in crises by assuming greater escalatory risks. Matt Kroenig, “Nuclear Superiority and the Balance of Resolve: Explaining Nuclear Crisis Outcomes,” International Organization 67, 1 (2013): 141-71. 104 See e.g. Barry Posen, Inadvertent Escalation.

conventional war. For leaders who view the conventional and nuclear domains as distinct realms of conflict, conventional mobilizations will not rock the nuclear boat and have the coercive effect envisaged by Schelling. On the other hand, for leaders who view the two domains as more fluid, conventional mobilizations and operations will activate the risk of nuclear war and thus constitute a nuclear signal similar in kind to nuclear force alerts.

Indeed it was the perceived fluidity between the nuclear and conventional worlds that laid the basis for the theory of the nuclear revolution articulated most famously by Robert

Jervis. 105 This discussion generates the following hypotheses:

H8 nuclear : Nuclear signals will be highly salient to target state leaders forcing them to quickly reassess their prior beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests and to update assessments of threat credibility.

H8A nuclear : Whether conventional military mobilizations by a nuclear- armed state constitute nuclear signals (and therefore “activate” a nuclear threat) will depend on target state leaders’ theories about the process of escalation from conventional to nuclear war. Of course, it is possible that nuclear weapons – even when their use is activated through conventional or nuclear signaling – do not influence the formation of target state leaders’ beliefs and subsequent threat assessments at all. There are a number of reasons that might explain this outcome. First, as Sechser and Fuhrmann note, there are a number of features of nuclear weapons that render them useful tools for existential deterrence, but poor tools for broader coercive purposes. When facing a coercive threat from an adversary, target state leaders may discount the presence of nuclear weapons for either or both of the two reasons that they posit: (1) nuclear weapons do not help states to seize or

105 On the restraining effects of nuclear weapons on international conflict see Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Kenneth Waltz, “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better,” Adelphi Papers, Number 171 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981).

hold territory under dispute; and (2) the costs of nuclear use by threatening states are too great to bear for purposes other than self preservation.106 Building on this latter point, other scholars claim that in cases where two states hold nuclear weapons such that they exist in a condition of mutually assured destruction (MAD), that their nuclear arsenals effectively cancel one another out. Since neither state can credibly threaten its own annihilation, nuclear weapons become irrelevant to crisis outcomes and other factors, such as the conventional balance of power, are more decisive. 107 Finally, the evolving

“taboo” on the employment of nuclear weapons has increased the incredibility of nuclear use to achieve political ends during international crises. 108 As a result, nuclear threats may play little or no role in target state assessments of threat credibility. These arguments generate the following (null) nuclear hypothesis:

H9 nuclear : Given the incredibility of using nuclear weapons, nuclear threats will have no independent effect on target state leaders’ beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests and assessments of threat credibility.

6. ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESES Before delving into alternative explanations, it is worth noting the similarities and differences between the cognitive-institutional theory and the theory of threat assessment offered by Keren Yarhi-Milo. Yarhi-Milo’s theory also focuses on the role of beliefs in state threat assessments, and she analyzes the types of signals that leaders use in arriving

106 Todd Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, “Crisis Bargaining and Nuclear Blackmail,” International Organization 67, 1 (2013), 174. 107 John Mueller, “The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World,” International Security 13 (1988): 55-79. See also Daniel Geller, “Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence, and Crisis Escalation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 34 (1990): 291-310; Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 236-37. 108 Nina Tannenwald, “The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Normative Basis of Non-Use,” International Organization 53 (3): 433-468; Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

at their final judgments. Nevertheless while there are similarities in the substantive focus of our two projects, there are a number of important differences to highlight.

First, Yarhi-Milo focuses on periods of peacetime and looks at how target states assess an adversary’s long-term intentions. The cognitive-institutional theory, on the other hand, focuses on periods of crisis, and takes beliefs about an adversary’s intentions as the independent variable to explain assessments of threat credibility. As a result, the two theories are designed to explain two quite different phenomena (long term intentions in peacetime vs. assessments of threat credibility during crises). Second, the cognitive- institutional theory and Yarhi-Milo’s “selective attention thesis” posit different mechanisms through which assessments of intentions are made. The cognitive- institutional theory focuses on the importance of past crisis interactions in target state leaders’ beliefs about an adversary’s foreign policy interests, traces the influence of those beliefs through the allocation of state resources, and then looks at how those beliefs and subsequent resource allocation decisions shape assessments of future threat credibility.

Yarhi-Milo’s theory diverges from this by focusing not on the importance of past crisis interactions, but rather on face-to-face and “vivid” personal communication between individual leaders in assessments of their long-term intentions. She then looks separately at intelligence and defense communities and the different indicators that they use in formulating their own evaluations. She does not attempt to aggregate these two levels of analysis, as I do here, and as a result the two parts of the theory – the leadership level and that of the intelligence/defense community – remain largely separate. In sum, both the phenomena that Yarhi-Milo and I seek to explain, and the theories posited to do so, are distinct.

Despite these differences, however, it is plausible that the two theories could operate in conjunction to explain the sources of belief formation during different periods of time. The cognitive-institutional theory states that past crises establish particularly strong beliefs, but leaders obviously form beliefs absent crises also. Yarhi-Milo’s work, then, may explain the formation of peacetime beliefs particularly well. What I argue is that these prior beliefs about long-term intentions can be overtaken in the course of crisis interactions, and that leaders will update their beliefs based on experiences of resolve during these periods of time.

The first alternative to my theory is Daryl Press’s argument that target states will base their assessment of threat credibility on the balance of material capabilities and interests in a given crisis. According to this account, a target state leader asks two questions when assessing an adversary’s threat: 1) Does the adversary have enough power to do what he wants to do? And 2) Are the interests at stake large enough to justify the costs/risks of that action? Power, for Press, is measured according to the balance of military and economic capabilities in a crisis, while state interests – and whether they are

“vital” and “important” interests, or simply “concerns” – are inferred from the same material indicators.109 This theory generates the following hypothesis:

HA1: Target states will assess the credibility of an adversary’s threat based on the relative balance of military capabilities and material interests in a given crisis.

If this is correct, then we should expect states to base their assessments of threat credibility on the economic and military balance of power, and to pay close attention to military movements and mobilizations during a crisis. Thus while each party’s stake in

109 Press, Calculating Credibility , 21, 24-26.

the conflict may be uncertain prior to the onset of a crisis, once it is underway the relative balance of interests should quickly be revealed through the mobilization of military forces. This alternative argument differs from the cognitive-institutional theory in positing a direct causal relationship between current material capabilities and target state’s assessment of interest, and in assuming that these capabilities will be perceived in the same way by all actors in a given crisis.

A second rationalist variant holds that costly signals are key to target state assessments of threat credibility. This is similar to the first alternative hypothesis in emphasizing the importance of a state’s current behavior in revealing information to target state leaders, though it focuses on non-material variables. According to this group of theories, leaders in coercing states can increase the credibility of their threats by tying their hands publicly through domestic institutions or working through time-consuming international organizations.110 The costs incurred through such actions – whether due to time delays or loss of political support – means that target states should find the content of such signals informative, update their assessments, and believe these threats to be credible.

Leaders of democratic states are believed particularly advantaged in generating costly signals due to their domestic political environments.111 According to a number of scholars, the presence of an enfranchised democratic audience and the risk of incurring political costs makes democratic leaders both more cautious about issuing public threats,

110 Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences”; Thompson, Channels of Power. 111 I acknowledge, however, that this hypothesis is difficult to test in a small n study given claims in the quantitative literature that democracies are “on average” more effective at delivering coercive threats than non-democracies.

but also more resolved to follow-through on threats that they commit to in public.112 In a slight twist to this logic, Schultz argues that it is not the publicity of threats that matters so much to democratic credibility, but rather the open and competitive nature of democratic politics itself. The transparency of domestic institutions reveals crucial information to target state leaders about the level of domestic support for the use of force, which can serve to either increase or undermine the credibility of democratic demands.113

Despite these slight discrepancies, however, all of these theories share the common assumption that once costly signals are employed, that they will be perceived similarly by all states and that assessments of credibility will follow automatically. This stands in contrast to the cognitive-institutional theory which holds that all signals will be interpreted and weighted according to beliefs about an adversary’s interests formed through past crisis interactions. This discussion leads us to the second alternative hypothesis:

HA2: Target states will assess the credibility of an adversary’s threat based on its use of costly signals.

HA2a: Since democracies are advantaged in their ability to generate costly signals, targets of threats issued by democratic states will assess those threats a credible.

Since all of the cases included in this dissertation contain threats issued by democratic states, I will focus on the democratic credibility thesis as a key alternative explanation.

Mercer offers a third alternative drawing on work from social psychology and theories of reputation. According to his account, reputation is a judgment of someone’s character (or disposition) that is then used to predict or explain future behavior. It follows that only behaviors that elicit dispositional explanations will lead to reputation formation.

112 See e.g. Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences.” 113 Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy , 3-10.

Building on findings from social psychology, he argues further that only undesirable behavior will be attributed to an actor’s disposition, while desirable behavior will be attributed to situational factors that fail to generate reputational effects. In terms of relations between states, this means that when a state faces an adversary that chooses to stand firm in a given dispute, such behavior will be deemed undesirable. As a result of that undesirable behavior, that adversary will gain a reputation for resolve that will influence future assessments of its threat credibility. When an adversary shows weakness or concedes to a threat, however, this desirable behavior will elicit situational explanations. Since situational explanations cannot lead to reputation formation, an adversary will not earn a reputation for lacking resolve, and future threats assessments will instead be based on contextual variables like the balance of power. 114 This generates the following alternative hypothesis:

HA3: Target states will use an adversary’s behavior in a prior crisis to assess its future threat credibility when it stands resolute, but will not use its behavior in a prior crisis to assess its future threat credibility when it backs down.

Importantly, while the rationalist hypotheses diverge from those of the cognitive- institutional theory in their assumptions about the source of assessments and the inferences that leaders are expected to draw, the social-psychology theory differs more in its empirical expectations of how target states will use past behavior in future assessments of threat credibility.

The fourth and final alternative is a rationalist theory of past behavior which holds that an adversary’s history of following through on commitments and/or threats to use force serves to increase (or decrease) the credibility its future demands. Specifically, an

114 Mercer, Reputation and International Politics, 65-69.

adversary’s willingness to follow through on past threats increases target state assessments of its credibility, while an adversary’s failure to follow through on previous ultimatums has the opposite effect. 115 This argument differs to Mercer’s social- psychology theory in its commitment to rationalist assumptions of inference, and it differs from the two previous rationalist hypotheses in the timing of the behavior that is believed central to target state assessments of threat credibility.

Insofar as this fourth argument focuses on an adversary’s past behavior, it also shares similarities with the theory developed in this chapter. The past actions theory operates differently, however, by focusing on an adversary’s history of threat follow- through , rather than on target state leader’s beliefs regarding an adversary’s foreign policy interests. How the state actually behaves during a crisis is less important for past actions theory than whether the threat was carried out or not. By contrast, the cognitive- institutional theory focuses more on the costs a state is willing to absorb to achieve its goals regardless of whether the threat is executed successfully or not. Since both theories agree that past actions in general matter to future assessments of credibility, however, adjudicating between the two will require careful empirical analysis in order to show that the divergent expectations of the cognitive-institutional theory are born out in practice.

This discussion generates the final alternative hypothesis:

HA4: Target state leaders will assess the credibility of an adversary’s threat based on that adversary’s behavior in past crises, and specifically on its history of following through on past commitments.

The following table summarizes these alternative theories and the key mechanisms that each posits for state threat assessments:

115 Schelling, Arms and Influence , 55-59.

Table 2.2 Alternative Theories

Theory Key Mechanism of Assessment

Current Calculus Thesis Relative balance of power and material interests

1. Public threats issued by democratic leaders Regime-Type Thesis 2. The openness and competitiveness of the democratic political system

Reputations Thesis Relative desirability of an adversary’s behavior in past crisis.

Past Actions Thesis Threatening state’s record of following through on past commitments 1. Target state leaders’ beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests based on Cognitive-Institutional Thesis ‘experiences of resolve’ in past crises 2. Availability of new information during a crisis

Two other theories are worth mentioning here. First, prospect theory offers an alternative psychological argument to Mercer’s reputations thesis. One of the key findings of prospect theory is that individuals are more risk averse when they are in the domain of gains, and are more risk acceptant when in the domain of losses. 116 However, since this framework is more useful for predicting state behavior once frames of reference are understood, it does not help answer the question at hand – namely, how states assess the credibility of threats. One might hypothesize that a leader who believes a threat to be credible would be in the domain of losses and therefore take riskier actions.

Yet this does not tell us how the leader came to this threat assessment, nor is it clear whether the riskier action would involve standing firm or conceding to the adversary.

Nevertheless, since this theory has been used to explain Argentina’s actions during the

116 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science 211 (4481): 453-458.

Falklands War, I will address this theory specifically in the empirical analysis in Chapter

Five.

Second, there is a question of whether beliefs about a state’s past actions are attributed to the leader or the state itself – that is, do leaders believe an adversarial leader is more resolved given his or her past behavior or the state. Lupton, for example, argues that leaders develop their own reputations for resolve based on his/her actions while in office. 117 The cognitive-institutional theory, by contrast, is a behavioral theory that argues that target state leaders’ beliefs form as a result of prior crisis interactions, and specifically from observing another state’s resolve to achieve its foreign policy goals. I expect, therefore, that when beliefs form that they attach to the state and not to an individual leader, and that they will remain constant irrespective of leadership changes in an adversarial state. Recent statistical analysis by Yarhi-Milo and Weisiger supports this claim, finding that reputations for resolve are not leader specific, and that leader turnover in a country with a poor reputation does not significantly lower the probability that such a country will be challenged again in the future.118 Nevertheless, since it is difficult to rule out this theory by deduction alone, I will address Lupton’s argument in the empirical chapters where appropriate.

7. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY Before moving on to the empirical analysis it is important to identify some of the scope conditions of this dissertation. First, to be included as a potential case of interest for my study, a state must be the target of a coercive threat from an adversary. At a general level, a coercive threat is “the use of threatened force…to induce an adversary to

117 Lupton, “Leaders, Perceptions and Reputations for Resolve.” 118 Weisiger and Yarhi-Milo, “Revisiting Reputation,” 492.

behave differently than it otherwise would.” 119 According to Alexander George, the intent of coercive diplomacy “is to back a demand on an adversary with a threat of punishment for noncompliance that will be credible and potent enough to persuade him that it is in his interest to comply with the demand.” 120 Coercive threats can be both verbal and physical in nature. Verbal threats are conditional statements that are designed to convey both the capacity and intention to inflict harm if desired results are not forthcoming – whether that be to change the behavior of the target (compellence) or deter the target from undertaking a given action in the future (deterrence). Coercive threats can also be delivered physically through non-verbal means such as military alerts, mobilizations, and the movement of forces. 121

To test the effect of prior belief formation on future state threat assessments, I also look for cases in which a state has experienced at least two international crises with the same adversary. For the purposes of this project an international crisis is characterized by two key conditions: (1) “a distortion in the type and an increase in the intensity of disruptive interactions between two or more adversaries, with an accompanying high probability of military hostilities, or, during a war, an adverse change in the military balance, and (2) a challenge to the existing structure of an international system – global, dominant, or subsystem – posed by the higher-than-normal conflictual interactions.” 122 This is the definition provided by the International Crisis Behavior (ICB)

119 Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, The Dynamics of Coercion. American Foreign Policy and the Limits of Military Might (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30. 120 George and Simons, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy , 2. 121 Janice Gross Stein, “Threat Perception in International Relations,” in Leonie Huddy et al . (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013 ), 364-65. 122 Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, International Crisis Behavior Project, 1918-2004 , ICPSR09286-v7. College Park, MD, http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/9286 (accessed May 12, 2015).

project, the data from which I use to establish the relevant universe of cases for this dissertation. 123

The prior interaction does not need to have taken place within a particular timeframe of the subsequent crisis, though it is highly desirable for the purposes of testing my theory that the target state leader remains the same across the two crisis interactions. I say highly desirable and not necessary, however, since it is possible that a state leader serving during a second crisis interaction was a senior official – such as

Minister of Defense, Minister of State, or Deputy Prime Minister – during the first crisis.

Serving as a senior official in a position of responsibility during an interstate crisis would plausibly provide the individual with the first hand experience and access to the privileged information necessary to form beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests. Nevertheless, I do expect beliefs to hold more strongly in cases where the two crises take place within a shorter time frame and where the leader in the target state remains the same across the two interactions. In these instances, target state leaders are more likely to use an adversary’s past behavior to guide their assessments of that state’s current foreign policy interests.

At the broadest level, the dependent variable of this dissertation is a state’s assessment of an adversary’s threat credibility (Stage 1 in Figure 2.4). Since a state’s assessment of credibility can mean a number of things in practice, I disaggregate the dependent variable into three steps in order to address this ambiguity. The first step involves establishing that a target state has received a given signal and finding evidence

123 I add one additional crisis to the ICB dataset – the South Thule crisis of 1976 between Argentina and Great Britain. This was a low-level crisis that has only recently been documented due to its private nature and the declassification of government documents. I provide a more detailed explanation for this coding decision in Chapter 5.

that the target state leader is aware of the action of the signal-sending state. In other words, I need empirical evidence that the signal has been acknowledged. 124 At the broadest level, signals are defined as statements or actions that are “issued by one state to influence another state’s image of the sender.” 125 For the purposes of this project more specifically, signals can be thought of as statements issued and actions undertaken by a coercing state in order to communicate interests to a target and with the goal of influencing target state perceptions.

This project is interested in more than just signal acknowledgement, however – it seeks to understand what meaning is taken from an adversary’s actions. The second step thus asks how the target state leader interprets the content of a signal given what is observed. This requires that the receiving state not only notice the adversary’s signals, but also that its leader processes the information received and arrives at an interpretation of intent on the part of the coercing state. 126 The third step in the process involves determining the final assessment of threat credibility .

Building on work by Press, I code the final assessment of threat credibility primarily by looking closely at target state leaders’ statements and deliberations.127 More specifically, I look at statements made by target state leaders regarding the credibility of the adversary’s threat, and examine archival documents that contain explicit discussions and statements regarding the likelihood of an adversary carrying out its promise to use force. Like Press, I privilege statements that are made in private and during the period of the crisis itself. Public statements pose challenges since they may be made for political

124 Yacov Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 45. 125 Jervis, Logic of Images, 18. 126 Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds , 45. 127 Press, Calculating Credibility , 30-31.

effect and thus not represent the true beliefs of target state leaders, while statements made after the fact can be affected by bias and memory loss.

In order to get around the somewhat amorphous nature of beliefs, I triangulate data by looking at the behaviors and policies that target state leaders adopt in response to an adversary’s threat. In cases where threats to use force are deemed credible, for example, one might expect target state leaders to undertake some range of military preparations in order to defend against an adversary’s attack. While not a perfect proxy for a leader’s assessment of an adversary’s threat credibility – indeed, as discussed already a leader could believe a threat to be credible and choose a policy of resistance for domestic political reasons – state policies often do correlate with beliefs about credibility; the more credible the threat, the more likely are concessions. It is thus possible to make cautious inferences about target state assessments of threat credibility based on state policies where archival documentation is lacking, while also acknowledging that policies provide weaker evidence for my claims than do private discussions and statements made by leaders themselves.128 Whenever possible, I use both indicators to measure a target state’s assessment of an adversary’s threat credibility.

The prior step of information processing is a little harder to measure, but provides the rationale behind a target state’s threat assessment and examines how leaders arrive at their final conclusion. Here I look at two key indicators of information processing: 1) the extent to which the leader of the target state actively seeks out a range of information

128 Regime-change threats are a special class of threats that make the use of behavioral indicators particularly difficult. In these cases one might argue that there is little a target state leader can actually do given the direct threat to his or her survival. This is especially the case when leaders face competing internal and external threats to their rule. In these instances, I acknowledge the difficulty in using behavior as a proxy for leaders’ beliefs and try whenever possible to only look at leaders’ statements regarding the credibility of a threat. When direct statements are not available, I offer more tentative conclusions. This issue is addressed in more detail in Chapter 3.

about an adversary and considers multiple indicators of threat credibility; and 2) the interpretation of those signals and the meaning that is attributed to them. The first indicator speaks to the constraining effect of a leader’s prior beliefs in determining the information that is sought out. Evidence of filtering signals includes hand-picking information and advisors, actively sidelining or ignoring incoming information, and/or arriving at opinions as to an adversary’s intentions prior to reviewing intelligence reports or other newly available information. This stands in contrast to leaders who reach out broadly to a number of agencies, request a wide array of information, and welcome disparate views. The second indicator tells us how the information received is perceived by a leader, and whether it is viewed as evidence of resolve to achieve a set of foreign policy objectives, or as a signal of irresolution.

The decision to code the dependent variable in this way stands in contrast to a large body of IR literature in which threat credibility is equated with threat effectiveness

(Stage 2 in Figure 2.4). This is less useful for a number of reasons, however. First, threat effectiveness is poorly operationalized in the literature and often conflated with victory or reciprocation. Neither of these indicators, however, fully captures the concept of interest. 129 Victory for a state can result from a successful signal of resolve to use force, or as a result of the application of force in the wake of a failed threat. In the latter case, a state’s threat might be ineffective but the outcome of the crisis still coded in its favor.

Reciprocation – or the absence thereof – is also a weak measure of threat effectiveness when taken alone. A threat can be credible and yet an adversary may still see it in its

129 Downes and Sechser, “The Illusion of Democratic Credibility.”

rational best interests to reciprocate and escalate a crisis. 130 The following diagram shows the distinction between a state’s assessment of threat credibility and its subsequent behavior.131

Figure 2.4 Clarification of Dependent Variable

Stage 1 Stage 2 Targe t S tate Targe t S tate Assessment Be ha vi or

Concede High Credibility ~ Concede

Threat Issued by Coercing State

Concede Low Credibility ~ Concede

Second, demonstrating threat effectiveness might tell us that a demand has been communicated successfully and is deemed credible, but fails to identify the source of its credibility. It is possible, in other words, that a threat is assessed as credible due to the presence of domestic political constraints, as claimed by the democratic credibility theorists. It is also possible, however, that a threat is deemed credible due to the positioning of an opposition party, 132 the mobilization of military forces, 133 or the

130 Goemans, for example, notes that the risks of a war may be acceptable to decision makers when the alternative is the loss of political power or the anticipated weakening of their country’s international security position. See Hans Goemans, War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination and the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 131 The dotted line from “low credibility” to “concede” simply indicates that this is a less likely outcome given the nature of the threat. 132 See e.g. Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy.

sanctioning of the international community. 134 In short, by taking threat effectiveness as the dependent variable, one forfeits the ability to distinguish between these possibilities.

To avoid these concerns, this dissertation focuses on the beliefs and assessments of target state leaders regarding actions undertaken by an adversary.

The key independent variable of this dissertation is a target state leader’s beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests . This belief comprises two key elements: a political assessment of the adversary’s foreign policy objectives (the political element) and the perceived financial, political, and military costs the adversary is willing to expend to achieve those ends (the material element). I code target state leaders’ political assessments of their adversary’s foreign policy interests as either revisionist or status quo in nature, and look for evidence of these beliefs in the private and public discussions within the target state. In addition, there are a number of objective indicators and behaviors in the realm of international security that help in coding this variable. An adversary is more likely to be viewed as a revisionist power if it regularly flouts international law and attempts to achieve its foreign policy objectives through aggressive means – the most obvious being the use of force. In addition, states that break commitments to act with restraint will also be viewed as revisionist powers. At the other extreme, states that abide by international law, seek approval from the international community before using force, and keep their commitments to friends and foe may be viewed as having limited foreign policy goals and as satisfied with the current international order.

133 See e.g. Press, Calculating Credibility. 134 See e.g. Thompson, Channels of Power.

To ascertain target state leaders’ beliefs as to the costs an adversary is willing to expend, I look at the outcome of the previous crisis between the two countries, the military strategy (if any) employed by the coercing state, the financial and political resources that it devoted to achieving its ends, and crucially the perception of these efforts within the target state . Military resources include the types of forces devoted to the crisis and the strategies employed ( i.e. ground campaigns versus air strikes).

Deploying ground forces that will engage in hand-to-hand combat, for example, exposes a country’s citizens to greater danger than do air campaigns that rely on pilots executing airstrikes from above. A willingness to engage in ground campaigns, therefore, may be perceived by a target state leader as an indicator of a state’s (and especially a democratic state’s) high level of resolve.

In addition to military resources, a target state can estimate the financial resources devoted to achieving a given objective and whether the costs are born individually by one state, or shared amongst allies. Last but not least, a target state leader can observe both the domestic and the international political processes that an adversary is willing to go through in order to meet its policy goals. For example, coalition action sanctioned by the domestic public and/or the international community may be perceived as less politically costly than unilateral action that has not received approval. The following table summarizes these various “objective” indicators of a state’s resolve. It is important to emphasize, however, that it is the perception of these actions and behaviors within the target state – and whether they are perceived to be costly or not – that is of paramount interest to this project (the third column in Table 2.3).

Table 2.3 Target State Leaders’ Perceptions of Resolve Costs Yes No Target State Perception Military Alerts/Mobilization Nuclear Alerts Military Ground Invasion (denial strategy) Air Strikes (punishment strategy) Allies to Share Burden Economic Sanctions Financial Allies to Share Burden UN Authorization Political Public Opinion in Favor of Action Political Elite in Favor of Action

Finally, I also look at target state leaders’ perceptions of an adversary’s behavior in other international crises as having the potential to reinforce these beliefs. Indeed if prior beliefs are expected to exert an influence in the interpretation of incoming signals, there are similar reasons for expecting these beliefs to shape the selection of confirmatory evidence more broadly.

I have chosen to focus on target state leaders because it is their regime or government at stake in periods of crisis, and because these individuals are in particularly powerful positions to influence state policy and assessment processes. During periods of crisis there is often a contraction of authority to the highest levels of government. This contraction of authority, when combined with severe time pressure, can serve to dilute the constraints on political action, granting leaders more authority than is the daily norm. 135 Not all leaders are included within the scope of this project, however. In order to exert influence over the political decision-making apparatus in ways required by my theory, a political leader needs to be the authoritative decision-making unit of a

135 See e.g. Charles F. Hermann, International Crises: Insights from Behavioral Research (New York, NY: Free Press, 1972); Lebow, Between Peace and War ; Paul ‘t Hart, Groupthink in Government: A Study of Small Groups and Policy Failure (Amsterdam: Swetz and Zeitlinger, 1990).

democratic or authoritarian state. This means that the leader is vested with the authority to “commit or withhold the resources of the government with regard to making foreign policy.” 136 Most authoritarian leaders will fall under this category, but so too will democratic leaders who sit at the top of hierarchical organizational structures and are vested with substantial powers in the realm of foreign affairs. The President of the United

States is one such example.

A key intervening variable linking leadership beliefs to a target state’s final threat assessment is a target state leader’s prioritization of threats according to their perceived urgency. Again, this variable is largely perceptual in nature and thus archival records of private meetings and discussions of state security issues will reveal the extent to which target state leaders worry about threats to their security. In addition to looking at archival materials, evidence of threat prioritization can also be found by looking at a state’s history of security threats. A recent history of civil war, coup attempts, and civil unrest, for example, would indicate the relative importance of domestic security threats to any given regime, while frequent territorial disputes with neighbors and participation in wars would indicate the presence of external threats. 137

Another important indicator of this variable is the way in which the state security forces are arranged to meet threats. Since state resources are finite in nature, leaders are forced to prioritize the allocation of resources according to what they believe are the most pressing needs of the state. In the security realm, this includes decisions around research and development, training and modernization programs, and the positioning and posture of the state police and armed forces. Each of these resource allocation decisions provides

136 Margaret G. Hermann et al., “Who Leads Matters: The Effects of Powerful Individuals,” International Studies Review 3, 2 (2001), 84 137 Desch, Civilian Control of the Military , 19. Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army , 21-23.

important insight into the political leaders’ priorities. By looking at coup-proofing practices, the nature of police and armed force training, and the deployment of these security forces, I can ascertain a state’s security priorities, the leader’s threat prioritization, and the degree to which this prioritization has been institutionalized within the security apparatus.

In order to trace the impact of prioritization and institutionalization to a leader’s threat assessment, I look at a range of information. First, if available, I try to gather information on the intelligence services themselves – how they are organized, staffed, and directed, and whether this changed across different leaders in accordance with their shifting threat perceptions. In some cases gathering this type of information on intelligence services is challenging – especially given the authoritarian nature of the regimes in question. In instances where this empirical strategy is not possible, I try to ascertain at least how the intelligence apparatus functioned during the crisis in question.

To do this, I ask the following: 1) Is the intelligence community detecting the signals being sent by other states? 2) If so, how is the intelligence community interpreting this information? Does it have a nuanced understanding of the adversary? Or is it simply collecting raw data? 3) And is this information being passed along to the key decision makers? The answers to these questions get me some way towards determining if threat prioritization and institutionalization has any impact on the information available to the leader, and if it does, whether this is due to the diversion of resources or to political culture (or both).

Finally, as noted in Section 4, it is possible that consecutive leaders will share the same threat prioritization in which case we should not expect to see a sharp change in the

orientation of the state security apparatus (and the intelligence community especially).

Unfortunately this outcome is also observationally equivalent to instances of institutional path dependence, where leaders might wish to change the focus of the intelligence agencies and security institutions but are unable to do so. In order to tease out the differences between these cases, I seek out any statements of leaders’ threat perceptions and priorities in order to ascertain whether the focus of the security apparatus reflects those concerns. In addition, I look for any evidence of failed attempts to divert resources or establish organizations that would indicate a case of path dependence versus one of shared threat perception.

In order to assess my argument and test it against competing hypotheses, I conduct a series of structured historical comparative analyses of state threat assessments when faced with a coercive threat from an adversary. Qualitative analysis is well suited to this project due the nature of my independent and dependent variables. Leadership beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests and leadership assessments of threat credibility are both perceptual variables and as a result they are difficult to quantify.

This is different to studies that focus on crisis outcomes and threat effectiveness where large n studies are more appropriate. Moreover, studies that have managed to quantify perceptual variable have tended to use the verbs-in-context operational code framework that is based upon a fixed set of questions ill-suited to evaluating assessments of threat credibility. 138 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, qualitative, historical analysis is

138 The verbs-in-context operational code system is based on a set number of questions which are much broader in nature and pertain to leaders’ beliefs about the nature of the political universe. See e.g. Jonathan Renshon, “Stability and Change in Belief Systems: The Operational Code of George W. Bush,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, 6 (2008): 820-849; Julia Macdonald and Jacquelyn Schneider, “Presidential Risk Orientations and Use of Force: The Case of Unmanned Weaponry,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (2015). Early view: DOI: 10.1177/0022002715590874; Stephen Walker, Mark Schafer, and Michael D. Young, “Systematic Procedures for Operational Code Analysis: Measuring and Modeling Jimmy Carter’s

necessary to trace the causal impact of leadership beliefs on state threat assessments, and to establish the pathways through which this occurs, including processes of threat prioritization and institutionalization.

7.1 Case Selection While I use the ICB dataset to establish the larger universe of cases for the dissertation project – that being all cases where two states have experienced at least two crises with one another – I refer to Todd Sechser’s Militarized Compellent Threats

(MCT) dataset for case selection purposes. Sechser defines a coercive threat as an explicit demand issued by one state to another in order to compel a material change to the status quo, backed by the threat to use force if the target does not comply. A coercive threat thus has two key components: 1) a verbal demand to compel a change to the status quo, and 2) an assurance of future military action if the demand is not met. 139 While the demand must be explicit in nature, the threat of military force does not and may be transmitted through the signaling mechanisms discussed in Section 2. Indeed, in terms of threats to use nuclear force, there are almost no empirical examples of explicit threats from which to draw. As a result, I look at cases in which the threat to employ nuclear force is implied through signaling mechanisms such as the raising of nuclear alert levels or the movement of missiles. Appendices 1 and 2 contain a list of all dyads that have experienced repeated crisis interactions, and those where the second interaction contains a coercive threat.

Although these requirements produce a relatively narrow understanding of what constitutes a coercive threat, I have chosen to look at cases where the second crisis meets

Operational Code” International Studies Quarterly 42 (1): 175-89. 139 See Todd Sechser, “Militarized Compellent Threats, 1918-2001,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 28, 4 (2011), 380.

this definition in order to find instances where the ultimate threat to use force is as clear as possible to target state leaders. In doing so, I am able to reduce elements of random noise or ambiguity on the part of the coercing state in the threat communication process. 140 My final case selection therefore comprises only compellent threats. 141 I should emphasize, however, that while the MCT definition is employed for case selection purposes, I look at the interpretation and reception of coercive signals from the onset of the crisis onwards, including but not limited to the delivery of an explicit threat. This longer time horizon increases the number of possible signals being issued by a coercing state and thus provides greater opportunity to explore how this information is incorporated into target state threat assessments.

From this universe I have selected four cases for in-depth analysis that capture variation on both of my independent and dependent variables as well as providing the opportunity to tease out the importance of threat prioritization and institutionalization – key intervening variables. The four cases are: the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962); the Suez

Crisis (1956); the Falklands War (1982); and the Iraq Wars (1991-2003). In all of these crises, the leader in the target state is the predominant authority – an important scope condition for my project. This selection also provides interesting variation on regime type, incorporating militaristic, personalized, and single party states as targets of coercive threats.

140 Note that this requirement only applies to the second crisis interaction between a given pair of states. The first crisis interaction does not have to contain a compellent threat as defined by the MCT dataset since I am not evaluating target state assessments of threat credibility at that point in time. 141 Note that while compellent threats are believed more difficult to execute effectively for both rational and psychological reasons, these factors should affect the behavior of states and not their prior assessments of threat credibility.

The Iraq case is especially interesting given the number of U.S.-Iraqi interactions between 1991 and 2003. I use this opportunity to incorporate a number of within-case crises in my analysis (those of 1994 and 1998), making this the most informative case study of the four. In particular, this extended period allows me to demonstrate the importance of prior interactions with the United States in shaping Saddam Hussein’s beliefs about the extent of U.S. foreign policy interests. I then show how these beliefs subsequently fed into a prioritization process in which internal threats became of paramount concern, limiting the amount of new information available to Saddam in the lead up to 2003.

The Falklands War case study also shows how Argentina’s prior crisis interaction shaped its leaders’ beliefs about the limited extent of Great Britain’s foreign policy interests, and how the inward-looking nature of the regime impacted the quality and quantity of information available to Argentine leaders in assessing the credibility of the

British threat. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a valuable case study insofar as Kennedy and

Khrushchev had prior interactions that revealed the United States to be highly resolved to defend the status quo, but also unwilling to risk war with the Soviet Union .

Khrushchev’s prior beliefs thus explain both the instigation and subsequent escalation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Once the nuclear threat was “activated” by the United States mid-crisis, however, Khrushchev updated his beliefs and the crisis ended promptly thereafter. Finally, the Suez Crisis is a useful negative case insofar as Nasser had no prior experiences through which to form beliefs about the extent of British foreign policy interests. It thus presents an opportunity to explore how processes of threat assessment operate absent these constraints.

These four cases are also well suited to testing alternative explanations of target state threat assessments. I follow Eckstein’s approach to small n theory testing by selecting historical cases that are most likely cases for these rival theories. 142 That is, if these alternative theories hold any explanatory power, then they should be able to explain what happens in these crises. The Iraq War is a most likely case for the current calculus and democratic credibility theories since Saddam Hussein faced a much more powerful democratic adversary during this timeframe. It also provides a test of past actions theory and Mercer’s reputations theory since the United States had a long history of interactions with Iraq, including the previous Gulf War of 1991. The Falklands War of 1982 provides a good test of past actions theory, the democratic credibility thesis, and should be an easy case for the current calculus theory given Britain’s small military capability in the South

Atlantic. The Suez Crisis of 1956 is a most likely case for the current calculus theory and those of democratic credibility since Egypt was the target of a compellent threat issued by

Great Britain and France and both countries had limited capabilities in the region. Finally, the Cuban Missile Crisis is a good test case for the democratic credibility thesis, Mercers reputations theory, and power-based rational theories. Interestingly in this instance

Press’s current calculus thesis fairs relatively well, but in ways that differ to conventional explanations. In the Cuba case a less powerful state initiated a crisis with a country in a much more favorable military position (if one considers the proximity of Cuba to the

United States) resulting in a significant escalation of hostilities. These hostilities were brought to an end not through a calculation of the conventional military balance, however, but through a fear of escalation to nuclear war that pushed the Soviet leadership to update

142 Harry Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” in Fred Greenstein and Nelso Polsby (eds.), Handbook of Political Science (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley , 1975), 118.

its threat assessments. Figure 2.5 shows the coding for each of these cases in terms of leadership beliefs and the predicted outcomes for assessments of threat credibility.

Figure 2.5 Predicted Outcomes and Case Selection

Level of Resolve

Political Objectives High Low

Threat Assessment : Credible but Threat Assessment : Limited also unrestrained. threats credible but expansive threats incredible

Revisionist Response: Unlikely to concede Response: Concession to limited threats will depend on domestic costs of doing so.

E.g. Iraq 1991* E.g. Iraq 1990s/2003 Threat Assessment : Credible Threat Assessment : Incredible

Status Quo Response: Likely to concede Response: Unlikely to concede

E.g. Cuban Missile Crisis E.g. Suez Crisis* and Falklands *Weak prediction due to no prior crisis interaction.

The following flow chart (a replica of Figure 2.2) shows the cases in which I expect leaders to update their prior beliefs (or not) due to information availability in the course of each crisis.

Figure 2.6 Leader Beliefs and Target State Threat Environment (Case Selection)

Leader has prior beliefs about external adversary

N Y

Beliefs exert no External threat constraining assessed as target influence on threat state's dominant assessment concern - Updating likely Suez Crisis 1956 N Y

- Strong evidence of beliefs - Evidence of prior belief at shaping threat assessment onset of crisis - Security agencies focused - Security agencies focused internally externally - Little new info available to - New info available during assess threat credibility crisis to assess threat credibility - Updating very difficult - Updating possible Iraq Wars 1991 - 2003 Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 Fal klan ds War 1982 The data for this dissertation is drawn from a variety of primary and secondary sources. One of the benefits of my research design is the presence of an English-speaking democratic state in all of the crisis dyads. This enables increased access to archival records and historical material. I have capitalized on this advantage by visiting archives in both the United States and Great Britain, including the National Security Archives in

Washington, D.C., the Iraq Archives housed at the National Defense University, the U.K.

National Archives, and the John. F. Kennedy Presidential Library. In each location I have studied recorded minutes and transcripts of high-level meetings, private correspondence, and declassified government documents. In addition, for many of the cases I refer to

volumes from the Foreign Relations of the United States collection, newspaper reports, and of course to the rich secondary literature on these international crises.

Finally, there remains the question of how to measure the intentions of the signal- sending state and whether that is necessary for this project. On this matter, there are two ways of proceeding. One option is to treat the interaction between these states as dyadic.

This would entail detailing the intentions of the signal-sending state, looking at what it meant to convey, and then comparing this to the receiving state’s understanding of the signal and subsequent assessment of the sending-state’s credibility. The second way of carrying out this project involves looking only at the receiving state and seeing how well that state interprets the signal given the actions undertaken by its adversary.

I choose the latter of these two options for theoretical and pragmatic reasons. First, and most importantly, a coercing state may issue a threat with the intention of bluffing. In order to bluff effectively, however, that state must undertake a series of actions designed to convince the adversary of its credibility – ideally, a series of actions identical to those that would be undertaken by a genuinely threatening state. When this occurs, the receiving state ought to assess the signal-sending state’s threat as credible even though the intention of the sending state is to bluff. In these cases it is not clear what we gain from looking at the intentions of the threatening state. Second, from a pragmatic standpoint it is extremely resource-intensive to detail the inner workings and assessment processes of one state in any given dyad, never mind two. Given that this dissertation is a qualitative project that requires significant historical materials to support its claims, for practical purposes it is justifiable to treat this question as monadic rather than dyadic. I

thus treat the sending-state as a black box and look solely at how well a target state interprets an adversary’s signals given the actions observed.

Cases and Coding on Key Variables

Pre-Crisis Pre-Crisis Assessment of Threat Coercing Target Chief Source of Assessment of Assessment of Credibility 143 State Threat Extent of Interests Resolve (Crisis outcome)

Incredible External (Israel and UK/France Egypt Status Quo* Low* (Limited Great Britain) force/withdrawal)

External (United Credible USSR Status Quo High States) (Resolved prior to war)

Incredible Argentina Status Quo Low Domestic (War)

(USA) (Iraq) Revisionist* High* External (United (Credible ) States/Iran) (War)

Iraq Revisionist Low Domestic Credible (No force)

Iraq Revisionist Low Domestic Credible (Air strikes)

Iraq Revisionist Low Domestic Incredible (War) due to no prior crisis interaction .

Note that the type of threat is held as constant as possible across cases by selecting only those that conform to Sechser’s MCT definition. 8. CONCLUSION In this chapter I have laid out a theory that explains how leadership beliefs can impact assessments of threat credibility during crises and the conditions under which we should expect them to do so. In the following chapters I test this theory against four empirical case studies. In each case I provide evidence for the independent variable – leaders’ beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests – and use this evidence to make predictions about how these beliefs might impact leaders’ future threat assessments. I then look to the broader threat environment in which each leader resides to determine the conditions under which we should expect prior beliefs to exert a substantive influence on assessments of threat credibility, versus conditions under which we should expect leaders to update. Finally, I examine each case against four alternative theories of threat assessments: Press’s current calculus theory, Mercer’s reputations theory, the democratic credibility thesis, and past actions theory.

The empirical chapters proceed as follows. Chapter 3 provides an overview and analysis of the Iraq Wars from 1991-2003 and evaluates Saddam Hussein’s assessment of

U.S. threat credibility. Chapter 4 evaluates Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s beliefs regarding U.S. threat credibility in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and assesses whether the type of threat matters to target state assessments. Chapter 5 presents an analysis of the

Falklands War of 1982 and evaluates Argentine military leaders’ assessments of British threat credibility during this period. Finally, Chapter 6 provides an analysis of the Suez

Crisis of 1956 to determine Gamel Nasser’s assessment of Great Britain’s threat to use force over the canal. Chapter Seven concludes by reviewing this dissertation’s key

findings, outlining its contributions for both academic and policy worlds, and highlighting opportunities for further research.

3. THE IRAQ WARS 1991 – 2003

1. INTRODUCTION In this chapter I examine whether the cognitive-institutional theory developed in

Chapter 2 can explain Saddam Hussein’s assessments of U.S. threat credibility from 1991 through 2003. This is an interesting case for a number of reasons. First, during this relatively short twelve-year period, the United States and Iraq experienced a total of seven interstate crises. 144 In five of these seven crises, the United States issued a clear verbal threat to Iraq and mobilized its military forces. The sheer number of threats delivered during this timeframe thus provides useful within-case variation in terms of both Saddam Hussein’s evaluation of U.S. interests, and his assessments of U.S. threat credibility.

Second, in addition to the number of threats issued, this case provides a useful opportunity to evaluate the performance of the cognitive-institutional theory against the four alternative explanations for state threat assessments: the current calculus thesis, the past actions thesis, the democratic credibility thesis, and Mercer’s reputations thesis.

Indeed, since the United States was the sole economic and military superpower throughout this time period, a democracy, and it carried out a threat to employ military force in 1991, Iraq presents a most likely case for all four of these theories. Yet despite these favorable conditions, Saddam’s pattern of threat assessments during this period creates a series of puzzles that are best accounted for by the cognitive-institutional theory alone. The Iraqi leader’s experience during the Gulf War in 1991 combined with his complex internal threat environment play a crucial role in explaining Saddam’s reception,

144 Taken from the ICB dataset, these seven crises include: 1) the Gulf War (1991); 2) Iraq No-Fly Zone (1992); 3) Iraq troop deployment Kuwait (1994); 4) Desert Strike (1996); 5) UNSCOM I (1997); 6) UNSCOM II/Desert Storm (1998); and 7) the Iraq War (2003).

interpretation, and ultimate assessment of U.S. threat credibility in the lead up to the 2003 invasion.

This chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 provides a brief discussion of case selection and explains why the Iraq Wars (1991-2003) are useful for testing my theory against the alternative candidate explanations. Section 3 provides a brief case summary outlining the key events during the timeframe of interest. Section 4 turns to the cognitive- institutional theory and provides evidence for Saddam Hussein’s beliefs about the extent of U.S. foreign policy interests in order to generate a set of predictions about his threat assessments. Section 5 evaluates Saddam Hussein’s assessments of U.S. threat credibility in 1991 (the Gulf War), 1994 (Iraq troop deployment to Kuwait), 1998 (UNSCOM

II/Operation Desert Fox), and 2003 (the Iraq War). Section 6 addresses the importance of threat prioritization and institutionalization in explaining Saddam’s threat assessment.

Finally, Section 7 concludes the chapter by comparing the cognitive-institutional theory to a number of alternative explanations for Saddam’s behavior.

2. CASE SELECTION AND METHODOLOGY The Iraq case meets all necessary scope conditions for this project. Iraq and the

United States were involved in a series of iterative crises between 1991-2003 therefore allowing us to assess the importance of prior belief formation in future assessments of threat credibility. Saddam Hussein, moreover, was the authoritative decision-making unit in Iraq during this timeframe, with the ability to “commit or withhold the resources of the government with regard to making foreign policy.” 145 Indeed, of all the leaders considered in this dissertation project, Saddam exercised the most power over his

145 Hermann et al.,"Who Leads Matters,” 84

bureaucracy and decision-making apparatus. According to the Iraq Survey Group’s (ISG)

Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD , commonly known as the Duelfer Report , “Saddam controlled every peak position of authority in Iraq and formally dominated its state, administrative, Ba’ath party and military hierarchies.” 146 Finally, from 1991 to 2003 Iraq was the target of five explicit, coercive threats issued by the United States. 147 Of these threats, one contained elements of both deterrence and compellence (1994), while the remaining four were explicitly designed to compel Iraq to change its behavior (1991, 1997, 1998, and 2003).

In addition to satisfying the scope conditions listed above, the Iraq crises together provide a good case study for assessing alternative explanations. First, given the military power of the United States relative to Iraq, as well as U.S. interests in the Gulf region at the time, one would think this an easy case for theories of coercive diplomacy that rest on material power variables. Yet the United States experienced varying degrees of success in coercing Saddam during this period. Second, according to the basic formulation of past actions theory, the U.S. government’s commitment to follow-through on its threat of force in 1991 should have increased its credibility in future crises. Saddam’s resistance to

U.S. demands in 2003 thus creates an interesting puzzle for this theory. Third, according to Mercer’s reputations theory, the U.S. should only be able to develop a reputation for resolve during this period, not one for its lack of resolve. Evidence that U.S. behavior in

1991 undermined U.S. credibility in the eyes of Saddam therefore creates problems for

146 Charles Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD: Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004), 5. This report, commonly known as the Duelfer Report , is based on the Iraq Survey Group’s unprecedented access to Iraqi senior military and political leaders, including Saddam himself, Iraqi documents, and reported weapons sites after the 2003 invasion. 147 As defined by the Militarized Compellent Threats dataset.

this account. Finally, since the United States is a democratic state, this case also provides a useful opportunity to assess theories of democratic credibility and see how (if at all)

U.S. domestic political processes fed into the Iraqi leader’s threat assessment.

As discussed in detail in Chapter 2, I engage in qualitative historical analysis to code leadership beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests, and to trace the role of these beliefs in subsequent assessments of threat credibility. In the Iraq case specifically, I look through newly available primary and secondary documents in order to ascertain the key beliefs and perceptions of Saddam Hussein. The documents and records seized after the 2003 invasion, combined with interviews of Iraqi military and political leaders, provide a unique insight into Saddam’s thinking and his threat perceptions. 148 In addition to looking for clear statements of his own beliefs, I take into account the opinions and statements of Saddam’s key advisors, as well as policies that he advocated in response to U.S. threats. Since state policies are not a perfect proxy for leaders’ assessments of threat credibility, I refer to these only when archival documentation is lacking and make more cautious inferences about Saddam’s threat assessments in such instances. This is especially the case in 2003, where the threat of regime change combined with competing internal threats makes Saddam’s actions a more problematic indicator of his beliefs. The proceeding section provides a brief summary of

148 The Iraqi material comes from captured Iraqi records and media files (audio and videotapes) originally accessed as part of a U.S. Joint Forces Command project known as the Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP). This chapter draws on two IPP studies, Kevin M. Woods, et al., The Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Joint Forces Command, 2006); and Kevin Woods et al. (eds.), The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrants Regime (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

the key events from 1991 to 2003, followed by an analysis of Saddam Hussein’s thinking and decision making during this period. 149

149 I focus mainly on the Iraq-U.S. relationship, while acknowledging that many other actors were involved in the crises during this period.

3. CASE OVERVIEW

Figure 3.1 Map of Iraq 150

3.1 The Gulf War 1991 Following a series of disputes over oil revenues, Iraq deployed its armed forces to invade neighboring Kuwait on August 2, 1990. 151 That same day, the United Nations

Security Council (UNSC) passed Resolution 660 condemning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and demanding the immediate withdrawal of its forces. 152 U.S. President George H. W.

Bush was also quick to denounce the invasion, stating that there was “no place for this sort of naked aggression in today’s world.” 153 The United States froze both Iraq and

150 CIA World Factbook, “Iraq,” https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/iz.html (accessed February 2, 2015). 151 Michael R. Gordon, "Iraq Army Invades Capital of Kuwait in Fierce Fighting," The New York Times , August 2, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/02/world/iraq-army-invades-capital-of-kuwait- infiercefighting.html?scp=6&sq=iraq&st=nyt&pagewanted=1 (accessed February 2, 2015). 152 UN Security Council, “Resolution 660 (1990)," August 2, 1990, http://daccess-ddsny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/575/10/IMG/NR057510.pdf?OpenElement (accessed February 2, 2015). The UNSC issued the compellent demand that “Iraq withdraw immediately and unconditionally all its forces to the positions in which they were located on 1 August 1990.” 153 Quoted in R. W. Apple Jr., "Invading Iraqis Seize Kuwait and its Oil; U.S. Condemns Attack, Urges

Kuwait’s financial assets and declared a “virtual trade embargo” against Iraq, urging other countries to do the same. 154 The United States also dispatched a naval task force to the Persian Gulf in a show of force. On August 3, 1990, the U.S. Senate approved a resolution calling for multilateral action under the UN charter to restore peace to the

Persian Gulf. 155

In August 1990, President George H.W. Bush remained publicly non-committal on the use of U.S. military force to repel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. He continually reaffirmed his conviction that the United States and its allies would not accept the invasion, but he did not outline what military tools he might employ to achieve this end. 156 Privately, however, Bush was concerned about Saddam’s intentions towards

Saudi Arabia and he ordered the deployment of U.S. forces to the region under code- name Operation Desert Shield. 157 On August 8, Iraq announced the annexation of

Kuwait as its 19 th province, signaling its refusal to comply with UN demands. 158 The

United States responded with a naval blockade to prevent the export of Iraqi oil and

United Action," The New York Times , August 3, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/03/world/iraqiinvasion-invading-iraqis-seize-kuwait-its-oil-us- condemnsattackurges.html?scp=18&sq=iraq&st=nyt&pagewanted=1 (accessed February 2, 2015). 154 Clyde H. Farnsworth, "Bush, in Freezing Assets, Bars $30 Billion to Hussein," The New York Times , August 3, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/03/world/the-iraqi-invasion-bush-in-freezing-assetsbars- 30-billion-to-hussein.html?scp=9&sq=iraq&st=nyt (accessed February 2, 2015). The U.S. sanctions were subsequently adopted by all UN states. UN Security Council, “Resolution 661 (1990)," August 6, 1990, http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/575/11/IMG/NR057511.pdf?OpenElement (accessed February 2, 2015). 155 Apple Jr., "Invading Iraqis Seize Kuwait and its Oil.” 156 George H. W. Bush, "Remarks and an Exchange With Reporters on the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait," George Bush Presidential Library and Museum: Public Papers, August 5, 1990, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=2138&year=1990&month=8 (accessed February 2, 2015). 157 United States Department of Defense, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report to Congress, April 1992 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992), 31, 33. 158 UN Security Council, "Resolution 662 (1990)," August 9, 1990, http://daccessddsny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/575/12/IMG/NR057512.pdf?OpenElement (accessed February 4, 2015).

prohibited the import into Iraq of all goods except food. 159 In a televised address to the

American public, Bush called Hussein an “aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors” and announced his decision to deploy troops to Saudi Arabia. He also made clear U.S. policy objectives, namely the unconditional and complete withdrawal of Iraqi forces from

Kuwait, reinstating the legitimate Kuwaiti government, restoring Gulf security and stability, and protecting the lives of American citizens abroad. 160

While building up forces in the region, the United States also worked to create an international coalition of support. Great Britain and France quickly agreed to cooperate, as did Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey. Believing sanctions to be ineffective,

Bush deployed additional troops to the Gulf in October and November 1990, “to ensure that the coalition has an adequate offensive military option should that be necessary to achieve our common goals.” 161 By early 1991, nearly 50 countries were committed to the goal of rolling back Saddam Hussein and pushing his forces out of Kuwait. 162

On November 29, 1990, the UNSC passed Resolution 678 authorizing member states “to use all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area.” 163 The Iraqi regime was given until January 15, 1991, to comply. Thus the coercive

159 Michael R. Gordon, "Bush Orders Navy to Halt All Shipments of Iraq's Oil and Almost All Imports," The New York Times , August 13, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/13/world/confrontation-gulfbush- orders-navy-halt-all-shipments-iraq-s-oil-almost-all-its.html?scp=2&sq=iraq&st=nyt (accessed February 4, 2015). 160 Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi, Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography (New York, NY: Grove Atlantic, 2002), 220-221. 161 George H. W. Bush, "The President's News Conference on the Persian Gulf Crisis," George Bush Presidential Library and Museum: Public Papers, November 8, 1990, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=2416&year=1990&month=11 (accessed February 4, 2015). 162 United States Department of Defense, Conduct of the Persian War, 20-22. 163 UN Security Council, "Resolution 678 (1990)," November 29, 1990, http://daccessddsny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/575/28/IMG/NR057528.pdf?OpenElement (accessed February 4, 2015).

threat was clear: Saddam must comply and withdraw from Kuwait, or the U.S.-led coalition would use force against him. President Bush reiterated the ultimatum and called for Iraq’s “immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait” noting that “if force is required, we and the other 26 countries who have troops in the area will have enough power to get the job done.” 164 Secretary of State Baker again emphasized the threat of military force during a meeting with Iraq’s Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz on January 9,

1991, warning him of certain war if Iraq did not comply with the UN demands. 165

Three days later, Congress passed a resolution authorizing the use of military force to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait under the authority of the United Nations. 166

Operation Desert Storm commenced on January 17, 1991, with an air campaign followed by the launch of ground troops one month later. After just 100 hours of fighting, the U.S.- led coalition pushed Iraqi forces back into their own territory and declared a cease-fire on

February 28, 1991. 167

3.2 The 1990s Tension between the United States and Iraq continued to exist throughout the

1990s. As part of the cease-fire framework of 1991, Saddam agreed to thorough arms control inspections. 168 On April 3, 1991, the UNSC passed Resolution 687 outlining the

164 George H. W. Bush, "The President's News Conference, 1990-11-30," George Bush Presidential Library and Museum: Public Papers, November 30, 1990, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=2516&year=1990&month=11 (accessed February 4, 2015). 165 "U.S. Department of State Memorandum of Conversation: Secretary James A. Baker III and Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz," The James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, January 9, 1991, http://bakerinstitute.org/files/archive/vm_baker_aziz.pdf/view (accessed February 4, 2015), 3, 34. 166 "Bill Text, 102nd Congress (1991-1992) H.J.RES.77.ENR," The Library of Congress, January 12, 1991, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c102:3:./temp/~c102aEDht6 (accessed February 2, 2015). 167 Kevin Woods et al., The Saddam Tapes , 168. For a more detailed overview of the Gulf War, see U.S. Department of Defense, The Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report to Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992); Eliot A. Cohen and Thomas A. Keaney, Gulf War Airpower Survey: Volumes 1-5 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2003). 168 UN Security Council, "Resolution 687 (1991)," April 3, 1991,

details of the international community’s monitoring program to contain Iraq’s pursuit of

Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). In addition to recognizing Iraq’s previous efforts to develop such weapons, the Resolution required that Saddam “unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision” of all chemical and biological weapons, and all ballistic missiles with a range greater than

150km. 169 According to the terms agreed by the United Nations, Iraq would submit a report to the Secretary-General on the location of such materials and “agree to urgent, on- site inspection” of related facilities. Finally, Resolution 687 demanded that Iraq agree not to acquire nuclear weapons and nuclear materials, and authorized a “Special Commission” to inspect all facilities related to their development. 170 The United Nations established a

Special Commission (UNSCOM) to inspect and dismantle Iraq’s weapons programs with the assistance of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In December 1999, UNSCOM would be replaced by UNMOVIC – the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and

Inspection Commission – in an effort to implement more rigorous oversight of the Iraqi weapons programs. 171

Despite the terms agreed by the international community and Iraq, however,

Saddam’s regime proved less than cooperative on a number of occasions. In July 1991,

Iraqi troops fired warning shots at inspectors seeking to intercept their trucks, and over subsequent months Iraqi armed forces obstructed inspectors and even blocked them from destroying equipment that was required by the terms of the cease-fire. In 1992, the UNSC

http://daccessddsny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/596/23/IMG/NR059623.pdf?OpenElement (accessed February 5, 2015). 169 Ibid. 170 Ibid. 171 UN Security Council, “Resolution 1284 (1999),” December 17, 1999, http://daccessddsny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N99/396/09/PDF/N9939609.pdf?OpenElement (accessed February 2, 2015).

declared Iraq in “material breach” of the UN resolutions and promised serious consequences if Iraq did not comply. Tensions rose again in 1993, when Iraq moved surface-to-air missiles into the southern no-fly zone and demanded that UNSCOM officials travel on Iraqi government planes to conduct their inspections. At this time reports emerged that Iraq had moved troops into the demilitarized zone to retrieve

Silkworm missiles left behind in the war. France, Britain, and the United States responded by bombing suspected missile sites in January 1993. 172

In 1994, Saddam again threatened to expel UNSCOM inspectors from Iraq and moved 50,000 Iraqi Republic Guard troops to the Kuwaiti border. The United States became aware of the movement on October 5 and quickly responded by repositioning its forces and deploying thousands of troops to the Gulf, accompanied by several hundred warplanes. Great Britain and France joined by sending naval assets to the region. In addition to mobilizing forces, the United States issued a verbal threat to deter Iraq from reinvading Kuwait and demanded that Iraq redeploy its forces north of the no-fly zone. 173

On October 8, President Clinton warned that “it would be a grave mistake for Iraq to repeat the mistakes of the past or to misjudge either American will or American power.” 174 Over subsequent days Clinton dispatched more forces to the region and placed

150,000 ground troops on alert. Saddam responded by announcing the withdrawal of

Iraqi troops on October 10, claiming that they had been undertaking a military exercise.

On October 11 Iraqi troops started to retreat from the border, and by October 17, 1994,

172 Jon B. Alterman, "Coercive Diplomacy against Iraq, 1990-98," in Robert J. Art and Patrick M. Cronin (eds.), The United States and Coercive Diplomacy (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2003), 285. 173 Ibid., 286. This demand comprises the compellent element of the U.S. threat. 174 President William Clinton, "Remarks on Iraq," American Presidency Project, October 8, 1994, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=49261 (accessed February 10, 2015).

U.S. intelligence confirmed that Saddam’s forces had returned to their permanent posts. 175

While there were other points of tension between the United States and Iraq during the 1990s, 176 nothing proved quite as problematic as Saddam’s erratic compliance with UNSCOM. After a series of disputes in October 1997 over the credibility of Iraqi reporting and UNSCOM’s restricted activities, the UNSC passed Resolution 1137 demanding that UN inspectors have unconditional access to all suspected weapons sites. 177 The following day, Iraq expelled the U.S. UNSCOM inspectors. President

Clinton responded by sending a U.S. aircraft carrier to the region, ordering additional military aircraft to the Gulf, and stating publicly that the United States was willing to use military force if necessary to compel Saddam’s compliance. 178 The threat appeared effective and Saddam readmitted UNSCOM inspectors to Iraq in November 1997. By this stage, however, he had created a special category of “presidential and sovereign sites” that inspectors were not permitted to visit. This new designation resulted in a further negotiations, which were finally settled in February 1998 with a new Memorandum of

Understanding. 179

In August 1998, and despite improved access to the weapons sites, UNSCOM

Executive Chairman Richard Butler demanded that Iraq submit to a more intrusive

175 Ibid. See also ICB Case Summary, “Iraq Troop Deployment - Kuwait,” http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/icb/dataviewer/ (accessed February 27, 2015). 176 In addition to UNSCOM inspections, a crisis arose in 1996 when Iraq sent troops into Kurdistan and killed more than one hundred lightly armed Kurdish troops. The United States responded by launching cruise missiles south of the zone of fighting and expanding the southern no-fly zone by another seventy miles. Iraqi troops withdrew. Alterman, “Coercive Diplomacy,” 286-87. 177 UN Security Council Resolution, “Resolution 1137 (1997),” http://daccess-ddsny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N97/313/47/PDF/N9731347.pdf?OpenElement (access February 2, 2015). 178 Steven Lee Myers, “Clinton is Sending 2D Carrier to Gulf,” The New York Times , November 15, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/15/world/clinton-is-sending-2d-carrier-to-gulf.html (accessed February 2, 2015). 179 Alterman, "Coercive Diplomacy,” 289. See also ICB Case Summary, “UNSCOM I,” http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/icb/dataviewer/ (accessed February 27, 2015).

weapons inspections program. In response to these demands and ongoing questioning regarding the accuracy of Iraq’s declarations, Saddam re-suspended his cooperation with

UNSCOM on August 5, 1998. The Iraqi leader stipulated the he would resume cooperation on the condition that the UN consider lifting its sanctions on Iraq and remove

Richard Butler from his position as chair of UNSCOM. 180 On November 5, 1998, the

UNSC passed Resolution 1205 demanding that Iraq “rescind immediately and unconditionally” its non-cooperation pledge of August 5. 181 On November 9, the United

States and Great Britain announced increased military mobilizations in the region and urged the evacuation of all UNSCOM personnel working in Iraq. 182 The Clinton administration proceeded to issue a clear, coercive threat demanding that Iraq resume cooperation with the UNSCOM inspectors, or face military consequences. 183 Saddam relented on November 14 with U.S. airplanes reportedly en route to Iraq. UNSCOM inspections resumed with the warning that the United States and its allies would launch air strikes if Iraq failed to live up to its obligations. 184 On December 15 Richard Butler reported that Iraq was not abiding by the terms of the November agreement. The United

States and Britain responded quickly by ordering air strikes on Iraqi weapons facilities, lasting four days from December 17-20, 1998. 185 By the end of the operation, however,

180 Ibid. 181 UN Security Council Resolution, “Resolution 1205 (1998),” http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/1205(1998 ) (accessed September 10, 2015). 182 Barbara Crossette, “U.N Orders Inspectors and Relief Staff Out of Iraq,” The New York Times , November 12, 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/12/world/un-orders-inspectors-and-relief-staff-out- of-iraq.html (accessed February 5, 2015). 183 Steven Lee Myers, “Raising Pressure on Iraq, U.S. Rules Out Talks on Arms Search,” The New York Times , November 11, 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/11/world/raising-pressure-on-iraq-us-rules- out-talks-on-arms-search.html (accessed September 10, 2015). 184 Robert S. Litwak, Regime Change: U. S. Strategy through the Prism of 9/11 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2007), 135-136. 185 Alterman, “Coercive Diplomacy,” 288-89.

there was still little consensus on how to deal with Iraq’s intransigence over the inspections regime.

3.3 The Iraq War 2003 Saddam Hussein’s WMD program was of concern to President George W. Bush when he assumed office in 2000. However, the real shift in U.S. policy towards Iraq occurred in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which served to solidify Bush’s hostility towards Saddam’s regime. 186 From that point onwards events moved quickly. In November 2001, Bush asked Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to examine war plans for Iraq,187 and Congress expressed its own growing concerns about

Saddam’s WMD activity. In December 2001, the House passed HJ Res. 75 by a vote of

392-12 calling Iraq’s refusal to readmit UN weapons inspectors a “mounting threat” to the United States. 188 Shortly thereafter, Bush publicly identified Iraq as part of the “axis of evil” in the 2002 State of the Union address, stating that the United States would not

“permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten [the United States] with the world’s most destructive weapons.” 189 On June 1, 2002, Bush claimed that standard policies of deterrence and containment would not work against unbalanced dictators with

WMD, 190 and in the 2002 National Security Strategy the president infamously declared that the United States had the right to use preventive force to eliminate terrorist threats. 191

186 Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack: The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2004), 21-27; Kenneth Katzman, “Iraq: U.S. Efforts to Change the Regime,” CRS Report No. 14391 (October 3, 2002), 10; Peter L. Hahn, Missions Accomplished? The United States and Iraq Since World War I (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012), 140. 187 Ibid., 3. 188 H.J.Res.75, “Regarding Inspection and Monitoring to Prevent the Development of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq,” 107 th Congress (2001-2002), December 20, 2001. 189 George W. Bush, "The President's State of the Union Address," The White House Archives, January 29, 2002, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html (accessed February 5, 2015). 190 "Text of Bush's Speech at West Point," The New York Times , June 1, 2002,

The president continued this rhetoric in an address to the UN General Assembly, explicitly identifying Iraq’s WMD program as the target of his concerns and calling on the international community to take action. 192 In October 2002, Bush made a televised speech laying out a case against Iraq’s pursuit of WMD and emphasizing Saddam’s continued violation of the UN agreement.193 Just three days later, Congress authorized the use of force against Iraq to fulfill the terms of the UNSC resolutions and granted Bush a broad mandate to take action against Saddam. 194 On November 8, 2002, the UNSC adopted Resolution 1441 declaring Iraq in breach of its obligations under Resolution 687 and demanding that Iraq disclose its weapons program and stockpiles to UN and IAEA inspectors. 195 Inspections continued through early 2003.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/international/02PTEX-WEB.html?pagewanted=all (accessed February 5, 2015). 191 National Security Council, "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," September 2002, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2002/index.html (accessed February 5, 2015). The president’s senior advisors also made a number of statements indicating a growing threat to Iraq. In February 2002, Secretary of State Powell announced in a Senate Budget Committee hearing that the Bush Administration was weighing all options for how to deal with Iraq, drawing a distinction between Iraq on the one hand and Iran and North Korea on the other. “With respect to Iran and with respect to North Korea there is no plan to start a war with these nations…With respect to Iraq it has long been, for several years now, a policy of the U.S. government that regime change would be in the best interests of the region, the best interests of the Iraqi people, and we are looking at a variety of options that would bring that about.” Michael. R. Gordon and David E. Sanger, “Powell Says U.S. Is Weighing Ways to Topple Hussein,” New York Times , February 13, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/13/international/13IRAQ.html (accessed March 10, 2016). 192 "George Bush's Speech to the UN General Assembly," The Guardian , September 12, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/12/iraq.usa3 (accessed February 5, 2015). 193 George W. Bush, "President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat: Remarks by the President on Iraq, Cincinnati Museum Center - Cincinnati Union Terminal," White House Archives, October 7, 2002, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html (accessed February 5, 2015). 194 "Public Law 107-243: H.J. Res 114 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002," Government Printing Office, October 16, 2002, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW- 107publ243/pdf/PLAW-107publ243.pdf (accessed February 5, 2015); Alison Mitchell and Carl Hulse, “The Vote; Congress Authorizes Bush to Use Force Against Iraq, Creating a Broad Mandate,” The New York Times , October 11, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/11/us/threats-responses-vote-congress- authorizes-bush-use-force-against-iraq-creating.html (accessed February 10, 2015); “Senate Approves Iraq War Resolution,” CNN , October 11, 2002, http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/11/iraq.us/ (accessed March 10, 2016). 195 UN Security Council, "Resolution 1441 (2002)," November 8, 2002, http://daccessddsny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N02/682/26/PDF/N0268226.pdf?OpenElement (accessed February 5, 2015). The resolution held Iraq in "material breach" of previous resolutions and afforded Saddam a final

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Despite increased cooperation by the Iraqi regime, the cautious nature of UN reports, and the lack of hard evidence of a WMD program, President George W. Bush continued to make a case for an invasion of Iraq. 196 In December 2002, the United States declared Iraq to be in breach of UN Resolution 1441 after UN chief weapons inspector

Hans Blix reported that the Iraqi arms declaration contained within it little new information since 1998. 197 In January 2003 the United States and Great Britain deployed large-scale military forces to the region. In the 2003 State of the Union address, Bush appealed to domestic and international audiences by arguing that the United States had evidence that Iraq was working to deceive the UN inspectors and that Saddam was threatening scientists who tried to cooperate. He stated further that, “if Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.” 198

Notwithstanding Bush’s impassioned pleas, the international community was less convinced of the evidence against Saddam, and the United States failed to gain UN authorization to use military force.199 This lack of international support, however, did not deter the United States from pursuing its stated course of action. In his address to the

United States on March 17, 2003, Bush announced that, “the United Nations Security

opportunity to comply by disclosing his WMD program and allowing enhanced inspections. It also warned of serious consequences for non-compliance. 196 Hans Blix, "Briefing the Security Council, 19 December 2002: Inspections in Iraq and a Preliminary Assessment of Iraq's Weapons Declaration," UNMOVIC: Selected Security Council Briefings, December 19, 2002, http://www.un.org/depts/unmovic/new/pages/security_council_briefings.asp#2 (accessed February 5, 2015). 197 Colin Powell, “We are Disappointed, but We Are Not Deceived,’ by Iraq,” The New York Times , December 20, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/world/threats-responses-powell-s-words-we-are- disappointed-but-we-are-not-deceived.html (accessed February 15, 2015). 198 George W. Bush, "Text of President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address," Washington Post , January 28, 2003, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/bushtext_012803.html (accessed February 5, 2015). 199 "France Will Use Iraq Veto," BBC News , March 10, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2838269.stm (accessed February 5, 2015).

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Council has not lived up to its responsibilities so we will rise to ours.” He urged foreign nationals to leave Iraq and then issued a clear ultimatum to Saddam Hussein instructing him and his sons to leave Baghdad within 48 hours, or face military conflict “commenced at the time of our choosing.” 200 This statement, combined with the steady deployment of approximately 145,000 U.S. and British troops to the region, and total coalition forces of

250,000, comprised a clear coercive threat. 201 Yet despite the clarity of the demand and the presence of U.S. troops at his doorstep, Saddam and his sons refused to leave Iraq.

The United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 19, 2003.

4. THEORY AND HYPOTHESES To recall, the first stage in the cognitive-institutional theory of threat assessment argues that variation in leadership beliefs within a target state is key to understanding how threatening signals are interpreted during crises. More specifically, I claim that a target state’s prior crisis interactions provide crucial information to target state leaders about an adversary’s foreign policy objectives and the costs that it is willing to expend to achieve those goals. Collectively, this information enables target state leaders to form beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests, and whether it is satisfied with the status quo or wanting (and willing) to revise the current international order.

What does the cognitive-institutional theory predict about the Iraq crises from

1991-2003? How would it expect Saddam to assess the credibility of U.S. threats? The

200 George W. Bush, "President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq Within 48 Hours: Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation," White House Archives, March 17, 2003, http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030317-7.html (accessed February 5, 2015). 201 Anthony H. Cordesman, The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 24, 36-37; Hahn, Missions Accomplished , 151.

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remainder of this section provides evidence for Saddam’s beliefs about the extent of U.S. foreign policy interests throughout this period, and uses these beliefs to generate predictions about his threat assessments in each crisis. Section 5 then draws on newly available archival sources to reveal Saddam’s reasoning in each case.

4.1 Saddam’s Beliefs Pre-1991 It is useful to evaluate the contents of Saddam’s beliefs just prior to the 1991 Gulf

War in order to provide some context for his subsequent behavior, as well as to establish a baseline from which to assess any changes in beliefs post-1991. Newly released documents reveal that despite a warming of relations with the United States in the early- mid 1980s, a series of events in the years just prior to 1991 led Saddam to hold a negative opinion of the United States, and to view Washington D.C. with a high degree of hostility and suspicion. 202 U.S. support for one of Iraq’s chief adversaries, Israel, combined with

American support for the Kurdish rebels in the 1970s and Washington’s history of backing Iran, all appear to have contributed to Saddam’s beliefs in U.S. aggressive intent. 203

In the 1980s, the United States embarked upon a policy of engagement with Iraq that would lead to a significant warming of relations between the two countries for much of the decade. This shift – or “tilt” – towards Saddam’s regime was motivated both by a desire to bolster Iraq in the face of a growing Iranian threat to the region, and in the hopes

202 For three excellent studies utilizing recently released primary documents see Kevin M. Woods and Mark E. Stout, “Saddam's Perceptions and Misperceptions: The Case of ‘Desert Storm ,” Journal of Strategic Studies 33, 1 (2006): 5-41; Hal Brands, “Inside the Iraqi State Records: Saddam Hussein, “‘Irangate,’ and the United States,” Journal of Strategic Studies 34, 1 (2011): 95-118; Hal Brands and David Palkki, “Conspiring Bastards: Saddam Hussein’s Strategic View of the United States,” Diplomatic History 36, 3 (2012): 625-659. 203 Brands “Inside the Iraqi State Records,” 102; Brands and Palkki, “Conspiring Bastards,” 655.

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of encouraging Baghdad “down the path of modernization.” 204 In 1982, Iraq was removed from the U.S. government’s list of terrorist-supporting states, allowing for a significant increase in bilateral trade. One month after the full re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in December 1984, the United States increased its credits for food products and agricultural equipment from $345 million in 1984, to $675 million in 1985, to $1 billion in credit by the end of 1987. 205 In 1984, the Export-Import

Bank also opened a $684 million credit line to Iraq. 206 In addition to increasing its economic aid, Washington turned a blind eye to a number of incidents, including most notably Saddam’s use of WMD against Iranian forces and against the Iraqi Kurdish population in 1987. At this time, U.S. Congress attempted to impose sanctions on Iraq but the Reagan Administration squashed the bill. 207

Perhaps most important to the burgeoning relationship, however, was U.S. assistance to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. In 1984, Reagan authorized the sharing of intelligence with Iraq, including U.S. satellite photos and communication intercepts that would help Iraqi forces survive Iranian attacks. In April 1984, Reagan also signed the National Security Decision Directive 139, ordering the Defense Department,

CIA, and State Department to bolster American security in the Gulf against Iran, to strengthen regional counter-terrorism measures and shore up intelligence collection, and

204 Steven Hurst, The United States and Iraq Since 1979 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 58. 205 Karsh and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein , 159-60. 206 Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York, NY: Random House, 2002), 18; Hahn, Missions Accomplished , 78. 207 Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002), 20-21. For his part, Saddam responded by expelling the wanted international terrorist, Abu Nidal, from Iraq and encouraging the Iraqi media to take a more conciliatory approach towards the United States. He also championed the need for a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Arabs throughout the 1980s – a big policy shift given Saddam’s previous position.

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to develop a plan to avoid an Iraqi defeat. 208 Washington sold Baghdad ten Bell UH-1

Huey and sixty Hughes MD-500 Defender helicopters that Iraq quickly converted from civilian to military use, and in March 1985, the United States began issuing Baghdad high-tech export licenses that had previously been denied. Finally, Washington encouraged its allies to support Iraq and increase their own bilateral economic and military aid. 209

Yet evidence suggests that Saddam never entirely trusted the United States and remained suspicious of U.S. motives even during this period of positive relations. 210 He continued to view the United States and Israel as inseparable and believed that Israel’s support for Iran throughout the war had been facilitated by the United States. 211 These suspicions were confirmed by revelations of the secret provision of U.S. arms supplies and intelligence to Tehran in 1985-86. Since taking office, Reagan had publicly organized an international embargo on arms supplies to Iran, stating that “the United

States gives terrorists no rewards and no guarantees…we make no concessions. We make no deals.” 212 Despite these public claims, however, members of the Reagan

Administration provided Iran with hundreds of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles in

1985-86 in the hopes of improving the U.S.-Iranian relationship and winning the release of several U.S. hostages held by radical Islamic groups in Lebanon. 213

The disclosure of U.S. arms sales to Iran – a practice that the U.S. had denied to

Iraqi leaders previously – seriously damaged Saddam’s image of the United States and

208 Hahn, Missions Accomplished , 78. 209 Pollack, The Threatening Storm , 18-19. 210 Woods et al., The Saddam Tapes, 18. 211 Ibid., 19; Pollack, The Threatening Storm , 22. 212 Quoted in Hahn, Missions Accomplished , 79. 213 Ibid., 79.

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confirmed his previous suspicions. 214 Labeling the U.S. assistance to Iran as “a stab in the back,” 215 Saddam became convinced that as Iraq’s power in relation to Iran’s grew in size, “American conspiracies against Baghdad would increase.” 216 In fact “Irangate,” as it became known, appears to have marked a key turning point for Saddam in his views of the United States, blindsiding the leader and consolidating his belief in a U.S.-led conspiracy to undermine the Iraqi regime. 217 In private discussions with his advisors,

Saddam claimed that the United States had provoked Iran into attacking Iraq in 1980, and high-level officials voiced the belief that U.S. support for Iraq during the war had been a ploy to distract Saddam from U.S. broader goals in the region. 218

More specifically, Saddam believed Iranian arms sales were one element in a broader, conscious strategy on Washington’s part to join Israel and Iran in an anti-Iraq axis to oust Saddam from power. 219 According to historian Hal Brands, Saddam’s key lesson learned from the “Irangate” affair was “that Washington was relentlessly deceitful and implacably hostile to his regime.” 220 Iraq’s Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz added that the Iran-Contra disclosures had reinforced Saddam’s belief that America was

214 In discussing a letter of response to the Iran-Contra Affair with his Revolutionary Command Council in 1986, Saddam stated that “I want the letter [to the United States] to be detailed – that we, now, and in the future, will be suspicious of U.S. invitations and we will doubt them in a practical way.” Quoted in Woods et al., The Saddam Tapes, 25. 215 CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-609, “Saddam Hussein’s Meeting with Ba’ath Party Cabinet Ministers,” early 1987. 216 Woods et al., The Saddam Tapes, 19. 217 Ibid., 18-19; Brands, “Inside the Iraqi State Records,” 96-97. At the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz commented that “after the lessons Iraq has been through, conspiracy is inevitable.” See Brands and Palkki, “Conspiring Bastards,” 646. 218 Saddam said he was convinced that “Iran fearlessly attacked us under manipulation from America.” Quoted in Brands, “Inside the Iraqi State Records,” 109. 219 CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-609, “Saddam Hussein’s Meeting with Ba’ath Party Cabinet Ministers,” early 1987. Bengio calls this Saddam’s “nightmare of three circles of hostility.” Ofra Bengio, Saddam’s world: Political Discourse in Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 145. 220 Brands, “Inside the Iraqi State Records,” 97.

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untrustworthy and “out to get him personally.” 221 In the late 1980s, Saddam expressed concern that U.S. operatives were trying to assassinate him, and he identified the United

States as the primary foreign danger to his regime.222

Washington’s foreign policy in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War served to reinforce these beliefs. While President George H.W. Bush still advocated a policy of engagement with Iraq, not everyone with the administration was comfortable with the policy. In 1988 Saddam claimed that U.S. regional engagement efforts were merely meant to give Washington “the proximity they need so they can strike right where they wish.” Officials in Baghdad viewed any discontinuity in Bush’s policies towards Iraq as more evidence of bad faith,223 and U.S. efforts to defend its allies were interpreted as a

U.S. effort to build an anti-Iraq coalition in the Gulf. 224 When the United States terminated a series of military cooperation programs with Iraq and publicly criticized

Iraqi chemical weapons attacks against the Kurdish population, 225 Saddam seized on this behavior as evidence of a U.S. conspiracy with the Kurds, and as yet another ploy to improve the U.S. position in the region. A steady string of media reports documenting

Iraqi domestic repression, FBI operations catching illegal transfers of sensitive U.S technology to Iraq, the revelation of the Banco Nazionale del Lavoro scandal, and continued support for an increasingly assertive Israel, compounded Saddam’s

221 Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I, 31. Quoted in Woods et al ., The Saddam Tapes , 35. 222 Brands and Palkki, “Conspiring Bastards,”627. 223 CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-554, “Meeting between Saddam Hussein and Iraqi Officials regarding the Political Relationship between Iraq, Iran and the USA,” September 17, 1988. 224 Woods et al., The Saddam Tapes , 20. 225 Ibid., 648.

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concerns. 226 He interpreted all as part of a broader campaign to pave the way for military aggression. 227

Records indicate that by early 1990, Saddam was convinced that the United States was trying to cripple the Iraqi regime in order to achieve U.S. long-held goals of dominating the Persian Gulf. 228 U.S. concerns for Kuwaiti security especially were taken as confirmation of Saddam’s fears, and as further evidence that the United States was conspiring to strangle his government despite U.S. assurances to the contrary, including those delivered by Ambassador Glaspie. 229 In a meeting just prior to the Iraqi invasion of

Kuwait, Glaspie told Saddam that his fears of a U.S. conspiracy were unwarranted and that the administration fully understood the Iraqi leader’s desperate need for funds and desire for higher oil prices. 230 According to Foreign Minister Aziz, Saddam remained convinced that Washington’s policies were aimed at destroying Iraq, its military power, and “removing [his] nationalist, patriotic leadership.” 231 Saddam’s own brother-in-law and ambassador to the United Nations (Geneva) advised him that the United States was bidding for regional hegemony and that Iraq was the only country in its way. 232 By April

2, 1990, in a meeting with Yasar Arafat, Saddam warned that if there were any attack on

Iraq, Baghdad would “sweep away U.S. influence in the region.” He threatened British

226 Pollack, The Threatening Storm , 32. Saddam sparked a wave of international outcry after his execution of British journalist Farzad Bazoft in March 1990. Karshi and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein, 208-209. See also Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War (New York, NY: Little Brown and Company, 1995), 12-13. 227 Karshi and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein , 209. 228 Ibid., 650. 229 Brands and Palkki, “Conspiring Bastards,” 627, 653-53. Tariq Aziz later claimed that the tensions with Kuwait were part of “a conspiracy against Iraq, a deliberate conspiracy against Iraq, by Kuwait, organized, devised by the United States.” Quoted from “Oral History: Tariq Aziz,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/aziz/1.html (accessed February 6, 2015). 230 Karsh and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein , 215. 231 “Oral History: Tariq Aziz.” See also CRRC SH-SHTP-D-000-557, “Saddam and His Senior Advisors Discussing Iraq’s Historical Rights to Kuwait and the U.S. Position,” December 15, 1990. 232 Captured Record, “Letter from Barzan al-Tikriti to Saddam Hussein,” September 1989, quoted in Brands and Palkki, “Conspiring Bastards,” 648.

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and American warships in the Gulf and urged Arafat to reject all peace negotiations.

Saddam believed that Iraq was on a collision course with the United States and Israel. 233

U.S. policies in the late 1980s and early 90s thus appear to have informed

Saddam’s belief that Washington wanted to remove him from power and held revisionist foreign policy goals vis-à-vis his regime. The United States and Iraq, however, had not experienced a military crisis from which Saddam could observe the costs Washington was willing to absorb to achieve its objectives. Lacking direct crisis experience from which to assess U.S. willingness to employ force, Saddam developed a conspiratorial mindset and belief that the United States was highly resolved to achieve its objectives. In fact, Saddam’s statements and discussions with his inner circle indicate that he may have inferred high levels of resolve on the part of the United States from its impressive military and economic might. 234 Nevertheless, the presence of a prior crisis interaction is required by the cognitive-institutional theory for strong beliefs to form and to exert a predictable influence on subsequent threat assessments. As a result of this, I make only a tentative coding for Saddam’s beliefs in this period, and I expect these beliefs to be more susceptible to change throughout the course of the crisis as new information becomes available.

Based on the evidence presented, I code the content of Saddam’s beliefs about the

United States prior to the Gulf War as follows: 1) Saddam believed that the United States had revisionist foreign policy objectives; and 2) Saddam believed that the United States was willing to devote significant resources to achieving these ends. According to the theory developed in chapter two, when a target state leader has experienced a prior crisis

233 Quoted in Pollack, The Threatening Storm, 32. 234 The Duelfer Report notes that Saddam and his advisors were never in doubt of the power disparity between the United States and Iraq. Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I, 32.

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interaction that has led him or her to believe that an adversary has revisionist foreign policy objectives and that it is willing to devote significant resources to achieving these ends, future coercive threats will be interpreted in accordance with these prior beliefs. In particular, signals that establish the credibility of future threats will be emphasized and weighted heavily in threat assessments, and signals of restraint and accommodation reinterpreted, sidelined or ignored. In this case, however, Saddam had not experienced a prior crisis with the United States. As a result, these beliefs are useful in explaining his behavior prior to the onset of the Gulf War, but they are expected to change as information becomes available during the crisis and to exert a weaker influence on his final threat assessment.235 This discussion leads to the following case-specific predictions regarding Saddam’s Hussein’s assessments of U.S. threat credibility pre-Gulf War:

H1 Iraq : Based on his experiences in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein will initially assess U.S. coercive threats as credible, but lacking guarantees of reassurance and restraint.

According to the cognitive-institutional theory, this perceived lack of restraint on the part of the United States generates two further implications. First, Saddam is more likely to resist U.S. demands; and second, Saddam may be incentivized to seize the initiative and take preventative military action to avoid a worse situation arising in the future. Finally, given Saddam’s lack of prior crisis experience in the 1980s, I expect the

Iraqi leader to update his beliefs as more information becomes available.

H2 Iraq : Saddam will update his beliefs as new information becomes available during the course of the 1991 crisis.

235 We return to this point in Chapter 6 with the Suez Crisis.

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4.2 Saddam’s Beliefs Post-1991 Saddam’s beliefs in the 1990s were profoundly shaped by his experience of the

1991 Gulf War with the United States. The 1991 crisis provided Saddam with first-hand experience of U.S. military might and Washington’s willingness to use force to achieve its foreign policy objectives. Yet newly released primary documentation reveal that

Saddam was also deeply surprised by the course of events during the war. Given his prior belief in U.S. revisionist aims, it appears that once U.S. forces entered Iraq, he expected them to capitalize on their military advantage and continue onwards to Baghdad. The fact that they did not, and that the United States stopped short of regime change, profoundly influenced Saddam’s thinking in the years that followed.

At the onset of war in 1991, the United States had formed an international coalition force that was far more powerful than that available to Iraq. By the beginning of

Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led coalition had amassed 540,000 troops from 31 countries. This included seven U.S. Army divisions, two U.S. Marine Corps Divisions, a

British armored division, a French light armored division, and approximately 4 divisions from Arab states. In addition, the coalition force had more than 1,700 aircraft and six aircraft carrier battle groups at its disposal. This international coalition faced an Iraqi

Army of approximately 540,000 soldiers, with 4,200 tanks, and 3,100 artillery pieces positioned in Kuwait. 236 While the forces seem equivalent in numerical terms, the standard of professionalism and level of skill within the coalition, combined with the

236 This was the U.S. estimate of Iraqi strength at the outset of the war. Problems of under-manning and troop desertion, however, reduced Iraqi strength within the first week of the war. Later estimates state that Iraq actually deployed 340,000 troops to the Kuwait Theater of Operations (KTO) with 3,200 tanks and 2,400 artillery pieces. See Cohen and Keaney, Gulf War Airpower Survey , 254

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quality of weaponry available, made the U.S.-led force a far superior and formidable opponent. 237

In fact the U.S. war plan was built upon an assumption of technological superiority, calling for the use of air strikes and precision-guided munitions to target key components of the Iraqi political and military leadership in Baghdad and Kuwait, before resorting to a ground campaign. This sequence of attacks was designed to limit U.S. and coalition casualties, as well as to break up Iraqi military units in Kuwait. 238 The coalition force was very successful in executing this plan, achieving air superiority within one week of operations and degrading Iraqi leadership targets within just days. 239

The stated U.S. objective at the onset of the war was contained in UN Security

Council Resolutions 660 and 678 which required that “Iraq withdraw immediately and unconditionally all its forces to the positions they were located on 1 August 1990,” and that the coalition use whatever means necessary to enforce compliance. This was a compellent demand designed to restore the status quo ante. 240 Yet U.S. behavior during the course of the war indicated that this was not all that Bush wanted to achieve. By

February 1991, the air campaign had convinced Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait in order to save his army, and on February 11, 1991, Iraq announced its willingness to consider a ceasefire. After negotiations with the Soviet Union, the Iraqi regime agreed to

237 U.S. Department of Defense, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War, 85-86. 238 Gordon and Trainor, The Generals’ War , 132-33. 239 Cohen and Keaney, Gulf War Airpower Survey , 387 240 UN Security Council, “Resolution 660”; George H. W. Bush, "The President's News Conference, 1990- 11-30," George Bush Presidential Library and Museum: Public Papers, November 30, 1990, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=2516&year=1990&month=11 (accessed February 4, 2015).

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a ceasefire on the condition that the international community give Saddam 21 days to withdraw his troops from Kuwait. 241

The Bush Administration, however, was not interested in Iraqi withdrawal alone.

The United States refused the terms set by Saddam and chose instead to issue a new ultimatum: a coalition ceasefire was contingent on Iraq commencing a withdrawal by noon the next day (February 23), and completely evacuating Kuwait within 48 hours. If

Iraq failed to comply, Saddam would face a U.S.-led ground invasion to compel Iraqi troops from Kuwait. 242 The goal of this new set of demands was to force the Iraqi

Republican Guard to retreat in haste and abandon its heavy equipment in Kuwait. This would serve to significantly weaken the Iraqi Army, and leave Saddam vulnerable to external invasion and internal unrest. 243 The Bush Administration thus not only wanted to restore the status quo ante by forcing Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, but also wanted to create conditions ripe for the fall of Saddam by rendering impotent a central source of his power. 244 Having deployed thousands of troops and military equipment to the Gulf, the

United States now wanted to achieve the more expansive objective of destroying

Saddam’s regime. 245

The United States was not able achieve this outcome, however. Saddam refused to comply with the ultimatum and on February 24, 1991, the coalition forces commenced a

241 Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1995), 561-62. Iraq also required that once the withdrawal was complete that all past UN resolutions would cease to be in effect. 242 George H. W. Bush, "Remarks on the Persian Gulf Conflict 1991-02-22" The Bush Library, February 22, 1991, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/publicpapers.php?id=2729&year=1991&month=2 (accessed February 4, 2015). 243 Phil Haun, “On Death Ground: Why Weak States Resist Great Powers. Explaining Coercion Failure in Asymmetric Interstate Conflicts.” PhD Diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010, 194-96 244 Alterman, “Coercive Diplomacy,” 283. 245 Haun, “On Death Ground,” 190. According to Gordon and Trainor, General Schwarzkopf had left no ambiguity about the Army’s mission. “The Republican Guard were not to be routed, they were not to be made “combat ineffective.” They were to be destroyed.” Gordon and Trainor, The Generals’ War , 429.

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large-scale ground invasion. Iraqi forces responded quickly by withdrawing from Kuwait, and by February 28 the United States had declared a ceasefire. The combination of a month-long air campaign, an inability to split the coalition, and finally the realization that the United States could overrun the Iraqi military forced Saddam to retreat. The U.S.-led coalition thus achieved its principle foreign policy objective of removing the Iraqi Army from Kuwait. In addition to achieving this objective, the coalition operation had also served to significantly degrade the Iraqi military, which was much weaker at the end of the war than it had been just six weeks prior. Iraq’s Army had been reduced from 955,000 to 350,000 troops, artillery was down to 1,000 pieces, tanks had reduced from 5,500 to

2,300, and the Air Force had gone from 689 combat aircraft to 439. 246

Yet despite this weakening of forces, the United States had not achieved its broader goal of destroying the Iraqi Army, which was left intact alongside much of

Saddam’s Republican Guard. The decision to withdraw forces before this key objective had been achieved was later viewed as a key strategic error by many U.S. analysts. From an operational perspective, U.S. and coalition forces should not have been withdrawn until Iraqi Army escape routes had been blocked by allied ground forces and the

Republican Guard destroyed. Senior decision makers in Washington, however, misled by patchy intelligence indicating the weakness of Iraqi forces and concerned with the political fallout of exploiting a clear victory, decided to call a cease-fire. This was despite knowledge on the ground that the Republican Guard had not been destroyed, and that the majority of the fleeing Iraqi Army was south of Basra in the pathway of the coalition forces planned advance. 247 On March 1, after the cease-fire had been declared, American

246 Gordon and Trainor, The Generals' War , 459 247 Ibid., 424-25.

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surveillance photos showed that 842 Iraqi tanks, a quarter of the tanks in southern Iraq and Kuwait, and 1,412 Iraqi armored personnel carriers (half of all of its APCs) had escaped intact. In addition, half of the Republican Guard’s armor remained unscathed

(some 365 T-72 tanks) and 70 percent of the Republic Guard troops had escaped north of the marshes. 248 The continued existence of these forces – and the Republican Guard in particular – meant that Saddam could maintain his hold on power in the aftermath of the

Gulf War, and ended hopes within the Bush Administration of regime change in Iraq. 249

Recently released archival sources show that Saddam took careful note of these events, and in particular the U.S. decision not to oust him from power. 250 At the end of the war, the United States had in theater over 500,000 ground troops, 2,000 modern battle tanks, and 900 strike aircraft (not counting other coalition forces). 251 The U.S.-led force was therefore in a good position to pursue more revisionist aims had it so desired. The fact that it did not was surprising to Saddam. In March 1991, in a conversation with his advisors, Saddam commented that “the strongest scientific, technological, and military powers and the highest financial and economic potential existing in the region and the world without any exception . . . all got together against us and they did not succeed despite what happened. They did not dare attack Baghdad.” 252 The Americans had the opportunity and capacity to destroy the entire Iraqi military, including the Republican

Guard, but they stopped short of pursuing this goal. As a result, Saddam believed that

248 Ibid., 429. 249 Haun, “On Death Ground,” 190. 250 Saddam attributed Bush’s inability to achieve his stated goals in Iraq as a key reason for his electoral loss in 1992. He stated that “Bush’s failure to achieve his goal was a basic reason for his fall. In other words, he put himself in – in the position that it’s either him or Iraq.” Quoted in Woods et al ., The Saddam Tapes, 42. 251 Cohen and Keaney, Gulf War Air Power Survey: Volume Five , 27-32; Haun, “On Death Ground,” 198. 252 “Saddam Discusses How Iraq Won the Gulf War and Whether it Should Have Engaged in Preemptive Attacks on Gathering Coalition Forces,” circa March 1991,” in Woods et al., The Saddam Tapes , 214.

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Iraq had “punched a hole in the myth of American superiority and rubbed the nose of the

United States in the dust.” 253 In August 1991, he added that by assuming this course of action, America had revealed its true resolve: “American disclosed its weakness when it launched its military operations against us in the same way it unveiled its strength.” 254

Not only did the United States not push forward to Baghdad, but Washington also failed to support the uprisings that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the war. Part of the calculus in the decision to withdraw was the belief in Washington that Saddam’s position was tenuous and that he would not be able to survive politically after the removal of U.S. and coalition troops. Indeed, on February 15, 1991, Bush actively encouraged this outcome by calling on “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the director, to step aside.” 255 Just two weeks later, the Shi’ite and Kurdish populations did just that, instigating uprisings against the Iraqi Armed Forces and shaking the foundations of Saddam’s power. Yet despite the pleas from both groups for U.S. assistance in ousting Saddam, Washington refused to get involved revealing the limits of its policy objectives. Worried that the uprisings would result in an Iraqi state too weak to balance against Iran, the United States watched as the relatively unscathed Iraqi Republican Guard brutally repressed its own people. 256 U.S. inaction reaffirmed Saddam’s belief that Washington was unwilling “to

253 Neil MacFarquhar, “Saddam Hussein, Defiant Dictator Who Ruled Iraq with Violence and Fear, Dies,” New York Times , December 30, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/30/world/middleeast/30saddam.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed March 10, 2016). 254 CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-210, “Saddam and His Inner Circle Discussing Upheaval and the Communist Coup Attempt in the Soviet Union,” circa August 19-21, 1991. 255 Hurst, The United States and Iraq, 102. 256 Ibid., 102-03; Hahn, Missions Accomplished , 108-09. When Bush made his February 15 announcement, the administration had hoped for a military coup that would maintain the integrity of the Iraqi state.

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engage in what he regarded as real war: straight up, direct slugging it out, mano-a- mano.” 257

Primary source materials also indicate that Saddam attributed the withdrawal of

U.S. and allied forces to U.S casualty-aversion and an unwillingness to pay the human costs of war. Indeed the United States had suffered relatively few casualties during the course of the Gulf War, with just 146 combat-related deaths. 258 According to documents in the Iraqi Perspectives Project , Saddam perceived the U.S. air attacks and reluctance to deploy ground troops as displaying a complete unwillingness to engage in “real war” between soldiers on the ground. 259 Towards the end of the Gulf War, Saddam and his advisors demonstrated this belief in their discussion of the imminent ground campaign, emphasizing the importance of raising the number of U.S. casualties in order to force a retreat. 260 Additional conversations between Saddam and his inner circle confirm his surprise at the length of the air campaign prior to the ground invasion, 261 and demonstrate

Saddam’s growing belief that the U.S. war strategy was driven by concerns about casualty rates. In a conversation in November 1991, Saddam notes, “we were correct even in discounting a beach invasion. We said that there is no way they would try a beach invasion and expose themselves and suffer losses. Are they even ready to suffer such

257 Woods et al ., Iraqi Perspectives Project , 16. 258 Of the 146 combat-related deaths, 35 were caused by friendly fire. Eric Schmitt, “War’s Accidental Deaths Spur Push for Solutions,” The New York Times , June 5, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/05/us/war-s-accidental-deaths-spur-push-for-solutions.html (accessed February 20, 2015); Gordon and Trainor, The Generals’ War , 457. 259 Woods et al ., Iraqi Perspectives Project , 16. 260 Conversation quoted in Kevin Woods et al., The Saddam Tapes , 195. Muhammed : “I think our people will bear and start -- If we caused 5,000 American casualties in a period of time -- Saddam : 500 -- Sa’dun : Sir, we will win if we have one Iraqi casualty for one American casualty, two for two.” 261 CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-241, “Iraqi Officials Briefing Saddam Hussein on the Performance of Iraqi Troops in Kuwait,” November 17, 1991. Saddam commented that “one of the things that we did not take into consideration, or at least we did not discuss, but we kept measuring against the training basis in general, was that we didn’t expect the prewar aerial bombardment to continue for a month and a half.”

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losses? Therefore they had to think of coming by land. And the beach invasion did not take place.” 262

None of this is to say that Saddam thought the U.S. was militarily weak of course.

In fact quite the opposite – in a number of forums Saddam emphasized the discrepancy in power between the U.S. and Iraqi forces, 263 commenting on the strength of the U.S. military and its long-range missiles and naval forces. 264 In the aftermath of the Gulf War, however, Saddam did not believe that the U.S. had the resolve or willingness to use this military power to overthrow his regime and remove him from power. This belief was reflected in his diagnosis of American weakness: “America is not in the prime of youth.

America is in the last stage of elderliness and the beginning of the first stage of old age.” 265 Events from the Gulf War and its aftermath demonstrated to Saddam that the

United States was not the long-term threat he had anticipated in the 1980s, and that

Washington was not willing to absorb the costs necessary to achieve its revisionist foreign policy goals.

Finally, in addition to casualty aversion, both the lead-up to and outcome of the

Gulf War provided Saddam Hussein with evidence that the United States did not wish to suffer the international political or financial costs of acting unilaterally. Indeed, the Bush

Administration worked carefully to build support for both the sanctions regime and the subsequent military campaign in the international diplomatic community – efforts that paid off for the United States. 266 Once Iraq had invaded Kuwait, Great Britain quickly

262 Ibid. 263 Woods and Stout, “Saddam's Perceptions and Misperceptions,” 12-13. 264 MEMRI, “First Interview with Saddam Hussein in Twelve Years,” No. 5, 2002, http://www.memri.org/report/en/print756.htm (accessed February 9, 2015). 265 Woods et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project , 16. 266 James A. Baker III with Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace 1989-1992 (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1995), 288.

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supported U.S. efforts by freezing Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets, and the Great Britain and

France increased their military presence in the Gulf. The Arab League quickly condemned Saddam’s behavior, and the United States coordinated closely with the Soviet

Union throughout the crisis. This diplomatic approach resulted in substantial international support for the UN sanctions regime, and eventually for the use of military force. Of the fifty countries that contributed to the effort to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait, thirty- eight contributed air, sea or ground forces. 267 Saddam himself noted the importance of

UN approval for the Bush Administration in discussions with his advisors in 1992. When considering the possibility of additional military action on the part of the United States,

Saddam observed that he did not think Bush would attack unless “under the cover of the

United Nations through a decision from the Security Council.” 268

In addition to insulating Bush from political fallout, the coalition arrangement also significantly reduced the financial costs for the United States. Total incremental costs for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm were estimated at $61 billion in

1991 dollars, $54 billion of which was provided by coalition partners. 269 Importantly, while these diplomatic successes alleviated the costs born by the United States, this strategy of burden-sharing led Saddam to believe that the United States would not have gone to war in Iraq in 1991 without the support of its allies, and particularly absent the financial support of the Arab states. In August 1991, Saddam commented: “Let’s theoretically suppose that Saudi territory and Saudi wealth did not exist. Would America

267 U.S. Department of Defense, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War , 20-21. 268 CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-186_TF, “Saddam Hussein Meeting with Ba'ath Party Members to discuss UN Weapons Inspection,” July 23, 1992. 269 Ibid., 634. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other Gulf States provided $36 billion. CNN Library, “Gulf War Fast Facts,” CNN, July 28, 2015, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/15/world/meast/gulf-war-fast-facts/ (accessed September 3, 2015).

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have been able to undertake a military campaign with this magnitude against Iraq? . . If all the Arab wealth and all the Arab territories did not exist, would America and the West have been able to undertake the campaign they launched against Iraq?” 270

Despite Iraq’s experience during the war, however, evidence suggests that

Saddam did not completely revise his beliefs about the nature of U.S. foreign policy objectives in its aftermath. Discussions between Saddam and his advisors point to weaknesses in U.S. resolve and an unwillingness to expend costs – especially human costs – to achieve its objectives, but they do not question that regime change had been and remained the goal of the United States. Indeed, Saddam and his advisors considered the possibility of further acts of U.S. force against the regime in the immediate wake of the Gulf War, but presumed that these would be in the form of discrete air attacks rather than large-scale ground invasions. In conversations surrounding a potential U.S. attack in

1992, for example, Saddam acknowledged the possibility of “a small operation, such as a series of attacks for a certain period against specific targets they discuss and decide on,” but nothing more extensive. 271

Moreover, despite the initial warming of relations with President Clinton from

1992 and the new administration’s more pragmatic approach to the U.S.-Iraq relationship, 272 Saddam continued to view the United States with a high degree of suspicion. The sanctions regime, for example, was perceived to be an indirect strategy

270 CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-210, “Saddam and His Inner Circle Discussing Upheaval and the Communist Coup Attempt in the Soviet Union,” circa August 19-21, 1991. 271 SH-SHTP-A-001-186_TF: Saddam Hussein Meeting with Ba'ath Party Members to discuss UN Weapons Inspection,” July 23, 1992. The Duelfer Report notes that Saddam thought the possibility of a ground invasion in the 1990s to be “very low.” Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I, 31. 272 On 13 January 1992, Clinton stated that: “The people of Iraq would be better off if they had a different leader. But my job is not to pick their rulers for them.” “The New Presidency: Excerpts from an Interview with Clinton after the Air Strikes,” The New York Times , January 14, 1993. Quoted in Woods et al., The Saddam Tapes, 46.

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aimed at weakening Iraq and creating the conditions necessary for Saddam’s overthrow. 273 Saddam’s statements in 1995 illustrate this belief:

The United States has a hostile policy aiming to end the leadership in Iraq and to install a puppet regime, like the ones currently ruling in the gulf and in Egypt. That was the case in 1991 and hasn't changed since then. But they did reach a practical and realistic conclusion that this goal cannot be accomplished. They had hopes, plans and people that they depended upon. But the United States, and to a certain degree Britain, have a desire to change the regime. And they think that the economic embargo will give them the desired result. 274 In addition to the sanctions regime, Saddam and his advisors also believed that the

UNSCOM inspectors were collecting targeting information for the United States, and that these inspectors were instructed by Washington to plant evidence that could be used to accuse Iraq of non-compliance. 275 In 1995, Saddam acknowledged the continued efforts on the part of the United States to unseat him, commenting that “our battle is not over yet; it is still ongoing.” 276 And on occasion Saddam was right. In 1996, the Iraqi

Intelligence Service uncovered a CIA-MI6 coup plot that required UNSCOM inspectors to collect intelligence on the Special Republican Guard to enable an attack on Saddam’s personal security forces. Iraqi intelligence learned of the plan and arrested more than 800 suspected sympathizers. 277 Collectively this evidence suggests that Saddam did not revise

273 The U.S. never disguised the fact that it regarded sanctions not just as an instrument of international law to end Iraq’s infringements, but also as a political tool to contain Saddam, and hopefully to remove him from power. Sarah Graham Brown, Sanctioning Saddam: The Politics of Intervention in Iraq (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 335. 274 CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-814, “Saddam Hussein Meeting with the Revolutionary Council,” February 5, 1995. 275 Woods et al ., The Saddam Tapes , 256. 276 Quoted in Hal Brands and David Palkki, “Saddam, Israel and the Bomb: Nuclear Alarmism Justified,” International Security 36, 1 (2011), 163. 277 Patrick Cockburn, “Iraqi Officers Pay Dear for West’s Coup Fiasco,” The Independent , February 16, 1998, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/iraqi-officers-pay-dear-for-wests-coup-fiasco-1145298.html (accessed March 10, 2016).

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his belief of U.S. revisionist aims, but instead updated his assessment of the lengths that the United States would go, and the costs that it would run, to achieve these ends. 278

Finally, in case there was doubt in Iraq about U.S. foreign policy objectives in the early 1990s, policy statements later in the decade confirmed Washington’s revisionist aims vis-à-vis Saddam’s regime. In 1998, after a year of disputes over UNSCOM inspections, President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, declaring it a policy of the United States “to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam

Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” 279 The act authorized President Clinton to provide up to $97 million in military and other assistance to domestic Iraqi groups aimed at overthrowing Saddam’s regime and to provide assistance to support a democratic transition in this eventuality – a

U.S. policy that had actually been in place since 1992. 280 These “softer” measures, however, simply reinforced Saddam’s belief that the United States was unwilling to employ large-scale military force to remove him from power. In 1998, on the topic of recent U.S. policy statements, Saddam commented that “our analysis says that of course

Zionism is in agreement with the idea of ousting the regime and will not feel comfortable unless the regime is ousted…But under the American planning, those in power know very well they are unable to [do so].” 281

This discussion and the evidence available suggests that Saddam’s experience in the Gulf War led him to hold the following beliefs about the United States in the post-war

278 Woods and Stout, “Saddam’s Perceptions and Misperceptions,” 28-29. 279 "H.R.4655—Iraq Liberation Act of 1998," October 31, 1998, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgibin/query/D?c105:4:./temp/~c105UzH1Tc (accessed February 15, 2015). 280 Ibid. In fact support for domestic opposition groups in Iraq had been in place for some time. In 1992, Congress more than doubled the budget for covert support to Iraqi opposition groups to about $40 million. The Iraqi National Congress served as the key vehicle for U.S. support during this time. Katzman, “Iraq: U.S. Efforts to Change the Regime,” 2-3. 281 Quoted in Woods et al., The Saddam Tapes , 57.

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period: 1) that the United States continued to hold revisionist foreign policy objectives vis-à-vis Saddam; but 2) that the United States was unwilling to devote significant resources (and in this case, especially human military resources) to achieving those ends.

Moreover, due to Saddam’s direct crisis experience, these beliefs should exert a much stronger effect on Saddam’s subsequent threat assessments than those formed during his pre-Gulf War years.

Table 3.1 Saddam’s Perception of U.S. Resolve (Gulf War 1991)282 Costs Yes No Target State Perception Signal of Resolve pre- Military Alerts/Mobilization X Invasion Nuclear Alerts X N/A Military Ground Invasion (denial strategy) X (limited) Signal of Limited Resolve Air Strikes (punishment strategy) X Signal of Limited Resolve Allies to Share Burden X Signal of Limited Resolve Economic Sanctions X Signal of Limited Resolve Financial Allies to Share Burden X Signal of Limited Resolve UN Authorization X Signal of Limited Resolve Public Opinion in Favor of Political X283 N/A Action Political Elite in Favor of Action X N/A

According to the cognitive-institutional theory, future coercive demands will be interpreted in accordance with these prior beliefs of an adversary’s limited revisionist interests, and target state leaders will focus on signals and incoming information that establish the credibility of limited threats. This leads to the following prediction regarding Saddam’s Hussein’s assessments of U.S. threat credibility post-Gulf War:

282 N/A indicates not relevant to the crisis or that there is no documentary evidence of this indicator being considered informative by Saddam. 283 The day after the war broke out in January 1991, 79% of the U.S. public supported the use of military force against Iraq. Adam Clymer, “War in the Gulf: Public Opinion,” The New York Times , January 22, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/22/us/war-in-the-gulf-public-opinion-poll-finds-deep-backing- while-optimism-fades.html (accessed March 10, 2016).

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H3 Iraq : Based on his experiences in the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein will assess U.S. limited revisionist threats as credible.

Since the coercive threats are assessed as limited in nature and therefore as containing elements of restraint, Saddam will likely concede to U.S. demands. However, the cognitive-institutional theory also predicts that coercive threats that exceed the limited costs an adversary is perceived willing to expend will be assessed as incredible by target state leaders. This generates the third Iraq-specific hypothesis:

H4 Iraq : U.S. coercive threats that exceed the limited costs that Saddam believes the United States is willing to expend will be assessed as incredible.

5. THE IRAQ WARS 1991-2003 The following sections evaluate Saddam’s assessment of the credibility of a series of U.S. compellent threats delivered in 1991, 1994, 1998, and 2003. If the cognitive- institutional theory is correct, we should find evidence that the beliefs that Saddam held about the extent of U.S. foreign policy interests vis-à-vis Iraq in the post-Gulf War period affected his interpretation of U.S. signals, and ultimately his assessment of U.S. threat credibility.

5.1 Saddam’s Threat Assessment: Gulf War 1991 After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. issued compellent threats to use force on a number of occasions. The United States commenced a troop build-up in the Gulf region in October 1990 and President George H.W. Bush announced this mobilization publicly after the mid-term elections in November of that year. In order to gain domestic support for the possible use of force, Bush Administration officials also testified on the need for military action before a series of congressional committees. On November 29,

1990, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 678 setting January 15 as the deadline

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by which Iraqi forces must evacuate Kuwait, and authorizing the U.S.-led coalition to use

“all necessary means” to bring about this outcome. 284 President Bush issued this ultimatum publicly again on November 30. 285 Finally, Secretary of State Baker reiterated the U.S. threat privately to Iraq’s Foreign Minister on January 9, 1991, 286 before U.S.

Congress authorized the use of military force on January 12 of that year. 287

As expected, evidence suggests that Saddam Hussein and his closest advisors were well aware of the troop build-up and assessed the U.S. threat to use force as credible. 288

By the end of September the Iraqi leader commanded the military to prepare for an attack that could begin without any warning and to hold their positions near the Saudi border and in Kuwait. 289 In a meeting with a Soviet foreign delegation in October 1990, Saddam was informed that the United States was “gathering all means to carry out the attack.”

Saddam responded at this time that “his only option was to give in to the United States, or they will launch a war against us.” 290 In late October 1990, Saddam and his inner circle analyzed the likelihood of U.S. military action against Iraq. During this conversation

Foreign Minister Aziz recounted that the British had said they would be ready for a strike by November 15, 1990. Saddam asked whether this meant there was danger of an attack before November 15, to which Aziz responded that there was. 291

284 UN Security Council, "Resolution 678 (1990)." 285 George H. W. Bush, "The President's News Conference, 1990-11-30." 286 "U.S. Department of State Memorandum of Conversation: Secretary James A. Baker III and Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz," 3, 34. 287 Adam Clymer, "Confrontation in the Gulf; Congress Acts to Authorize War in Gulf; Margins are 5 votes in Senate, 67 in House," The New York Times , January 13, 1991. 288 In fact as early as July 1990, Iraq’s General Military Intelligence Directorate (GMID) concluded that, if Iraq invaded Kuwait, Kuwait would receive military support from the United States and potentially from other countries as well. Brands and Palkki, “Conspiring Bastards,” 657. 289 Ibrahim Al-Marashi and Sammy Salama, Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (London: Routledge, 2008), 179 290 CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-533, “Meeting between Saddam Hussein and the Soviet Delegation,” October 1990. 291 Quoted in Woods et al., The Saddam Tapes, 37.

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Even more telling, perhaps, is Aziz’s response to President Bush’s letter in

January 1991. The letter, delivered to Minister Aziz by Secretary Baker, assured Saddam that Iraq would face “certain calamity” if he did not meet the UN demands. Baker further urged Aziz not to underestimate the resolve of the United States to enforce the terms of the UN Resolution. Aziz responded by assuring Baker that Saddam had “no illusions about [U.S.] intentions,” that Iraq had been expecting U.S. military action since the invasion of Kuwait, and that its leaders were aware of the military buildup in Saudi

Arabia. 292 That month Saddam addressed the Iraqi National Assembly stating that,

“Bush’s invitation for talks as far as we can discern, has continued to bear the possibilities or the inclination toward aggression and war. The buildup is growing.” At the end of the meeting Baker confirmed that “Saddam Hussein continues to reject a diplomatic solution.” 293 Additional attempts at negotiation made by anxious third parties including the UN Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, and French President

Mitterand were met with a similar fate. 294

Instead, Saddam prepared his country for war, declaring that the U.S.-led coalition in Saudi Arabia were the “armies of aggression” who were waiting for “the opportunity to invade the holy land.” 295 Documents show that as the UN deadline drew near in January 1991, Saddam started to take actions to prepare Iraq for the U.S.-led attack. He considered blowing up oil wells to create smoke that would hinder air attacks, and planned to place mines in the Persian Gulf. The Iraqi leader also discussed plans to

292 "U.S. Department of State Memorandum of Conversation: Secretary James A. Baker III and Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz," 2, 9. 293 Quoted in Karsh and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein, 242. 294 Ibid. 295 "Iraqi Leader's Message to National Assembly," The New York Times , December 7, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/07/world/standoff-in-the-gulf-iraqi-leader-s-message-to- nationalassembly.html?scp=14&sq=iraq%20hostages&st=nyt&pagewanted=1 (accessed February 5, 2015).

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disperse Scud missiles so that they would not get destroyed in the first airstrikes. 296 Such military planning, in combination with the discussions between Saddam and his advisors, indicates a belief in the credibility of the U.S. threat to attack.

But how did Saddam arrive at this assessment of threat credibility? And why did he resist U.S. demands in light of this judgment? Recently released documents reveal that

Saddam assessed the U.S. threat not only as credible, but also as unrestrained in nature.

During the meeting with Aziz on January 9, for example, Baker conveyed U.S. objectives quite clearly, reminding the Iraqi Minister that his forces would be outclassed by U.S. technology and firepower and adding that the war might destroy Saddam’s ability to govern Iraq. According to the U.S. Secretary, “war will destroy everything you fought to build in Iraq and it will trigger, thanks to your unwillingness to withdraw from Kuwait, a conflict that will turn Iraq into a weak and backward country.” 297 On January 14, 1991,

Saddam expressed his concerns around the unlimited nature of U.S. interests when he told a Yemeni delegation that, “we have no guarantees if we withdraw . . . why should we surrender at the last moment?” 298

Indeed Saddam appears to have believed that the United States was determined to attack Iraq and remove him from power irrespective of his actions. On the inevitability of war with the United States, Aziz declared that, “Iraq was designated by George [H.W.]

Bush for destruction, with or without Kuwait. Inside Kuwait or outside Kuwait. Before

296 See Woods, et al., The Saddam Tapes , 181. In discussing naval preparations in early January 1991, for example, Saddam wanted to know “how we should spread out our units so that we do not get destroyed from the first naval bombardment.” “Iraq Leaders Talk about Sending Their Air Force and Navy to Iran for Safekeeping,” early January 1991. Quoted in Woods et al., The Saddam Tapes , 183. 297 “U.S. Department of State Memorandum of Conversation: Secretary James A. Baker III and Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz," 2. 298 Quoted in Gregory Gause, “Iraq’s Decision to Go to War, 1980-1990,” The Middle East Journal , 56, 1 (2002), 60.

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the 2 nd of August or after the 2 nd of August.” 299 Saddam also informed Soviet envoy

Yevgeny Primakov that “if America decided on war it will go to war whether I withdraw from Kuwait or not. They were conspiring against us. They are targeting the leadership for assassination.” 300 This suggests that contrary to some earlier analyses of Saddam’s decision making prior to the Gulf War, the Iraqi leader did not perceive a “green light” from the United States prior to sending armed forces into Kuwait. In fact the documentary evidence appears to show quite the opposite – Saddam expected the United

States to respond with military force and believed its threat was credible when issued in

November 1990. 301

Archival documents reveal that Saddam’s beliefs about U.S. malign intent may have fed into Saddam’s decision making process and shaped his strategic calculus regarding the benefits of invading Kuwait. It is here that the influence of U.S.-Iranian arms sales in shaping Saddam’s worldview is particularly pronounced. In December 1990,

Saddam stated the following:

Do you remember when they [the Americans] were preparing Israel to attack us? And we said clearly, “If Israel attacks us, we will attack back, and if it [Israel] attempts or thinks that possessing the nuclear bomb would be enough [to scare us, they are wrong], because we are capable of burning half of Israel. This happened last April, right before the events. The war was launched on us long before all of this. It officially started in the 1986 meeting, and was exposed under the title “Irangate,” which included Iran, Israel, and America, supported by some regional countries…August the second was an attack and a defense both at the same time. 302

299 “Oral History: Tariq Aziz.” 300 CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-533, “Meeting between Saddam Hussein and the Soviet Delegation,” October 1990. 301 See e.g. Karsh and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein, 215-26. In response to this possibility, Tariq Aziz stated that Iraq did expect an American reaction to the invasion, and that Iraq did not read the Glaspie interview as a “green light” from Washington.” Gause, “Iraq’s Decision to go to War,” 62. 302 CRRC-SH-SHTP-D-000-557, “Saddam and His Senior Advisors Discussing Iraq’s Historical Rights to Kuwait and the U.S. Position,” 15 December 1990.

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In a private conversation with his officials earlier that year, Saddam further stated that “all that we wanted as a command for the military operation to be carried out and then to prepare ourselves for a defensive posture under suitable circumstances. I say our timing was more than suitable. First, the operation went very quickly. Second, control of the situation was comprehensive. Third, we had ample time to prepare a defensive posture.” 303 This suggests a logic of preventive war, whereby action is taken earlier rather than later in order to capitalize on a superior position. Indeed, according to Aziz the worsening of relations between the United States and Iraq after the end of the Iran-Iraq war led Saddam to believe that his situation was getting worse, not better, and encouraged Saddam to attack Kuwait in 1990. 304 In their comprehensive study of

Saddam’s strategic thinking, Brands and Palkki note that while there is no “smoking gun” document specifically stating Saddam’s rationale for invading Kuwait, that “Saddam’s view of the United States and its relations with Kuwait, and his aggressive behavior in early 1990, raise the distinct possibility that Saddam saw the invasion as a way of seizing the initiative in his intensifying confrontation with the United States.” 305

While Saddam’s prior beliefs help explain the context within which the Gulf War took place and his initial threat assessment, there is also evidence that the Iraqi leader updated his assessments during the course of the war as more information became available – an expected outcome from Section 4. As the air campaign continued and

Iraq’s prospects of victory diminished, Saddam began to reevaluate his options. The air

303 The fact that Saddam spoke of needing defensive posture indicates his expectation that there would be military retaliation. “Saddam Appraises American and International Reactions to the Invasion of Kuwait,” August 7, 1990, in Woods et al ., The Saddam Tapes , 175. 304 Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I, 32. 305 Brands and Palkki, “Conspiring Bastards,” 654. Of course the U.S. position was not the only reason for invading Kuwait. Saddam was also in dire financial straights and invading Kuwait offered a solution to his economic problems. Pollack, The Threatening Storm , 32-33.

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campaign had gone on much longer than Saddam had expected and it was thus plausible that the United States would accept the attainment of more limited goals than the Iraqi leader had previously anticipated. 306 With this in mind, and with regime survival now at stake, Saddam made conciliatory gestures to Russia, agreeing to all of the UNSC demands and to withdraw from Kuwait within 21 days. In return, Saddam wanted an immediate ceasefire and for the previous UNSC resolutions against Iraq to be rendered moot.307

Washington’s response, however, served to reconfirm Saddam’s assessment of

U.S. revisionist intent. The United States refused to agree to Saddam’s terms, insisting instead that Iraqi forces pull out of Kuwait City within 48 hours and withdraw fully from

Kuwait within a week. Only then would Washington announce an end to hostilities. 308

Saddam saw this as a ploy to expose his forces to attack and force them to abandon all military equipment. Agreeing to such terms would risk losing the whole army in retreat to

U.S. and allied air raids, and would leave Baghdad unable to defend itself against any further coalition advances. 309 The nature of this demand reinforced the belief that the

United States was intent on removing Saddam from power, and provided the Iraqi leader with little choice but to resist.

This assessment of U.S. revisionist intent – one clearly informed by U.S. statements and behavior – serve to explain Saddam’s decision to continue the war even in the face of a possible U.S. ground invasion. In fact Saddam’s preparations indicated a belief that the United States would try to move much further into Iraq than it did. In the

306 Haun, “On Death Ground,” 179-80. 307 Ibid., 183. 308 George Bush, "Remarks on the Persian Gulf Conflict 1991-02-22." 309 Daniel Byman, Kenneth Pollack, and Matthew Waxman, “Coercing Saddam Hussein: Lessons from the Past,” Survival 40, 3 (1998), 133-34.

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lead up the ground campaign, Saddam prepared for the destruction of installations that would aid the coalition, discussed plans to arm the Iraqi people, and was readying the country to fight from house to house in the hopes of the defeating the U.S. war effort. 310

As we will see, the fact that the United States did not push further into Iraq or attempt to remove Saddam from power made a long-lasting impression on the Iraqi leader.

5.2 Saddam’s Threat Assessment: 1990s The documentary evidence from which to evaluate Saddam’s assessment of U.S. threat credibility is less comprehensive for the subsequent crises in the 1990s. This is in part of function of the fact that these events were of a smaller scale and so were less salient in the mind of Saddam when engaging in discussions with his inner circle, but also reflects Saddam’s strategic environment and the multitude of concerns facing his regime during this period. Nevertheless, Saddam’s pattern of behavior in the 1990s can provide some basis for inference in cases where primary sources are lacking. The two crises of interest in this period are Saddam’s 1994 troop movement to the Iraq-Kuwaiti border, and the 1997/98 UNSCOM crisis followed by U.S. airstrikes. In both cases, Saddam was successfully compelled to change his behavior, providing tentative evidence that he assessed the U.S. threats as credible.

In October 1994, after U.S. military mobilizations and President Clinton’s assurance of military action, 311 Saddam complied with U.S. demands. On October 10,

Iraq announced the withdrawal of the Republican Guards from the Kuwaiti border and by

310 Woods et al ., The Saddam Tapes , 188. 311 Haun “On Death Ground,” 212. Clinton responded swiftly to Saddam’s deployment of two Republican Guard divisions to the Kuwaiti border by dispatching an aircraft carrier to the Red Sea, repositioning U.S. marines, and deploying ships from Diego Garcia with equipment for another 15,000 troops. The U.S. Air Force combat wings were also placed on alert in the United States and Europe, along with the Army’s 24th mechanized division at Ft. Stewart in Georgia.

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October 17 the crisis had ended. 312 A few weeks later Iraq recognized the sovereignty of

Kuwait and the Iraq-Kuwait border. 313 Again in November 1997, the UN and United

States together responded quickly to Iraq’s expulsion of U.S. UNSCOM inspectors. The

UN Security Council passed a resolution warning Iraq of “serious consequences” if it failed to reverse its decision, while President Clinton announced the availability of U.S. troops in the region to strike Iraq and mobilized U.S. military forces in the Persian

Gulf. 314 Reports from Saddam’s senior officials at the time, Arab Cabinet Ministers who had visited him recently, and Arab intelligence officers monitoring Baghdad all confirmed that Iraq was preparing for the possibility of military strikes by the United

States and its allies, and was taking measures to ensure that Saddam survived the attack.

According to these reports, Republican Guard units were also dispersed around the country. 315 In response to the threat, Saddam readmitted inspectors and agreed to a new

Memorandum of Understanding in February 1998. 316

In October 1998, Saddam announced the re-suspension of UNSCOM activities, sparking the second crisis within a year. In response to U.S. and British public threats and military movements, and with U.S. airplanes in the sky en route to Iraq, Saddam agreed to allow the inspectors to return on November 14, 1998. On December 15 1998, however,

UNSCOM Chairman Richard Butler reported several instances in which Iraq had failed to comply with the inspectors. As a result, the United States and Great Britain

312 See ICB Case Summary, “Iraq Troop Deployment – Kuwait.” 313 Byman et al ., “Coercing Saddam Hussein,” 137. 314 UN Security Council Resolution, “Resolution 1137 (1997).” 315 Youssef M. Ibrahim, “Standoff with Iraq: Security,” New York Times , February 15, 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/15/world/standoff-with-iraq-security-saddam-hussein-sees-himself-no-1- target-lives-his.html (accessed March 10, 2016). 316 ICB Case Summary, “UNSCOM I.”

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commenced airstrikes on Iraq on December 17, 1998. 317 Saddam’s concessions, however, combined with efforts to brace the Iraqi populace for U.S. strikes and to disperse the

Republican Guard units all point to his assessment of U.S. and British threat credibility.318

Moreover, discussions between Saddam and his advisors in 1998 comport with this assessment. During the course of these conversations, the Iraqi leader commented that the UNSCOM report might be rejected and that if that were the case that airstrikes were likely to follow. In a meeting with his counsel, Saddam stated that: “One of their objectives is to get a green light from their command so the timing is not supposed to be known. They want to strain us. This is a possibility, and the other is that when Kofi

Annan leaves Iraq and they present their report they will refuse it, and before we hear their refusal we might see an attack.” 319 This provides some evidence that Saddam anticipated U.S. air strikes.

Additional documentation from this period further suggests that Saddam based his assessment of U.S. threat credibility on his experience in the Gulf War, and on the U.S. dependence on air power especially. In 1998, Saddam and his advisors discussed a potential military conflict with the United States during which Saddam commented that

“the worst case scenario is to think that the enemy is going to confront us in the same way that he confronted us in 17 January 1991; that is, he is going to use missiles and air force etc. and with as much pressure as possible…we believe that we should meet the enemy on the basis that it is going to attack in the same manner generally; it’s going to

317 Alterman, “Iraq 1990-98,” 288-289. According to Alterman, Baker noted several instances of Saddam’s failure to comply with UNSCOM out of several hundred inspections. 318 Byman et al ., “Coercing Saddam Hussein,” 140. 319 CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-895, “Saddam Hussein Meeting with the Revolutionary Council about UN Inspections,” 1998.

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use its missiles and aircraft mainly…” 320 Evidence that the limited threat of airstrikes specifically was believed credible can be seen in the timing of Saddam’s concessions in

1994. In this case, Saddam acquiesced to U.S. demands prior to the announced deployment of an additional 350 aircraft and 36,000 troops to the region. While this increased capability would have been enough to threaten the forward deployed

Republican Guard divisions, Saddam was successfully coerced with a threat of more limited force. 321

Yet the U.S. dependence on airpower in the Gulf War also set limits on what

Saddam thought the United States could credibly demand. Again on February 9, 1998,

Saddam discussed U.S. interests in removing him from power. During this meeting he noted that, “under American planning, those in power know very well they are unable to oust the regime. Therefore, they have to identify a target within their power, which is destroying all the capabilities they can.” 322 He further believed that U.S. airstrikes would be designed to avoid unnecessary casualties, and in particular that the U.S. would avoid hitting bridges and factories to avoid the impression of targeting the Iraqi people. Saddam took advantage of this perceived strategy by dispersing Republican Guard units in public places. 323

Moreover, Saddam appears to have interpreted information in accordance with his belief in the constraints on U.S. power. For example, despite being successfully compelled into retreat, documents reveal that Saddam perceived the international

320 SH-SHTP-A-000-756, “Saddam and Senior Advisors Discussing a Potential Military Conflict with the United States,” February 9, 1998. 321 Haun, “On Death Ground,” 217-218. 322 SH-SHTP-A-000-756, “Saddam and Senior Advisors Discussing a Potential Military Conflict with the United States,” February 9, 1998. 323 Ibrahim, “Standoff with Iraq: Security.”

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community’s response to his provocation in 1994 as weak and almost contemptible.

During a conversation with his counsel, he commented that “it is really something, four nations, among them two of the greatest nations of the world: Russia and America. I mean, they have nuclear bombs, missiles, and so on…and England and France, They came to me and handed me a memo. They gave me a warning and timing. In case we would not abide by it, we would endanger our existence.” 324 Saddam’s comments at the time demonstrate almost a degree of disappointment in the lack of international reaction, and reflect an assessment of U.S. unwillingness to compel him with greater military force.

Saddam also seized upon additional signals of U.S. restraint. In a conversation on

February 9, 1998, Saddam focused on the role of the international community in restraining U.S. actions and noted that aside from Britain, most of Europe did not want to see a weak Iraq and did not support military action. 325 Saddam’s advisors also relayed their belief to him that it was unlikely that the United States would undertake expansive military action without the authorization of the United Nations. 326 Finally, U.S. behavior in other regions of the world was taken as confirmation of Saddam’s belief in U.S. restraint and Washington’s preference for limited applications of military force. Saddam watched U.S. military action in Somalia with interest and observed that “150 dead is enough to make them withdraw from anywhere in the world.” 327 He added in a separate

324 Woods et al ., Iraqi Perspectives Project , 14. 325 SH-SHTP-A-000-756, “Saddam and Senior Advisors Discussing a Potential Military Conflict with the United States,” February 9, 1998. See also Pollack, The Threatening Storm , 88-90. 326 SH-SHTP-A-001-186_TF, “Saddam Hussein meeting with Ba'ath Party Members to discuss UN weapons inspection,” July 23, 1992. Saddam stated: “I do not believe that Bush would direct an attack against us at present, unless, as Comrade Tariq said, he would do it under the cover of the United Nations through a decision from the Security Council.” 327 SH-SHTP-A-000-753, “Saddam Hussein Meeting with Senior Advisor Regarding Bill Clinton's Administration and its Attitudes toward Iraq,” January 14, 1993.

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conversation that the Somali’s had shamed the U.S. Army. 328 America’s ongoing air campaigns in the Balkans only served to reinforce Saddam’s belief in U.S. restraint and cost-aversion. 329

Finally, the fact that U.S. threats promised only the use of limited force – and the application of air power specifically – helps to explain the pattern of Iraqi behavior in the

1990s. In Saddam’s eyes, the United States had the opportunity to destroy Iraq in 1991 and had failed to do so. Not only had it chosen not to act, but also America had revealed an important weakness in its unwillingness to suffer human costs to achieve its policy objectives. This realization meant that the United States was no longer an existential threat to Saddam’s regime in the way he had perceived it to be in the 1980s. 330 Instead, the various constraints Saddam perceived on the U.S. willingness to use force guaranteed restraint in its behavior, and created the conditions possible for Saddam to comply with

U.S. demands on multiple occasions, including in 1994 and 1998. 331 Indeed, according to number of key assessments, despite the rhetoric surrounding Iraq’s behavior during this period Saddam actually acquiesced to a large number of U.S. demands throughout the

1990s. 332 After 1991, Saddam accepted a ‘no-fly zone’ over southern Iraq and a de facto

U.S. protectorate over northern Iraq; he temporarily withdrew his opposition to

UNSCOM’s long-term monitoring regime and stopped interfering with its inspections in

328 Woods et al ., Iraqi Perspectives Project , 21, ft 79. 329 Ibid., 16. 330 Woods and Stout, “Saddam’s Perceptions,” 32. According to the Duelfer Report , Saddam assessed the probability of a U.S. invasion as very low during the 1990s. Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I , 31. 331 Haun, “On Death Ground,” 254. 332 Joshua Rovner, “Delusion of Defeat: The United States and Iraq,” Journal of Strategic Studies 37, 4 (2014), 496. Saddam complied with nearly all eight conditions of UNSC Resolution 687, which set the ceasefire conditions at the end of the Gulf War.

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1993; Saddam backed down from his threat to invade Kuwait in 1994; and he responded to coercive pressure in the winter of 1997-98. 333

Of course this was not always the case, and Saddam acted to provoke the international community and resist U.S. demands when domestic and regional politics required him to do so. 334 This was only a feasible strategy, however, because Saddam believed that he now faced a credible but limited military threat from the United States, and one that he could withstand if necessary. In fact evidence shows that Saddam instigated all of these crises (and more) knowing that the United States might retaliate with military force. The promised costs of U.S. action, however, were not always high enough to override competing threats to Saddam’s regime. 335

5.3 Saddam’s Threat Assessment: 2003 For most observers, U.S. policy in the wake of September 9/11 and throughout

2002 clearly signaled an intention to overthrow the Iraqi regime by force if it did not comply fully with U.S. demands. 336 Indeed, the United States delivered its coercive threat through a number of different signaling mechanisms, including regular public statements, testimony before the United Nations, and significant troop mobilization and build-up in the region prior to the 2003 invasion. The following table provides a useful reminder of the number of actions taken by the United States in the lead up to the war to convince

Saddam to concede:

333 Byman et al ., “Coercing Saddam Hussein,” 127. 334 On the multiple audiences Saddam was trying to appease, see e.g. Woods et al., “Saddam’s Delusions.” Continued ambiguity over the Iraqi WMD program served Saddam’s interests in his relations with Iran, as well as dealing with domestic opposition groups like the Kurds and the Shi’ite. Haun, “On Death Ground,” 252. 335 Byman et al ., “Coercing Saddam Hussein,” 140. In another example, in 1996 Saddam decided to proceed with an attack of Irbil, in northern Iraq, despite knowing that the United States would respond militarily. Yet the benefits gained from restoring his control and influence in the north and thus eliminating an internal regime threat outweighed the dangers of a U.S. limited retaliatory strikes (138-39). 336 Woods and Stout, “Saddam’s Perceptions and Misperceptions,”10.

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Table 3.2 Chronology of Lead-up to Iraq War (2003) 337 Date Action/Statement 11 September 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon Attacks November 2001 United States defeats Taliban in Afghanistan Late November Bush orders Rumsfeld to begin military planning for Iraq 2001 28 January 2002 "Axis of Evil" State of the Union Address 1 June 2002 Bush preventive war strategy speech at West Point graduation 12 September 2002 Bush UN General Assembly speech demanding Iraq declare WMD and admit UNMOVIC and IAEA inspectors October 2002 Congress authorizes use of force in Iraq 8 November 2002 UN Resolution 1441: 30 days for Iraq to declare WMD and cooperate with inspectors 19 December 2002 United States declares Iraq in material breach of UNSCR 1441 December 2002 United States announces large deployment of troops 5 February 2003 Secretary Powell provides “proof” of Iraq WMD at UN Security Council March 2003 France successfully leads a campaign within the Security Council to defeat the second resolution with a 17 March deadline for Iraq to disarm 17 March 2003 Bush withdraws second resolution before vote and issues 48-hour ultimatum for Saddam and sons to leave Iraq 20 March 2003 United States invades Iraq

President George W. Bush’s personal statements were echoed by his senior

advisors throughout 2002. In February 2002, Secretary Powell announced publicly that

the Bush Administration was weighing all options for how to deal with Iraq. 338 In August

2002, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice described the goal of removing the

Iraqi regime as a "moral imperative" in the war against terrorism, arguing that Saddam

Hussein was "evil," and that if left to its own devices the Baghdad government would

develop WMD that would ultimately threaten the U.S. and its allies. 339 And numerous news reports in the summer of 2002 documented the Bush Administration’s growing case for an invasion of Iraq. 340

337 Haun, “On Death Ground,” 235. 338 Gordon and Sanger, “Powell Says U.S. Is Weighing Ways to Topple Hussein.” 339 Glenn Kessler, “Rice Lays Out Case for War in Iraq,” The Washington Post, August 16, 2002, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/08/16/rice-lays-out-case-for-war-in-iraq/1cd4e5b7- 709a-40c8-90d9-3d376dee16a5/ (accessed March 10, 2016). 340 See footnote 191 for further examples.

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Moreover, U.S. signaling during the lead up to the 2003 war was costlier in many ways than the actions undertaken in 1991. In 1991, the military and financial costs of the war were shared amongst U.S. coalition partners, President George H. W. Bush received strong domestic support for the war, and he had a broad international mandate under the auspices of the UNSC Resolution (see Section 3.1). In 2003, on the other hand, the threatened military action was objectively more costly for the United States. President

George W. Bush’s threat to employ force was not supported by the United Nations or the majority of the international community, including a number of regular allies. 341 Issuing public declarations of his intent to pursue this policy thereby risked significant political fallout. Because of this lack of international support, moreover, George W. Bush had collected fewer coalition partners with whom to share the threatened military costs. As a result, the United States would bear a much larger burden of the human and financial costs of going to war in Iraq. Despite these setbacks, however, the United States continued to build up its forces in the region, and by March 17 Washington had more than 145,000 troops ready for action, including 20,000 British soldiers and marines. 342

Yet Saddam’s statements, and his behavior in 2002 through March 2003, suggest that he did not believe that the U.S. threat to overthrow his regime was credible.

Importantly, this was not because Saddam was unaware of the U.S. signals or was oblivious to the troop build-up in the region. In fact U.S. military plans were leaked by senior defense officials shortly after the UNSC vote on Resolution 1441 in November

341 "Spain, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and United States of America: Draft Resolution," March 7, 2003, http://www.un.org/News/dh/iraq/res-iraq-07mar03-en-rev.pdf (accessed February 20, 2015); "France Will Use Iraq Veto," BBC News . 342 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York, NY: The Penguin Press, 2006), 117; Cordesman, The Iraq War, 24, 36-37. Total coalition troops in the region just prior to the invasion totaled 250,000.

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2002. 343 Documents from the Iraq archives also show that as early as September 2002,

Saddam was receiving reports from his Directorate of General Military Intelligence detailing U.S. troop movements in the region. 344 Indeed, the number of memos produced on this issue demonstrate that U.S. military planning and preparations were tracked very carefully by the Iraqi leadership in the lead up to the war.

Nor was Saddam’s threat assessment based on the fact that he discounted the possibility of U.S. military force outright. In fact, Saddam’s behavior suggests that the

Iraqi leader did believe that the United States might employ some force to coerce him into cooperating with the United Nations. However, Saddam assessed that any application of force would be limited and restrained in nature just as it had been during the 1990s. The Iraqi leader’s continued cooperation with UNMOVIC in 2001 and 2002 supports this interpretation, moreover. Believing that the United States posed a credible but limited revisionist threat, Saddam cooperated with UNMOVIC and IAEA inspectors from November 2002 through March 2003. In mid-2002 Iraq invited the U.S. Congress to send a mission to Baghdad, offering free access to any site alleged to be developing weapons of mass destruction, but the White House dismissed the invitation. 345 On

December 7, 2002, Saddam further submitted a 12,000-page report detailing his weapons programs as required by the terms of UNSC Resolution 1441. UNMOVIC inspectors also confirmed high levels of Iraqi cooperation during this period. 346

343 David E. Sander, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, "Threats and Responses: The Military War Plan for Iraq Calls for Big Force and Quick Strikes," The New York Times, November 10, 2001. 344 CRRC SH-GMID-D-001-103, “A Report about the American Preparations and Troops "the army units and the naval ships" to attack Iraq,” September 5, 2002. 345 “Iraq Invited US to send mission to Baghdad,” The Irish Times , Monday August 5, 2002, http://www.irishtimes.com/news/iraq-invites-us-to-send-mission-to-baghdad-1.432132 (accessed March 10, 2016). 346 John F. Burns, "Unhindered by Iraqi Officials, Arms Inspectors Visit 3 Sites," The New York Times , November 28, 2002,

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What Saddam did not seem to believe, however, was that the United States would engage in a large-scale ground invasion to oust him from power. According to interviews with former Iraqi officials, Saddam believed that the U.S. had already achieved its aims in the Gulf of establishing a military presence, 347 and he was “very confident” that the

United States would not invade Iraq. 348 Instead, what Saddam was preparing for was a repeat of the Gulf War and a heavy reliance on airpower to coerce him into submission. 349 Saddam’s military directives ahead of the U.S. invasion support this assessment. In March 2003, the Iraqi Military Intelligence Directorate relayed a request to store and hide all equipment and weaponry in underground vertical shelters, because

“as applied at the beginning of Gulf War I, this will make them hard-to-find targets for the enemy's air force, especially weapons and devices not currently in operation at this time which could operate in the future.” 350 Thus instead of ordering his forces to assume entrenched defensive positions, Saddam dispersed and hid his forces in order to protect them from a prolonged U.S. air campaign, similar to 1991. 351

While Saddam may have updated his assessment after the final ultimatum, 352 his behavior suggests that he maintained the belief that the U.S. lacked the resolve to take

Baghdad. Saddam’s decision not to torch Iraq’s oil fields or open the dams to flood the south – two moves that many analysts predicted would be among the first taken by http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/world/threats-responses-hunt-for-weaponsunhindered-iraqi-officials- arms-inspectors.html?scp=2&sq=iraq+inspections&st=nyt (accessed February 10, 2015); "Joint Statement, Baghdad, 20 January 2003," UNMOVIC: Selected Security Council Briefings, January 20, 2003, http://www.unmovic.org/ (accessed February 6, 2015). 347 Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I, 32. 348 Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 31. 349 Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I, 62. 350 SH-GMID-D-000-132, “Hiding Equipment and Weaponry,” March 8-16, 2003. 351 Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York, NY: Vintage, 2006), 124; Woods et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project , 30-31; Hurst, The United States and Iraq Since 1979 , 175; Al-Marashi and Salama, Iraq’s Armed Forces , 193. 352 Scholars continue to debate whether Saddam updated his assessment at this point, though I have found no archival evidence to support the claim that he did so.

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Saddam in the event of a U.S. invasion – provide some tentative evidence of his commitment to this belief. Early reports that oil wells had been set on fire were later assessed as attempts by Saddam to obscure the battlefield from air attacks rather than a scorched earth policy. There was little point in destroying oilfields or key infrastructure if the U.S attack was going to be temporary and stop short of Baghdad. 353 Instead, Saddam believed that he could survive the U.S.’ limited use of force – as he had before – and so acted to protect himself from the threat of domestic unrest by placing his most capable and loyal troops in concentric circles around Baghdad. 354

What signals or indicators informed Saddam’s judgment of U.S. threat incredibility? The lessons that Saddam had learned from his experience of the Gulf War strongly shaped the way in which he selected information and interpreted its meaning in the lead up to the 2003 invasion. First, Saddam remained convinced that the United States was casualty-averse and unwilling to undertake action that would result in even a small number of U.S. soldiers being killed. 355 In fact, U.S. casualty-aversion proved an underlying principle that shaped Saddam’s entire threat assessment. According to the

Iraqi commission formed to discuss the possibility of war with America, an air campaign was “in keeping with their goal of affecting the morale of the armed forces and undercutting their role in the battle, and of attaining their goal as quickly as possible and

353 Ibid., 167. 354 Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II , 124. I say tentative evidence because in this case behavioral indicators are somewhat problematic. Saddam was facing a regime-change threat externally, and also feared for his security internally. As a result, he was in a no-win situation and the placement of troops may simply represent an attempt to hedge across all outcomes rather than indicating his assessment of U.S. threat incredibility. 355 Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 31; Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I, 32.

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with as few casualties and material losses as possible [emphasis added].” 356 Past experience led him to believe that a large-scale ground invasion exceeded the costs the

United States would pay to achieve its more expansive goals.

This view was reinforced by his belief that the American and British public was not supportive of war, and that public opinion would act as a restraint on U.S. and British leaders. In March 2002, Saddam was informed by his advisors that, “the Americans anyway as a military force are trying to avoid coming to Iraq. The support they received for [invading] Afghanistan is not available for them here against Iraq…In our assessment, the Americans will not strike, or maybe they will only strike military targets. They will not take an action to change the regime at this time and at least for a while because this requires considering their risks as far as the public opinion impact for attacking two

Muslim countries.” They added, “what [Bush] is saying [about changing the Iraqi regime] requires much more time and there are indications that his popularity is starting to partially diminish.” 357 In a 2002 interview, Saddam confirmed his beliefs on the constraining effects of public opinion:

"No doubt, time is working for us. We have to buy some more time, and the American-British coalition will disintegrate because of internal reasons and because of the pressure of public opinion in the American and British street. Nations know the truth and are more capable of understanding than the leaders who are preoccupied with the Zionist conspiracies that are hatched by the media, conspiracies that blind those leaders." 358

356 SH-PDWN-D-000-130, “Formation of a Commission to Discuss a War with the United States,” March 2003. 357 SH-SPPC-D-000-304, “Meeting Between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Nijirfan Al ‐Barzani in 2002 discussing the possible attack from the USA,” March 14, 2002. 358 MEMRI. “First Interview with Saddam Hussein.” Similarly in January 2003, Saddam attempted to warn the American public that attacking Iraq would be a mistake. Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 29.

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This assessment is interesting for two reasons. First, it ignores the fact that almost 60% of the U.S. public registered support for the use of force to remove Saddam from power in

June 2002, increasing to 72% in March 2003. 359 It also reveals that Saddam did not perceive public statements issued by democratic leaders as particularly costly signals of intent.

Saddam also focused on other, non-costly signals of U.S. restraint. Specifically, the Iraqi leader seized upon any evidence that France and Russia would be able to constrain the United States and prevent any use of military force. 360 According to Aziz,

Saddam believed that French and Russian economic interests intersected with his own strategic goals: “France and Russia each secured millions of dollars worth of trade and service contracts in Iraq, with the implied understanding that their political posture with regard to sanctions on Iraq would be pro-Iraq… Moreover, they wanted to prove their importance in the world as members of the Security Council – that they could use their veto to show they still had power.” 361 In fact, the Iraqi Ambassador to Moscow apparently sent a note to Baghdad on October 4, 2002, stating that, “our friends [in

Russian intelligence] have told us that President Putin has given very clear instructions to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs vis-à-vis Iraq. Our friends instruct us that Russia is very clear in its opposition to any attack on Iraq. It will not allow the new resolution to include any intention that would allow the use of force against Iraq.” 362 Of course Saddam was correct insofar as Russia and France did pledge to veto any UN resolution authorizing an

359 Jeffrey M. Jones, “Public Support for Iraq Invasion Inches Upwards,” Gallup Poll , March 17 2003. The questioned asked by the poll was: “Would you favor or oppose invading Iraq with U.S. ground troops in an attempt to remove Saddam Hussein from power?” 360 Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 28. 361 Ibid. 362 Ibid., 29.

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invasion of Iraq and were vocal in their opposition to the Iraq War. 363 It is less clear, however, why he thought that these two actors would be able to restrain the United States.

Finally, documents reveal that in addition to believing in the restraining effects of

U.S. casualty-aversion, public opinion, and French and Russian influence, Saddam also had some faith in the ability of the international community, and United Nations more specifically, to prevent the United States from taking action. 364 Again, this indicates a lesson learned from the Gulf War when the United States sought and received UN authorization prior to the invasion. It is possible that Saddam thought that the United

States placed high value on international support as a result of this behavior, and that the international community might therefore exert some influence over U.S. policy. 365

Absent any direct documentary evidence of this belief, however, it remains a point of conjecture.

6. SADDAM ’S LACK OF UPDATING Saddam formed a set of strong beliefs about the extent of U.S. interests vis-à-vis

Iraq from his experience of the Gulf War, and these beliefs were reinforced in a number of ways during the 1990s. U.S. casualty-aversion was demonstrated in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo and confirmed Saddam’s belief that the United States did not want to engage in large-scale ground operations. 366 Events in Afghanistan, moreover, while more concerning still demonstrated American commitment to achieving its foreign policy

363 Hahn, Missions Accomplished, 149. 364 Ibid., 14. 365 Haun, “On Death Ground,” 246. 366 Prepared Statement of Lt Col Kevin M. Woods, USA (Ret.), “The Iraqi Documents: A Glimpse into the Regime of Saddam Hussein.” Hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, April 6, 2006, Serial No. 109-184, 16-18.

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objectives with superior airpower “on the cheap.” 367 Finally, U.S.-Iraqi bilateral interactions in the 1990s served to reinforce Saddam’s view that the United States was not interested in abosorbing substantial military costs to engage in regime change, and certainly not absent allied or UN support.

Despite the strength of these beliefs, however, the question remains as to why

Saddam did not update in the face of overwhelming evidence that the United States was about to invade – especially from mid-2002 onwards. In Chapter 2, I argue that to understand whether (and how) leaders update, we need to look more closely at the information environment around them. More specifically, we need to look beyond the leader to the institutional environment in which he or resides, and in particular to the interactions between leaders and their security apparatus prior to, and during crises.

6.1 Saddam’s Threat Environment and Prioritization Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is a perfect example of a weakly institutionalized, personalistic state. 368 Saddam himself held the highest offices, including those of prime minister, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, chairman of the RCC, and secretary- general of the Ba’ath Party. The Iraqi leader also established control over all access to political appointments, and created patronage networks to ensure loyalty from those around him. Corruption and abuse of power was rampant at all levels of government, and

Saddam ruled completely “unconstrained by any group or institution.” 369

In Chapter 2 I hypothesized on the basis of previous scholarly findings that weakly institutionalized states are more likely to experience internal regimes threats – a

367 Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 16. 368 Barbara Geddes, “Authoritarian Breakdown: Empirical Test of Game Theoretic Argument.” Paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, September 1999, Appendix. 369 Quoted in Jessica Weeks, Dictators at War and Peace (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 85.

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claim that appears to find support in the Iraq case. Indeed throughout his time as president, Saddam Hussein faced a complex security environment composed of both internal and external threats. In terms of internal threats, Iraq has a long history of coup d’états as the chief means of leadership change. By just 1941 Iraq had experienced seven coups. After a short period of relative stability, more coups occurred in 1958, 1963, and

1968 when Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr and his cousin, Saddam Hussein, seized power. In

1979, Bakr resigned under suspicious circumstances leaving Saddam as the leader of

Iraq. 370 The fear of internal overthrow continued to haunt Saddam throughout his time as president, as did the fear of domestic uprisings from the Iraqi Shi’ite and Kurdish populations. 371 As a result, Saddam viewed his security apparatus as a key means of protection against internal challenges to his rule, believing that the chief role of the military was to “counter sabotage” and to defend his regime from both domestic and international threats. 372

Yet the severity of the domestic threat to Saddam’s rule ebbed and flowed depending on the relative urgency of other external threats to his regime. For the majority of the 1980s, Iran was Iraq’s chief external threat. Iraq and Iran had long experienced a turbulent relationship fueled by border disputes, ideological differences, and competition for influence within the Persian Gulf. After a series of escalating disputes in the late

1970s, and believing that Tehran was intent on overthrowing his regime, Saddam saw no other option than war. 373 The experience of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) served to shift

Saddam’s threat perception. The internal focus of the Iraqi military had led to a number

370 Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army , 153. 371 Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project, 5. 372 Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army , 153. 373 Karsh and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein , 147.

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of practices that proved detrimental to the military effectiveness of the Iraqi Armed

Forces when facing a conventional military threat. 374 By 1986, Saddam realized that he would lose the war with Iraq if these current practices remained in place. As a result, he ordered the Republican Guard and select army units to shift to conventional war practices signaling a change in his priorities. By the mid-1980s, Saddam perceived Iran to be the chief security threat to his regime, and the Iraqi leader reoriented his security forces accordingly. 375

In addition to Iraq, Israel posed a serious external threat to Saddam, and one that grew in importance in the 1980s as the United States became a more important player in

Iraq’s strategic environment. As with Iran, Iraq also had a long history of confrontation with Israel, participating in almost every Arab-Israeli war in some capacity as well as supporting the Palestinian cause. Israel’s military might, combined with its nuclear capacity and close relationship with the United States, was of great concern to the Iraqi leader. Israeli strikes against Iraq’s Osirak reactors in 1981 cemented Saddam’s fears, and by the late 1980s Iraq and Israel were locked into an escalating confrontation. 376 The inauguration of Iraq’s first uranium enrichment facility in 1990 sparked fears of a repeat

Israeli attack, not helped by U.S. officials’ frequent references to the likelihood of a preemptive Israeli strike to disarm Baghdad. 377

In this context, U.S. arms sales to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War and continued support for Baghdad’s “Zionist” enemy, Israel, proved especially threatening to Saddam.

374 Talmadge documents the detrimental effects of training regimes, command arrangements, promotion patterns, and information management systems that were put in place to remove the military threat to Saddam and ensure that he remained in power. Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army , 221. 375 Ibid. 376 Norman Cigar, “Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision: An Atomic Shield and Sword for Conquest,” Middle East Studies Occasional Papers, No. 1 (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, June 2011), 6. 377 Pollack, The Threatening Storm , 30-31.

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In addition to these countries posing independent threats to Iraq, evidence in Section 3 shows that Saddam believed that the United States was conspiring against him by using

Iran and Israel as strategic weapons against his regime. As Iraq’s power grew, moreover, he thought that American cooperation with Israel and Iran would only increase. 378 Thus while domestic pressures on Saddam’s rule remained a concern in the 1980s, it was Iraq’s external environment that was becoming more complex and threatening in nature in the lead up to the Gulf War.379

The events of the war, however, had the effect of shifting Saddam’s threat perception once again. Not only did the United States reveal itself not to be the existential threat that Saddam had previously envisaged, but also internal threats to his regime emerged immediately upon the termination of the war. Emboldened by Saddam’s perceived defeat, and hopeful of U.S. support, Shi’ite Muslims in southern Iraq and

Kurdish factions in the north launched widespread rebellions. Disillusioned Iraqi soldiers who had retreated from Kuwait into Basra sparked the initial revolt by attacking portraits of Saddam on February 28, 1991. In the north, some 150,000 soldiers quickly deserted their positions in the face of a Kurdish uprising. 380 The revolt in Basra spread through the south, while Kurdish rebels in the north were able to seize buildings of the Iraqi secret services and the Ba’ath Party. In total fifteen out of eighteen provinces rebelled against

Saddam’s regime. 381 The Iraqi leader quickly directed the remaining Republican Guard units to crush the internal revolts – a course of action only available to Saddam due to the

U.S. withdrawal and Washington’s reluctance to get involved further in Iraqi internal

378 Woods et al ., The Saddam Tapes , 17, 19. 379 Al-Marashi and Salama, Iraq’s Armed Forces , 175. 380 Ibid., 183. 381 Ibid., 184.

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affairs. The insurrections in the south were brutally repressed, while the Kurds in the north favored slightly better, benefitting from a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone from April

1991. 382

The threats to Saddam’s rule did not end with the suppression of these rebellions, however. Coup threats and the fear of externally supported rebellions continued to plague

Saddam’s rule throughout the 1990s, an outcome made increasingly possible by U.S. financial support for opposition groups and Iranian infiltration. According to one analyst,

“by late 1996 a series of betrayals, failures, and disappointments had left [Saddam] in a more precarious domestic position than at any time since the desperate moments of

March 1991.” 383 By the summer of 1996 the Iraqi leader was facing grievances from within his own tribe and the Iraqi forces had grown disenchanted with Saddam’s leadership. Low standards of living, the poor state of equipment and logistical support, and the frequent concessions to the UN and United States served to erode Saddam’s power base within the military. The resultant coup attempts, combined with domestic revolts, signaled a dramatic erosion in Saddam’s power by demonstrating that the key pillars buttressing his regime – the army, the Ba’ath party, the Sunni tribes, his own tribe, and his family – were growing weaker. It was this narrowing of Saddam’s support base that forced him to re-prioritize domestic politics and take measures to reassert his internal position. 384

In sum, Saddam’s updated assessment of U.S. interests post-1991, combined with growing internal unrest, served to reinforce a prioritization process that placed domestic

382 Katzman, “Iraq: U.S. Efforts to Change the Regime,” 1. 383 Cigar, “Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision,” xi. 384 Amatzia Baram, Building Toward Crisis: Saddam Husayn’s Strategy for Survival (Washington, D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998), 9.

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threats above all else. In terms of external threats, Iran remained a chief concern to

Saddam throughout the 1990s, especially as Iran’s growing WMD program in the mid- late 1990s threatened Iraq’s ability to deter Tehran. 385 In fact as late as October 2001, the

National Security Committee, the body that coordinated Iraq’s intelligence services, advised Iraqi leaders that Iran would remain Iraq’s foremost external threat in the future. 386 Iraq’s military weakness relative to its regional rivals in the wake of the 1991 war also meant that Israel posed a continued threat. But these regional concerns were less urgent than the more immediate existential threat posed by internal regime instability. 387

Thus in the 1990s and in the lead up to the Iraq War of 2003, Saddam focused on threats in the following order: (1) internal threats (a coup d’état and the Shi’ite threat); (2) regional threats (Iran and Israel); and 3) the U.S. threat. Given this threat prioritization, the cognitive-institutional theory predicts the following regarding the arrangement of

Iraq’s security apparatus:

H5 Iraq : Saddam’s belief that his external adversaries’ – including the United States post-Gulf War – posed less of a threat to his security than other internal threats will lead him to prioritize accordingly and devote domestic security resources towards addressing this internal concern.

6.2 Institutionalization Evidence suggests that Saddam arranged his security apparatus in accordance with his threat perceptions. According to a senior Republican Guard officer, after the

1991 Shi’ite and Kurd uprisings, Saddam gave his armed forces three priorities – 1) secure the regime; 2) prepare to handle regional threats; and 3) defend against another

385 Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I, 29, 30. 386 Ibid., 30. 387 Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 17. Brands and Palkki, “Conspiring Bastards,” 162-63.

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attack by an American-led coalition. 388 This prioritization was reflected in the arrangement of both military and intelligence services.

To address the domestic threat to his rule, Saddam reduced the size of the regular army from ten corps down to five corps, and forty-six infantry divisions down to fifteen. 389 In its place, Saddam created smaller private armies such as the Special

Republican Guard, the Saddam Fedayeen, the al Quds Army, and the martyrs brigades – all designed to put down uprisings while also ensuring that Iraq’s military forces would be too splintered to form a coordinated attack against the regime. 390 The al Quds Army was a part-time territorial force created to control areas of Iraq and quickly put down any disturbance that occurred, while the Saddam Fedayeen was created in response to the

1991 uprisings in order to crush domestic unrest, conduct extermination operations, ambushes and arrests. 391 The larger mechanized forces – the regular army and some units of the Republican Guard – were deployed farthest from Baghdad on the Iranian border where they remained throughout the lead up to the 2003 war. 392 This was both to address the continued regional threat posed by Tehran, and also to remove the less politically reliable forces from the capital.393 According to one senior Republican Guard officer, only air defense forces received resources to address external, non-regional threats. 394

388 Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 25. 389 Al-Marashi and Salama, Iraq’s Armed Forces , 186. 390 Woods, “The Iraqi Documents,” 17. 391 Woods et al., “Saddam’s Delusions.” Saddam’s strong fear of internal uprisings prevented him from taking a number of important tactical measures when U.S. forces invaded in 2003. Since movement in southern Iraq is wholly dependent on bridges, their destruction would have been advisable in light of a ground invasion from the south. However, Saddam refused to take this step because he needed the bridges to send troops south in case of another domestic uprising. Woods and Stout, “Saddam’s Perceptions and Misperceptions,” 33-34. 392 Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I, 32. 393 Woods and Stout, “Saddam’s Perceptions and Misperceptions,” 32. 394 Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 25.

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The structure and stationing of military forces provides us with helpful observable indicators of Saddam’s threat prioritization. The most important element of his security apparatus for the purposes of threat assessment, however, is the intelligence community.

As expected the emergence of internal threats to his regime also led Saddam to focus his intelligence community domestically in the wake of the Gulf War and to create new units to monitor rival elites. In 1992 Saddam established Military Security as an independent entity of the Military Intelligence Directorate reporting directly to the Presidential Palace on “disturbances” in the military. The agency was responsible for “detecting and countering dissent, investigating corruption and embezzlement, and monitoring all formations and units in the armed forces.” 395 It infiltrated all branches of the military and served as Saddam’s eyes and ears to ensure loyalty to his regime and enforce discipline in the armed forces.

The intelligence services had overlapping duties in monitoring the military to ensure that internal threats were detected, but also to prevent the emergence of any one threat to the regime. Intelligence agency responsibilities included foreign operations, internal security (including both against foreign intelligence agencies and domestic opponents), leadership protection (primarily physical security and counter-coup military rapid-reaction forces) as well as specialized agencies providing signals intelligence and limited imagery intelligence. However, while each agency had a slightly different mandate on paper, all of the security services had an internal security function in

Saddam’s Iraq. 396 Even the Mukhabbarat – the agency primarily responsible for foreign intelligence collection – had a substantial internal security role, tasked with watching

395 Al-Marashi and Salama, Iraq’s Armed Forces , 187. 396 Ibid.

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over the Iraqi populace as well as spying on other intelligence agencies, the armed forces, the Ba’ath Party, and the rest of the government bureaucracy. Under Saddam’s rule, all agencies were monitored and every member of the internal security services was being

(or assumed that they were being) watched by multiple sources. 397 This arrangement served to create “a pervasive and all-encompassing fear” that turned Iraq into a self- policing totalitarian state. 398

In addition to focusing the “official” intelligence apparatus inwards to monitor domestic threats, Saddam also developed personalized channels of intelligence collection within his regime. The Iraqi leader was known to fill the upper ranks of the government with members of his extended clan to provide additional protection but also as an extra source of information. For example, the General Security Directorate, General

Intelligence Directorate, and the General Directorate of Military Intelligence all passed information directly to the Presidential Secretariat, which was staffed by personnel drawn from Saddam’s own power base. Not only did Saddam use the Secretariat as a springboard for his patronage system, but its members were often dispatched to provide independent channels of intelligence and report back to Saddam. 399

In sum, Saddam was greatly concerned about the possibility of internal rebellions in the wake of the Gulf War and proceeded to devote enormous resources to internal security. By 2003, Saddam had expanded his security sector and established new military organizations – organizations which all required close observation, as did the population

397 Pollack, The Threatening Storm , 119. 398 Ibid., 117. 399 “Iraqi Intelligence Agencies,” GlobalSecurity.Org, http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/iraq/summary.htm (accessed March 25, 2016).

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at large. 400 Thus the Iraqi intelligence services spent a large portion of their time monitoring other regime officials, who were in turn tasked with spying on the Iraqi people to preclude the possibility of an internal revolt or coup d’etat. 401 According to the cognitive-institutional theory, this internal focus and institutional arrangement is expected to impact Saddam’s information environment in the following way:

H6 Iraq : Saddam’s prioritization of internal security threats and corresponding orientation of the Iraqi security apparatus inwards will reduce the likelihood of new information arising during the course of future crises with the United States.

6.3 Impact on Threat Assessment In Chapter 2, I outlined a number of pathways through which the process of threat prioritization – and the institutionalization of those priorities – can impact a leader’s information environment and subsequent threat assessment. More specifically, in cases where security resources – and especially intelligence agencies – are focused on internal threats to the state, I argue that they will be less capable of: 1) receiving information; 2) providing a sound interpretation of that information even if it is detected; and/or 3) making that information available to the leader. In order to determine whether threat prioritization and institutionalization had an effect on Saddam’s threat assessment in these ways, I ask the following questions: 1) Is the Iraqi intelligence community detecting the signals being sent by other states? 2) If so, how is the intelligence community interpreting this information? Does it have a nuanced understanding of the adversary? Or is it simply collecting raw data? And, 3) is this information being passed along to the key decision makers, and Saddam Hussein specifically.

400 Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 26. 401 Captured document, “Presidential Order to Cover All Internet News Concerning Iraq,” in Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 11; Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 26-27.

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The internal focus of the Iraqi security apparatus made the task of foreign intelligence collection more difficult. To protect his hold on power and prevent the incidence of coups or internal rebellions, Saddam had also succeeded in cutting most

Iraqis off from outside influences – including those within his inner circle. Saddam’s constant fear of domestic unrest meant that very few government officials had access to the Internet, for example. Among those that did, moreover, many refused to use it since the secret police monitored all activities. 402 The extent of this censorship is illustrated in a captured document from the Directorate of Internet Service issued in late 1999 outlining restrictions against all information on the Internet deemed hostile to Saddam’s regime. 403

Recovered documents also show that simple information like the weather report was classified. There was no freedom of expression – even foreign newspapers were banned – no freedom to travel, and all contact with foreigners was proscribed unless specifically approved by Saddam.404

Despite these restrictions, it does seem that part of the Iraqi intelligence community, and especially the General Directorate of Military Intelligence, collected information on external threats. The intelligence services were charged with providing

Saddam with regular summaries of the general military capabilities of potential adversaries, including Iran, Israel and the United States. 405 And while this effort was focused first and foremost on monitoring Iran and its weapons programs given Tehran’s close proximity and growing military strength vis-à-vis Iraq in the 1990s, 406 there is also

402 Woods et al., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 11. 403 Woods et al ., “Saddam’s Delusions.” 404 MacFarquhar, “Saddam Hussein, Defiant Dictator.” 405 Woods et al., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 16. 406 Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I,, 30.

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evidence that effort was devoted to monitoring UNSCOM activities, 407 as well as U.S. and allied troop deployments in the lead up to the Iraq War. In fact, the recovered documents discussed in Section 5 reveal that Saddam received reports from his

Directorate of General Military Intelligence detailing U.S. troop movements in the region from 2002. 408 Thus it seems likely that Saddam’s intelligence agencies – while focused primarily on internal security – did receive the basic signals that the United States was sending in the 1990s and up through 2003. 409

The restrictions put in place as a result of Saddam’s internal focus, however, appear to have limited the ability of the intelligence apparatus to develop a more nuanced understanding of U.S. interests and objectives in the 1990s. According to the Iraqi

Perspectives Project , the intelligence services collection efforts seem to have involved a large sweep of open-source materials ranging from articles written by Kenneth Pollock and Richard Betts, to military and technical journals, to writings from Masonic organizations and Lyndon LaRouche’s political organization. All material appears to have been treated equally and absent any careful analysis or evaluation. The emphasis when looking beyond the domestic environment therefore seems to have been on volume rather than the substance of information gathered, and the services had no apparent system in place to sort the important information from the more trivial. 410 Thus while

Saddam may have received raw intelligence reports documenting military movements

407 Scott Ritter, “The Coup that Wasn’t,” The Guardian , September 27, 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/28/iraq.military (accessed 20 March, 2016). 408 CRRC SH-GMID-D-001-103, “A Report about the American Preparations and Troops "the army units and the naval ships" to attack Iraq,” September 5, 2002. 409 Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I., 32. 410 Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 11.

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and troop deployments, 411 it seems that he did not have access to sophisticated or thoughtful analysis regarding the broader context within which these movements were taking place. This has led one analyst to label Iraqi security services as “crude, clumsy, and ignorant, even stupid.” 412

Yet even if this information had existed, and sophisticated reports were written, it is unlikely that they ever would have reached the Iraqi leader. Saddam’s focus on internal regime threats and his paranoia regarding potential coups led to the creation of a political culture that strongly dis-incentivized honest and objective counsel. Instead, Saddam surrounded himself with members of his extended clan and only sought advice from a small circle of trusted elite. These selected individuals feared the Iraqi leader and sought to please him at all cost. This meant anticipating Saddam’s wishes and at the very least avoiding suggesting policies and outcomes that he was known to detest or dislike. 413 Prior the Gulf War, Saddam protected himself from this tendency by verifying information through personal visits and inspections. In the wake of the war, however, and as internal threats became more frequent, Saddam rarely went out in public to cross-check his sources. By 1998 the fear of assassination had forced the Iraqi leader to become a recluse, enabling his advisors to pander to Saddam and offer their assessments relatively unchallenged.414 A general officer in the air defense forces commented that, each “one lied to the other from the first lieutenant up, until it reached Saddam.” 415 As a result, faulty information was allowed to permeate the military and security structures.

411 The focus on military over political indicators is perhaps not surprising given the predominant role of security forces – and especially the military – in Iraqi politics. 412 Pollack, The Threatening Storm , 122. 413 Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I,, 9. 414 Ibid., 11. 415 Woods et al., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 10.

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Indeed interviews with former regime officials show that some key decision makers had recognized the changing nature of the U.S. threat pre-2003, but had not felt able to convey this to Saddam. One senior regime official said that he believed from late

2002 that Iraqi policy towards the UN and the United States would lead to a disastrous war, but he “couldn’t convince Saddam that an attack was coming. I didn’t try that hard.

He was monitoring my performance in managing [UN] inspectors.” 416 Other senior military officers, realizing the growing military threat posed by U.S. deployments, attempted to formulate a plan for a comprehensive defense of Iraq in December 2002.

Yet no one disagreed when Saddam voiced his opinion that they should prepare instead for a short war and ordered the military to bury the air force. 417

The low quality of intelligence available to Saddam, combined with this pernicious political culture, meant that crucial information was not available to the Iraqi leader in the lead up to the Iraq War. Instead of receiving accurate reports that reflected changes in the international environment, Saddam received flawed assessments and lies that only served to reinforce his own preconceptions. 418 As a result, his personal beliefs were left unchallenged by those around him, and exerted a strong influence on his final threat assessment. As expected by the cognitive-institutional theory, signals and information that reinforced prior perceptions were weighted heavily, and changes in the environment that challenged Saddam’s beliefs were sidelined or ignored. 419 When the

U.S. finally attacked in March 2003, Tariq Aziz states that Saddam held to the belief that

416 Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I,, 19. 417 Hahn, Missions Accomplished , 156. 418 Woods et al., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 11. 419 For example, according to The Iraqi Perspectives Project , Saddam seemed incapable of appreciating that 9/11 had changed everything. From his perspective, American use of airpower and Special Forces in Afghanistan simply reinforced his belief in U.S. casualty aversion. Ibid., 16.

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the Americans would be satisfied short of regime change despite evidence to the contrary.

In the Foreign Minister’s words, “[Saddam] thought that this war would not lead to this ending.” 420

In sum, just prior to the Iraq War of 2003, the Iraqi regime focused on threats in the following order: (1) internal threats; (2) regional threats; and 3) the U.S. threat. This threat prioritization was institutionalized in all aspects of the Iraqi security apparatus, which was focused internally to protect Saddam. As a result of this prioritization, the nature of information available to the Iraqi leader on international affairs was of poor quality, and few individuals were willing or able to disagree with Saddam’s personal assessments. By March 2003, Saddam had failed to appreciate the extent of the U.S. threat to his regime. As a result he proceeded to prepare for a U.S. attack that was expected to end short of regime change.

6.4 Summary: Evaluating Saddam’s Threat Assessment The experience of the 1991 Gulf War led Saddam to form strong beliefs about the extent of U.S. foreign policy interests. Central to his assessment of U.S. interests was a perception of U.S. cost-aversion, and in particular an unwillingness to absorb significant human costs to achieve broader foreign policy goals. The lack of high quality information available to Saddam during the 1990s due to the inward orientation of his security apparatus created a permissive environment in which his personal beliefs were able to play an outsized role in assessing U.S. threat credibility. These beliefs shaped Saddam’s assessments of U.S. threat credibility throughout the 1990s, and strongly influenced his reception and interpretation of information in the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003. The

420 Ibid., 32. See also Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor: Vol. I, 62.

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Iraqi leader proceeded to interpret incoming signals in accordance with his prior expectations of U.S. behavior, selecting and emphasizing information that pointed to U.S. restraint and lack of commitment to a ground invasion, and underplaying signals of more malicious intent, including public statements of U.S. plans to oust him from power and a large ground force deployment that indicated a likely invasion. As highlighted in Chapter

2, while Saddam’s selective attention to some signals over others fails to comport with a purely rational threat assessment, it is also not entirely irrational given the low quality of information available to him in the lead up to the war. Instead, Saddam appeared to be operating according to the expectations of bounded rationality, where information availability, issue complexity, and cognitive limitations all combined to limit a purely rational threat assessment. 421

421 See e.g. Simon, “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice”; Simon, “Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning.”

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Figure 3.2 Saddam’s Beliefs and Threat Environment

Leader has prior beliefs about external adversary

N Y

Beliefs exert no External threat constraining assessed as target influence on threat state's dominant assessment concern - Updating likely Suez Crisis 1956 N Y

7. ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS It is now necessary now to consider how the four alternative explanations fare in explaining Saddam’s threat assessments from 1991 through 2003. To recap, these alternative explanations are: 1) rationalist power-based theories that assess threat credibility according to the balance of power and material interests in a crisis; 2) the rationalist (regime-type) theories that assess threat credibility based on the use of costly- signaling mechanisms; 3) the social-psychological theory that assesses threat credibility on the basis of the desirability of past actions; and 4) behavioral theories that assess threat credibility based on a state’s record of following through on past commitments.

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Let us first consider the capabilities thesis. Daryl Press argues that leaders assess a country’s threat credibility based on the balance of capabilities and interests at stake in a given confrontation. 422 According to Press, leaders ask two questions when assessing threats: 1) Does the adversary have enough power to do what he threatens in order to achieve his objectives? And, 2) are the interests at stake large enough to justify the costs and risks?

In the case of Iraq and the United States, the answer to the first question is clearly yes. U.S. military power dwarfed that of Iraq, as was demonstrated in both the 1991 and

2003 wars. In 1991, the coalition forces comprised more than 540,000 troops, 1,700 aircraft, and six aircraft carrier battle groups. This force was materially and technically far superior to the Iraqi Army, which while similar in absolute numbers quickly faced problems of desertion, low morale, and lack of skill. Throughout the 1990s, moreover, the disparity in military power only grew larger. Not only had the Gulf War weakened the

Iraqi military substantially, 423 but also the UN sanctions regime crippled the Iraqi economy and precluded any attempt to rebuild the armed forces. Iraq’s annual defense spending plummeted from $19 billion in the 1980s to $1.4 billion in the 1990s. By the end of the decade regular soldiers were poorly equipped and had little if any training; even the Republic Guard was forced to operate with minimal training, supplies, and support. 424 Thus even though the U.S. coalition force of 2003 was smaller in number than

422 Press, Calculating Credibility , 20-24. 423 International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 1991-1992 (London: Brassey's, 1992), 107. The Iraqi Army was one third its former size in terms of personnel and equipment at the end of the Gulf War. 424 Rovner, “Delusion of Defeat,” 493-94. The state of the Iraqi military by the end of the decade was described by one analyst as “decaying, obsolete, [and] obsolescent.”

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it had been in 1991, comprising 250,000 in total (145,000 of which were U.S. and British troops), the relative disparity in military capability had only grown in size.

The question then becomes whether the United States had large enough interests at stake to justify the costs and risks of invasion. Press assesses the level of interests at stake in a crisis according to whether they are “vital interests,” “important interests,” or

“concerns.” 425 Vital interests relate to a state’s survival, important interests to issues of material value that do not threaten state survival directly, and concerns to state values and ideals that do not involve significant material risk. Looking at the case at hand, it would be fair to say that Iraq’s removal from Kuwait and the destruction of its supposed WMD program were important interests to the United States given their ability to upset both economic and military balances of power. 426 Therefore given the military preponderance of the United States and significant U.S. interests in the Gulf region, Saddam should have assessed the 1991, 1994/98, and 2003 threats as credible according to the current calculus thesis. The fact that he did not in 2003 thus presents a problem for this theory.

The second alternative explanation is based on theories of costly signaling, and focuses on the regime-type variant specifically. According to these accounts, democracies are able to deliver more credible threats either due to their open institutional structures, or the ability of leaders to “tie their hands” through public statements and commitments to use force. Since U.S. leaders issued public threats that would engage the U.S. domestic audience during this period, and Congress supported the use of force in both 1991 and

425 Press, Calculating Credibility , 20-24. 426 Ibid. In fact Press uses the Gulf region as an example of an important U.S. interest.

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2003, 427 this thesis would expect Saddam to have assessed U.S. threats throughout this period as credible.

Interestingly, not only do Saddam’s assessments not comport with the predictions of the democratic credibility thesis, but also Saddam seems to have viewed the role of domestic politics in ways that differ from the expectations of these theories. Instead of serving to increase U.S. credibility by performing a “hand tying” function, Saddam appeared to have viewed both domestic and international audiences as a constraint on the use of U.S. military force in 2003, and the relatively weak domestic opposition as strong evidence of a lack of willingness to go to war. 428 This assessment was not only factually inaccurate, but runs counter to the audience costs thesis that would predict an increase, not decrease, in threat credibility. Aside from these references to U.S. public opinion, there is little evidence in the archival material that Saddam performed a more detailed assessment of U.S. domestic politics or took account of congressional activity in the lead up to the war.

More generally, the evidence suggests that Saddam was equally concerned with both costly and non-costly signals in assessing the extent of U.S. threat credibility. He paid attention to military mobilizations, as expected by rational accounts, although he did not always attribute equal weight to these movements despite them often being similar in

427 "Public Law 102-1: H.J. Res 77 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 1991," Government Printing Office, January 14, 1991, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/102/hjres77 (accessed February 3, 2015); “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002." The majority of the U.S. public also supported the use of force in both cases. See Frank Newport, “Seventy Two Percent of Americans Support War Against Iraq,” Gallup Poll, March 24, 2003, http://www.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-americans-support-war-against-iraq.aspx (accessed February 3, 2015) 428 SH-SPPC-D-000-304, “Meeting Between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Nijirfan Al -Barzani in 2002”; MEMRI. “First Interview with Saddam Hussein”; Woods et al ., The Iraqi Perspectives Project , 29.

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size.429 More interesting perhaps is that fact that Saddam emphasized a number of other non-costly signals in his assessments. He focused, for example, on the position of other countries in the international system and their potential to constrain the United States despite its powerful position, as well as attributing significant normative weight to the role of the United Nations in authorizing the United States to use force. In short, a wide range of information informed Saddam’s threat assessments in ways that are not always consistent with rational signaling theories, and are certainly not consistent with the expectations of the democratic credibility variant.

The third alternative explanation is Mercer’s reputations thesis. According to his social-psychology argument, a state will use an adversary’s past behavior as a guide to future action only when that past behavior is perceived as undesirable by the state in question. For example, when a state faces an adversary that chooses to stand firm in a given dispute, such behavior is deemed undesirable. As a result of that undesirable behavior, that adversary will gain a reputation for resolve that will influence future assessments of its threat credibility. When an adversary shows weakness or concedes to a threat, however, this is desirable behavior that will elicit situational explanations. Since situational explanations cannot lead to reputation formation, an adversary will not earn a reputation for lacking resolve, and future threats assessments will instead be based on contextual variables like the balance of power. 430

In this case, U.S. behavior during the course of the Gulf War was both desirable and undesirable for Saddam. The fact that the U.S. invaded Iraq and inflicted severe damage on Saddam’s armed forces was clearly undesirable, but Washington’s decision to

429 This is the case in 1991 and 2003 especially. 430 Mercer, Reputation and International Politics, 65-69.

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withdraw short of regime-change was also a good outcome for the Iraqi leader. As a result, it is unclear what Mercer’s theory would expect based on this first conflict.

Nevertheless, let us assume for the sake of argument that Saddam viewed 1991 as an undesirable outcome for Iraq. If this were the case, then we should see evidence that the

United States earned a reputation for resolve during the 1990s and that Saddam relied on this when making his threat assessments. Again, however, the empirical record is mixed.

For in this case it seems that the United States did earn a reputation for having limited resolve post-1991, but also that Saddam doubted U.S. willingness to undertake more extensive, costly actions. Furthermore, Saddam’s references to the U.S. lacking resolve in certain situations, and his attribution of that assessment to Washington’s behavior in 1991, suggests that the U.S. also earned a reputation for irresolution – an expectation that runs counter to the reputations theory.

Finally, past actions theory claims that a state’s prior fulfillment of commitments and threats to use force serves to increase the credibility of that state’s future demands in the eyes of target states. 431 Since the coercing and target state remain constant across the four cases from 1991 through 2003, and the United States followed through on its promise to attack Iraq in 1991 and again in 1998, 432 Saddam should have viewed the U.S. threat to invade in 2003 as credible. Yet not only did Saddam appear not to assess the U.S. threat as credible in 2002-03, but the opposite seems to have occurred – Saddam formed

431 Schelling, Arms and Influence , 55-59.For a more recent review of these claims see, Paul Huth, “Deterrence and International Conflict: Empirical Findings and Theoretical Debates,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 25-48. 432 Whether the United States would have invaded in 1994 to compel Iraqi forces from the Kuwaiti border is difficult to say given that Saddam conceded before military action was necessary. Nevertheless, the rapid deployment of forces indicates that the United States may well have taken military action in this case also.

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beliefs based on his 1991 experience and the way in which the U.S. carried out its prior threat that led him to view the 2003 threat as less credible.

Table 3.3 Alternative Theoretical Predictions: Iraq Wars

1991 1994/98 2003 Theory Mechanism/s Prediction Prediction Prediction

Current U.S.-Iraq balance of power Credible Credible Credible Calculus Thesis 1. U.S. costly signals Regime-Type 2. The openness and Credible Credible Credible Thesis competitiveness of the U.S. political system Reputations Desirability of U.S. N/A Credible Credible Thesis behavior in past crises Past Actions History of U.S. threat N/A Credible Credible Thesis follow-through 1. Saddam’s previous Cognitive- experience of U.S. resolve Institutional Credible Credible Incredible Thesis 2. Availability of new (Weak information Prediction)

Before concluding the chapter, it is worth making a brief note regarding Danielle

Lupton’s theory of reputation formation. To recap, Lupton argues that leaders develop their own reputations for resolve through the actions they undertake while in office. As a result, an adversary’s perceptions of that state’s resolve should adhere to the leader of the state, and presumably change with turnovers in power. In the case of Iraq, I find little evidence in support of this theory. Saddam did note changes in leadership in the United

States, and archival evidence shows discussions of the change in presidency from George

H.W. Bush to Clinton. Nevertheless, there is no indication that Saddam’s perceptions of

U.S. interests of resolve changed during this period, or more tellingly that he reassessed

U.S. interests and resolve when George W. Bush came to power. Instead, Saddam

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focused on the consistent behavior of the United States across these different presidents, and interpreted U.S. actions in light of his own beliefs.

In sum, the cognitive-institutional theory is the only one of the four theories identified in this dissertation that can explain Saddam’s pattern of assessments of U.S. threat credibility from 1991-2003. Moreover, not only does the cognitive-institutional theory come closest to predicting the pattern of Saddam’s assessments, but it also accounts for two instances of otherwise puzzling behavior. First, Saddam’s invasion of

Kuwait in 1990 becomes more reasonable when one considers his belief in the late 1980s of U.S. revisionist interests and Washington’s desire to overthrow his regime. Second,

Saddam’s compliance in the 1990s with a number of U.S. demands also becomes more understandable in light of his updated belief in U.S. limited revisionist aims, and Iraq’s competing domestic and regional threat environments.

8. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I argue that prior to the Gulf War of 1991, Saddam Hussein viewed the United States as a revisionist power and as an existential threat to his regime.

The experience of the Gulf War, however, provided direct evidence of U.S. cost- intolerance and an unwillingness to expend large amounts of resources to achieve its broader objectives. In light of these events, Saddam assessed the United States as a credible but limited revisionist power. His updated belief in the extent of U.S. foreign policy interests, and more importantly the assessment of U.S. restraint, made it possible for Saddam to acquiesce to U.S. demands in the 1990s. During this period, Saddam’s revised belief about the extent of U.S. interests fed into his strategic calculus and broader threat perception that now privileged Iraq’s internal security concerns over the U.S.

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external threat. This prioritization process led Saddam to focus his security apparatus inwards to address domestic unrest.

In 2002-03, the Bush Administration’s promise to invade Iraq and overthrow

Saddam’s regime exceeded the limited range of costs Saddam believed the U.S. would expend to achieve its foreign policy objectives. The lack of information available to

Saddam due to the inward orientation of his security agencies created a permissive environment in which his prior personal beliefs were able to determine his assessment

U.S. threat credibility. As a result, Saddam assessed the compellent threat as incredible and refused to comply with U.S. demands. The United States subsequently invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003.

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4. THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS 1962

1. INTRODUCTION In this chapter I examine whether the cognitive-institutional theory developed in

Chapter 2 can explain Premier Khrushchev’s assessments of U.S. threat credibility in the

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. This is a useful case for a number of reasons. First, President

Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev experienced a crisis over Berlin just one year prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis thereby enabling Khrushchev to form beliefs about the extent of

U.S. foreign policy interests. Second, the Cuban Missile Crisis contains a nuclear threat issued by the United States thus providing an opportunity to assess whether the cognitive- institutional theory extends to non-conventional crises. Finally, as with the previous empirical chapter, this case provides a useful opportunity to evaluate the performance of the cognitive-institutional theory against the four competing explanations for state threat assessments: the current calculus theory, the past actions theory, the democratic credibility thesis, and Mercer’s reputations theory. Of the four alternatives presented, the power-based current calculus theory fares the best but in ways that differ to conventional explanations. In this case, Premier Khrushchev initiated a crisis with a country in a more favorable military position due to his prior belief that the United States would not engage in direct military conflict and risk nuclear war to compel a change in Soviet behavior.

Once the United States signaled its willingness to escalate hostilities beyond that expected by Khrushchev and “activated” the nuclear threat, however, the Soviet leader quickly updated his beliefs and the strategic balance of power became important in his assessment of U.S. threat credibility.

This chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 provides a discussion of case selection and explains why the Cuban Missile Crisis is useful for testing my theory

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against the alternative candidate explanations. Section 3 presents brief case summaries of the two key events during the timeframe of interest. Section 4 turns to the cognitive- institutional theory and provides evidence for Khrushchev’s beliefs about the extent of

U.S. foreign policy interests in order to generate a set of predictions about his subsequent threat assessment. Section 5 evaluates the Soviet leader’s assessment of U.S. threat credibility in the lead up to, and during, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Section 6 addresses the importance of threat prioritization and institutionalization in explaining

Khrushchev’s assessment. Section 7 revisits the theoretical extension discussed in

Chapter 2, and evaluates the role of nuclear weapons in this crisis. Finally, Section 8 concludes the chapter by comparing the cognitive-institutional theory to the four alternative explanations for Soviet behavior.

2. CASE SELECTION AND METHODOLOGY The Cuban Missile Crisis meets all necessary scope conditions for this project.

The Berlin Crisis of 1961 between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev one year prior to the conflict over Cuba allows us to assess the importance of the Soviet leader’s prior belief formation in subsequent assessments of threat credibility. In addition,

Khrushchev was the clear authoritative decision-making unit in the Soviet Union during this time. According to Zubok, by 1958 Khrushchev had eliminated his domestic opposition and was “an unchallenged authoritarian leader who stood behind all major decisions in Soviet foreign policy.” 433 Finally, the Soviet Union was the target of clear

433 Vladislav M. Zubok, “Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis (1958-1962),” Working Paper No. 6 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, May 1993), 6. William Taubum adds that “the rout of Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich in June 1957, followed by the sacking of Zhukov four months later, left Khrushchev as the USSR’s undisputed leader.” William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2003), 363.

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coercive threats issued by the United States during this period – a deterrent threat in 1961 over the Berlin Wall, and both a deterrent and compellent threat in 1962 over Cuba.

In addition to satisfying the scope conditions listed above, the Cuba crisis serves two additional purposes. First, since the United States engaged in escalatory signaling through troop movements and raised the national threat level to Defense Readiness

Condition (DEFCON) 2 during the crisis, this case allows me to see whether the type of threat – nuclear versus conventional – matters to assessments of an adversary’s credibility.

Second, this case also provides an opportunity to assess alternative explanations. First, the location of Cuba to the United States combined with U.S. military (and nuclear) power during this period of time should, in principle, make this an easy case for conventional balance of power theories. Khrushchev’s decision to initiate a conflict with the United States and the subsequent escalation of the crisis after the delivery of

Kennedy’s initial coercive threat thus creates a problem for pure capability-based accounts.

Second, this case also provides an opportunity to evaluate the performance of past actions theory. In 1961 the United States issued a deterrent threat to the Soviet Union over Berlin that Khrushchev did not explicitly challenge. Thus while the United States did not have to follow through on its threat to use force, the U.S. willingness to stand firm over Berlin should have given Khrushchev some reason to believe that the United States would behave similarly in future conflicts with the Soviet Union. The fact that the Soviet leader decided to initiate a crisis despite this past experience and allowed hostilities to escalate once Kennedy issued his threat thus creates a puzzle for this theory. Similarly, according to Mercer’s reputations theory the United States should have been able to

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develop a reputation for resolve during this period of time due to its stance over Berlin in

1961, but not a reputation for irresolution. The fact that Khrushchev appeared to learn mixed lessons from Berlin and perceived a limit to U.S. resolve is therefore confusing, as is his subsequent decision to initiate and escalate the Cuba crisis. Finally, since the

United States is a democratic state, this case also provides a useful opportunity to assess theories of democratic credibility and see how (if at all) U.S. domestic political processes fed into Khrushchev’s threat assessment.

Relations of the United States series, 434 and the Cold War International History project has recently released a new set of translated primary documents on Soviet decision making during this period. 435 These primary documents are supplemented with a growing body of secondary literature on the Khrushchev era.436 I review these newly available primary and secondary documents in order to ascertain the key beliefs and perceptions of

Premier Khrushchev prior to and during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In addition to looking for clear statements of his own beliefs, I take into account the opinions and statements of

Khrushchev’s chief advisors to evaluate the information available to the Soviet leader, as well as policies that Khrushchev advocated in response to the U.S. threats. Since state

434 FRUS , 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges . 435 The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, “Cold War International History Project Digital Archives,” http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/theme/cold-war-history (accessed November 20, 2015). 436 See e.g. Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence, (New York, NY: Random House, 1995); Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York, NY: W.W. Norton 2007); Taubman, Khrushchev ; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble:’ Castro, Kennedy, and the Cuban Missile Crisis 1958-1964 (London: John Murray, 1997).

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policies are not a perfect proxy for leaders’ assessments of threat credibility, I refer to these only when archival documentation is lacking and make more cautious inferences about Khrushchev’s threat assessments in such instances. The proceeding section provides a brief summary of the key events in 1961 and 1962, followed by an analysis of

Khrushchev’s thinking and decision making during this period.

3. CASE OVERVIEW The United States and Soviet Union experienced a number of crises throughout the early Cold War and in the lead up to the Cuban Missile Crisis that may have revealed important information to Khrushchev about U.S. interests. Many of these crises, however, occurred prior to the presidency of John F. Kennedy and – more importantly for the purposes of the cognitive-institutional theory – did not entail a direct conflict between the

United States and the Soviet Union. The Berlin Crisis of 1961, however, provides an instance of a direct interaction between the United States and the Soviet Union through which Khrushchev could evaluate first hand the extent of U.S. foreign policy interests.

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Figure 4.1 Map of Berlin 1961 437

3.1 Berlin 1961 In November 1958, Khrushchev startled the world by announcing his intention to conclude a peace treaty with Communist East Germany. The Soviet Union proposed that

West Berlin be transformed into a “free city,” and gave the Western occupiers six months to conclude a settlement along these lines. If no agreement was reached during this six- month period, a treaty between the Soviets and East Germany would be signed and the rights of the Western powers terminated. From this point onwards, the East Germans would control all access to West Berlin. 438 In response to the Soviet ultimatum, the

Eisenhower Administration restated its commitment to the security of West Berlin and

437 Department of State, Bulletin, Vol. XLV, No. 1154 (August 7, 1961), 225. 438 Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1987), 84. On December 11 TASS announced that it would view “any attempt to force a way into Berlin” as an attack on East Germany that would mobilize the Warsaw Pact and raise the possibility of nuclear war. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail , 85. See also Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 167. For the text of the Soviet note of November 27, 1958, see Department of State, Bulletin, Vol. XL, No. 1021 (January 19, 1959), 81-89, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293008121539;view=1up;seq=81 (accessed September 10, 2015)

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refused to enter into any agreement that repudiated its rights and obligations to the city. 439

In the proceeding months, Eisenhower remained consistent and clear about his willingness to defend West Berlin against any Soviet aggression. 440 In May 1959, the

Western Powers agreed to a Conference of Foreign Ministers in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss the status of Berlin. Although the meeting did not result in any agreement among the parties, Khrushchev allowed the six-month deadline to lapse and did not revisit the possibility of concluding a separate peace treaty for the remainder of Eisenhower’s presidency. 441

When John F. Kennedy assumed office in 1961, Khrushchev initially welcomed the change in U.S. leadership, viewing it as an opportunity to push for greater concessions on the status of Berlin. 442 When the two leaders met in Vienna in June that year, Khrushchev decided to seize his moment. On the second day of the meeting, the

Soviet leader handed Kennedy an aide-mémoire reiterating the terms of his 1958 ultimatum: either the United States and the Soviet Union sign a treaty agreeing to turn

West Berlin into a “free city,” or Khrushchev would be compelled to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany leading to the “liquidation of the occupation regime in

West Berlin with all the resulting consequences.” 443 Negotiations towards the conclusion of these treaties, moreover, had to take place within the following six months. After that

439 For the full text of this statement, see Department of State, Bulletin, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1016 (December 15, 1958), 948, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293008121521;view=1up;seq=418 (accessed September 10, 2015) 440 Betts, Nuclear Blackmail , 90. 441 Hope M. Harrison (ed.), “The Berlin Crisis and the Khrushchev-Ulbricht Summits in Moscow, 9 and 18 June 1959,” The Cold War International History Project Bulletin 11 , 204, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/CWIHPBulletin11_p5.pdf (accessed September 10, 2015). 442 Dobrynin, In Confidence, 45, 64; Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, digital location 6885; Taubman, Khrushchev, 495. 443 Quoted in Betts, Nuclear Blackmail, 92. For the full text of the aide-mémoire see Department of State, Bulletin, Vol. XLV, No. 1154 (August 7, 1961), 231-233, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293008121638;view=1up;seq=231 (accessed September 12, 2015).

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point, Western occupation rights and free access to the city of Berlin would “cease to exist.” 444

On July 25, 1961, President Kennedy issued a public television address in response to the Soviet ultimatum announcing the significant mobilization of reserves, defense budget increases, civil defense measures, and placed the Strategic Air Command on high ground alert in a strong signal of resolve to Khrushchev. He further declared that,

“we cannot and will not permit the communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force…So long as the Communists insist that they are preparing to end by themselves unilaterally our rights in West Berlin and our commitments to its people, we must be prepared to defend those rights and those commitments. We will at all times be ready to talk, if talk will help. But we must also be ready to resist with force, if force is used upon us.” 445 On August 7, Khrushchev decried U.S. escalatory measures. 446

Kennedy responded three days later by reiterating his desire for a peaceful solution to the crisis but affirming the U.S. commitment to stand firm. 447

With no resolution to the Berlin issue in sight and pressure mounting on

Khrushchev to take action, the Soviets began construction on the Berlin Wall on August

13, 1961. The United States labeled the wall “illegal, immoral, and inhumane” but took no immediate action to halt or remove the construction. 448 After months of relative calm, the crisis came to a head on October 27, 1961, with a standoff between U.S. and Soviet tanks at Checkpoint Charlie – a key crossing point between East and West Berlin. The

444 Dobrynin, In Confidence , 45. 445 John F. Kennedy: "Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Berlin Crisis," July 25, 1961. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project . http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8259 (accessed September 16, 2015). 446 Betts, Nuclear Blackmail , 107. 447 Ibid., 104. 448 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 7792.

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confrontation ended peacefully on October 28 when the Soviet tanks withdrew from the border, marking an end to the Berlin Crisis. While Khrushchev’s initial demands had not been met by the Western powers, he claimed the Berlin Wall as a victory for the Eastern bloc and allowed the ultimatum to lapse. 449

3.2 The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 In May 1962, Premier Khrushchev decided to deploy 50,000 Soviet forces to

Cuba armed with medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, light bombers, naval vessels and submarines, with the intention of bolstering the Soviet presence in the Caribbean. 450 The Soviet forces in Cuba were intended to deter a U.S. attack against the Castro regime, but also to strengthen the Soviet position vis-à-vis the

United States and grant Khrushchev greater bargaining leverage over events in Europe.451

The hope was that U.S. President John F. Kennedy would not become aware of the Soviet deployment in Cuba until the base had been constructed and missiles were operational, at which time the United States would be forced to accept the Soviet presence as a fait accompli .452

449 Ibid., digital location 8237. 450 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 188-189. 451 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 8759. 452 David Holloway, “Nuclear Weapons and the Escalation of the Cold War, 1945-1962,” in Odd Arne Westad and Melvin Leffler (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: University Press, 2010), 393-394.

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Figure 4.2 Map of Cuba 1962 453

In August 1962, the United States detected the unusual movement of Soviet ships towards Cuba and uncovered evidence of Soviet missile sites. In response to this news,

President Kennedy called up 150,000 reservists and issued public statements on

September 4 and 13 warning that the United States “would do whatever must be done” to protect its own security and that of its allies. 454 On October 15, Kennedy received photos taken by an American spy plane showing further evidence of Soviet medium-range

453 The Cuban Missile Crisis, http://www.jcs-group.com/military/warsmaller/1962cuban.html (accessed September 16, 2015). 454 Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev 1960-63 (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1991), 414, 423-35; Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble , 206, 227.

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ballistic missiles (MRBMs), missile sites, and launch equipment in Cuba. Kennedy and his advisors spent the next few days in secret deliberations considering their next steps. 455

On October 22, 1962, Kennedy announced the U.S. response in a televised speech to the American nation: a naval quarantine would be established around Cuba and any ship carrying offensive military equipment to the island turned back. In addition, the

United States demanded the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles. 456 Khrushchev responded by issuing a stern note to Kennedy refusing to abide by the terms of the quarantine, and instructing Soviet ships heading for Cuba to run the naval blockade. 457 By October 26, however, Khrushchev’s resolve had waned. That day, President Kennedy received a letter from the Soviets offering to remove the offensive weapons from Cuba and to cease further shipments in exchange for an end to the quarantine and a U.S. assurance that it would not invade the Caribbean island.458 In a second letter to Kennedy on October 27,

Khrushchev added a further condition to the agreement. In return for the missiles in Cuba, the Soviets demanded the removal of U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey. 459 Puzzled by the shifting demands, Kennedy met with the Executive Committee of the National Security

Council (ExComm) and decided to accept the terms of the second letter but only on the condition that the missile exchange be kept secret. As a result, Kennedy publicly accepted the terms of the first letter, while in private agreeing to Khrushchev’s demand to

455 During their deliberations Excomm considered a number of options including air strikes and a ground invasion of Cuba. 456 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble , 233-34; Beschloss, The Crisis Years , 483. Full the full text of the speech see John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba,” October 22, 1962, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/sUVmCh- sB0moLfrBcaHaSg.aspx (accessed September 16, 2015). 457 Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, FRUS , 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy- Khrushchev Exchanges , Document 63. 458 Telegram From the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, FRUS , 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges , Document 65. 459 Letter from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, FRUS , 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy- Khrushchev Exchanges , Document 66.

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remove the missiles from Turkey. 460 On October 28, 1962, Khrushchev notified the U.S. government that he had ordered work on the missile sites in Cuba to cease, and that all equipment would be dismantled and shipped back to the Soviet Union. The naval quarantine was formally lifted on November 20, 1962, marking the end of the Cuban

Missile Crisis.

Throughout the crisis, the United States endeavored to bolster the credibility of its demands through a number of costly, military signals. In addition to Kennedy mobilizing

U.S. reserves in September, preparations for the quarantine included the deployment of

150 ships, 250 aircraft, and 30,000 troops to the Caribbean to establish and enforce the blockade. 461 By October 26, more than 100,000 U.S. troops stood ready in Florida and additional aircraft carriers were on their way to Cuba to prepare for an invasion should the Soviets not comply with U.S. demands. 462 When Kennedy addressed the nation on

October 22, U.S. nuclear forces were placed on alert at DEFCON 3 signaling the ability to launch the country’s entire nuclear bomber fleet within fifteen minutes of a presidential order. 463 Polaris submarines also moved out of their ports to pre-assigned stations, and U.S. military commands throughout the world increased levels of readiness for war.

On October 24, President Kennedy made the unprecedented decision to raise the nuclear threat level to DEFCON 2 – one level short of war. At this time, 183 B-47 bombers were dispersed to civilian and military airfields and the B-52 airborne alert

460 Holloway, “Nuclear Weapons and the Escalation of the Cold War,” 393-394. 461 Sheldon M. Stern, The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), digital location 1082. 462 Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 34-36, 38, 41, 46. 463 Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 51-52.

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training program was expanded so that 1/8 th of the forces were continuously in flight.

Approximately 57 bombers and 61 tankers were airborne at any given time, and 49 B-52s, with 182 nuclear weapons on board, were on standby and ready for orders. The total ground alert force comprised 672 bombers and 381 tankers carrying some 1627 nuclear weapons. In addition, 46 Titan and 90 Atlas inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were placed at high states of readiness. 464 On October 27, and for the first time ever, new

Minuteman solid fuel missiles were placed on alert at Malmstrom Air Force Base in

Montana. 465 With this level of mobilization, the United States was poised to strike enemy targets around the world.

4. THEORY AND HYPOTHESES The first stage in the cognitive-institutional theory of threat assessment argues that variation in leadership beliefs within a target state is key to understanding how threatening signals are interpreted during crises. More specifically, I claim that a target state’s prior crisis interactions provide crucial information to target state leaders about an adversary’s foreign policy objectives and the costs that it is willing to absorb to achieve those goals. Collectively, this information enables target state leaders to form beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests, and whether it is satisfied with the status quo or wanting (and willing) to revise the current international order.

What does the cognitive-institutional theory predict about the Cuban Missile

Crisis of 1962? How would it expect Khrushchev to assess the credibility of the U.S.

464 Scott D. Sagan, “Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management,” International Security 9, 4 (1985), 109. He adds that on “October 25 or 26, CINCSAC was directed to generate his remaining 804 airplanes and 44 missiles. Within 24 hours of that alert order, SAC was expected to have 172 missiles and 1,200 bombers with 2858 weapons on alert.” See also Strategic Air Command HQ, “Strategic Air Command Operations in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962,” Historical Study 90, Vol. I. 465 Strategic Air Command HQ, “Strategic Air Command Operations,” 97.

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threat? The remainder of this section provides evidence for Khrushchev’s beliefs about the extent of U.S. foreign policy interests prior to October 1962, and uses these beliefs to generate predictions about his threat assessments in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Section 5 then draws on available archival sources to evaluate Khrushchev’s assessment of U.S. threat credibility in 1962, before discussing the role of nuclear weapons in this assessment in Section 6.

4.1 Khrushchev’s Beliefs Pre-1962: The Berlin Crisis 1961 Available evidence suggests that Khrushchev’s assessment of U.S. foreign policy interests was influenced in important ways by his experience during – and the U.S. response to – the Berlin Crisis of 1961. The 1961 episode was in many ways a continuation of the 1958 Berlin Crisis between Khrushchev and Eisenhower over the status of East Berlin. The timing of this second iteration, however, was owed to two key events: 1) the increasingly poor economic situation in East Germany and large outpouring of refugees to the West; and 2) the U.S. failure at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.

The latter event in particular appeared to influence Khrushchev’s impressions of

U.S. resolve prior to his June 1961 meeting with President Kennedy. 466 Concerned by the revolutionary policies of the Cuban government and the existence of a communist outpost so close to the United States, the U.S. government decided to support the overthrow of

Fidel Castro’s regime in April 1961. On April 17, U.S.-backed Cuban rebels invaded three beaches along the Bay of Pigs with plans to incite a national uprising and to

466 The Bay of Pigs provides a potential second crisis from which Khrushchev was able to learn about the extent of U.S. foreign policy interests. However, since this crisis was between the United States and Cuba, and did not constitute a direct conflict with the Soviet Union, it fails to satisfy the scope conditions of the theory. That is not to say, however, that Khrushchev did not learn anything about U.S. interests from this event – indeed, as I note in Chapter 2, leaders continue to learn from crises and conflicts that take place elsewhere in the world. The beliefs formed as a consequence of these events, however, are expected to have a less direct impact on leaders’ threat assessments than those that form as a result of first-hand experiences.

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establish a new, provisional government. Unfortunately the plan was doomed to fail.

When the twelve hundred men landed on the beaches along the bay, there was no guerrilla force nearby to help fortify the beachhead. In addition, there was only one access road to the beach which Soviet-supplied tanks were able to monopolize in its defense. President Kennedy failed to provide air cover for the forces, enabling Castro’s six planes to sink two of the landing force’s ships – one of which carried the regiment’s radio equipment and some ammunition. By April 19, the United States started to withdraw its equipment and fighters from the area in an embarrassing defeat. 467

While this event did not entail a direct interaction between the United States and the Soviet Union – and thus its effect on Khrushchev’s belief formation is expected to be more muted than that of the subsequent Berlin Crisis – the Bay of Pigs fiasco did inform

Khrushchev’s perceptions of U.S. interests and influenced his subsequent decision making. The Soviet leader’s foreign policy advisor, Oleg Troyanovsky, recalls that the

Bay of Pigs failure led the Kremlin to believe that “incompetence was the hallmark of the

American administration,” and led Khrushchev to view Kennedy as “inexperienced” and

“untried.” 468 It was this perceived weakness and vulnerability that encouraged

Khrushchev to request a summit with the new American president in June 1961, and to reissue the Berlin aide-mémoire with hopes of a more favorable resolution. 469

467 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 7383. 468 Oleg Troyanovsky, “The Making of Soviet Foreign Policy,” in William Taubman et al. (eds.), Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 230-31. See also Arkady N. Shevchenko, Breaking with Moscow (New York, NY: Knopf, 1985), 182. 469 Kennedy was aware of the Soviet Premier’s perception. At the end of the first day of the summit, Kennedy complained to his advisors that Khrushchev had treated him “like a little boy,” and speculated that “because of the Bay of Pigs” Khrushchev “thinks…that I’m inexperienced.” Quoted in Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 347.

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Khrushchev and Kennedy met in Vienna in June 1961 where Khrushchev delivered his famous ultimatum: unless the German question was resolved within the next six months, the Soviets would sign a peace treaty with East Germany “putting an end to the occupation regime in West Berlin with all its implications.” 470 Khrushchev made clear that any use of force by the West to maintain access rights to Berlin beyond this point would be perceived as an act of “open aggression” resulting in war.471 By laying down the new rules of the game in this way, the Soviet leader was placing the onus of initiating conflict over Berlin in the hands of the United States. 472 Kennedy immediately responded to the ultimatum by informing Khrushchev that his terms were unacceptable to the United States, just as they had been in 1958. Kennedy proceeded to warn the Soviet

Premier that his demands presented the U.S. government with “a most serious challenge” and that “no one can foresee how serious the consequences might be.” 473 Khrushchev proceeded to increase the pressure on Kennedy by publicly announcing his Berlin ultimatum and publishing the aide-mémoire in the Soviet press on June 9, 1961. 474

Despite Khrushchev’s display of confidence during the Vienna meeting, the subsequent U.S. response to the ultimatum appeared to have shocked the Soviet leader.

Facing the need to signal U.S. disapproval and resolve to defend the status quo, Kennedy quickly ordered a reassessment of the U.S. defense budget and requested an additional

$3.5 billion. On July 8, Khrushchev responded to this news by suspending the Soviet

470 Quoted in Trachtenberg, History and Strategy , 216. 471 Ibid. 472 Khrushchev stated that, “it is up to the United States to decide whether there will be war or peace…the decision to sign a peace treaty is firm and irrevocable and the Soviet Union will sign it in December if the U.S. refuses an interim agreement.” Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 7049. 473 Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth (New York: Berkeley Books, 2011), 245; John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), 244. 474 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 7388.

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armed forces reduction program and announcing his intention to increase the Soviet defense budget by one-third – approximately equivalent to $3.4 billion. 475 But it was

Kennedy’s speech to the U.S. public on July 25, 1961, that was of greatest concern to

Khrushchev. In the speech, Kennedy stated firmly that West Berlin had “now become – as never before – the great testing place of Western courage and will, a focal point where our solemn commitments…and Soviet ambitions now meet in basic confrontation” and that the United States “cannot and will not permit the communists to drive us out of

Berlin, either gradually or by force.” 476 Kennedy proceeded to announce a series of measures being undertaken to improve U.S. military strength and nuclear readiness, including a reserve call-up, a significant increase in the alert status of the strategic bomber force, 477 and a request for more than $200 million for civil defense. 478 In making this speech, Kennedy was intending to send a clear signal of resolve to the Soviet

Union. 479

Khrushchev’s reaction was one of horror and disbelief; U.S. mobilization and defense preparations had clearly exceeded his expectations. The Soviet leader informed the U.S. Special Advisor on Arms Control and Disarmament, John McCloy, that

Kennedy’s speech amounted to a declaration of preliminary war against the Soviet Union and warned that if Western countries were considering the use of force over Berlin, they should think carefully about Soviet military superiority and its geographic proximity to

475 Kempe, Berlin 1961 , 305; Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 7424. 476 John F. Kennedy: "Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Berlin Crisis." 477 National Security Action Memorandum No. 62, FRUS , 1961-63 Vol. XIV, Berlin Crisis, 1961-62 , Document 80. Strategic Air Command was placed at a 50 percent rate of ground alert by the end of July 1961, and by late summer 12 B-52s were on constant airborne alert. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail , 103; Trachtenberg, History and Strategy , 218. 478 Betts, Nuclear Blackmail , 103. 479 Ibid.

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the region.480 More importantly, Khrushchev appeared to interpret this speech – and especially U.S. military preparations – as signaling a potential shift in U.S. foreign policy.

Up until this point, the Soviet leader had been operating upon the assumption that the

United States did not want war with the Soviet Union over Berlin – a view that flowed from Khrushchev’s personal faith in the restraining effect of nuclear weapons on great power conflict. 481 His concern with the destructive power of these new weapons and their potential to eliminate entire cities greatly worried the Soviet leader and led him to conclude that war between the superpowers was politically meaningless. 482 According to

Dobrynin, “Khrushchev did not seem to believe a major conflict with the United States was possible…though he assumed there would be occasional tensions over Germany.” 483

Even limited war was ruled out because of the risk of escalation to the nuclear level once hostilities were initiated.484 Indeed it was due to fears of escalation and the devastating effects of any nuclear exchange that Khrushchev believed that possessing only a few nuclear weapons was sufficient to achieve parity with the United States. 485 “Missiles are not cucumbers,” he quipped, “one cannot eat them and one does not require more than certain number in order to ward off an attack.” 486

480 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 7648. 481 After witnessing the first Soviet thermonuclear test in 1953, Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, noted that his father “came home depressed and could not calm down for days.” Khrushchev’s shock was again evident when he commented to an Egyptian journalist that after learning all the facts about nuclear power he “could not sleep for days.” Quoted in Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 126. 482 Vladislov Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 189, 193. 483 Dobrynin, In Confidence , 52. 484 Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War , 259. 485 Frank Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 68. See also Sergei Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev , Vol. 2 (Philadelphia, PA: Penn State University Press, 2006), 520. 486 Quoted in Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, digital location 4901.

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At the Geneva summit in 1955, Khrushchev learned that Eisenhower and Dulles shared his misgivings about the military utility of nuclear weapons. From talking with the

American leaders he believed that the United States wished to intimidate the Soviets, but within the limits dictated by the new nuclear age. 487 Khrushchev felt that “as a war veteran,” Eisenhower would not allow confrontation between the two powers to get out of hand. 488 According to his own recollections, Khrushchev returned from this meeting encouraged by the belief “that our enemies probably feared us as much as we feared them.” 489 In a conversation with Special Assistant Harold Stassen in 1956, Khrushchev agreed with Eisenhower’s previous comments that a war would be extremely dangerous for both the United States and the Soviet Union, and said “that he knew there was only a small percentage of madmen in both countries who think otherwise. Nearly everyone knew that war was unacceptable and that co-existence was elementary.” 490 Because war was unacceptable, Khrushchev believed that Dulles’ policy of “massive retaliation” was a bluff. In reality, the U.S. Secretary of State “knew where the brink was [that the

Americans] should not overstep, and behaved in a prudent way, taking our resistance into account and seeing that, with sheer force and extortion, they could not get what they wanted.” 491

Interestingly, it is precisely because of this perceived shared belief in the inutility of nuclear force for military purposes that Khrushchev felt able wield nuclear weapons as a political tool to gain bargaining leverage over the West. Indeed, with similarly minded

487 Indeed, Eisenhower had warned that “there are really no limits that can be set to the use of force” and that pressure to escalate to the nuclear level once a military conflict was initiated would be difficult to resist. Quoted in Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft , 65. 488 Dobrynin, In Confidence , 38. 489 Nikita S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston, MA: Little Brown and Company, 1970), 400. 490 Telegram From the Embassy in the United Kingdom to the Department of State, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. X, Regulation of Armaments, Atomic Energy , Document 136. 491 Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War , 190.

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leaders in Washington, Khrushchev believed there was a margin of safety – and therefore, a window of opportunity – in nuclear brinksmanship.492 The events of the Suez Crisis served to confirm his belief in the power of nuclear coercion. In 1956, Khrushchev threatened Great Britain and France with a nuclear strike to end their intervention in

Egypt. Though it is much more likely that London and Paris withdrew their forces in response to U.S. pressure rather than that of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev nevertheless believed that his threat was effective. 493 Nuclear brinksmanship was employed again in

1958 when the Soviets demanded that Western forces convert Berlin into a “free city” within six months. When Sergei asked his father what reaction he expected from the

United States in response to the ultimatum and whether war was likely, Khrushchev responded “Of course not! No-one would want a war over Berlin.” 494 In a note written just prior to the crisis, Khrushchev claimed that “only madmen can go to the length of unleashing another world war over the preservation of the privileges of the occupationists in West Berlin.” 495 He simply wanted to scare the Western powers into negotiations.

Thus when Khrushchev delivered his ultimatum to Kennedy in June 1961, he did so with the belief that the United States did not want to engage in a great power war over

Berlin. As Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin made clear in his memoirs, “The possibility of military confrontation” in 1961, was “absolutely excluded from our plans.” 496 One of Kennedy’s closest assistants confirmed his belief that Khrushchev “did not believe that [the U.S. president] would start a nuclear war over traffic controls on the

492 Zubok, A Failed Empire , 129. 493 Taubman, Khrushchev , 359-60. 494 Quoted in Zubok, A Failed Empire , 133. 495 Quoted in Holloway, “Nuclear Weapons and the Escalation of the Cold War,” 390. 496 Quoted in Trachtenberg, “Audience Costs,” 28.

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autobahn .” 497 After delivering his aide-mémoire, moreover, Khrushchev appeared pleased with the effect of the ultimatum on Kennedy, observing that the U.S. president seemed “not only anxious, but deeply upset.” 498 He thought that Kennedy was a

“reasonable man” interested “in avoiding conflict with the Soviet Union,” and that there were clear limits to the extent of U.S. foreign policy interests in Europe. 499

Kennedy’s initial response to the Soviet demands, however, threatened to undermine Khrushchev’s assessment of the two leaders’ mutual belief in the impossibility of great power war. 500 The increased alert levels and increased investment in civil defense in particular were perceived as costly signals of U.S. intent, and indicated to Khrushchev that the U.S. government thought nuclear war was not only possible, but also winnable. Khrushchev’s fear was evident in his speeches of August 7 and August 11,

1961, when he called for an easing of tensions. Appearing on television on August 7,

1961, Khrushchev appealed directly to the reason of the U.S. government: “let us nor create a war psychosis, let us clear the atmosphere, let us rely on reason and not on the power of thermonuclear weapons.” In a sharp reversal of policy Khrushchev added that he did not “intend to infringe upon any lawful interests of the Western Powers. Any barring of access to West Berlin, any blockade of West Berlin, is entirely out of the question.” 501 Finally, he argued, “if the U.S. leaders appreciate the nature of modern war involving the use of thermonuclear weapons, then why do they inflame the atmosphere as

President Kennedy did in his speech?” 502

497 Quoted in Betts, Nuclear Blackmail , 93. 498 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 7388. 499 Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War , 248. 500 Trachtenberg, History and Strategy , 218-219; Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 7842. 501 Quoted in Trachtenberg, History and Strategy , 219. 502 Quoted in Betts, Nuclear Blackmail , 107.

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Just a few days later, on August 11, Khrushchev continued to emphasize the need to ease tensions between the United States and Soviet Union. It was “madness” to threaten war, he argued, since “war hysteria could lead to nothing good. There must be a sense of proportion and military passions must not be fanned.” Highlighting his fear of escalation, Khrushchev explained further:

“that if the feelings are let loose and they predominate over reason, then the flywheel of war preparations can start revolving at a high speed. Even when reason prompts that a brake be put on, the flywheel of war preparations may have acquired such speed and momentum that even those who had set it revolving will be unable to stop it.” 503 Thus, Kennedy’s initial response to Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum elicited fear from Khrushchev and created uncertainty as to the extent of U.S. interests in Europe.

Kennedy had signaled the U.S. government’s willingness to devote significant resources to pursuing its objectives on the continent, but it was not yet clear how extensive those objectives were.

In fact it was the July 25 speech and the uncertainty that it generated within

Moscow that served to increase Khrushchev’s commitment to resolving the East German problem before it was too late. 504 Under increasing pressure from the East German

Leader Walter Ulbricht to stem the flow of refugees to West Berlin, 505 and observing little positive movement on the German question in Washington D.C., 506 the Soviet leader decided to take matters into his own hands. With the consent of Ulbricht,

503 Quoted in Trachtenberg, History and Strategy , 219. 504 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 7648. 505 The flow of refugees from East to West Germany was 100,000 in the first half of 1961, and had reached a monthly high of 30,000 by July of that year. Donald A. Carter, “The U.S. Military Response to the 1960- 1962 Berlin Wall,” (Washington, D.C.: The U.S. Army Center for Military History, date unknown), 3, http://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/cold-war/1961-berlin-crisis/overview/us-military- response.pdf (accessed September 16, 2015). 506 The United States had continued to stand firm and refused to accept the terms of the Berlin ultimatum.

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construction began on a wall to officially separate East and West Berlin on August 13,

1961. Once built, this wall would provide Khrushchev with a substitute for a unilateral treaty that might risk costly countermeasures, whilst also satisfying Ulbricht’s demands.

The U.S. response to the Berlin Wall proved highly informative for Khrushchev.

For although Washington had previously signaled that Khrushchev was free to take actions in Soviet territory so long as they did not interfere with Western access to Berlin, the provocative nature of the Wall combined with recent U.S. military preparations created significant uncertainty about Washington’s response. 507 Khrushchev’s concern is evident in the comments that he made to fellow Warsaw Pact members just prior to the

Wall’s construction, where he acknowledged that, “no one can give a guarantee that there will be no war,” and that the bloc should strengthen its defense and military forces in preparation. 508

Much to the Soviet leader’s relief, however, Kennedy, responded quite calmly. 509

He labeled the edifice “illegal, immoral, and inhumane, but not a cause for war.” 510

Under pressure from West Germany to take some sort of action to signal disapproval, the

U.S. government sent Vice President Johnson and retired General Lucius D. Clay on a morale-building trip and reinforced the West German garrison with 1,500 additional troops. On August 22, West German forces announced the creation of a buffer zone of

100 meters on each side of the Wall and ordered civilians to stay away from the area. 511

507 Kempe, Berlin 1961, 318. Looking back on events, Khrushchev commented that, “war might have broken out.” Quoted in Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 7812. 508 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 7728. 509 According to his son, Sergei, Khrushchev “sighed with relief” when he realized that the Americans were not going to interfere with the construction of the Wall. Sergei Khrushchev, Creation of a Superpower (Philadelphia, PA: Penn State University Press, 2000), 457. 510 Ibid., digital location 7792. 511 ICB Case Summary, “Berlin Wall,” http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/icb/dataviewer/ (accessed January 15, 2016).

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Khrushchev was not alarmed by this response, however, and reasoned quite rationally that “the United States and its Western Allies had no choice but to take certain unilateral steps” to protect their interests. More telling was the lack of escalation on the part of the

United States, and the reluctance to forcibly remove the Wall once erected. 512 Moreover, not only did the Western powers allow the Wall to remain standing, but also the Allied leaders appeared unwilling to penalize the Soviets with sanctions for undertaking this action – a response for which Khrushchev had prepared. 513 Khrushchev’s gamble thus appeared to have paid off, and in the course of events the United States revealed the limits of its interests in Berlin. With an alternative solution to the East German issue now available, Khrushchev was able to drop the Berlin ultimatum entirely. 514

Similarly telling of U.S. interests in Europe was Washington’s response to the standoff that arose at Checkpoint Charlie in October 1961. The crisis began on October

22, 1961, when a senior American diplomat in West Berlin – Allen Lightner – attempted to cross the border into East Berlin to attend the opera. The East German officers demanded that Lightner show identification, and when he refused at the advice of U.S.

General Lucius Clay, the German Officers prevented his passage through the checkpoint.

East German officials subsequently announced that all civilians crossing into East Berlin must show ID cards. The U.S. government responded by authorizing a series of daily

512 In fact evidence now suggests that the Berlin Wall was perceived as somewhat of a relief to Kennedy given its ability to contain the Berlin issue and resolve the East German refugee problem. See Gregory M. Tomlin, Murrow’s Cold War: Public Diplomacy for the Kennedy Administration (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 98. 513 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 7666, 7812, 7987. Minster of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromkyo also reported that Secretary of State Rusk had said nothing critical about the Berlin Wall during their meeting on September 21, 1961. 514 Ibid., digital location 7852, 7905.

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probes, providing Western civilians with U.S. armed escorts. U.S. M48 tanks were also positioned on the Western side of the checkpoint for the duration of each episode. 515

The crisis escalated on October 27, 1961, when ten Soviet tanks rolled down the

Friedrichstrasse and positioned themselves at Checkpoint Charlie in anticipation of the daily armed probe. 516 A tense standoff between U.S. and Soviet tanks ensued for the next

17 hours whilst Khrushchev and Kennedy scrambled to keep the crisis contained. In the end Kennedy quietly requested that Khrushchev remove Soviet tanks in the context of “a mutual disengagement.” 517 Khrushchev ordered the withdrawal of Soviet troops followed quickly thereafter by a U.S. retreat. While there is no record of the conversation that took place between the leaders nor of the meeting that apparently took place between Bobby

Kennedy and Soviet spy, Georgi Bolshakov, the U.S. ceased its military escorts of civilians and U.S. officers stopped provoking East German authorities at the border. 518 A few days later, Khrushchev claimed that he “knew Kennedy was looking for a way to back down” and that was why the Soviet leader decided to pull back first. 519 The crisis ended peacefully and provided further evidence to Khrushchev of Washington’s desire to avoid direct conflict with Moscow and risk further escalation. 520

In sum, the events of summer 1961, while initially worrisome, ultimately served to reinforce Khrushchev’s belief that the United States held strong status quo interests vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The U.S. refusal to concede to Khrushchev’s Berlin

515 Ibid., digital location 8152-8196. 516 Ibid. 517 George Schild, “The Berlin Crisis,” in Mark J. White (ed.), Kennedy: The New Frontier Revisited (London: MacMillan Press, 1998), 118. 518 Kempe, Berlin 1961 , 479. 519 Quoted in Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 8203. See also Khrushchev, The Creation of a Superpower , 466. 520 Zubok, A Failed Empire, 142. According to Zubok, “Kennedy’s behavior confirmed in Khrushchev’s mind that the Americans would not start a war over West Berlin.”

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ultimatum combined with the defense budget increase, troop mobilizations, and civil defense preparations indicated that Washington was willing to devote significant resources to protecting its interests in Europe. Indeed, the United States continued to reinforce its military position in Europe throughout the latter half of 1961, with 40,000 troops arriving in France in mid-October and Kennedy deploying an additional armored cavalry regiment to Germany in mid-November. 521 Despite these military movements, however, the U.S. political position on Berlin had not changed significantly and the U.S. response to the Berlin Wall, as well as other smaller incidents including Checkpoint

Charlie, appeared to confirm Khrushchev’s belief that Washington – like Moscow – wanted to avoid direct conflict with the Soviet Union out of fear of escalation to total war.

In particular, these events revealed that the United States was unwilling to risk confrontation to revise a situation once it had changed, and that nuclear weapons continued to exert a constraining effect on superpower conflict.522

Table 4.1 Khrushchev’s Perception of U.S. Resolve (Berlin Crisis 1961)523 Costs Yes No Target State Perception Military Alerts/Mobilization X Signal of Resolve Nuclear Alerts X Signal of Resolve Military Ground Invasion (denial strategy) X N/A Air Strikes (punishment strategy) X N/A Allies to Share Burden X N/A (U.S. key focal point) Economic Sanctions X Signal of Restraint Financial Allies to Share Burden X N/A (U.S. key focal point) UN Authorization X N/A Public Opinion in Favor of Political X N/A Action Political Elite in Favor of Action X Signal of Resolve

521 Carter, “The U.S. Military Response to the 1960-1962 Berlin Wall,” 8. 522 Trachtenberg, History and Strategy , 223. 523 N/A indicates not relevant to the crisis or that there is no documentary evidence of the indicator being considered informative by Khrushchev.

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As a result, and based on the evidence available, I code the content of

Khrushchev’s beliefs about the United States prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis as follows:

1) Khrushchev believed that the United States had status quo foreign policy objectives vis-à-vis the Soviet Union; and 2) Khrushchev believed that the United States was willing to devote significant resources to achieving these ends. According to the theory developed in Chapter 2, when a target state leader believes that an adversary has status quo foreign policy objectives and is willing to devote significant resources to achieving these ends, future coercive threats will be interpreted in accordance with these prior beliefs. In particular, signals intended to convey threat credibility, such as public and private statements of resolve as well as troop movements, will be weighed heavily by a target state leader and perceived as genuine indicators of intent to act. In such cases, threats to preserve the status quo will be assessed as credible and the target will likely acquiesce. This leads to the following case-specific prediction regarding Premier

Khrushchev’s future assessments of U.S. threat credibility:

H1 Soviet Union : Based on his experiences in 1961 during the Berlin Crisis, Khrushchev will assess U.S. threats to defend the status quo as credible.

However, the cognitive-institutional theory also predicts that coercive threats that exceed the costs a target state believes an adversary is willing to absorb will be assessed as incredible by target state leaders. In these cases, signals indicating restraint or lack of credibility, such as public and international opposition as well as private disclosures, will be highlighted and seized upon, while costly signals of intent to follow through on more expansive coercive threats, such as troop movements and public statements to use force, will be reinterpreted or ignored. This generates the second Soviet-specific hypothesis:

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H2 Soviet Union : U.S. coercive threats that exceed the costs Khrushchev believes the United States is willing to absorb to achieve its objectives will be assessed as incredible.

5. THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS OF 1962 5.1 Context to the Crisis Evidence suggests that Khrushchev’s belief in U.S. status quo interests and a desire to avoid direct conflict with the Soviet Union shaped the broader context within which the Soviet leader deployed missiles to Cuba. The reason for the deployment is the subject of a long-standing debate among scholars of the Cold War, although most agree that primary motivations included some combination of deterring a U.S. attack on Cuba, shoring up the strategic balance in the wake of U.S. growing superiority, 524 and providing

Khrushchev with a bargaining chip over Berlin. 525 More interesting for the purpose of this project, however, is the way in which Khrushchev chose to deploy the missiles – namely, in secret. Based on his experience of the Berlin Crisis, Khrushchev appeared to be under no illusion that the United States would act to prevent a change in the status quo, and that the U.S. government would try to deter a deployment of the missiles if it became aware of such activity prior to the fact. According to Sergei Khrushchev, his “father realized that the United States would do everything possible to prevent the open deployment of missiles in Cuba. The winner would be the one who was better at concealing and deceiving.” 526

524 James M. Goldgeier, Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy: Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev (Baltimore MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 53. These missiles would represent a major augmentation of Soviet strategic power. As of mid-1962, the Soviets had only about twenty strategic rocket launchers with missiles that could reach the United States and they were all intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) located in the USSR. 525 James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink (Oxford, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 344 526 Khrushchev, The Creation of a Superpower , 484.

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If the status quo changed before the U.S. government could do anything about it, however, Khrushchev expected Kennedy to accept the new situation in line with his experience during the Berlin Crisis, and the U.S. response to the Berlin Wall in particular.527 In a conversation with the future Soviet Ambassador to Cuba, Aleksandr

Alekseev, in May 1962, Khrushchev apparently stated that faced with a fait accompli of secretly installed missiles, “pragmatic Americans would not take any irrational risks and would follow the Soviet lead and simply learn to live with the nuclear threat.” 528 Since compelling the Soviets to remove the missiles would require a direct confrontation with

Moscow that raised the specter of nuclear war, Khrushchev assessed the risk of a U.S. response as low. 529 The Soviet leader expressed this exact sentiment in January 1962 when he told his Presidium colleagues that “the risk that we are taking is justified; if we look at it in terms of a percentage, there is more than a 95% probability that there will be no war.” 530 He later recalled his thinking: “if we installed the missiles secretly and then the United States discovered the missiles after they were poised and ready to strike, the

Americans would think twice before trying to liquidate our installations by military means” 531

Khrushchev’s belief in the limits of U.S. resolve and the ultimate success of his plan shaped his behavior in important ways in the lead-up to the crisis. During the

527 Russell J. Leng, Bargaining and Learning in Recurring Crises (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 113; Goldgeier, Leadership and Soviet Foreign Policy , 74. See also, Arnold L. Horelick, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Analysis of Soviet Calculations and Behavior,” World Politics 16, 3 (1964): 363- 389. 528 Quoted in James W. Wirtz, “Organizing for Crisis Intelligence: Lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis,” in James G. Blight and David A. Welch (eds.), Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Abingdon, Oxon: Frank Cass Publishers, 1998), 129 529 Vladislav M. Zubok and Hope M. Harrison, “The Nuclear Education of Nikita Khrushchev,” in John Lewis Gaddis et al. (eds.), Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 158. 530 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , 356. 531 Taubman, Khrushchev, 534.

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summer of 1962 Khrushchev made his views on the possibility of conflict clear when he stated that, “every idiot can start a war, but it is impossible to win this war … the missiles have one purpose – to scare, to restrain them so that they have appreciated this business…to give them back some of their own medicine.” 532 According to Sergei

Khrushchev, his father planned to reveal the news of the missile installments to Kennedy on November 20, after the October Revolution holidays in the Soviet Union. At this point his aim was “to persuade Kennedy that our objectives were exclusively defensive and that we were trying to protect a weak republic from attack…[Khrushchev] expected the conversation to be difficult, but he did not believe that there was any possibility of armed conflict over Cuba.” 533 Given these beliefs prior to the onset of the crisis, the interesting question to ask is when – and why – did Khrushchev update his threat assessment?

5.2 Khrushchev’s Threat Assessment In August 1962, Kennedy received news of Soviet shipments to Cuba and evidence of new missile sites. To address concerns around the Soviet activities, the U.S. president issued a series of public warnings to Premier Khrushchev. On September 4,

Kennedy advised Khrushchev that if “offensive missiles” were found in Cuba “the gravest issues would arise.” 534 Just a few days later the U.S. leader bolstered this threat by requesting authority to call up 150,000 reservists. 535 On September 13, Kennedy again warned Khrushchev that should Cuba “become an offensive military base of significant capacity for the Soviet Union, then this country will do whatever must be done to protect

532 Quoted in Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 182. 533 Khrushchev, The Creation of a Superpower , 542. 534 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 9251. 535 Ibid.

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its own security and that of its allies.” 536 At this point, Khrushchev could have heeded these threats and halted the operation since no ground-to-ground missiles or warheads had yet arrived in Cuba. In fact this second, clear deterrent threat from the United States on September 13 was issued before the earliest initiation date for site construction and deployment activity in Cuba – estimated between September 15 and 20. Khrushchev thus had two opportunities to reconsider his plan in light of explicit U.S. warnings. 537

It appears, however, that these public statements were interpreted in accordance with Khrushchev’s prior beliefs regarding U.S. foreign policy interests. Again,

Khrushchev was under no illusion that the United States would attempt to prevent the deployment of missiles if they knew about the plan prior to it going into effect, but he believed that once it was underway – and certainly once missiles were deployed – that the costs of undertaking action against the Soviet Union would exceed U.S. interests.

Moreover, based on his previous experience, Khrushchev believed that even if the

Americans discovered Soviet missiles before they were fully operational, that the two countries would be able to find a diplomatic solution to the problem as they had in the past. 538

This interpretation of events explains why Kennedy’s speeches solidified

Khrushchev’s determination to deploy missiles to Cuba as soon as possible. The Soviet leader needed to quickly raise the costs of U.S. action to such heights that removal of the missiles was too risky to undertake. The expedited delivery resulted in the arrival of the

536 Lester. H. Brune, The Cuban American Missile Crisis of October 1962 (California, CA: Regina Books, 1996), 45. 537 Horelick, “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” 387. 538 Taubman, Khrushchev , 552.

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medium-range missiles two weeks earlier than initially planned. 539 By mid-October, the

Soviets had successfully sent 36 medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) to Cuba with their nuclear warheads, 100 nuclear warheads for the coastal defense missiles, short- range rockets, as well as IL-28 bombers. The nuclear warheads to be carried on the

IRBMs were also in Cuba, although the missiles themselves were still at sea. 540 In response to the September speeches, Khrushchev requested that the Ministry of Defense deploy 12 tactical nuclear weapons for the Soviet motorized brigades already in Cuba.

These weapons were scheduled to ship on Indigirka , which was designated to carry the warheads for the MRBMs. 541 The decision to send the Luna short-range missiles meant that the arrival of the ballistics missiles would be delayed, and that the IRBMs would arrive in Cuba sometime between November 3 and November 5. 542 Finally, to divert

Kennedy’s attention, Khrushchev went out of his way to reassure the Americans that the

Soviet Union was undertaking no such action in Cuba. 543

The fact that the United States presented a credible deterrent threat to Khrushchev is also evidenced in the lengths to which the Soviet premier went to keep the missile deployment secret in September and October of 1961. In response to Khrushchev’s request for greater security for the nuclear warhead shipment, the Soviet Navy presented a plan that involved a convoy of seven Golf missile submarines and four Foxtrot torpedo submarines, two cruisers, two cruise missile ships, two destroyers, and a host of auxiliary ships. Khrushchev was concerned, however, that the U.S. government would detect the

539 Ibid. , 553-54. 540 Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (London: W. W. Norton, 2001), 430. 541 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 9273 542 Ibid., digital location 9273. 543 Taubman, Khrushchev, 554.

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convoy, and so instructed the Chief of Navy, Malinovsky, to send only the four Foxtrot- class diesel. He also authorized the deployment of a single Zulu-class B-75 ballistic missile submarine to escort the Indigirka , which had left the Soviet Union on September

16. 544

Despite Kennedy’s early warnings, however, Khrushchev appeared shocked by the news of the president’s impending speech on October 22, 1962. 545 This shock can be attributed in part to his prior belief that the United States and Soviet Union would engage in diplomatic negotiations over the Cuban missiles, as they had approached similar conflicts of interest in the past. Gromyko and Kennedy had just met on October 18 to discuss the mounting crisis over Cuba and Gromyko had reported back to Khrushchev that while the United States remained concerned with Soviet activities, Kennedy had little intention to escalate the crisis or to invade Cuba.546 Khrushchev thus had little reason to expect a change in tack by the United States, and Kennedy’s decision to bypass negotiations and make a public announcement served to increase pressure on the Soviet leadership. 547

Khrushchev’s concern regarding Kennedy’s speech, however, also reflected his knowledge about the status of Soviet missiles in Cuba. As discussed in Section 4, the

Soviet leader believed that the United States was a strong, status quo power, and was

544 Digital location 9387, 9397. 545 May and Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes, 429. 546 “Kennedy said that, to make things completely clear on this issue, he would like to announce once more that the USA do not have any intentions to invade Cuba. Nevertheless, intensified armaments supplies to Cuba on the part of the Soviet Union, which began in July of the current year, have complicated the situation greatly and made it more dangerous.” “Cable from Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko on 18 October 1962 meeting with President Kennedy (excerpts),” October 20, 1962, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, AVP RF; copy obtained by NHK, provided to CWIHP, and on file at National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.; translation by Vladimir Zaemsky http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111911 (accessed January 16, 2016). 547 Zubok, A Failed Empire , 147.

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willing to devote significant resources to defending its interests, but also that the U.S. government would not accept the high costs of revising a situation once it had changed.

In deploying the missiles to Cuba secretly, then, Khrushchev was hoping to change the status quo before the U.S. government had time to react. At the time of Kennedy’s speech, however, Khrushchev was aware that the deployment of missiles was incomplete. Some of the nuclear-tipped missiles had reached Cuba and were operational, as were the tactical nuclear weapons and cruise missiles, but the missiles and warheads for the longer-range

IRBMs had not reached the island.548 Khrushchev acknowledged the predicament in his comments prior to Kennedy’s speech: “our problem is that we didn’t deploy everything we wanted to, and we didn’t publish the [Soviet-Cuba Mutual Defense] treaty.” 549 The

Soviet leader was worried that Kennedy had a window of opportunity in which to defend the status quo.

However, when the Kremlin finally received a copy of Kennedy’s speech just after 1:00am Soviet time,550 Khrushchev immediately interpreted it in a positive light. 551

As expected by the Soviet leader, the United States did not want to start a war over Cuba.

According to Sergei Khrushchev, his father’s reaction was one of relief rather than alarm, with the Soviet leader perceiving the quarantine of Cuba as “leaving a great deal of room for political maneuvering” and not as “an ultimatum or a direct threat of an attack against

Cuba.” 552 This was despite the fact that Kennedy had clearly stated his intention to

548 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 9524. 549 Ibid., 9545. 550 See Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba.” 551 The details of the U.S. threat have already been outlined, but for more detail see Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble , 246. 552 Troyanovsky, “The Making of Soviet Foreign Policy,” 236. Apparently upon hearing of the blockade, Khrushchev exclaimed, “We’ve saved Cuba!” Quoted in Taubman, Khrushchev, 562.

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reinforce the U.S. base in Guantanamo, evacuate all non-essential U.S. personnel, and to place additional military units on standby. 553

Khrushchev’s reading of Kennedy’s speech reveals the importance of the Soviet leader’s prior frame of mind and set of beliefs in filtering the information that he received.

The U.S. speech contained two key threats within it: a deterrent threat in the form of a naval blockade of Cuba to dissuade Khrushchev from sending any further missiles; and a compellent threat demanding the removal of missiles already on the island. 554

Khrushchev’s relaxed response to the speech provides the first indication that he believed the credibility of the U.S. deterrent threat and Kennedy’s intention to prevent the arrival of further weapons, but doubted the willingness of the U.S. government to forcibly compel the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.

The second indication, and perhaps the more telling, was Khrushchev’s behavior in the wake of Kennedy’s speech. First, in response to the U.S. demands, Khrushchev crafted a statement to convey a clear “determination to answer force with force and warn that [the Soviet Union] possessed a nuclear strike force no less powerful than the U.S. one.” 555 The letter to Kennedy also stated that the blockade was a violation of international law, and warned that Soviet ships would not respect the quarantine line – a

553 Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba.” 554 In the public speech, Kennedy stated that the U.S. unswerving objective “must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country, and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the Western Hemisphere.” He added a “call for the prompt dismantling and withdrawal of all offensive weapons in Cuba, under the supervision of UN observers, before the quarantine can be lifted.” See Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba.” In his private note to Khrushchev, he added that “I must tell you that the United States is determined that this threat to the security of this hemisphere be removed.” See Letter from President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev, FRUS, 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, Document 60. 555 Sergei Khrushchev, Creation of a Superpower (PA: Penn State Press, 2000), 559.

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statement that was later shown to be a bluff.556 The Soviet leader delivered a second letter to Castro, reassuring him that the Soviet Union had no intention of backing down. 557

Khrushchev certainly did not appear to see any reason for Kennedy’s speech to get in the way of him completing his missile sites in Cuba before the beginnings of the blockade.558

On the evening of October 23, Sergei recalls asking his father whether there would be war. Khrushchev responded confidently that “it’s one thing to threaten with nuclear weapons, quite another to use them.” 559 Troyanovsky confirmed that even after the U.S. threat and commitment to a naval blockade, a “war with the United States did not enter

[Khrushchev’s plans] under any circumstances.” 560

The perceived credibility of the U.S. deterrent threat was most apparent in

Khrushchev’s response to the U.S. naval blockade and the revisions that he made to the

Cuba plan. On October 22, thirty ships were heading towards Cuba. The Soviet leader quickly decided that the ships in the Atlantic were too far away to beat the blockade and should go no further, and those in the Mediterranean returned to their ports. 561 However the Aleksandrovsk , carrying a full cargo of nuclear warheads including as many as twenty-four nuclear warheads for the IRBMs and more for the land-based missiles was nearing Cuba, along with four additional Foxtrot submarines carrying nuclear-tipped torpedoes. Given the importance of the cargo, the decision was made to allow the

Aleksandrovsk to get to port as quickly as possible to beat the quarantine. After some

556 Letter from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, FRUS, 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy- Khrushchev Exchanges, Document 61. 557 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble , 248. 558 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble , 247. Sergei Khrushchev adds that “despite everything, Father thought that construction should continue in [Cuba]” before the situation became more difficult. Khrushchev, Creation of a Superpower , 562. See also Zubok, A Failed Empire, 147. 559 Khrushchev, Creation of a Superpower , 565. 560 Troyanovsky, “The Making of Soviet Foreign Policy,” 236-37. 561 Goldgeier, Leadership and Foreign Policy , 66.

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debate, Khrushchev decided to keep the submarines at a distance from Cuba, although the orders were not passed on to the Soviet Navy. The plan to establish a Soviet strategic missile capability in Cuba thus remained in place after Kennedy’s speech, 562 and

Khrushchev instructed work on the missile sites to carry on.563

On October 24, Khrushchev received Ambassador Dobrynin’s report outlining his meeting with Robert Kennedy and recounting the Attorney General’s flat statement that the United States intended to stop Soviet ships – a threat that it seems Khrushchev had already assessed as credible. 564 As expected, the U.S. blockade went into effect at 10am

EST on October 24 and Khrushchev ordered the ships carrying the IRBMs to halt, allowing only those carrying innocent cargo to sail ahead towards the quarantine. 565 By this time, he reasoned, all necessary weapons had arrived in Cuba, even if the IRBMs had not. The Aleksandrovsk managed to just beat the quarantine, while all of the MRBMs and warheads had reached Cuba already and were nearly operational. 566 With this knowledge in mind, Khrushchev sent another strong letter to Kennedy decrying the blockade as illegal and demanding that the United States back down. The Soviet leader advised that his “instructions to Soviet mariners are to observe strictly the universally accepted norms of navigation in international waters and not to retreat one step from them.” If the

American side violated these rules, moreover, “it must realize what responsibility will rest upon it in that case. Naturally we will not simply be bystanders with regard to

562 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble , 247. Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 9773. 563 Khrushchev, Taubman , 566; Khrushchev, Creation of a Superpower , 562. 564 Dobrynin reported Kennedy’s final statement: “I don’t know how all of this will end, for we intend to stop your ships.” “Telegram from Soviet Ambassador to the USA Dobrynin to the USSR MFA,” October 24, 1962, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, AVP RF, copy courtesy of NSA; translation by Mark H. Doctoroff, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111625 (accessed January 16, 2016). 565 May and Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes , 431. 566 Taubman, Khrushchev , 566; Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble , digital location 5820.

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piratical acts by American ships on the high seas. We will then be forced on our part to take the measures we consider necessary and adequate in order to protect our rights. We have everything necessary to do so.” 567 Thus, at this point in the crisis, Khrushchev was still not convinced that U.S. interests in Cuba were sufficient to risk war with the Soviet

Union and construction on the missile sites continued.568

Kennedy’s response to Khrushchev’s letter of October 24 disappointed the Soviet leader, however. The cable, received by Khrushchev just before noon on October 25, recounted recent events, restated the U.S. position, and expressed “regret” that the Soviet

Union “still did not appear to understand what it is that had moved [the United States] to this position.” Kennedy ended the letter with the “hope that [the Soviet] Government will take the necessary action to permit a restoration of the earlier situation.” 569 The letter clearly indicated to Khrushchev that the current situation was unsustainable, and that

Kennedy was not going to be satisfied with a Soviet military presence in Cuba. 570 The threat to remove the Soviet missiles by force was still not yet deemed credible, however, and Khrushchev continued to cling to his belief that the United States wished to avoid a direct conflict with the Soviet Union. This assessment was evident in Khrushchev’s continued hope for a diplomatic solution, a sentiment that he expressed to the Presidium that afternoon. During a meeting with his counsel he stated that the Kremlin should continue to “look around” for signs that Kennedy might yield and added that he did not expect a U.S. attack any time soon. Nevertheless, his concession that a “zone of peace” in

567 Letter from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, FRUS, 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy- Khrushchev Exchanges, Document 63. 568 Taubman, Khrushchev , 566. 569 Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in the Soviet Union, FRUS, 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, Document 64. 570 Khrushchev, The Creation of a Superpower , 580.

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the Caribbean was only possible through negotiation indicated that the U.S. determination to defend the status quo was highly credible. 571

Incoming news late on October 25, however, appeared to force a sudden change in Khrushchev’s assessment of U.S. resolve to remove the missiles from Cuba. At

10:00pm on October 24, the KGB had intercepted an order to put the U.S. Strategic Air

Command (SAC) on DEFCON 2 nuclear alert. 572 In fact SAC commander, Thomas

Powers, had dispatched an (intentionally) uncoded message to the Pentagon

“emphasizing the full strength of SAC’s alert force.” 573 Confirmation of this alert appeared to reach Khrushchev in the early hours of October 26. Since U.S. forces had not been mobilized to this level since the beginning of the Cold War, Khrushchev’s reaction was one of horror.

Compounding the effect of the SAC alert, however, was an additional stream of

Soviet intelligence indicating that the Americans were preparing their forces for an invasion of Cuba on October 27. 574 In the early morning of October 25, a Soviet intelligence agent had stopped by the National Press Club in Washington D.C. where the

Soviet barman had overheard New York Herald Tribune correspondent Warren Rogers discussing an imminent landing of U.S. Marines in Cuba. Military action, he had claimed, was set for the next day. 575 Georgi Kornienko, Dobrynin’s chief political advisor, set up a lunch with Rogers on October 25 to confirm the intelligence. At the lunch Rogers spoke openly, claiming that “the Kennedy Administration had already taken the principal

571 Quoted in Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble , digital location 5884. 572 Stern, The Week the World Stood Still , digital location 1664. 573 Betts, Nuclear Blackmail , 119. 574 The U.S. had assembled more than 150,000 troops in southeastern U.S. ports. Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight , digital location 4343. 575 Khrushchev, Creation of a Superpower , 583.

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political decision ‘to finish with Castro,” that military preparations were complete, and that “the attack on Cuba could begin at any moment.” 576 This intelligence was quickly relayed via cable to Moscow, in which Dobrynin added “there is information that an order has been issued to bring the armed forces into maximum battle readiness, including readiness to repulse nuclear attack.” 577 Additional reports of U.S. hospitals preparing to receive casualties provided further confirmation. 578

This news, in combination with the unprecedented level of nuclear alert, led

Khrushchev to believe that the threat of war was not only credible, but also imminent. 579

He had underestimated the extent of U.S. interests in the Caribbean and overestimated the

U.S. commitment to avoiding conflict with the Soviet Union. Deputy Foreign Minister

Vasily Kuznetsov later recalled that when Khrushchev received the news of the invasion

“he dropped a load in his pants.” 580 The Soviet leader called an urgent meeting of the

Presidium and solemnly declared that today “we have been warned that war could start.” 581 He continued to outline his proposal:

“Of course it is possible that the information was planted, but the risk is too great. America is gripped by a real frenzy and the military are thirsting for action. I therefore propose that we not involve U.S. missiles in Europe in the argument at this time. They’re not bothering anyone. We have to concentrate on the main point: if the United States, their president, pledges not the attack Cuba, we will withdraw our missiles, despite the unpleasantness. Otherwise the situation becomes too dangerous.”

576 Quoted in Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble , digital location 5923. 577 “Cable from Soviet ambassador to the US Dobrynin to USSR Foreign Ministry (1),” October 25, 1962, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Archive of Foreign Policy, Russian Federation (AVP RF), Moscow; copy obtained by NHK (Japanese Television), provided to CWIHP, and on file at National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.; translation by Vladimir Zaemsky. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111918 (accessed January 16, 2016). 578 Taubman, Khrushchev , 568. 579 Ibid. 580 Taubman, Khrushchev , 568. 581 Khrushchev, Creation of a Superpower , 584.

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Khrushchev quickly drafted a letter to Kennedy that conveyed the depth of his shock at the recent course of events. On the possibility of war between two nuclear powers, Khrushchev asked Kennedy, “do you really seriously think that Cuba can attack the United States and that even we together with Cuba can attack you from the territory of Cuba? Can you really think that way? How is it possible? We do not understand this.

Has something so new appeared in military strategy that one can think that it is possible to attack thus. I say precisely attack, and not destroy, since barbarians, people who have lost their sense, destroy.” And on the danger of escalation to nuclear war, he added further:

“we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.” 582

Khrushchev then outlined the terms of an agreement: he would remove the missiles in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba.583

Khrushchev’s change in attitude on October 27, however, demonstrates the strength of Khrushchev’s prior belief in the impossibility of war with the United States.

After resting for the night, Khrushchev had begun to reevaluate his emotional response to the news of a U.S. invasion and to think again about the credibility of the U.S. threat.

Importantly, new intelligence was arriving in Moscow about U.S. interest in a missile trade – the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Intelligence reports

582 Telegram From the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, FRUS , 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, Document 65. 583 Ibid.

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accorded, moreover, with a news article by American foreign policy pundit, Walter

Lippmann, who also advocated a missile swap to end the crisis. 584 These reports gave

Khrushchev pause and encouraged him to revisit his previous, alarmist assessment of U.S. intent. Indeed, the incoming news appeared to indicate that the Soviet leader’s initial evaluation of U.S. interests had actually been correct. 585 Regaining his confidence,

Khrushchev told the Presidium that he still did not think that Kennedy would risk war, for if the Americans had not attacked so far, then, to his mind “they are not ready to do it now.” 586 He then proposed drafting a new letter to Kennedy adding a further condition to the previous day’s agreement. The Soviet Union would remove the missiles from Cuba in exchange for the removal of America’s Jupiter missiles in Turkey. 587

Yet by the time the second letter had arrived at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, a series of additional events had finally convinced Khrushchev that he must resolve the crisis at once. On the morning of October 27 an Alaska-based U-2 spy plane on a routine mission had strayed into Soviet airspace causing Soviet interceptors and American fighters to scramble. While nothing eventuated from this minor incident, it quickly reemphasized the risk of unintended escalation to Khrushchev. On that same day,

Khrushchev received news that a Soviet commander in Cuba had shot down an American

U-2 plane without his authorization. 588 Apparently Castro had authorized Cuban antiaircraft forces to fire at any plane entering Cuban airspace without seeking prior approval from Moscow, and a Soviet general had followed Castro’s orders. Khrushchev

584 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, digital location 6243. 585 Khrushchev, Creation of a Superpower , 591-92; David A. Welch et al . “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” in Robert Art and Kelly Greenhill (eds.), The Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 203. 586 Taubman, Khrushchev , 569. 587 Letter from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, FRUS, 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy- Khrushchev Exchanges, Document 66. 588 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 9967.

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was furious, exclaiming “whose army is he in, the Soviet or the Cuban? If it’s the Soviet

Army, why does he allow himself to obey a foreign commander?” Sergei added that it was at this moment “that Father felt the situation slipping out of his control.” 589 This reckless act greatly concerned Khrushchev, although not quite as much as a letter that he received from the Cuban leader on October 27 advocating a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States. Convinced that an invasion was imminent, Castro had told the

Soviet Ambassador to Cuba that, “the situation is developing in such a way that it’s either we or they. If we want to avoid receiving the first strike, if an attack is inevitable, then wipe them off the face of the earth.” 590 In the cable itself, Castro stated that:

“If they initiate an attack on Cuba – a barbaric, illegal, and amoral act – then in those circumstances the moment would be right for considering the elimination of such a danger, claiming the lawful right to self-defense. However difficult and horrifying the decision may be, there is, I believe, no other recourse.” 591

Khrushchev was horrified by the cable and feared what actions Castro might take to further escalate the crisis.

The increased risk of accidental escalation was accompanied by a series of Soviet intelligence and open source news reports from within the United States documenting plans for an imminent invasion of Cuba. Marine detachments, the Air Force, and Army troops were apparently positioned in Florida and ready to mount an attack. 592 Khrushchev called a Presidium meeting to discuss the latest developments when news from

Ambassador Dobrynin arrived regarding his meeting with Robert Kennedy. According to

589 Khrushchev, Creation of a Superpower , 608. 590 Stern, The Week the World Stood Still , digital location 2056. 591 “Telegram from Fidel Castro to N. S. Khrushchev,” October 26, 1962, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Archive of Foreign Policy, Russian Federation (AVP RF), available at http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114501 (accessed January 20, 2016). 592 Khrushchev, Creation of a Superpower , 623.

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the report, Robert Kennedy was distressed and disturbed by the possibility of rapid escalation following the U-2 incident:

“Because of the plane that was shot down, there is now strong pressure on the president to give an order to respond with fire if fired upon when American reconnaissance planes are flying over Cuba…But if we start to fire in response – a chain reaction will quickly start that will be very hard to stop. The same thing in regard to the essence of the issue of the missile bases in Cuba. The USA government is determined to get rid of those bases – up to, in the extreme case, of bombing them, since, I repeat, they pose a great threat to the security of the USA. But in response to the bombing of these bases, in the course of which Soviet specialists might suffer, the Soviet government will undoubtedly respond with the same against us, somewhere in Europe. A real war will begin, in which millions of Americans and Russians will die. We want to avoid that any way we can…[but] the situation might get out of control, with irreversible consequences.” 593

The risk of escalation, exemplified first by the U.S. conventional and nuclear alerts and further exacerbated by events in Cuba, had forced Khrushchev to reevaluate his assessment of U.S. interests and to update his prior beliefs about the possibility of war.

Indeed the fear of uncontrolled escalation to general nuclear war appeared to dominate

Khrushchev’s thinking in the latter days of the crisis and ultimately compelled him to end the standoff with the United States.594 In his address to the Presidium just prior to drafting a response to Kennedy, Khrushchev noted that, “we found ourselves face to face with the danger of war and of nuclear catastrophe, with the possible result of destroying the human race. In order to save the world, we must retreat.” 595 On October 28, Khrushchev dispatched a letter agreeing to the U.S. terms of removing the Cuban missiles in exchange

593 “Cable, Ambassador Dobrynin to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Meeting with Robert Kennedy,” October 27, 1962, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Russian Foreign Ministry archives, translation from copy provided by NHK, in Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), appendix, 523-526, with minor revisions. available at http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116955 (accessed January 18, 2016). 594 Zubok, A Failed Empire , 148. 595 Quoted in Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, digital location 6470.

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for those in Turkey, and to keep the U.S. side of the agreement private. Khrushchev’s belief that the U.S. government would stop short of military action had been shaken to the core. War, it seems, was in fact possible in the nuclear age.

6. KHRUSHCHEV ’S UPDATING Khrushchev formed a set of beliefs about the extent of U.S. interests vis-à-vis the

Soviet Union during the course of 1961, and during the Berlin Crisis in particular.

Specifically, Khrushchev appeared to have concluded that the United States was willing to devote significant resources to defending the status quo, but was not willing to expend resources or assume the risk of a direct conflict with the Soviet Union in order to revise a situation once changed. Furthermore, these beliefs appeared to have influenced

Khrushchev’s behavior both in the lead-up to, and in the early stages of the crisis, shaping his reception of information and expectations of a diplomatic solution short of war.

From October 25 onwards, however, Khrushchev updated his beliefs and his expectations about the extent of U.S. resolve, and the likelihood of great power war. Why was this the case? In Chapter 2, I argue that to understand whether (and how) leaders update, we need to look more closely at the information environment around them. More specifically, we need to look beyond the leader to the institutional environment in which he or resides, and in particular to the interactions between leaders and their security apparatus prior to, and during crises.

6.1. Khrushchev’s Threat Environment and Prioritization The Soviet Union during the Khrushchev period (1953-64) is commonly coded as a “single party” regime due to the ruling power of Central Committee of the Soviet

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Communist Party. 596 This classification, however, combined with the expansive Soviet bureaucracy, belies the informal and personalistic nature of Soviet rule in the post-Stalin era. Stalin’s death marked the beginnings of a period of transition and flux in Soviet politics, and one characterized by relatively unrestrained competition among various bureaucratic interests. According to one scholar of Soviet politics, aside from a tacit agreement within the central political elite to rule out terror, “political power was fluid and unstable.” 597 In the absence of an all-powerful politician to constrain and curb the maneuverings of the political elite, Khrushchev carved out a powerful patronage network that saw him elected first as party General Secretary in 1953, and then Prime Minister in

1958. 598

As expected by the theory developed in Chapter 2, the personalistic and clientelist nature of the Soviet state increased the domestic threat to Khrushchev’s rule and one that he met head on during the course of his ascendancy to power. 599 In 1956, Khrushchev’s foreign policy towards Eastern Europe, proposed economic reforms, and de-Stalinization campaigns resulted in the formation of an “anti-party” group that pushed through a vote in the Presidium to oust Khrushchev from office. Khrushchev demanded that the issue be put to a vote in the Central Committee of the Communist Party where he knew he enjoyed strong support. The Central Committee rejected the Presidium’s decision and decided to expel Khrushchev’s chief opponents from the party. Khrushchev sidelined the

596 Geddes, “Authoritarian Breakdown,” Appendix. 597 Thomas F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia: Ideology and Industrial Organization, 1917-1921 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), 183. 598 Ibid. 599 Recall that according to Hypotheses 7, leaders in less institutionalized states will face more internal regime threats and be able to exert more direct influence over their institutional environments than leaders in more institutionalized states.

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main conspirators - Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich – to minor offices and moved to consolidate his power. 600

After the elimination of Khrushchev’s chief domestic opponents, the Soviet leader exercised relatively free reign in maintaining his leadership position. Official power was centralized in Khrushchev’s hands due to him holding the dual position of General

Secretary and Prime Minister. This provided him not only with the means to establish and maintain a large patronage network, but also the freedom to make substantial organizational changes as he saw fit. Similar to Stalin, Khrushchev also used institutional reorganizations and rotations to strengthen his personal position, and put in place reforms that shifted policy-making authority from resistant ministries to the more pliable party apparatus led by his allies. 601

In sum, Khrushchev’s position enabled him to exercise significant power over

Soviet institutions, and he used this power early in his tenure to eliminate domestic threats to his rule. Of course, this is not to say that domestic politics did not continue to concern Khrushchev during his time as Soviet premier. The Soviet security apparatus, including the widely known KGB, were tasked with monitoring the activities of the domestic population and ensuring that the Communist Party rule was being observed. 602

Similarly, many of Khrushchev’s policy priorities focused on domestic agricultural

600 Serigo Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Press, 2012), 24. For example, in October 1956 he removed Marshal Zhukov from the office of defense minister, because he feared Zhukov’s influence in the armed forces. See Glenn E. Curtis, ed. Russia: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1996), http://countrystudies.us/russia/ (accessed January 18, 2016). 601 Ibid.; John P. Willerton, Patronage and Politics in the USSR (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 33-34. 602 Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “Soviet Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Intelligence and National Security 13, 3 (1998), 65.

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reforms in the interest of boosting the Soviet economy and improving quality of life. 603

Nevertheless, Khrushchev’s rapid consolidation of power early in his time as Soviet leader served to stamp out a number of domestic political threats that might otherwise have dominated his time in office.

While removing challenges to his rule at home, Khrushchev faced an increasingly complex international threat environment. From the mid-1950s onwards, the Soviet leader faced a series of challenges in Eastern Europe, including the rise of a new communist movement in Yugoslavia in 1955, riots and the emergence of a new government in Poland in 1956, and a revolt in Hungary in 1956. To the east, China was growing restless under the leadership of Mao Zedong, who had embarked on his own nuclear weapons program marking the beginning of the end of the Sino-Soviet alliance.

The schism between China and the Soviet Union escalated post-1960 forcing communist countries around the world to choose between Moscow and Beijing. 604

However, despite these various troubles – some more significant than others – the

United States remained the key focal point of Soviet foreign policy during this period.

Indeed, the United States had been the Soviet Union’s chief geo-political rival since the end of the Second World War and this did not change under Khrushchev. 605 The Marxist-

Leninist ideology that drove Soviet foreign policy posited “an electable conflict” between the capitalist and socialist world. Since the United States not only led the capitalist bloc but was clearly the only great power to rival the Soviet Union, relations with Washington

603 Roy D. Laird, “Khrushchev’s Administrative Reforms in Agriculture: An Appraisal,” in Jerzy F. Karcz (ed.), Soviet and East European Agriculture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 29-51. 604 Curtis, Russia: A Country Study . 605 Stalin stated the “our main enemy is America” just before he died and had highlighted the United States as the Soviet Union’s chief threat. Quoted in Jonathan Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 176.

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were inevitably Moscow’s central concern for the large majority of the Cold War. 606 In

1956, Khrushchev famously declared to a group of Western diplomats, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side, we will bury you!” 607

Even the policy of “peaceful co-existence” that came to define Khrushchev’s approach towards Washington in the late 1950s was part of a longer-term strategy to avoid nuclear war with the United States, and to bolster the Soviet economy in order that it eventually supersede the successes of capitalism. The desire to accommodate the

United States in the short-term, however, was always in tension with Moscow’s need to demonstrate resolve for domestic political purposes and to reassure communist allies around the world. This became more important in lieu of events in the late 1950s and early 1960s that served to increase the U.S. threat to the Soviet Union and raised the risk of great power conflict. U.S. determination not to leave West Berlin, the growing power of NATO and talks of a nuclear-armed West Germany, all combined with growing U.S. strategic superiority outlined in the Gilpatric speech of October 1961, 608 constituted great threats to Khrushchev’s position as leader of the communist bloc. This threat grew greater still with the U.S. attempt to oust Khrushchev’s communist ally, Castro, at the

Bay of Pigs in 1961, and Kennedy’s speech of July 25, 1962, which was perceived initially as indicating increased U.S. resolve for war. 609

606 Raymond L. Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary During the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2015), xi. 607 John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 84. 608 On October 21 1961, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gilpatric gave a speech outlining how vast and how well protected America’s strategic nuclear forces were. In the speech, Gilpatric made explicit the number of U.S. bombers, submarines, carrier strike forces, and theater nuclear forces that favored the United States. The next day Rusk publicly denied Khrushchev’s claim that strategic parity existed between the two countries. See Trachtenberg, History and Strategy , 221; Betts, Nuclear Blackmail , 106. 609 Curtis, Russia: A Country Study . Indeed the fear of strategic inferiority and corresponding loss of bargaining leverage with the United States was a key motivator in the deployment of missiles to Cuba in 1962. To counter the growing power of the United States, Khrushchev came to rely more heavily on the

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In sum, while domestic politics continued to play a role in Khrushchev’s decision making during the late 1950s and early 1960s, there can be little doubt that Moscow’s relationship with Washington, and the growing U.S. threat to the communist bloc, weighed heavily on his mind. As a result of this threat assessment, and based on the theory developed in Chapter 2, we would expect the following regarding the orientation of the Soviet security apparatus:

H3 Soviet Union : Khrushchev’s belief that the United States posed at least equal to, if not more of a threat to his security than other internal or external threats will lead him to prioritize accordingly and devote domestic security resources towards addressing this external concern. 6.2. Institutionalization Unfortunately there is little direct evidence available to assess the precise portion of resources devoted by Khrushchev to assessing the U.S. threat during this period of time. Nonetheless, given the relatively constant threat posed by the United States during the 1950s, the heavy investment in establishing intelligence networks within the United

States and allied states in the early part of the decade, and the quantity of data available to

Khrushchev on U.S. behavior, it seems that Khrushchev’s foreign intelligence maintained its heavy focus on the United States and NATO during his time in office. 610 There is certainly no evidence that Khrushchev diverted foreign intelligence resources away from their focus on the United States in the course of this timeframe – something that

Khrushchev was capable of doing given his predominant position of power – nor is there

deterrent power of his nuclear arsenal. These weapons offered a cheaper alternative to conventional forces, which he proceeded to cut alongside conventional procurements. Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , 248. 610 Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence , 20.

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any evidence that Khrushchev attempted to make changes that reflected divergent priorities.611

As Raymond Garth attests, the United States was “seen by Soviet political leaders, and by the intelligence service [emphasis added], as the Soviet Union’s “Main Adversary”

(glavnyi protivnik ) throughout the Cold War,” and devoted resources to addressing the threat in accordance with that assessment. 612 In the latter years of the 1940s, when it became clear that the United States was to become a chief adversary of the Soviet Union,

Moscow mad a significant effort to improve its foreign intelligence assessments, and it established extensive access to NATO HQ and NATO member countries for the duration of the Cold War. The reports of secret NATO discussions revealed detailed analyses and decisions relating to a wide range of issues. 613 From 1948 onwards, Moscow devoted a large amount of resources to establishing espionage rings targeting the United States and its allies. In 1951, the Committee on Information (KI) – a short-lived combination of the foreign intelligence arm of the Minister of State Security (MGB, and from 1954 the

KGB), the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense (GRU), and the

Internal Information Department Central Committee (OMI) – declared the United States its main adversary and emphasized that intelligence “on U.S. capabilities, intentions, and actions would be the fundamental task of foreign intelligence work” – a designation that remained in place up until 1990. 614

611 Indeed, Khrushchev’s powerful position enabled him to significantly restructure the domestic economic sector from 1956. For more detail see Nataliya Kibita, Soviet Economic Management Under Khrushchev (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 28-29, 31. 612 Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence , ix; Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbors , 176. 613 Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence , 31. 614 Ibid., 15.

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This external focus led to a large quantity of information from various sources being produced for the Politburo leadership. In fact, according to Andrew and

Gordievsky, Soviet foreign intelligence on the United States was superior to that available to the West in the early decades of the Cold War. 615 By 1956, the Soviets had apparently bugged the U.S. Embassy in Moscow so thoroughly “that the Kremlin could make copies of virtually every telegraphic message it sent or received.” 616 This intelligence proved crucial in determining U.S. policy towards its allies during the Suez

Crisis of 1956. Stolen messages from the U.S. Embassy confirmed that the United States was not willing to risk war over the canal and would not support Britain and French calls for a military intervention. 617

In addition to focusing domestic agency resources on the United States, the

Soviets had developed a large network of human intelligence sources in Washington reporting back to Moscow on a daily basis. In the late 1950s Khrushchev called for

“greater attention” to the recruitment of U.S. agents with “access to encrypted and other secret correspondence.” In 1957 this paid off when two young NSA officers decided to flee to Moscow and share top-secret American intelligence priorities and working practices with the Soviets. 618

By 1962, Aleksandr Feklisov – the chief of the KBG station in Washington D.C. during the Cuban Missile Crisis – had also developed extensive contacts. With the help of

Anatoli Gorsky – a TASS correspondent who likely double-hatted as a Soviet spy –

Feklisov had developed valuable journalistic contacts as well as being able to extract

615 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1992), 469. 616 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 1807. 617 Ibid. 618 Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbors , 236.

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timely information from Washington’s foreign diplomatic community. The KGB had regular contacts in the State Department, and an agent was positioned in the halls of U.S.

Congress to pick up useful information and report back to Moscow. 619 In addition to establishing an extensive espionage network targeting the United States, the Soviet

Embassies were also tasked with providing reports on the United States and the international environment more generally. 620 Finally, Soviet leaders received daily foreign press reviews compiled by the Soviet news agency (TASS) during the Stalin and

Khrushchev eras, and Pravda journalists wrote letters back to Moscow with their observations and views on political developments overseas. 621

In short, while we lack direct evidence demonstrating the continued predominance of the United States in the intelligence activities of the Soviet state, indirect evidence suggests that resources had been, and continued to be, focused on understanding U.S. intentions and behavior during the Khrushchev era. This leads to the following expectation regarding information availability during the Cuban Missile Crisis:

H4 Soviet Union : Khrushchev’s continued prioritization of the U.S. security threat and corresponding orientation of the Soviet security apparatus externally will increase the likelihood of new information arising during the course of future crises with the United States.

619 Ibid., 67, 69. Andrew and Gordievsky note that the KGB office in Washington played a key role in helping to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis. See Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB , 470. 620 Ibid., 16. 621 Sergio A. Mikoyan, “Eroding the Soviet “Culture of Secrecy”: Western Winds Behind Kremlin Walls,” Center for the Study of Intelligence, April 2007, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of- intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/fall_winter_2001/article05.html (accessed January 16, 2016).

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information environment and subsequent threat assessment. More specifically, in cases where security resources – and especially intelligence agencies – are focused externally on the adversary in question, I argue that they will be more capable of: 1) receiving information; 2) providing a sound interpretation of that information if detected; and/or 3) making that information available to the leader. In order to determine whether threat prioritization and institutionalization had an effect on Khrushchev’s threat assessment in these ways, I ask the following questions: 1) Is the Soviet intelligence community detecting the signals being sent by the adversary? 2) If so, how is the intelligence community interpreting this information? Does it have a nuanced understanding of the adversary? Or is it simply collecting raw data? And, 3) is this information being passed along to the key decision makers, and Premier Khrushchev specifically.

First, evidence suggests that the Soviet intelligence agencies detected many signals issued by the United States, and moreover had access to even more detailed indicators of intent as a result of extensive espionage activity. Prior to the Cuban Missile

Crisis, KGB foreign intelligence reported quite extensively on events in 1960 and 1961 providing a stream of documents on NATO planning, Western position papers on the

May 1960 Paris summit (subsequently cancelled), and diplomatic exchanges between the

United States and its allies on Berlin and Germany. 622 In addition, Khrushchev was provided with concrete intelligence on NATO military planning and contingencies during the Berlin Crisis, including the possibility of Western sanctions being placed on the

Soviet Union as a result of the ultimatum. Letters from Kennedy to leaders in Europe and follow-up instructions by Secretary of State Rusk were intercepted, and intelligence received in the build up to Checkpoint Charlie led Khrushchev to perceive the United

622 Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence , 25.

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States as a posing a serious threat. 623 In September 1961, Soviet military intelligence had observed tanks equipped with bulldozer attachments demolishing a replica of the Berlin

Wall in the German forests. Despite this activity being directed by a rogue U.S. general,

Lucius Clay, without the authorization of Washington, Khrushchev was alerted to these activities and anticipated U.S. aggression at the Wall. 624

Soviet intelligence had its limits, of course, and a number of Soviet specialists are particularly critical of the lack of intelligence analysis versus reporting that the KGB and

GRU undertook during the Cold War. Garthoff argues, for example, that despite the steady stream of documents and intelligence in 1960, there was little analysis or information collected on high-level political decision making in Washington, and that the

KGB lacked high-quality sources of political intelligence on the United States. 625 The

Soviet intelligence agencies have also been criticized for not having known that the U.S. government had detected the Soviet missiles, or being able to draw firm conclusions regarding the likelihood of an attack if they were discovered. 626 Fursenko and Naftali add that Khrushchev had no prior warning of Kennedy’s speech, or indication of what it might entail. 627

Part of the lack of intelligence analysis versus straightforward reporting was owed to the political culture of the communist regime combined with the rather erratic personality of Khrushchev. The intelligence agencies were aware of the political power of the Presidium and thus is was prudent not to provide analysis that contradicted its

623 Ibid., 27. 624 Ibid., 31. 625 Ibid., 25, 31. 626 Beth A. Fischer, “Perception, Intelligence Errors, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” in James G. Blight and David A. Welch (eds.) Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 155. 627 Fursenko and Naftali, “Soviet Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” 78.

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leader’s preferences. As a result, opinions were rarely offered, and political “analysis” in the true sense of the term was not prioritized or encouraged.628

Numerous sources also paint a picture of Khrushchev as a difficult personality who did not appreciate disagreement. As a result, intelligence reports and advice were often tailored with his preferences in mind. 629 Khrushchev himself rarely made an effort to reach out to the intelligence services for their opinions or analysis, nor did he request advice even from those closest to him. This was perhaps most apparent in the lead-up to the missile crisis, when Khrushchev chose not to seek the opinions of Troyanovsky,

Dobrynin, Feklisov, and other foreign affairs experts who had devoted their lives to understanding U.S. politics and worldview. 630 Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan appears to have been one of the few advisors closest to Khrushchev to have expressed doubts about the Cuba plan, but commented later that Khrushchev was not receptive to his concerns and that at the Politburo meeting nobody dared contradict him. 631 Gromyko also recalls trying to raise questions about U.S. reaction to the missiles, but quickly gave up when it became clear that the Soviet Premier did not want to hear them. 632 Indeed

Khrushchev’s authoritative decision-making style helps to explain why his personal beliefs about U.S. interests played such a dominant role in shaping his behavior in the early stages of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Nevertheless, despite the deficiencies of the Soviet intelligence agencies, and the dogmatic personality of Khrushchev, it still appears that the resources devoted to

628 Ibid., 68. 629 Mikoyan, “Eroding the Soviet “Culture of Secrecy.” 630 James. G. Blight and David. A. Welch, “The Cuban Missile Crisis and Intelligence Performance,” in James G. Blight and David A. Welch (eds.), Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Abingdon, Oxon: Frank Cass Publishers, 1998), 182. 631 Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis, 92. 632 Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence , 34.

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understanding the U.S. threat helped to generate timely information in the course of the crisis that informed Khrushchev’s threat assessment. For while the initial interpretation of

Kennedy’s speech and the blockade indicate the continued influence of the Soviet leader’s prior belief in Kennedy’s desire to avoid a war, he was soon subjected to a rapid stream of information from the United States from a variety of intelligence sources. Not only was Khrushchev receiving daily reports from Ambassador Dobrynin on his meetings and his observations of the political mood in the United States, but also the Soviet

Premier received all of the press coverage, military analysis of U.S. movements, and briefings from Soviet spies in Washington D.C. GRU agents closely monitored U.S. communication systems and sent Moscow a total of 268 reports during the month of

October 1962 alone. 633 Finally, despite being disinterested in outside opinions prior to the crisis, all sources confirm that Khrushchev paid special attention to his “blue folder” of intelligence reports during the week itself and read them “avidly.” 634

Perhaps the greatest indication of the importance of incoming intelligence during the crisis was Khrushchev’s reaction to the reports of U.S. military preparations – first from Feklisov in Washington D.C., and then corroborated by the Soviet military intelligence who intercepted signals of U.S. military movements and the DEFCON 2 alert. 635 This news triggered such fear in Khrushchev that he rushed to draft a letter to

Kennedy offering to remove the missiles. 636 The fact that the Soviet leader altered his position based on newly available intelligence on October 26 further reinforces the claim

633 Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbors , 203. 634 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of Gamble , digital location 5954; Taubman, Khrushchev, 568. 635 Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbors , 203; Horelick, “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” 387. Note that I am making no claims about the quality of the intelligence received. It is now known, for example, that Rogers was incorrect in his claim that an attack was imminent. The key interest here, however, is whether intelligence was made available to Khrushchev, and whether it had an impact on his decision making. 636 Fursenko and Naftali, “Soviet Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” 84.

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that incoming information during the course of the crisis was responsible for forcing the

Soviet leader to update his prior beliefs.

6.4. Summary: Evaluating Khrushchev’s Threat Assessment As expected by the cognitive-institutional theory, the evidence presented suggests that Khrushchev’s prior belief in U.S. status quo interests combined with his conviction that the United States wished to avoid a direct conflict with the Soviet Union shaped the broader context within which Khrushchev deployed the missiles Cuba. These beliefs also explain the Soviet leader’s interpretation of U.S. signals early in the crisis. 637 Khrushchev interpreted Kennedy’s speech of October 22 as delivering a credible deterrent threat to prevent the deployment of additional missiles to Cuba, but he did not appear to believe that the United States would risk war with the Soviet Union to forcibly compel their removal. This was despite Kennedy’s public commitment to ensuring the withdrawal and elimination of the missiles from the Western Hemisphere, accompanied by military reinforcements, evacuations of non-essential military personnel from Cuba, and troop mobilizations – all clear signals of preparation for war. 638

Khrushchev’s prior beliefs in U.S. conflict-aversion dominated his reading of the crisis until late October 25/early October 26, when the Soviets detected an alarming increase in the U.S. nuclear alert status, and received information from multiple sources regarding U.S. plans for an imminent invasion of Cuba. The quantity of this information, combined with its alarming content, forced Khrushchev to update his prior beliefs. The

United States was taking measures that explicitly risked superpower conflict – a conflict that Khrushchev believed could rapidly escalate to nuclear war. The urgency of this threat

637 Recall from Chapter 2 that the cognitive-institutional theory expects beliefs to exert a stronger influence on threat assessments and for slower updating across all cases than do purely rationalist accounts. 638 Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba.”

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overrode the Soviet leader’s prior expectations, and pushed him to quickly update his assessment of U.S. threat credibility. With this new assessment in mind, Khrushchev drafted his first letter to Kennedy marking the beginning of the end of the Cuban Missile

Crisis.

Figure 4.3 Khrushchev’s Beliefs and Threat Environment

Leader has prior beliefs about external adversary

N Y

Beliefs exert no External threat constraining assessed as target influence on threat state's dominant assessment concern - Updating likely Suez Crisis 1956 N Y

7. THEORY EXTENSION : NUCLEAR THREATS In Chapter 2, I posited a second explanation for belief updating that pertained less to the information available, and more to the type of threat being issued by a coercing state. In particular, I wanted to know whether the presence of nuclear weapons in crises influenced target state leadership beliefs in threat assessments in ways that differed from the expectations of the cognitive-institutional theory. To recall, I hypothesized that

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nuclear threats and signals may be more salient to target state leaders than those issued during conventional crises due to the heightened levels of destruction promised. 639 The risk of nuclear war can be manipulated through two key signaling mechanisms: through military mobilizations and troops movements that risk escalation from the conventional to the nuclear domain; and/or through explicit nuclear signals, which could include moving missiles or placing nuclear forces on high alert. Since we cannot assume that all leaders will perceive conventional mobilizations as raising the risk of nuclear war, I argued further that whether conventional mobilizations count as “nuclear signals” or constitute a nuclear threat will depend on target state leaders’ theory about the relationship between nuclear and conventional war, and the process of escalation to the nuclear level. For those leaders who view the conventional and nuclear domains as distinct realms of conflict, conventional mobilizations will not rock the nuclear boat. On the other hand, for leaders who view the two domains as more fluid, conventional mobilizations and operations will activate the risk of nuclear war and thus constitute a nuclear signal. Since the Cuban Missile Crisis entailed a crisis between two nuclear- armed states, involved both conventional and nuclear signals, and historical material exists to establish Khrushchev’s nuclear beliefs, this case provides a useful opportunity for assessing these hypotheses.

First, Khrushchev received both conventional and nuclear signals during the course of the crisis: the U.S. naval blockade and news of U.S. military mobilizations, followed by the SAC alert to DEFCON 2 (received by Khrushchev on October 26).

Second, as foreshadowed in previous sections, it appears that Khrushchev had clear views

639 Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict; Schelling, Arms and Influence ; Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution ; Robert Powell, “Crisis Bargaining, Escalation, and MAD,” American Political Science Review 81, 3 (1987): 717-35.

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about the relationship between conventional and nuclear war, and how war would escalate between two nuclear-armed states. Section 4 provides clear evidence of the

Soviet leader’s belief in the impossibility of limited war in the nuclear age, and of the restraining effect of nuclear weapons on great power conflict. In response to an article by

Walter Lippmann in which the author claimed that nuclear war entailed “a wholly new order of violence,” Khrushchev stated the he agreed “with a lot his conclusions. He is certain that today war means suicide.” 640 This belief explains his shocked reaction to John

F. Kennedy’s July 25 speech, which provided Khrushchev with an initial inkling that the young U.S. leader might think differently about the nuclear revolution, and the role of nuclear weapons in politics more broadly. This leads us to the two Soviet-specific hypotheses regarding the effect of nuclear signals on Khrushchev’s threat assessment:

H5 Soviet Union : U.S. nuclear signals will be highly salient to Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, forcing him to quickly reassess his prior beliefs about U.S. foreign policy interests and update his assessments of threat credibility.

H5A Soviet Union : Khrushchev’s theory about the process of escalation from conventional military to nuclear warfare will lead him to view conventional military mobilizations by the United States as constituting a nuclear signal, thereby “activating” a nuclear threat. The evidence appears to provide preliminary support for both of these hypotheses.

Interestingly the mere presence of nuclear weapons did not exert an immediate effect on

Khrushchev’s threat assessment. 641 After reading Kennedy’s speech and hearing of U.S. plans to establish a naval quarantine, Khrushchev expressed relief and maintained his

640 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location7962. 641 This should not come as a surprise since Khrushchev initiated the crisis (and that over Berlin in 1961) in full knowledge that the United States was a nuclear-armed state.

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belief that the United States did not want a war over Cuba. 642 This can be attributed, at least in part, to Khrushchev’s theory of nuclear politics and the belief that any war would quickly turn nuclear – a view that he thought that the U.S. government also shared. 643 As a result, in the early days of the crisis the United States was acting in ways that corresponded with the Soviet leader’s understanding of international politics, and he interpreted the initial mobilizations in light of these prior beliefs. This is evidenced by

Khrushchev’s comment to his son on October 23 that it was “one thing to threaten with nuclear weapons, quite another to use them.” 644 If anything, the Soviet leader’s beliefs about nuclear weapons led him to expect that over time the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals would have a dampening effect on hostilities, with both countries trying to deescalate tensions in order to avoid the use of force.

The belief in the impossibility of great power war in the nuclear age appears to have held more or less constant until late October 25/early October 26 – when the Soviet leader received news of plans for a U.S. invasion and the DEFCON 2 alert. While

Khrushchev had begun to realize that the missiles would have to be removed under some sort of agreement with the United States just prior to this point, the Soviet leader did not believe war was imminent until he received this stream of intelligence. The news of

Kennedy’s military mobilizations and nuclear alerts suddenly made the possibility of general war real and alarmed Khrushchev greatly. Indeed the fear of war that Khrushchev felt at this moment is plainly evident in the rushed letter that he wrote to Kennedy on

October 26, where he referred the tightening “knot of war” and the difficulty in

642 In May 1962, Khrushchev expressed this view clearly when he stated that Kennedy was intelligent and would not “set off a nuclear war” over missiles in Cuba. Taubman, Khrushchev , 545. 643 For further evidence of this, see Section 4. 644 Khrushchev, Creation of a Superpower , 565.

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deescalating hostilities once begun. 645 Put in the language of the cognitive-institutional theory, U.S. signals from October 25 created a risk of escalation, the costs of which greatly exceeded Khrushchev’s prior estimation of U.S. resolve. Instead of interpreting these new signals in light of his prior beliefs and assessing the threat as incredible, however, the Soviet leader responded by rapidly updating his assessments of U.S. interests and revising his expectation of the U.S. threat to use force. 646

Of course the question remains as to the role of conventional versus nuclear threats and whether the threat of a U.S. conventional invasion, absent explicit nuclear alerts, would have been sufficient to bring about the same result. This is an important question and also one that is difficult to answer given that the conventional and nuclear mobilizations occurred more or less in tandem during the crisis. Nevertheless,

Khrushchev’s statements through the course of the week reveal that while the nuclear alerts scared him immensely, and especially the shift to DEFCON 2, it was the broader fear of escalation to nuclear war that concerned the Soviet leader. This fear appeared to have been triggered as much by the threat of a U.S. conventional invasion as by the nuclear alerts themselves. This explains his exclamation following news of the impending invasion that “we have been warned that war could start today.” 647 Since Khrushchev believed that conventional military confrontations could escalate quickly to nuclear war, nuclear alerts themselves may have been less important than the broader risk of military conflict. Indeed, Khrushchev later recalled that it was the fear of invasion – rather than

645 Telegram From the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, FRUS , 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, Document 65. 646 The importance of demonstrations of resolve through military mobilizations and alerts in explaining cases of compellent success also receives support in Sechser and Fuhrmann’s analysis. See Sechser and Fuhrmann, “Crisis Bargaining and Nuclear Blackmail,” 187. 647 Khrushchev, Creation of a Superpower , 584.

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the nuclear alerts specifically – that forced his decision to withdraw the missiles from

Cuba. 648 This assessment, of course, is particular to Khrushchev. It was the Soviet leader’s fear of rapid escalation, and personal disbelief in the possibility of limited war, that rendered conventional alerts part of a broader nuclear threat. The experience of the

Cuban Missile Crisis served to shatter Khrushchev’s belief in the impossibility of war in the nuclear age, and he became much more cautious after this point in time. 649

The final issue to address is to what mechanism we owe Khrushchev’s updating: information availability or the nuclear threat. This is also difficult to assess given the presence of large amounts of intelligence, and the nuclear nature of the crisis at hand.

Nevertheless, it seems likely – and the evidence appears to suggest – that Khrushchev’s fear of nuclear war became much more salient from October 25 onwards, and that it was his concern with rapid crisis escalation that pushed him to quickly draft the first letter to

Kennedy. Of course, he would not have known about the plans for an invasion absent the

Soviet institutional resources devoted to intelligence collection in the United States, and so both mechanisms are necessary to some extent. But it was the content of this information that appeared to resonate most urgently with Khrushchev; information that activated a threat of such magnitude that it could not be interpreted in any other way.

8. ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS It is now necessary to briefly consider how the four alternative explanations fare in explaining Khrushchev’s threat assessment in 1962. To recap, these alternative explanations are: 1) rationalist power-based theories that assess threat credibility

648 Horelick, “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” 387. In his final assessment, Horelick concludes that it seems reasonable to “take at face value Khrushchev’s statement of December 12, 1962, that he took his decision to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba after receiving urgent word that a U.S. attack was imminent.” 649 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 10029, 10036.

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according to the balance of power and material interests in a crisis; 2) rationalist (regime- type) theories that assess threat credibility according to the use of costly-signaling mechanisms; 3) a social-psychological theory that assesses threat credibility on the basis of the desirability of past actions; and 4) behavioral theories that assess threat credibility based on a state’s record of following through on past commitments.

Let us first consider the current calculus thesis. Daryl Press argues that leaders assess a country’s threat credibility based on the balance of capabilities and interests at stake in a given confrontation. According to Press, leaders ask two questions when assessing threats: 1) Does the adversary have enough power to do what he threatens in order to achieve his objectives? And, 2) are the interests at stake large enough to justify the costs and risks? 650

In the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the answer to the first question is affirmative. The location of Cuba gave the United States a clear military advantage over the Soviet Union given the U.S. ability to employ conventional forces as well as shorter- range missiles if desired. The U.S. Navy controlled the seas in the region and the United

States would have air superiority in any crisis. 651 It is true that the U.S. government had previously failed to oust Castro during the Bay of Pigs in 1961, but that was a much smaller, covert mission that did not call on the full strength of the U.S. armed forces. In addition to the location favoring U.S. conventional forces, the United States also had a strategic advantage at the time – an imbalance that Khrushchev was hoping to redress by installing missiles in Cuba. Roswell Gilpatric’s speech of October 21, 1961, had undermined Khrushchev’s public claims of a missile gap in favor of the Soviet Union.

650 Press, Calculating Credibility , 20-24. 651 Ibid., 120.

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Instead, Gilpatric had emphasized U.S. strategic superiority and commented that even after absorbing a Soviet surprise attack, the United States would retain a second-strike force at least as large as the Soviet’s first strike arsenal. 652 The fact that Khrushchev thought it necessary to deploy missiles to the Western hemisphere to balance the strategic books indicates his concern with the U.S. advantage.

This brings us to the question of U.S. interests at stake during the crisis. To recall,

Press assesses the level of interests at stake in a crisis according to whether they are “vital interests,” “important interests,” or “concerns.” 653 Vital interests relate to a state’s survival, important interests to issues of material value that do not threaten state survival directly, and concerns to state values and ideals that do not involve significant material risk. The Soviet deployment of missiles in Cuba, according to Press’s typology, would arguably constitute a vital interest for the United States given the presence of an enemy’s nuclear weapons just off the coast of Florida. Even if we relax this assessment for the sake of argument, the Soviet missiles most certainly constituted an important interest for the U.S. government. Taken together, then, U.S. military power and interests should have led Khrushchev to assess the U.S. threat as credible on October 22, 1962.

Since the empirical analysis shows that Khrushchev did ultimately assess the U.S. threat as credible, the current calculus thesis is less wrong in this case than it is simply incomplete. This is in part due to the theory’s attempt to measure perceptions of interest according to their current material value. Yet based on this metric, it is difficult to understand why Khrushchev would ever have deployed missiles to Cuba in the first place since U.S. capabilities and interests (if measured according to Press’s theory) changed

652 Stephen J. Cimbala, Nuclear Strategy in the Twenty-First Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 48-49. See also, Trachtenberg, History and Strategy , 221; Betts, Nuclear Superiority , 106. 653 Press, Calculating Credibility , 20-24.

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little in the lead-up to the crisis. Khrushchev’s actions are much more reasonable, however, if we consider how U.S. behavior and past actions influenced Khrushchev’s assessments of the extent of U.S. interests, and specifically his belief that the U.S. government wished to avoid war. Indeed, these prior interactions with the United States help make sense of Khrushchev’s otherwise puzzling behavior.

Perhaps more importantly, the current calculus theory cannot account for variation over time in Khrushchev’s threat assessment. According to Press’s theory,

Khrushchev ought to have assessed the U.S. threat as credible upon delivery on October

22. Yet the empirical record reveals greater nuance in the Soviet leader’s interpretation of

Kennedy’s speech. In particular, Khrushchev interpreted the speech in line with his prior expectations of U.S. interests, assessing the deterrent threat as credible but refusing to believe that the U.S. would risk war to remove the missiles from Cuba. It was only when

Khrushchev received intelligence of an imminent U.S. invasion on October 25/26 – and thus the fear of nuclear war became a reality – that Khrushchev updated his beliefs and his assessment of the U.S. compellent threat. Importantly, once Khrushchev updated his threat assessment and believed that war was likely, the balance of power did play a role in Khrushchev’s decision to withdraw the missiles. According to Fursenko and Naftali,

Khrushchev’s greatest concern from October 25 onwards was Soviet military inferiority and the knowledge that he could not win a war over the Caribbean. 654 However this concern with the balance of power only really became relevant to Khrushchev’s threat assessments once the nuclear threat had been activated and Khrushchev had re-evaluated his assessment of U.S. resolve.

654 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, digital location 5884, 5896.

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The second alternative explanation is based on theories of democratic credibility.

According to these accounts, democracies are more able to generate information during crises due to their transparent competitive institutional structures and the ability of leaders to “tie their hands” through public statements and commitments to use force.

Since the United States is a democracy during this timeframe and Kennedy issued public threats that engaged the U.S. domestic audience, this thesis would expect Khrushchev to have assessed all U.S. threats as credible.

As with the current calculus theory, the democratic credibility thesis also fails to account for variation in Khrushchev’s threat assessment over time and his changing perception of U.S. resolve. In particular, the democratic thesis is unable to explain

Khrushchev’s interpretation of Kennedy’s October 22 speech and his belief that it suggested room for negotiation, rather than a clear statement of U.S. intent to remove the missiles. It is true that prior to the speech, Kennedy’ s decision to make a public statement as opposed to engaging in private diplomatic negotiations had an effect on

Khrushchev and worried the Soviet leader. However, this concern seemed more attributable to a break in U.S.-Soviet crisis behavior than to the activation of U.S. democratic constraints. Moreover, Kennedy’s public statements did not seem to be perceived as any more credible than the private – and therefore “cheap” – notes exchanged between the leaders.

More telling for the democratic credibility thesis writ large, perhaps, is the fact

Khrushchev showed little understanding of, and made few references to, U.S. democratic politics throughout the crisis despite Gromyko’s prior warning that the missiles would

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cause a “political explosion” in the United States.655 Khrushchev made no references to the position of the Republican opposition in his threat assessment, nor seemed aware of

Republican criticisms of Kennedy’s “weak” response to the crisis – an indicator that the president would receive support for a stronger show of force. 656 What Khrushchev was concerned about was the current balance of power between Kennedy and the U.S. military who the Soviet leader believed wanted an invasion of Cuba. 657 While this concern grew in the latter days of the crisis after receiving intelligence on U.S. military preparations, it had little to do with the mechanisms through which the democratic credibility thesis is presumed to operate. 658

The third and fourth alternatives are Mercer’s reputations thesis and the past actions thesis respectively, both of which fail to account fully for Khrushchev’s threat assessment. To recall, Mercer’s social-psychology argument claims that a state will use an adversary’s past behavior as a guide to future action only when that past behavior is perceived as undesirable by the state in question i.e. when a state faces an adversary that chooses to stand firm in a given dispute. In these cases, the undesirable behavior will be attributed to the disposition and character of the opposing state. However when an adversary’s behavior is perceived as desirable – i.e. the adversary shows weakness or concedes to threats – the target state will attribute this to situational factors and will not

655 May and Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes, 426. 656 During a Congressional briefing on October 23, 1962, a number of Republican Senators criticized Kennedy’s “weak” response to the Soviets. See Mariah Zeisberg, War Powers: The Politics of Constitutional Authority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 163. Kennedy also continued to receive strong support from the U.S. public with a job approval rating of 61% during the week of the crisis. See Tom W. Smith, “The Cuban Missile Crisis and Public Opinion,” Public Opinion Quarterly 67 (2003), 280. 657 Zubok, A Failed Empire , 140; Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers , 498. 658 For a more detailed dismissal of audience costs theory as applied to the Cuban Missile Crisis, see Snyder and Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats,” 452-455.

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expect similar responses in the future. As a result, an adversary can only ever gain a reputation for resolve, and never one for lacking resolve. 659

In this case, the U.S. government’s firm position over Berlin in 1961 was undesirable for the Soviet Union, and as such the U.S. ought to have earned a reputation for resolve and its future threats deemed credible. Yet if this is true, then Mercer’s reputations theory cannot explain why Khrushchev perceived a limit to U.S. resolve in

1962. This perceived limit is owed to the fact that Khrushchev did form beliefs based on both the desirable and undesirable aspects of U.S. behavior in 1961, and he used both sets of beliefs to inform his decision making in 1962. In fact the only way to make sense of

Khrushchev’s perception of U.S. resolve in 1962 is to take into account both the U.S. decision to stand firm over Berlin alongside the U.S. government’s desire not to escalate the crisis any further.

Finally, the past actions thesis claims that a state’s prior fulfillment of commitments and threats to use force serves to increase the credibility of that state’s future demands in the eyes of target states. 660 In 1961 the United States issued a deterrent threat to the Soviet Union over Berlin that the Soviet Union did not explicitly challenge.

Thus while the United States did not have to follow through on its threat to use force, the

U.S. willingness to stand firm over Berlin should have given Khrushchev some reason to believe that the United States would stand firm in future conflicts with the Soviet Union.

Once again, however, while the past actions theory gets part of the story correct in predicting a credible assessment of the U.S. deterrent threat, it is unable to account for the

Soviet leader’s changing threat assessment over time. The following table summarizes

659 Mercer, Reputation and International Politics, 65-69. 660 Schelling, Arms and Influence , 55-59.

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the expectations of the alternative explanations compared to those of the cognitive- institutional theory.

Table 4.2 Alternative Theoretical Predictions: Cuban Missile Crisis

1962 Prediction Theory Mechanism/s Compellent Deterrent Threat Threat Current U.S.-Soviet balance of power Credible Credible Calculus Thesis and interests 1. U.S. costly signals Regime-Type 2. The openness and Credible Credible Thesis competitiveness of the U.S. political system Reputations Desirability of U.S. behavior Credible Credible Thesis in past crises Past Actions History of U.S. threat follow- Credible Credible Thesis through 1. Khrushchev’s previous - Incredible Cognitive- experience of U.S. resolve Initially Institutional Credible Thesis 2. Availability of new - Credible from Oct information 25 onwards

It is worth making a note here regarding Danielle Lupton’s theory of reputation formation given that John F. Kennedy was U.S. president during both the 1961 and 1962 crises. To recap, Lupton argues that it is leaders, rather than states, that develop reputations for resolve based on their actions while in office. As a result, a target state leader’s perceptions and beliefs should adhere to the leader of the coercing state, and presumably change with turnovers in power. In the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is some support for this theory. A number of accounts of the Berlin and Cuba Crises note Khrushchev’s personal views of Kennedy, and the change in leadership certainly appeared to influence the Soviet leader’s decision to deliver a second Berlin ultimatum in

Vienna in 1961. Khrushchev perceived the U.S. leader as young and inexperienced, and the failure at the Bay of Pigs confirmed his opinion: “I know for certain that Kennedy

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doesn’t have a strong backbone, nor generally speaking does he have the courage to stand up to a serious challenge.” 661 One possible reason why resolve might attach more to the leader in this case than in the others under examination is due to the nuclear nature of the crisis. Since crises in the nuclear age – and between two nuclear-armed rivals – become more a test of nerves than in the conventional realm, the resolve of an individual leader to rock the boat may be more important in a target state’s evaluation of an adversary.

Whatever the reason might be, however, it is clear that after the Berlin crisis and

Kennedy’s firm response, references to the young leader’s weak character disappeared, and Khrushchev’s focus returned to evaluating the U.S. government’s behavior more broadly.

In sum, the cognitive-institutional theory is the only one of the four theories identified in this dissertation that can fully explain the variation in Khrushchev’s assessment of U.S. credibility during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Moreover, in addition to accounting for the changes in Khrushchev’s assessment, the cognitive-institutional theory is also better able to explain Khrushchev’s thought process in the lead up to the crisis.

The Soviet leader’s decision to deploy missiles in secret – as well as his subsequent escalation of the conflict – becomes more understandable when one considers his belief from 1961 onwards of U.S. status quo interests vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, and a U.S. desire to avoid direct conflict leading to war. These beliefs together shaped Khrushchev’s decision-making context in 1962.

661 Quoted in W.R. Smyser, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 79.

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9. CONCLUSION In this chapter I argue that based on his experiences during the Berlin Crisis in

1961, Nikita Khrushchev viewed the United States has having strong status quo interests vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The U.S. government was willing to devote significant resources to defending its interests and to preventing the Soviet Union from altering the status quo. The Soviet leader also believed, however, that the United States wanted to avoid a direct conflict with the Soviet Union out of fear of escalation to total war, and that as a result the U.S. government would not absorb the costs necessary to compel a change if it risked such an outcome. These beliefs, I claim, set the stage for the Cuban

Missile Crisis of 1962. During the crisis, Khrushchev initially interpreted U.S. signals and threats in accordance with his prior beliefs, assessing the U.S. deterrent threat as credible but failing to believe that Washington would start a war over missiles in Cuba.

The large influx of information during the crisis, however, and especially from October

25 onwards, forced Khrushchev to update his threat assessment. The incoming intelligence warning of an imminent invasion served to “activate” the nuclear threat, overriding the Soviet leader’s prior beliefs and leading him to quickly assess the U.S. threat to use force as credible. Khrushchev pledged to remove the missiles and the crisis ended abruptly on October 28, 1962.

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5. THE FALKLANDS WAR 1982

1. INTRODUCTION In this chapter I examine whether the cognitive-institutional theory developed in

Chapter 2 can explain the Argentine military junta’s assessment of Great Britain’s threat credibility in 1982. Great Britain and Argentina have a long-standing dispute over the ownership of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. This dispute culminated in a low-level crisis over the island of South Thule in 1976, and was followed soon thereafter by a war between the two countries over the Falkland Islands in 1982. The iterative nature of these crisis interactions thus provides a useful opportunity not only to evaluate the power of the cognitive-institutional theory in explaining the Argentine leaders’ threat assessment, but also to assess the performance of the four alternative theories – the current calculus theory, the past actions theory, the democratic credibility thesis, and

Mercer’s reputations theory – in explaining this outcome.

In this case, both the past actions and current calculus theses are able to cast some light upon the junta’s assessment of British threat credibility prior to the crisis onset in

March 1982. Neither, however, can account for the “stickiness” of the junta’s prior beliefs, and the Argentine leaders’ lack of updating from late March onwards when the

British parliament publicly committed to defending the islands. As this chapter demonstrates, the lack of updating can be explained by the strength of the junta’s prior beliefs in the limited extent of Britain’s foreign policy interests, combined with the low quality and quantity of information available to the military leaders in assessing the credibility of the British threat. The cognitive-institutional theory thus provides a more accurate and complete explanation for the Argentine leaders’ threat assessment in the lead up to the Falklands War than do the alternatives.

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This chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 provides a brief discussion of case selection and explains why the Falklands War of 1982 is useful for testing my theory against the alternative candidate explanations. Section 3 provides brief case summaries of the crisis over South Thule and events leading up to the Falklands War. Section 4 turns to the cognitive-institutional theory and provides evidence for the Argentine junta’s beliefs about the extent of British foreign policy interests in order to generate a set of predictions about its threat assessments. Section 5 evaluates the military junta’s assessments of

British threat credibility in 1982 (the Falklands War). Section 6 addresses the importance of Argentina’s threat environment and the junta’s threat prioritization in explaining its final threat assessment. Finally, Section 7 concludes the chapter by comparing the cognitive-institutional theory to a number of alternative explanations for Argentina’s behavior.

2. CASE SELECTION AND METHODOLOGY The Falklands War meets all necessary scope conditions for this project, though this case contains some unique features that need to be addressed. First, Great Britain and

Argentina have been involved in long-standing dispute over the sovereignty of the

Falkland Islands since the early 1800s. This dispute escalated in the 1970s resulting in a low-level crisis over the small island of South Thule in 1976, and culminated in a full- blown war over the Falkland Islands in 1982. The occurrence of these two crises – the second containing explicit compellent threats – allows us to assess the importance of prior belief formation in future assessments of threat credibility. It is important to point out, however, that the crisis over South Thule is not contained in the ICB data set, though its characteristics satisfy the requirements of a low-level crisis of which there are many in

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the ICB list. 662 As will be explained in more detail in the following section, the incident involved a direct challenge to British sovereignty over the islands, in response to which the use of force was considered though not taken. Instead, the British government made a formal protest to the Argentine government and demanded that the military junta not undertake this action again. A repeat incident occurred in 1981 eliciting a firmer British response. The fact that the crisis was resolved privately between the Argentine and

British governments and that pertinent documents have only recently been declassified may go some way towards explaining its absence from standard crisis databases.

Second, the government of Argentina during the period 1976-82 was a military junta comprising trifectas of different military leaders, one from each of the armed forces

(army, air force, and navy). This presents some challenges for the cognitive-institutional theory, which rests importantly on establishing the beliefs of the leader of a target state and tracing these beliefs through to subsequent threat assessments. In the case of the

Falklands War, therefore, I have carefully determined which leaders exercised power during this period, and whose beliefs truly mattered to the government’s assessments.

More specifically, I look at the beliefs of General Leopoldo Galtieri, since he was named

President of Argentina in 1981 and remained in that position throughout the duration of the Falklands War. Prior to this position he was Commander of the Argentine

Engineering Corps and then Commander-in-Chief of the Argentine Army – both senior positions in the military government. Galtieri was also a strong supporter of the 1976

662 The ICB dataset includes a number of low-level crises that were resolved diplomatically. See e.g. ICB Crisis 36 (Vilna II). In fact, according to Downes and Sechser, non-militarized disputes constitute 34.9% of all of the crises in the ICB list. Of course, that is not to say that all 34.9% are identical cases to South Thule. The authors note that this high number can be attributed to a variety of factors, one being the lack of the use of force, but also to instances where states found themselves on opposing sides of a dispute but had no direct contact. Downes and Sechser, “Illusion of Democratic Credibility,” 462-63.

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military coup, which occurred on March 24, 1976, just prior to the crisis over South

Thule. The military government was thus in place before the first crisis under consideration.

The structure of the Argentine junta, however, involved a power-sharing arrangement with the leaders of the two other services – the air force and the navy. As a result, it is important to look at the other members of the military government during this period. 663 According to multiple sources, the air force was a junior partner in Galtieri’s government, and as a result Brigadier General Basilio Dozo – the second member of the leadership trifecta – is deemed less important for this analysis. 664 My own review of the primary and secondary sources confirm that he was almost entirely removed from the junta’s decision making processes.

The third member of the junta was the Chief of Navy, Admiral Jorge Anaya.

Anaya had been the Chief of Naval Operations from 1976 and was a key member of the first military junta. He remained in this senior position until assuming the role of Chief of

Navy in 1981, and then joined Galtieri’s junta after the coup in December that year.

Anaya’s beliefs are very important to consider not only because of his senior position in the prior military governmnet (and therefore during the crisis of South Thule), 665 but also because he is believed by many to have been the key instigator of the Falklands campaign.

In fact multiple accounts claim that Anaya assisted Galtieri’s rise to power on the proviso

663 Manuel Viedma, “A Man or a Junta on Horseback: The Politics of Executive Institutions under Military Rule.” Working Draft Paper Presented at the Midwest Political Science Association, 2013, 13, 15. 664 David Welch, “Culture and Emotion as Obstacles to Good Judgment,” in Stanley Renshon and Deborah Larson (eds.), Good Judgment in Foreign Policy (New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 194; Francisco Fernando de Santibañes, “The Effectiveness of Military Governments During War,” Armed Forces and Society 33, 4 (2007), 621. 665 Anaya’s senior position in the first military junta also means that there is more evidence available on his beliefs prior to the Falklands War.

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that he support the Navy’s ambition to retake the Falkland Islands. 666 Since Anaya is believed to be the mastermind behind Argentina’s actions in 1982, his beliefs are just as, if not more important than those of Galtieri himself. 667

Finally, in addition to satisfying the scope conditions listed above, the South

Thule and Falklands crises together provide a useful opportunity for assessing alternative explanations for the military junta’s threat assessment. The repeated crisis interactions allow for an easy test of Mercer’s reputations thesis as well as past actions theory, and the democratic character of British politics provides an opportunity to evaluate the democratic credibility thesis. In addition, the small deployment of military forces to the

South Atlantic at the time makes the Falklands War a relatively easy case for the current calculus theory given Argentina’s assessment of low British threat credibility during the lead up to the conflict. However, while this account goes some way towards explaining

Argentine assessments of British resolve prior to the onset of the crisis, it is unable to explain Galtieri and Anaya’s lack of updating after the deployment of the British task force and Thatcher’s public commitment to the use of force.

As explained in Chapter 2, I engage in qualitative historical analysis to code leadership beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests, and to trace the role of these beliefs in subsequent assessments of threat credibility. In the Falklands

666 See e.g. Roger J. Guerra, “Political Perception and Strategic Miscalculation: Argentina’s Role in the Malvinas/Falklands War.” PhD Diss, University of Miami, 1990, 44-45; Hastings and Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, 46. 667 Note that this is the one case where the target state leaders during the second crisis are not identical to the target state leaders during the first. In 1976, the Argentina military junta was comprised of Jorge Videla, Emilio Massera and Orlando Agosti. The composition of the junta changed again in 1980, before the coup of 1981. As discussed in Chapter 2, however, I allow for cases in which the target state leaders in the second crisis hold senior governmental positions during the first since this experience allows for some belief formation on the basis of direct crisis experience. There is also reason to believe that senior leaders would still have access to the high-level, privileged information that can influence assessments of an adversary’s interests. Since Galtieri and Anaya were senior military leaders in the 1976 regime, they satisfy these scope conditions.

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case specifically, I analyze primary documents from the British National Archives at

Kew Gardens, refer to the Foreign Relations of the United States series, and have made use of the many primary documents housed online in the Margaret Thatcher archives. 668

On the Argentine side, I translated recently declassified Argentine government documents and after-crisis reports. In this regard the Argentine Government’s Rattenbach

Commission’s Report has been particularly insightful in providing an in depth evaluation of the military leaders thinking at the time of the Falklands crisis, and the nature of planning and preparation that took place in the lead up to the conflict. 669 Finally, I supplement the primary documents with the vast secondary literature that exists on the

Falklands War. 670 Since the Argentine military junta was relatively secretive in nature, there are inevitably some data gaps that still need to be filled. Nevertheless, I have tried to use all materials available to provide as accurate an analysis as possible, and refer to the policies and actions undertaken by the junta where direct evidence of Galtieri and

Anaya’s thinking is unavailable.

668 Margaret Thatcher Foundation, Margaret Thatcher Archives, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/archive . See also Falkland Islands Review , Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors. Chairman: The Rt. Hon. The Lord Franks (London: HMSO, January 1983), referred to hereafter as “The Franks Report”; FRUS , 1981-84, Vol. XIII, Conflict in the South Atlantic . 669 Brig General Benjamin Rattenbach, “Analysis and Evaluation of Responsibilities in the Conflict in the South Atlantic,” December 2, 1982, http://seprin.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Informe-Rattenbach.pdf (accessed March 5, 2016). This will be referred to hereafter as the “Rattenbach Report.” 670 See e.g. Lawrence Freedman, Britain and the Falklands (Oxford, UK: Blackwells, 1988), Sir Lawrence Freedman, The Official History of the Falklands Campaign, Vol. I (London: Routledge, 2005). Virginia Gamba, The Falklands/Malvinas War (New York, NY: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Lawrence Freedman and Virginia Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War: The Falklands Conflict of 1982 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1991); M. Hastings and S. Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1983).

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3. CASE OVERVIEW

Figure 5.1 Map of the South Atlantic 671 3.1 South Thule 1976 The dispute between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands (known as the Malvinas in Argentina) has a long history, dating back to 1820 when Argentine first inherited claims to the territory. Britain and Argentina continued to contest the status of the islands until 1833, when Britain established its rights to the islands through settlements and the building of a naval base. The Argentine government continued to press the issue, extending its sovereignty claims to include the South Georgia and South

Sandwich Islands in 1927. The UN Committee on Decolonization eventually passed a

671 D. George Boyce, The Falklands War (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2005), viii.

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resolution calling for Britain and Argentina to enter into negotiations to resolve the status of the disputed territories.672

The ousting of Isabel Peron's civilian government in the military coup of March

24, 1976 marked the beginnings of a new and more aggressive approach to the Falklands issue in Buenos Aires. Within just a few weeks of General Videla's assumption of power, the Argentine Navy harassed the British warship Shackleton 80 miles off the coast of the

Falklands, purportedly for sailing in Argentine territorial waters.673 Then in November

1976, a small group from the Argentine military landed on South Thule in the South

Sandwich Islands – a barren dependency of Great Britain located some 1,000 miles south of the Falklands. The small party constructed a military base complete with barracks and a helicopter landing pad, set up a weather station, a radio station, and a flag pole from which to fly the Argentine flag. This was done without notifying the British government, and at the direction of the Argentine Government to bolster its sovereignty claims to the islands. 674

On December 20, 1976, the British ice patrol ship HMS Endurance detected the settlement during a routine visit to the island. The British Foreign Office immediately recognized this as a direct challenge to British sovereignty. On January 5, 1977, Britain requested an explanation from the Argentine Government. Argentina responded on

January 14 by describing the settlement as a station for future scientific investigation

“within the jurisdiction of Argentine sovereignty” and implied that the presence would not be permanent. 675 The British Government formally protested on January 19, 1976,

672 Freedman, Britain and the Falklands , 19-23. 673 Freedman, The Official History , 54-55. 674 Freedman, Britain and the Falklands , 25-26; 675 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 41.

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stating that the presence on South Thule was a ‘violation of British sovereignty’ and in breach of the standard rule of prior consultation with the British Foreign Office. It requested that the “scientific project” be terminated, which it was not. 676 An internal

Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) report released in February 1977 described the base as a political act designed “as a physical demonstration of sovereignty.” 677 The

British government considered a variety of responses to the incursion, including the use of military force, but ultimately decided to deescalate the crisis and keep the matter private. 678 In fact Prime Minister Callaghan chose to keep the incident so secret that the

British public did not learn about it until May 1978, when the RSS Bransfield discovered the settlement.679

In December 1981, a repeat of South Thule occurred in the South Georgia Islands.

Earlier that year, Constantino Davidoff, an Argentine scrap metal dealer, had received permission and a contract from a British firm to dismantle four abandoned whaling stations on South Georgia Island. 680 In August he applied to use the Antarctic transport ships of the Argentine Navy to complete the contract. On December 16, Davidoff left

Buenos Aires with a small team aboard the Almirante Irizar , arriving five days later at

Leith on South Georgia to inspect the whaling stations. Davidoff had alerted the British

Embassy in Buenos Aires to his departure, but his notification was vague and he did not

676 Ibid.; Freedman, Britain and the Falklands , 25-26; UK National Archives, “Report on Southern Thule,” November 21, 1977, in “Dispute over the Falklands – Argentine Presence on the South Sandwich Island Dependencies,” FCO7/3375. This document reviews the British protests made to the Argentine Government over its presence on South Thule and notes Argentina’s reactivation of the base in November 1977. 677 Quoted in Freedman, The Official History , 78. 678 Ibid., 77-78; David A. Welch, “Remember the Falklands: Missed Lessons of a Misunderstood War,” International Journal (Summer 1997), 489. 679 John Bingham, “National Archives: How Britain Covered Up Argentine Occupation of Falklands,” The Telegraph , December 29, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/falklandislands/4014500/National-Archives- How-Britain-covered-up-Argentine-occupation-of-Falklands.html (accessed March 10, 2016). 680 Freedman, Britain and the Falklands , 55.

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request diplomatic clearance for the ship . He continued to maintain radio silence during the voyage and failed to check in at King Edward Point, Grytviken – the official point of entry to the islands and where British Customs and Immigration clearance was obtained. 681

By the time the British Government discovered that the visit had occurred, the

Almirante had departed Leith. A subsequent inspection of the visit site on December 23,

1981, revealed traces of an Argentine military visit and a wall defaced with the slogan

‘Las Malvinas son Argentinas’ (‘the Falkland Islands are Argentina’s’) dated December

20. The Governor of the Falkland Islands, Sir Rex Hunt, reported the incident immediately to the FCO, advising a strong response from London. The British

Government, not wanting to “risk provoking a most serious incident which could escalate and have an unforeseeable outcome” instead instructed Hunt to make a formal protest against further violations of British sovereignty. 682 The British complaint was officially registered on February 3, 1982, some fifty days after the initial offence had been committed. The Argentine Government rejected the protest nine days later, and the matter was laid to rest. 683

3.2 The Falklands War 1982 Not long after Davidoff’s first voyage to Leith in December 1981, a second incident took place the consequences of which were much greater. On March 18, 1982,

Davidoff returned to Leith Harbor, South Georgia, with 19 workmen aboard the

Argentine naval transport ship Bahi Buen Suceso . Once they had disembarked, the scrap dealers proceeded to fire shots in the air, sing the Argentine anthem, and raise the

681 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 42. 682 The Franks Report , para. 164, 683 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 43.

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Argentine national flag. The British Government was alarmed by Davidoff’s failure to report at the British base in Grytviken, and feared that military personnel were hidden amongst the scrap dealers. The British Embassy in Buenos Aires was instructed to inform the Argentine Foreign Ministry that the Bahi Buen Suceso must leave immediately, and that if it did not do so, that Britain would take any action deemed necessary to ensure its removal. 684 On March 21, this demand was accompanied by the dispatch of HMS

Endurance from Port Stanley to monitor the situation at South Georgia. 685

The Argentine Foreign Minister Costa Mendez reported surprise at the reaction of the British. He assured the British Ambassador Williams in Buenos Aires that the Bahia

Buen Suceso would soon be leaving and stated that the party at South Georgia was not official and did not contain service personnel. 686 On March 22, British sources reported that the Buen Suceso had departed Leith but that the Argentine party remained in place.

The British Government proceeded to authorize Endurance to remove the Argentine men and their equipment from South Georgia, 687 and informed Costa Mendez that the

Argentine Government had left Britain with no alternative. 688 Minister of Foreign Affairs

Luce reported Britain’s position to the House of Commons on March 23 acknowledging that Endurance with a detachment of Royal Marines was “in the area” and that is was

684 Freedman, The Official History , 175; Telegram, Falklands: FCO to Port Stanley (“Illegal Landing on South Georgia”), March 20, 1982, PREM 19/613 f56, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/121942 (accessed March 10, 2016). 685 Telegram, Falklands: FCO to Port Stanley (“Illegal Landing on South Georgia”), March 20, 1982, PREM 19/657 f87, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/122486 (accessed March 10, 2016) 686 Telegram, Falklands: UKE Buenos Aires to FCO (Argentine Landing on South Georgia), March 23, 1982, ALW 040/325/12 Part A 1-100, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/118399 (accessed March 12, 2016); Freedman, The Official History , 177. 687 Freedman, The Official History , 179. 688 Telegram, Falklands: FCO to UKE Buenos Aires (“Illegal Landing on South Georgia”), March 23, 1982, ALW 040/325/12 Part A 1-100, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/118396 (accessed March 12, 2016).

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“the duty of this Government and any British Government to defend and support the islanders to the best of their ability.” 689

On March 24 the British had second thoughts. Concerned that the Argentines might find it difficult to concede in the face of public threats, the government ordered

Endurance to Grytviken instead of Leith Harbor to enable the Argentines to remove their citizens without public embarrassment. 690 The Argentine junta, having met to discuss the growing crisis on March 23, refused to acquiesce to British demands and chose instead to dispatch its own frigate Bahia Paraiso to protect the Argentines at Leith. 691 The British made one final attempt to resolve the crisis through diplomacy. On March 25, Williams informed Costa Mendez that if Davidoff’s party returned to Grytviken they would be furnished with suitable immigration documentation allowing for their return to Leith without having to leave the island. The men could then complete their work before departing. 692 The Argentine Foreign Minister did not respond. That same day the junta had received (false) intelligence reports that Britain had dispatched additional ships to the area, including a nuclear submarine. 693 On March 26, in the wake of this news, the military junta made the decision to reinforce their defense of the men at Leith and to invade the Falkland Islands. 694

An Argentine force of 500 men landed at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands on

April 2, 1982. The British, taken by surprise by the invasion, restated their determination

689 Statement by Minister of Foreign Affairs Richard Luce, “South Georgia (Incident),” House of Commons Debate, March 23, 1982, https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1982-03-23a.798.0 (accessed March 12, 2016). 690 Telegram, Falklands: UKE Buenos Aires to FCO (“South Georgia”), March 24, 1982, PREM 19/613 f40, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/121949 (accessed March 10, 2016). 691 Gamba, The Falklands/Malvinas War, 119. 692 Telegram, Falklands: FCO to UKE Buenos Aires (“South Georgia”), March 25, 1982, ALW 040/325/12 Part A 1-100, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/118401 (accessed March, 2016). 693 Gamba, The Falklands/Malvinas , 120. 694 Ibid.; Freedman, The Official History , 187;

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to defend the islands. Prime Minster Thatcher addressed the House of Commons publicly on April 3, stating that, “the Falkland Islands and their dependencies remain British territory. No aggression and no invasion can alter that simple fact. It is the Government’s objective to see that the islands are freed from occupation and returned to the British administration at the earliest possible moment.”695 She announced that a British task force would sail in defense of the Falklands on April 5. After a failed attempt at mediation by U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Argentine and British forces made first contact on April 25. After seven weeks of fighting the Argentine government surrendered on June 14, 1982, bringing an end to the Falklands War. 696

4. THEORY AND HYPOTHESES According to the first stage in the cognitive-institutional theory, variation in leadership beliefs within a target state is key to understanding how threatening signals are interpreted during crises. Specifically, I argue that a target state’s prior crisis interactions provide crucial information to target state leaders about an adversary’s foreign policy objectives and the costs that it is willing to expend to achieve those goals. Collectively, this information enables target state leaders to form beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests, and whether it is satisfied with the status quo or wanting (and willing) to revise the current international order.

What does the cognitive-institutional theory predict about the Falklands War of

1982? How would it expect the key members of the military junta –and especially

Galtieri and Anaya – to assess the credibility of the British threat? The remainder of this

695 Speech by Margaret Thatcher to the House of Commons, April 3, 1982, Hansard HC [21/633-38], Margaret Thatcher Archives, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104910 (accessed March 15, 2016). 696 Boyce, The Falklands War, 96-97, 145.

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section provides evidence for these leaders’ beliefs about the extent of British foreign policy interests prior to March 1982, and uses these beliefs to generate predictions about their threat assessment during the subsequent Falklands War. Section 5 then draws on available primary and secondary sources to evaluate the junta’s assessment of British threat credibility in 1982.

4.1 Argentine Leaders’ Beliefs Pre-1982: South Thule 1976 Available evidence suggests that the Argentine junta’s assessment of British foreign policy interests in 1982 was influenced in important ways by their experience during the South Thule Crisis of 1976. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is found in the statements of senior Argentina leaders themselves. The Argentine Foreign Minister later recalled that past British behavior, and in particular the acceptance of an Argentine naval base on Thule Island, had strongly shaped Galtieri and Anaya’s views that Britain had a diminishing interest in the South Atlantic. 697 British diplomatic protests and the lack of a more forceful effort to remove the Argentine presence informed the Argentine leaders’ view that the British Government would not “deploy major forces to protect the islands.” 698 In fact, not only had Britain failed to deploy forces to remove the Argentine presence, but British formal protests had come to naught. After their brief departure from the island, the Argentine authorities informed the British Government that the “workers” were returning to the base in South Thule in October 1977. The FCO simply responded

697 T.V. Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts: War Initiation by Weaker Powers (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 163; Michael Charlton, The Little Platoon: Diplomacy and the Falklands Dispute (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989), 109. 698 Nicanor Costa Mendez, “Beyond Deterrence: The Malvinas-Falklands Case,” Journal of Social Issues 43, 4, (1987), 120.

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by reaffirming British sovereignty, and requesting that the issue be kept out of the public eye. 699

In fact, British Prime Minister Callaghan seemed more concerned with avoiding publicity and further escalation of the dispute than signaling resolve to the Argentine government.700 By 1978, the British calculated that there were 40 Argentine personnel present on the islands, of which a number were armed forces.701 Given that Argentina had made contingency plans to respond militarily if Britain attempted to retake South Thule by force, London’s decision to focus on private diplomatic communications over stronger public protests in the United Nations and/or the use of military tools was deemed highly informative. 702 A British intelligence assessment released on February 1, 1977, expressed concern about the lessons being learned by the Argentine leaders and the precedent that

British behavior might set. In considering the British response to the base at South Thule, the report’s author speculated that Argentine actions “might have been considered so successful as to encourage the Argentine Government to take further actions.” 703

And indeed they did. The importance of South Thule in shaping Argentine leaders’ beliefs about the extent of British foreign policy interests is most apparent in the military’s subsequent planning and behavior. Anaya, Chief of Naval Operations at the time of South Thule, seized upon Britain’s lack of response as indicative of its broader interests in the South Atlantic. The perceived success of the Thule landing and the absence of any significant British resistance led Anaya to formulate a plan code-named

Operation Alpha. It was a simple idea designed to replicate the success of South Thule by

699 UK National Archives, “Report on Southern Thule.” 700 Ibid.; Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 41; Freedman, Britain and the Falklands , 26. 701 Freedman, The Official History , 92. 702 Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts, 163; Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 41. 703 Freedman, The Official History , 78.

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establishing a similar military station on South Georgia. In fact the relationship between the Thule and Georgia operations, and the importance of perceived British indifference in the latter’s design, is documented in an official Argentine government memo of June 12,

1981. The analysis presented states clearly that the rationale for considering the establishment of a base on the South Georgia Island was based on “the positive experience of the previous operation in the Sandwich Islands and the absence of an

English reaction when that occurred.” 704

Constantino Davidoff’s request to use naval transport for his visits to South

Georgia provided Anaya with a perfect opportunity to execute his two-stage plan. In the first stage, Argentine military officers would infiltrate Davidoff’s official party and form an advance landing team on South Georgia. After the base had been established, a small contingent of Argentine marines would follow shortly thereafter to build a more permanent military base of approximately fourteen men. 705 As we know from Section 3, this first stage of the plan was executed in December 1981, when Davidoff landed at

Leith. As Anaya anticipated, when London detected the visit it registered a formal protest with the Argentine foreign office but took no further action. 706 This episode reconfirmed the new military junta’s belief that Britain was not willing to absorb the military or political costs necessary to defend the islands, and more importantly served to increase

Anaya’s confidence in Argentina’s ability to achieve its ultimate objective – retaking control of the Falkland Islands. 707 In fact the experience of South Thule and South

Georgia combined led the junta, under the new leadership of Galtieri and Anaya, to

704 Rattenbach Report, Anexos Al Informe Final, Tomo III, #454, Puerto Belgrano, 12 Junio de 1981. 705 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 41. 706 Ibid., 43. Hugh Carless, the FCO Latin American Desk Officer at the time, later confirmed that Argentine actions in South Thule were an indicator of things to come. Charlton, The Little Platoon , 61. 707 Guerra, “Political Perception and Strategic Miscalculation,” 52-53.

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postpone the second stage of Operation Alpha in favor of a new operation code-named

Operation Azul. 708 This latest plan sidestepped South Georgia altogether and called for a full-scale invasion of the Falkland Islands in late 1982. 709

South Thule was thus key to shaping Admiral Anaya’s beliefs about British interests, and these beliefs in turn determined his subsequent military strategy. However the Argentine leader also saw Britain’s behavior elsewhere in the world as confirming his assessment of British resolve. In an interview just after the Falklands War, Anaya stated that he saw Britain’s behavior in Rhodesia and the Suez Crisis as particularly informative.

British foreign policy towards Rhodesia revealed London’s general inclination to negotiate rather than fight – a preference that was also clear in its dealings over the

Falklands – and it indicated a disinterest in holding onto far-flung territories. 710 Anaya also cited the Suez Crisis as providing additional proof of British irresolution and an unwillingness to absorb large-scale military costs. More importantly, perhaps, it showed that even on those rare occasions that Britain decided to use force, that London could easily be tamed by American pressure and would heed Washington’s calls for restraint. 711

While these crises did not constitute first-hand, direct experiences, they were useful in reaffirming the Argentine leader’s perceptions of British interests. Anaya concluded that

“Her Majesty’s Government lacked the national will to respond to military pressure,” 712

708 Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts, 152. 709 There is an ongoing debate over whether the Davidoff mission in March was authorized by elements within the Argentine Navy who wished to see the completion of Operation Alpha. Welch, “Remember the Falklands,” 490; Freedman, The Official History , 172; Jack S. Levy and Lilu I. Vakili, “Diversionary Action by Authoritarian Regimes: Argentina in the Falklands/Malvinas Case,” in Manu I. Midlarsky (ed.), The Internalization of Communal Strife (London: Routledge, 1992), 133. 710 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of Wa r, 78. 711 M. Taylor Fravel, “The Limits of Diversion: Rethinking Internal and External Conflict,” Security Studies 19, 2 (2010), 52; Welch, “Remember the Falklands,” 330. 712 Charlton, The Little Platoon , 115.

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especially over such a strategically and economically insignificant piece of territory as the Falklands. 713

Finally, Anaya and Galtieri found evidence in London’s defense planning to support their assessments of British resolve. The 1981 British defense review’s conclusion that HMS Endurance should be withdrawn from the South Atlantic was taken by the military junta as further evidence of a lack of British interest in the region. 714

According to the Argentine Foreign Minister Costa Mendez, the Argentine military, and

Anaya especially, paid close attention to the defense debate in Britain over the future of the South Atlantic presence in 1981.715 The decision to withdraw Endurance from the region was confirmed in Parliament on June 30, 1981, and was met with joy in the

Argentine press.716 As the Frank Report noted, the withdrawal was “construed by the

Argentines as a deliberate political gesture; they did not see it as an inevitable economy in Britain’s defense budget since the implications for the Islands and for Britain’s position in the South Atlantic were fundamental.” 717 The leaders within the junta inferred

British intentions directly from these parliamentary discussions and concluded that

Britain was anxious to reduce its international footprint. 718

It is important to note, however, that while the defense review certainly influenced the views of the Argentine junta in late 1981 and into 1982, this debate and the British decision to withdraw Endurance from service was taken after Anaya had direct experience of British resolve during South Thule. The British 1981 Defence

713 Paul, Asymmetric Conflict , 151. 714 UK Defence White Paper, UK Defence Programme: The Way Forward (London: HMSO, 1981), THCR 2/6/2/47, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/121307 (accessed March 12, 2016); Freedman, Britain and the Falklands War , 31-32. 715 Charlton, The Little Platoon, 109 716 Boyce, The Falklands War, 27. 717 The Franks Report, para 116. 718 Gamba, The Falklands/Malvinas, 101-03; Charlton, The Little Platoon , 109.

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Review thus served to confirm the Argentine leader’s prior beliefs about the extent of

British interests and resolve to defend its territories in the South Atlantic. Evidence of these prior beliefs is found in government documents and more explicitly in Anaya’s plans for South Georgia – an operation based directly on his experience of South Thule.

The British decision to choose a diplomatic over military response during the 1976 crisis and to allow the Argentine base to remain proved critical in shaping Anaya, and later

Galtieri’s, assessments of British resolve.

Table 5.1 Anaya/Galtieri’s Perception of British Resolve (South Thule 1976)719 Costs Yes No Target State Perception Military Alerts/Mobilization X Signal of Limited Resolve Nuclear Alerts X N/A Military Ground Invasion (denial strategy) X N/A Air Strikes (punishment strategy) X N/A Allies to Share Burden X N/A Economic Sanctions X N/A Financial Allies to Share Burden X N/A UN Authorization X N/A Public Opinion in Favor of N/A Signal of Limited Resolve* Political Action (Secret) N/A Political Elite in Favor of Action Signal of Limited Resolve* (Secret) *There is some evidence that the decision to keep the crisis secret reinforced beliefs in the lack of British resolve.

In light of Argentina’s experience with Great Britain over South Thule in 1976 and the subsequent “repeat” landing at South Georgia in 1981, I code the content of

Anaya and Galtieri’s beliefs about Great Britain prior to the Falklands War as follows: 1) they believed that Great Britain had status quo foreign policy objectives in the South

Atlantic and an ongoing interest in defending British sovereignty; but 2) they believed that Great Britain was not willing to devote significant resources to achieving this end.

According to the theory developed in Chapter 2, when a target state leader believes that

719 N/A indicates not relevant to the crisis or that there is no documentary evidence of the indicator being considered informative by the Argentine military leaders.

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an adversary has status quo foreign policy objectives but is not willing to devote significant resources to achieving these ends, future coercive threats will be interpreted in accordance with these prior beliefs. In particular, signals intended to convey threat credibility, such as statements of resolve and troop movements, will be sidelined and reinterpreted by target state leaders in accordance with their prior expectations, and signals of restraint and reassurance such as public and international opposition as well as private disclosures will be weighted heavily. In such cases, threats to preserve the status quo will be assessed as incredible and the target will likely resist. This leads to the following case-specific prediction regarding Galtieri and Anaya’s future assessments of

British threat credibility:

H1 Argentina : Based on their experiences in 1976, the military leaders will assess British threats to defend the status quo in the South Atlantic as incredible.

Since the cognitive-institutional theory expects Galtieri and Anaya to assess

British threats to defend the status quo as incredible, it goes without saying that more costly compellent threats would be interpreted similarly.

5. ARGENTINE MILITARY LEADERS ’ THREAT ASSESSMENT 5.1 Argentine Leaders’ Threat Assessment: March 20 – April 2 1982 The evidence available suggests that Galtieri and Anaya’s belief in the lack

British resolve to defend its interests in the South Atlantic strongly shaped the broader context within which the Falklands invasion took place. This assessment is clear in the statements made by the military leaders themselves in interviews after the war. Anaya claimed that he did not believe that the British would respond militarily to the landing at

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Port Stanely, 720 and Galtieri recalled that he was “absolutely, viscerally convinced that the British would not fight.”721 He further claimed that “although it was considered possible that Great Britain would react, we did not believe that it was probable that there would be a mobilization over the Malvinas [Falklands]…In my judgment, it was scarcely possible and totally improbable.” 722 The Rattenbach Report later concluded from its interviews with the Argentine military leaders that because they did not think there would be a serious reaction from Britain, the occupation was “conceived and executed in an absolutely false framework.” 723

Galtieri and Anaya’s prior beliefs strongly shaped how they responded the

Falklands crisis as it unfolded during the last days of March. Immediately upon detecting the presence of Davidoff and his “workers” at Leith, Britain issued a firm response.

Ambassador Williams conveyed his government’s wishes that the men be removed, and that if they were not, that Britain would “have to take whatever action seems necessary.” 724 These verbal warnings were followed by the dispatch of HMS Endurance to observe Argentine actions, 725 and heated statements in the House of Commons reaffirming British rights to the islands. On March 23, Minister of Foreign Affairs Luce confirmed that the British Government was taking action to defend the rights of the islanders, and British media responded by calling the landing at Leith an act of Argentine

720 Charlton, The Little Platoon, 119. 721 Quoted in Richard C. Thornton, The Falklands Sting: Regan, Thatcher, and Argentina’s Bomb (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1998), 147. 722 Quoted in Carlos J. Moneta, “The Malvinas Conflict: Some Elements for an Analysis of the Argentine Military Regime’s Decision Making Process, 1976-82,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 13, 3 (1984), 319. 723 Quoted in Phil Williams, “Miscalculation, Crisis Management and the Falklands Conflict,” The World Today , 39, 4 (1983), 144-45. 724 Telegram, Falklands: FCO to Port Stanley (“Illegal Landing on South Georgia”), March 20, 1982, PREM 19/613 f56. 725 Telegram, Falklands: CINCFLEET to HMS Endurance (“Illegal Landing on South Georgia”), March 20, 1982, PREM 19/613 f53, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/121941 (accessed March 15, 2016).

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aggression. 726 Ambassador Williams informed the Argentine Foreign Ministry that

Endurance would be anchoring at Leith on March 24 to remove the Argentine workers and that the “cooperation” of the Argentine authorities was expected. 727

These strongly issued warnings, however, delivered in both public and private, did not appear to alter the Galtieri and Anaya’s assessments of British interests. Costa

Mendez did inform the British Ambassador that the military junta was “surprised” by the reaction of the British and that they felt London was overreacting to the incident. 728 This much, it seems, was true. Nevertheless, British behavior during the final weeks of March did not result in the military leaders updating their perception of British resolve. As a number of commentators have rightly pointed out, a much more forceful British reaction would have been required for this to occur. 729 What the British reaction did serve to achieve was to increase concern within the Argentine leadership that the planned withdrawal of Endurance would not go ahead, and that Britain would bolster its presence in the South Atlantic to deter future Argentine operations. If Britain were to undertake such action, it would interfere with Galtieri and Anaya’s pans for a larger offensive against the Falkland Islands later that year. 730

The Argentine military junta met on March 23 and again on March 26 to decide on their next steps. On March 23 Galtieri and Anaya decided to reinforce the defense of

Leith and to defend the workers on the islands. After observing the debate in the House of Commons on March 24 and the calls for greater British protection of its South Atlantic

726 Williams, “Miscalculation, Crisis Management and the Falklands Conflict,” 148; Rubén O. Moro, The History of the South Atlantic Conflict (New York, NY: Praeger, 1989), 12-13. 727 Moro, The History of the South Atlantic Conflict, 12-13. 728 Telegram, Falklands: UKE Buenos Aires to FCO (Argentine Landing on South Georgia), March 23, 1982. 729 Williams, “Miscalculation, Crisis Management and the Falklands Conflict,” 146. 730 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 70-71.

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territories, the military leaders decided to bring forward the planned invasion of the

Falkland Islands to the end of the month. 731 It is important to emphasize that in taking this decision, however, Galtieri and Anaya had in no way revised their assessment of

British policy over the Falklands. Indeed, it is precisely because they assessed London as having limited interests in the islands, and being unwilling to absorb costs to defend them, that an invasion plan had been devised. 732

This assessment is clear, moreover, in the nature of the junta’s military planning in preparation for the invasion. The plan was premised on the very assumption that

Britain would not use force to retake the islands. According to the Rattenbach Report, the plan envisaged an occupation of the island by an amphibious force, a bloodless operation to seize control of Port Stanley, the installation of a military government, and the subsequent withdrawal of forces except for a small military garrison to support a new

Argentine governor. This would be possible, moreover, in just five days. 733 There were no contingency plans devoted to defending the island against an attack should the British respond with military force. 734 As a result, when the junta invaded the islands on April 2, it did so with a force ill-suited to fighting a war. Of the 1,400 troops deployed, half were recently trained conscripts with little to no combat experience, and the majority were instructed to return to Argentina in the days immediately after the invasion. 735 Finally, the timing of the invasion itself revealed little expectation of war. In March 1982, Britain had

731 Ibid.; Freedman, Britain and the Falklands , 56-58. 732 Boyce, The Falklands War , 31; Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 79; Rattenbach Report, para 105. 733 Rattenbach Report, para 126. 734 Ibid., paras 143, 243. The Argentine military governor of the island, General Mario Benjamin Menendez recalls, “There was nothing in the plans about what would happen after five days. The last entry was “D+5: Menendez becomes governor.” Quoted in Welch, “Remember the Falklands,” 494. 735 Arthur Gavshon and Desmond Rice, The Sinking of the Belgrano (London: Secker and Warburg, 1984), 30-31; Fernando de Santibañes, “The Effectiveness of Military Governments During War,” 628-29.

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not yet reduced its naval presence in the region as it planned to later in the year, 736 and the Argentine Navy had not received the weapons that it had previously purchased from

France and Germany. 737 The Argentine Armed Forces were thus poorly prepared to face a military conflict with Britain.

The question arises as to what Galtieri and Anaya thought the British would do in response to the Argentine invasion. According to a wide range of sources, the military leaders expected Britain to respond through diplomatic channels, as it had in the past, and to reengage in stalled negotiations over the future status of the islands. 738 The Argentine leaders planned to present Britain with a fait accompli and compel it to negotiate. Foreign

Minister Costa later confirmed that the Argentine junta believed that a “the military solution would force Britain to negotiate. The idea was to recover the islands with a small force and leave a small force there.” 739 In a post-war interview, Anaya confirmed that he thought he was “giving a nudge to diplomacy” by landing a small force of five hundred troops at Port Stanley. 740 The guiding principle was “occupy to negotiate” 741 in order to bargain with Britain from a position of strength. 742 The day after the invasion, most of the troops that had landed in the Falklands returned to their original units in the mainland,

736 Fernando de Santibañes, “The Effectiveness of Military Governments During War,” 629. 737 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 83; Guerra, “Political Perception and Strategic Miscalculation,” 58. 738 Boyce, The Falklands War , 31. 739 Quoted in Charlton, The little Platoon , 115. 740 Ibid., 119. 741 Rattenbach Report, paras 4(d), 240, 570. The Rattenbach Report states that that objective of the invasion was “limited.” 742 Freedman, The Official History , 187; Richard Ned Lebow, “Miscalculation in the South Atlantic: The Origins of the Falklands War,” in Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein (eds.), Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1985), 112-14; Levy and Vakili, “Diversionary Action by Authoritarian Regimes,” 134.

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and Argentine diplomats stood ready to begin negotiations over the sovereignty of the

Falklands. 743

5.2 Argentine Leaders’ Threat Assessment: April 2 – April 25 1982 British intelligence picked up on Argentine force mobilizations on March 31, and the invasion was subsequently confirmed on April 2. The response in the British

Parliament was explosive. 744 In a special meeting of the House of Commons on April 3,

Prime Minister Thatcher faced the prospect of being ousted from leadership by hardline

Conservative backbenchers. 745 In response to calls for immediate action, Thatcher stated the government’s clear objective to remove the Argentine forces and announced the deployment of a task force of 10,000 troops to achieve that end. 746 By the end of that week, the first wave of the task force was en route comprising two carriers, three submarines, eleven destroyers and frigates, tankers, landing ships, and stores ships. This was followed soon thereafter by the Royal Marines, with additional frigates joining the task force from Gibraltar.747

In addition to deploying a naval task force, the British Government called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on April 1 demanding international condemnation of Argentina’s actions. UNSC Resolution 502 passed on April 3 calling for the cessation of hostilities, a withdrawal of all Argentine forces, and for all parties to seek a diplomatic solution to their differences. 748 On April 12, with no resolution in sight,

743 Fernando de Santibañes, “The Effectiveness of Military Governments During War,” 617. 744 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 110, 121. 745 Lebow, “Miscalculation in the South Atlantic,” 118. 746 Speech by Margaret Thatcher to the House of Commons, April 3, 1982; Freedman, Britain and the Falklands , 47. 747 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 128. 748 UNSC Resolution, “Resolution 502 (1982),” April 3, 1982. https://documents-ddsny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/435/26/IMG/NR043526.pdf?OpenElement (accessed March 15, 2016). In addition ten countries of the European Common Market voted to suspend their imports from

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Thatcher announced the establishment of a maritime exclusion zone around the Falkland

Islands. From that time onwards, any Argentine warship or naval platform found within this area would be “treated as hostile and liable to be attacked by British forces.” 749 On

April 14, Thatcher publicly reaffirmed her commitment to retaking control of the

Falkland Islands, informing the House of Commons that:

“We shall continue to insist on Argentine withdrawal from the Falkland Islands and dependencies. We shall remain ready to exercise our rights to resort to force in self-defense under article 51 of the United Nations charter until the occupying forces leave the islands. Our naval task force sails on towards its destination. We remain fully confident of its ability to take whatever measures may be necessary…through diplomatic, economic, and if necessary military means, we shall persevered until freedom and democracy are restored to the people of the Falkland Islands.” 750

Throughout this period of time, British public opinion was strongly in favor the government’s response to the Argentine invasion. 751 Incensed by newspaper headlines reading “SHAME” (Daily Mail), and “HUMILIATION” (Daily Telegraph), 752 support continued to grow for the use of military force. 753

Yet despite these strong signals of increased British resolve, Galtieri and Anaya’s prior beliefs continued to shape their assessment of British threat credibility through the early weeks of April 1982. According to the Rattenbach Report, the leaders remained

Argentina. Lt Col Luis Andarcia, “Falklands’ War: Strategic, Intelligence and Diplomatic Failures,” (Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, 1985), 88. 749 Speech by Margaret Thatcher to the House of Commons, April 14, 1982, Hansard HC [21/1146-50], Margaret Thatcher Archives, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104918 (accessed March 15, 2016). 750 Ibid. 751 Support for the naval task increased from 83% on April 14, to 85% on April 20 and May 3. See “The Falklands War Panel Survey,” MORI Public Opinion Poll, June 1982, https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=49 (accessed March 10, 2016). 752 Moro, The History of the South Atlantic Conflict , 31. 753 Williams, “Miscalculation, Crisis Management and the Falklands Conflict,” 148. Support for landing British forces on the Falklands grew from 65% on April 20, to 72% on May 3. See “The Falklands War Panel Survey.”

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convinced that the land defenses of the islands were impregnable and that the British

“could not bear the enormous costs” of invasion. 754 Thus, the military leaders took note of the task force deployment, but saw it as an “overreaction” in the broader context of negotiations. 755 Galtieri and Anaya seemed to pay very little attention to British domestic politics during this period, and though the UN vote was a surprise, it was received relatively well since it did not label Argentina an aggressor nor call for a return to the status quo ante April 2. 756

Perhaps the clearest evidence of the continued role of prior beliefs in shaping the

Argentine leaders’ threat assessment was in their reading of the U.S. position throughout the early weeks of April. As noted in Section 4, Galtieri and Anaya believed both that

Great Britain was highly unlike to fight a war over the Falkland Islands, but also that the

United States would intervene to constrain London should it choose a more assertive path.

The military leaders had apparently received support for this view in March 1982 during a dinner between Costa Mendez and Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders. During the course of the evening, Costa Mendez reported that Enders implied a “hands off” policy in Washington with respect to the Falklands dispute. The junta also believed that it had a sympathetic ear in Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick who had expressed sympathies for the Argentine cause. 757 This belief in U.S. neutrality – alongside an estimate of low

British resolve – was a key guiding assumption prior to landing troops at Port Stanley on

754 Rattenbach Report, para 571. 755 Ibid., para 576. 756 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 141. 757 Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts , 157-58.

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April 2. 758 This assumption was made despite the fact that Secretary of State Alexander

Haig had consistently maintained that U.S. interests lay squarely with Great Britain. 759

Irrespective of how rational Galtieri and Anaya’s commitment to this belief may have been prior to the invasion, 760 their assumption of U.S. support quickly ran up against a number of clear signals that failed to influence the leaders’ assessments. Upon hearing the news of the impending invasion of the Falklands on April 1, Reagan made a personal call to Galtieri during which he stated that:

“Mrs. Thatcher is a friend of mine, is a very determined woman and she would have no other alternative but to make a military response. The conflict will be tragic and have grave consequences for the Hemisphere…the relationship between your country and mine will suffer greatly. American and world-wide public opinion will take a negative attitude to an Argentine use of force.” 761

This clear warning from the President, however, had little effect on Galtieri. He proceeded with the invasion plan, declared General Mario Benjamin Menendez the new governor of the “Islas Malvinas” on April 3 and ordered the withdrawal of all but 500

Argentine troops. 762

The words of caution offered by Secretary of State Alexander Haig also appeared to fall on deaf ears. According to the Rattenbach report, Galtieri not only failed to heed the warnings of Reagan, but also a statement from Haig on the eve of the invasion.

758 Rattenbach Report, para 755. 759 David Lewis Feldman, “The United States Role in the Malvinas Crisis, 1982: Misguidance and Misperception in Argentina’s Decision to Go to War,” Journal of Inter American Studies and World Affairs 27, 2 (Summer, 1985), 7. 760 This is generous, since a relatively simple analysis at the time would conclude that the United States shared a closer relationship with Great Britain than Argentina and thus would side with London if forced to choose. Andarcia, “Falklands’ War,” 10. 761 Quoted in Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 97; Rattenbach Report, Anexos No 11/25, 289-290, Conversacion Telefonica del Presidente Reagan con El Presidente Gatltieri El 01 Abril 82, Junta Militar, Comisión de Anális y Evaluación de las Responsabilidades del Conflicto del Atlántico Sur; “Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassies in Argentina and the United Kingdom,” FRUS 1981-84, Vol. XIII Conflict in the South Atlantic , Document 41. 762 Guerra, “Political Perception and Strategic Miscalculation,” 65.

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Secretary Haig contacted Argentine Ambassador Takacs in Washington to request that the junta not go ahead with the planned invasion, stating that it would spark conflict between allies of the United States. He offered his good services to try and mediate the dispute and advised that if war broke out, the United States would not remain neutral and would have to support Great Britain. A memo of this conversation was passed on to

Galtieri. The report adds that from April 1, the military junta was repeatedly warned that the United States would support Great Britain in an armed conflict, a position that was made clear at the United Nations when the U.S. Representative voted in favor of UNSC

Resolution 502. 763

Despite these clear statements of intent, however, Galtieri was reportedly pleased with the U.S. offer to mediate, saw this as a “green light,” and perceived Secretary Haig’s involvement as proof that the junta’s calculations had been correct. 764 The junta agreed that no new military actions needed to be taken, and ordered restrictions on the use of any force. 765 In light of such optimism, Haig himself began to worry that Galtieri was misunderstanding the U.S. warnings. To make sure that his position was clear, Haig spoke with the Argentine leaders on April 8-9 with the express purpose of persuading them that the British were not bluffing over the use of force. 766 On April 9, he explained that there was a danger of war and that if the British task force continued south, they would lose control of the situation. Haig added that Britain had a far superior force and would win if it came to war. “I must be frank,” he stated, “in the United States the support for Britain is widespread. In the liberal world the sentiment is overwhelmingly in

763 Rattenbach Report, para 99. 764 Gamba, The Falkland/Malvinas War , 149-50. 765 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 148. 766 Andarcia, “Falklands’ War,” 21.

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favor of Great Britain and would remain so if it comes to confrontation.” 767 Still worried that the message was not getting through, Haig asked Special Envoy Dick Walters to meet with Galtieri personally to explain in Spanish that the British would fight and win, and that the United States would back Britain. Walter recalls:

“I said to Galtieri, ‘General they will fight, and they will win. They have technical means that you simply do not have. They have an experienced career army in which everybody has been shot at, and everything else. You’ve got seventeen-year-old conscripts, some of whom come from tropical areas to this very cold, very unpleasant windy climate.’ But he was absolutely, viscerally convinced that the British would not fight. At one time he said to me ‘That woman wouldn’t dare.' I said, ‘Mr. President, “that woman” has let a number of thunder strikers of her own basic ethnic origin starve themselves to death without flickering an eyelash. I would not count on that if I were you.” 768

On April 13, Haig warned Foreign Minister Costa Mendez that “I think that both

[parties] are going to end up in a war that will have very damaging consequences for all.” 769 However Anaya and Galtieri’s commitment to the belief that the crisis would end short of armed conflict continued to shape their assessments. On April 17, Haig met with the two leaders in a last effort to mediate the dispute. During the meeting, Anaya apparently accused Haig of lying when the Secretary warned that America would ‘tilt’ towards Britain if negotiations broke down. 770 This meeting effectively marked the end of

Haig’s involvement in the crisis.

The conclusion of U.S. mediation efforts failed to have a significant effect on the junta’s preparations for war with Britain. Although there is some evidence that Galtieri

767 Quoted in Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 175. 768 Ibid., 176. 769 Quoted in Ibid., 184. 770 Ibid., 201.

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visited Port Stanley on April 22 and ordered reinforcements, 771 numerous sources contend that Galtieri and Anaya did not expect a large-scale British attack on the

Falklands until the eve of war, and continued to believe that the more likely outcome of the crisis would be the severing of diplomatic relations and/or economic sanctions. 772

More telling still is the lack of military preparations even as the British task force drew near. The runway at Port Stanley was too short to land larger aircraft and yet the junta did not make any effort to build an extension. 773 The new Falklands Governor, General

Menendez, had limited combat experience and was given little instruction as to how to best position his forces, nor was he provided adequate troops to defend the island. 774 He later wrote “we had no idea that the English would attack.” 775 Neither of the commands in Puerto Belgrano nor Port Stanley expected anything other than a diplomatic resolution of the conflict. The belief that the mission was to “occupy to negotiate” and not to defend appeared to last right through until the outbreak of war. 776

According Anaya, the Argentine junta believed that they were operating in crisis management mode right up until Great Britain fired the first shots. “It was not until the

[Argentine frigate] Belgrano was sunk,” he claimed, “that the hard fact came home to the

Argentines that they really were at war.” 777 While it is always difficult to know the extent to which such statements reflect official thinking at the time, in this case they gain some credibility in light of the military planning that appeared to follow directly from these

771 Guerra, “Political Perception and Strategic Miscalculation,” 74-75; Duncan Anderson, The Falklands War 1982 (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishers, 2002), 8.; Moro, The History of the South Atlantic Conflict , 82. 772 Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts , 151. 773 Ibid., 153. 774 Galtieri chose not to replace Menendez with a more experienced General even after hearing about the deployment of the task force. Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 147; Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts , 153. 775 Quoted in Ibid., 147. 776 Moro, The History of the South Atlantic Conflict , 86. 777 Quoted in Charlton, The Little Platoon , 119.

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judgments. For at the least the first three weeks of April following the invasion, Galtieri and Anaya clung to their belief that Great Britain was not sufficiently resolved to go to war over the Falklands Islands, and that the dispute would be settled diplomatically. 778

The military leaders continued to interpret incoming information in accordance with their prior experiences and expectations, 779 and found it extremely difficult to free themselves from the idea that the “critical battle was to be fought at the diplomatic front” and that military operations would be unnecessary.780

6. ARGENTINE LEADERS ’ LACK OF UPDATING Galtieri and Anaya formed a set of strong beliefs about the extent of British interests in the South Atlantic based on their experiences in the late 1970s, and the crisis over South Thule especially. More specifically, Britain’s continued recourse to diplomacy even in the face of encroachments on its sovereignty led the Argentine military leaders to doubt Britain’s commitment to its territories in the region. Over time, these beliefs were reinforced through selective readings of history. British behavior in the

Suez Crisis and London’s willingness to forgo control over other far-flung colonies provided particularly powerful case studies in this regard.

Despite the strength of these beliefs, however, the question remains as to why

Galtieri and Anaya did not update in the face of a mounting body of evidence that Great

Britain would use force to reclaim the Falklands Islands, especially from April 2 onwards.

In Chapter 2, I argue that to understand whether (and how) leaders update, we need to look more closely at the information environment around them. More specifically, we need to look beyond the leader to the institutional environment in which he or resides,

778 Anderson, The Falklands War , 35. 779 Rattenbach Report, para 104. 780 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 148.

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and in particular to the interactions between leaders and their security apparatus prior to, and during crises.

6.1 Argentine Leaders’ Threat Environment and Prioritization Typically, military dictatorships are weakly institutionalized regimes, and as such should be more prone to domestic instability and especially coup risks. 781 Argentina in the 1970s and 80s appeared to conform to this expectation. When the military first came to power in 1976 it did so riding a wave of public disenchantment with the Perón government and facing an urgent need to rebuild the Argentine economy. In order to achieve its domestic political and economic objectives, the junta embarked on a widespread program of economic liberalization and repression collectively known as the

Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganization). Fearing a threat to its rule, the military eliminated any traces of opposition to the regime in a nation-wide sweep, 782 eradicating leftist groups in a campaign now referred to as the

“dirty war.” Victims of the Reorganización movement were arrested, imprisoned, and

“disappeared” from society in the thousands. 783 The need to eradicate domestic threats grew over time as the Argentine public resisted the repressive practices of the government, and as the economic liberalization policies failed to deliver on their promises.784

781 Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army , 20-21; Barbara Geddes, Erica Frantz, and Joseph G. Wright, “Military Rule,” Annual Review of Political Science 17, 1 (2014), 148. See Chapter 2 for further discussion on this point. 782 The eradication of internal enemies through statewide repression is a common characteristic of many military regimes. Geddes, “Military Rule,” 155 783 David Pion-Berlin, “Military Dictatorships of Brazil and the Southern Cone,” World Scholar: Latin America & the Caribbean , 2011, https://www.academia.edu/2900228/Military_Dictatorships_of_Brazil_and_the_Southern_Cone (accessed April 12, 2016). 784 Amy Oakes, “Diversionary War and Argentina’s Invasion of the Falkland Islands,” Security Studies 15, 3 (2006), 446.

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Galtieri and Anaya came to power through a military coup – the third that

Argentina had experienced in less than five years. Given this recent history, the newly appointed leaders continued to prioritize the domestic political environment over other external concerns. 785 Domestic insecurity was particularly acute for Galtieri when he assumed the presidency towards the end of 1981. By this time, the Argentine public was facing economic collapse and expressing large-scale dissatisfaction with the military regime. The failure of state economic policies and the increasing risk of public revolt had also led to growing disagreement within the officer corps as to the broader mission of the state. 786

Between March 1980-81 forty banks and investment firms had gone bankrupt, and attempts to reverse the economic decline by devaluing the peso had led to high rates of inflation. 787 In 1981, Union leaders launched a series of strikes against the government and public demonstrations occurred on a regular basis demanding the attention of the police and armed forces. By the end of the year, the Argentine press had reneged on its agreement not to openly criticize the government resulting in public condemnation, and a number of political parties were demanding open party activity and competitive elections. 788 Finally, previous allies of the military government, including the Catholic

Church and business elite, had started to turn against the regime, criticizing its policies and calling for an end to military rule. 789 To control the domestic unrest, Galtieri and

Anaya continued the previous trend of government-sanctioned repression, responding to

785 Levy and Valkili, “Diversionary Action by Authoritarian Regimes,” 130-31. 786 Ibid., 127-29. 787 Economic growth fell from 7.1 percent in 1979 to under 1 percent in 1981, while the rate of inflation increased from 87 to 149 percent. Unemployment rose to two million, and real wages declined by 18 percent. Lebow, “Miscalculation in the South Atlantic,” 98. 788 Ibid. 789 Juan E. Corradi, The Fitful Republic: Economy, Society, and Politics in Argentina (London: Westview Press, 1985), 136-37.

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mass protests with violence. 790 Indeed the strength of domestic opposition and Galtieri’s depth of concern with his narrowing support base has led some scholars to view the

Falklands invasion as an intentional diversionary tactic in order to rally government support for a common nationalist cause. 791

Galtieri’s second priority after addressing domestic security and shoring up regime support was the Chilean threat. In 1978, the two countries had experienced a serious crisis over contested islands in the Beagle Channel that had almost resulted in war.

After troop mobilizations on both sides, Argentina and Chile eventually agreed to Papal mediation and committed themselves to seeking a peaceful resolution of the dispute on

January 8, 1979. 792 Galtieri, however, had long considered Chile to pose a direct challenge to Argentina’s position on the continent and relations between the two countries reached a new low during his time in office. 793 Immediately upon assuming the presidency, Galtieri stated his intention to repudiate the 1972 treaty requiring all border disputes between Chile and Argentine to be mediated through the International Court of

Justice. 794 Galtieri’s continued preoccupation with Argentina’s neighbor is clear in the deployment of the three best-trained mountain brigades to the Argentine-Chilean border. 795 The fear of an aggressive move by Pinochet on Argentina’s southwestern border dominated the military junta’s perception of its external security environment, and

790 Fravel, “The Limits of Diversion,” 324. 791 See e.g. Oakes, “Diversionary War and Argentina’s Invasion of the Falkland Islands”; Amy Oakes, Diversionary War: Domestic Unrest and International Conflict (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Jack S. Levy, “Domestic Politics and War,” in Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (eds), The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 94; Levy and Valkili, “Diversionary Action by Authoritarian Regimes.” For a rebuttal see Fravel, “The Limits of Diversion.” 792 ICB Case Summary, “Beagle Channel II,” http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/icb/dataviewer/ (accessed May 15, 2016). 793 Hastings and Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands , 47. 794 Oakes, “Diversionary War and Argentina’s Invasion of the Falkland Islands,” 444. 795 Guerra, “Political Perception and Strategic Miscalculation,” 89.

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certainly posed a more immediate threat to Argentine security than did negotiations with

Britain over the status of the Falkland Islands.

Galtieri and Anaya’s threat prioritizations prior to the Falkland’s War can thus be considered as follows: 1) maintain internal security and ensure regime cohesion; and 2) defend Argentine border interests against Chile. 796 This leads to the following hypothesis regarding the relationship between the military leaders’ threat environment and the orientation of state security institutions:

H2 Argentina : The Argentine leaders’ beliefs that their external adversaries – and especially Great Britain – posed less of a threat to their security than other internal threats will lead them to prioritize accordingly and devote domestic security resources towards addressing internal concerns.

Finally, though domestic security was of paramount concern, it also follows that to the extent that Argentine security resources were devoted towards the international environment, they will be oriented towards Chile over any other external threats.

6.2 Institutionalization It is clear that the organization of the Argentine state security institutions continued to reflect Galtieri and Anaya’s chief priorities at the end of 1981 and into

1982. 797 The domestic security apparatus was responsible first and foremost for ensuring domestic order and the safety of the regime. As a result, rooting out “subversion” was a primary task of both the police and armed forces, which had assumed a strong domestic

796 This prioritization is confirmed in the Rattenbach Report, para 718(a). 797 Since Galtieri only assumed office in December 1981 and the Falklands War was in April 1982, it is also possible that he did not have enough time to alter the priorities of the security forces prior to the onset of war (the institutional path dependence argument highlighted in Chapter 2). While this is a logical possibility, there is little evidence of a change in regime priorities upon Galtieri’s ascension to power, nor of any failed attempts to reorient the security apparatus to address other more pressing needs.

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security role since the military coup of 1976. 798 The armed forces carved the nation into security zones replacing political appointees with military personnel who were granted expansive powers to repress and eliminate all threats to the new military regime. 799

Furthermore, in addition to the armed forces being employed for domestic security purposes, the police and military intelligence were also charged with locating individuals and groups targeted for eradication. Indeed domestic intelligence played a crucial role in the ability of the military junta to wage such an expansive counter-subervsion campaign .800 In assuming these internal roles, the armed forces became an all-purpose domestic security force geared almost exclusively towards controlling the Argentine populace. This internal focus of the armed forces, and their intelligence capabilities especially, has since been cited as a key explanation for the lack of a broader, more effective Argentine intelligence service during this period of time. 801

The continued fear of internal unrest, and of coups especially, was also reflected in the organization of domestic security institutions and their information management practices in particular. To avoid the risk of coordination and plotting amongst officers, each of the service commands met independently and had their own organic intelligence services. In the absence of a centralized national intelligence agency,802 information was often collected in silos and not shared across branches of the armed forces. 803 Within the services themselves, information sharing and coordination was made difficult by parallel

798 Gabriel Aguila, “State Violence and Repression in Rosario During the Argentine Dictatorship, 1976- 83,” in Marcia Esparza, Henry R. Huttenbach, and Daniel Feierstein (eds.), State Violence and Genocide in Latin America (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 138-39. 799 Pion-Berlin, “Military Dictatorships of Brazil and the Southern Cone.” 800 David R. Mares, “The National Security State,” in Thomas Holloway (ed.), A Companion to Latin American History (London: Blackwell, 2007), 396. 801 Feldman, “The United States Role in the Malvinas Crisis,” 9. 802 Mares, “The National Security State,” 399 803 Feldman, “The United States Role in the Malvinas Crisis,” 9.

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diplomatic and military networks each with independent communication links to the service chiefs. The military officers distrust of their civilian counterparts, moreover, combined with the heavy emphasis that was placed on military intelligence during this period, meant that civilians often found themselves side-lined or excluded entirely from the regime’s inner circles. 804

Finally, as expected in Section 6.1, to the extent that the Argentine regime devoted security resources externally, they were chiefly oriented towards the Chilean threat. Galtieri continued the trend of stationing units on the Chilean-Argentine border, deploying three mountain brigades to monitor the activities of the Chilean Armed Forces and defend Argentine territorial interests. According to the Rattenbach Report, this focus was mirrored within the intelligence services, which were primarily oriented towards addressing the threat of internal subversion, followed by that of Chile.805

Evidence thus suggests that Galtieri and Anaya’s chief priority of maintaining internal order, followed secondarily by monitoring the Chilean threat, was reflected in the arrangement of both the military and intelligence services. This discussion leads to the following hypothesis regarding the relationship between Argentina’s institutional arrangements and the availability of information during future crises with Great Britain:

H3 Argentina : The Argentine leaders’ prioritization of internal security threats and corresponding orientation of the Argentine security apparatus inwards will reduce the likelihood of new information arising during the course of future external crises with Great Britain.

804 Hastings and Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands , 108; Levy and Valkili, “Diversionary Action by Authoritarian Regimes,” 129. 805 Rattenbach Report, para 718(a).

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6.3 Impact on Threat Assessment In Chapter 2, I outlined a number of pathways through which the process of threat prioritization – and the institutionalization of those priorities – can impact a leader’s information environment and subsequent threat assessment. More specifically, in cases where security resources – and especially intelligence agencies – are focused on internal threats to the state, I argue that they will be less capable of: 1) receiving information; 2) providing a sound interpretation of that information even if detected; and/or 3) making that information available to the leader. In order to determine whether threat prioritization and institutionalization had any effect on Galtieri and Anaya’s threat assessment, I want to know whether the Argentine intelligence community is detecting the signals being sent by other states; if so, how the intelligence community is interpreting this information; and finally, whether this information is being passed along to the key decision makers, and

Galtieri and Anaya specifically.

Studies of the Falklands War reveal that the organization of the domestic security apparatus in Argentina played an important role not only in determining what information was received by Galtieri and Anaya, but also its interpretation. First, the military nature of the regime, and heavy emphasis on the use of force as the principle means of diplomacy, meant that the junta and its intelligence agencies were primed to recognize military signals. 806 The perceived importance of military mobilizations as signals of

British intent is evident in early discussions on the withdrawal of Endurance . Evidence suggests, moreover, that the military leaders continued to receive intelligence on British

806 On the “military mindset” and use of force more generally see Weeks, Dictators at War , 24-26.

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military movements from April 2 onwards, most notably detecting the location of the

British fleet prior to its arrival at Port Stanley on May 2. 807

However there were also fundamental errors in Argentine military intelligence that stemmed both from a lack of resources, and also the coup-proofing measures that had been instituted to prevent collusion between officers. The poor quality of the Argentine military intelligence services meant that much of the information received by the leaders was reported directly from the international press. This was the case on March 25, 1982, when Galtieri received “intelligence” that the British had deployed warships to the

Falklands in order to deter any future landings by Argentine workers. These erroneous and unverified reports – likely drawn from faulty press reports in Britain and Europe – informed Galtieri and Anaya’s assessment that Argentina needed to bring forward the

Falklands invasion to the end of March. 808

Other sources cite the failure of Argentine military intelligence to detect overt signals of U.S. military support for Great Britain. In fact, Secretary of Defense Casper

Weinberger had authorized transfers of material, bases, aircraft, fuel, and other vital equipment to Great Britain shortly after Prime Minister Thatcher’s decision to deploy the naval task force. Yet these signals of U.S. support were only picked up by Argentine intelligence through a Washington Post column in mid-April. Given the importance attached to U.S. neutrality in Galtieri and Anaya’s assessment of British resolve, the delay in reporting the details of these transfers created an environment in which the military leaders’ were able to hold onto their prior assumptions unchecked.809

807 Gamba, Falklands/Malvinas , 166; Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 219 808 Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 73-74. 809 Feldman, “The United States Role in the Malvinas Crisis,” 9.

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The stove-piped nature of the Argentine military and intelligence agencies and their lack of coordination also led to severe errors in judgment. The continued demand for secrecy within the junta meant that when Galtieri and Anaya decided to start planning for an invasion of the Falkland Islands, they did so through the establishment of an elite ad hoc working group (“Comisión de Trabajo”) that met in different places to avoid detection and kept only hand-written notes. 810 This group was comprised of a handful of entrusted senior military leaders, and it presented analysis on the prospects of a successful invasion absent coordination with any other branches of the Argentine

Government, including the intelligence services. 811 The secrecy surrounding the invasion meant that a large portion of both military and civilian officials were entirely unaware of the Argentine leaders’ plans, limiting their ability to provide sound analysis and timely information on relevant changes in the international environment. Indeed the individual services own intelligence agencies were kept in the dark about the invasion until just hours before it took place. 812

The absence of civilian advisors involved in the junta’s assessment process had a particularly significant impact on the military leaders’ understanding of their broader political context. 813 Minister of Foreign Affairs Costa Mendez later recalled the he was informed of a possible military invasion in mid-February, but neither he nor his colleagues were asked for their opinion on the merits of the plan.814 The junta apparently failed to warn their own Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the initial South Georgia

810 Rattenbach Report, paras 113-14; Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 105. 811 Ibid., paras 115-16. 812 Moro, The History of the South Atlantic Conflict , 68; Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War , 103-05. 813 Rattenbach Report, para 759. 814 Charlton, The Little Platoon, 110

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landing, and also chose not to consult with Argentine diplomats – including those stationed in London and the United States. The Argentine negotiating team in New York later reported that they were entirely unaware of the junta’s invasion plan and the need to put diplomatic pressure on Britain. 815 Instead, Galtieri and Anaya sidelined civilian experts, choosing instead to focus on reassuring reports from their more trusted military attachés. 816

The desire for secrecy and lack of inclusivity meant that Galtieri and Anaya had a limited understanding of the political context within which signals were being sent. The

Argentine leaders appeared unaware of the strength of the Falklands lobby in the British government or the strong Conservative support for the retention of the Falkland Islands.

Interestingly, while the junta paid attention to domestic politics in Britain when military movements were discussed, they failed to appreciate the reasons for shifts in policy

(economics rather than changes in fundamental interests), and selected only information that accorded with their prior beliefs. 817 In addition, this lack of political awareness and consultation with expert advisors meant that Galtieri and Anaya failed to appreciate the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain. Absent the broader context within which to understand U.S. behavior the two leaders continued to believe that a favorable negotiated settlement was possible, “interpreting the advice of the United

States in accordance with their own views, and not the political realities of the situation.” 818

815 Levy and Vakili, “Diversionary Action by Authoritarian Regimes,” 132. 816 Hastings and Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands , 108. 817 Weeks, Dictators at War , 114. 818 Rattenbach Report, para 104.

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Finally, the prioritization of the Chilean threat over that of Great Britain was perhaps most influential in terms of overall Argentine military effectiveness than the process of threat assessment itself. As the crisis unfolded with Great Britain, Galtieri and

Anaya chose to keep their best-trained troops concentrated on the Chilean border in case of an attack. Unfortunately this decision meant that the forces stationed in the Falklands to fight the British were mostly conscripts who had only recently completed their military training. 819 The fact that Galtieri and Anaya refused to alter this assessment with the

British task force en route provides further proof of their ongoing disbelief in the possibility of war, as well as the junta’s continued prioritization of Chile as Argentina’s chief external threat.

6.4 Summary: Evaluating the Argentine Leaders’ Threat Assessment The crisis over South Thule in 1976 and the “repeat” landing on South Georgia in

1981 led Galtieri and Anaya to form strong beliefs about the extent of British foreign policy interests. Central to their assessment of British interests was a perception of British cost-aversion, and an unwillingness to expend significant resources to achieve broader foreign policy objectives in the South Atlantic. The domestic orientation of the Argentine security forces, and intelligence services in particular, combined with the structural inefficiencies of the security organizations reduced the quantity of high quality information available to the junta in the lead up to the Falklands War. In particular, the secrecy surrounding the planned invasion and the lack of consultation with political advisors created a permissive environment in which the military leaders’ own beliefs and assessments reigned supreme. Galtieri and Anaya proceeded to sideline and/or reinterpret

819 Fernando de Santibañes, “The Effectiveness of Military Governments During War,” 628-29; Rattenbach Report, paras 580-81.

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signals that failed to comport with their prior expectations leading them to assess the

British threat to wage war over the Falklands as incredible. As was the case in Chapter 3, this analysis was not strictly irrational given British behavior prior to the onset of the crisis and the low quality of information available to the junta leaders just prior to the war.

Instead, a combination of issue complexity, low information availability, and cognitive limitations resulted in an assessment of threat credibility that accords with the expectations of bounded rationality. 820

Figure 5.2 Argentine Leaders’ Beliefs and Threat Environment

Leader has prior beliefs about external adversary

N Y

Beliefs exert no External threat constraining assessed as target influence on threat state's dominant assessment concern - Updating likely Suez Crisis 1956 N Y

820 See e.g. Simon, “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice”; Simon, “Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning.”

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7. ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS In this final section I consider how the four alternative explanations fare in explaining Galtieri and Anaya’s threat assessments from 1991 through 2003. The chief alternative explanations are: 1) rationalist power-based theories that assess threat credibility according to the balance of power and material interests; 2) the rationalist

(regime-type) theories that assess threat credibility based on the use of costly-signaling mechanisms; 3) a social-psychological theory that assesses threat credibility on the basis of the desirability of past actions; and 4) behavioral theories that assess threat credibility based on a state’s record of following through on past commitments.

First, Daryl Press argues that leaders assess a country’s threat credibility based on the balance of capabilities and interests at stake in a given confrontation. 821 Leaders thus ask two questions when assessing threats: 1) Does the adversary have enough power to do what he threatens in order to achieve his objectives? And, 2) are the interests at stake large enough to justify the costs and risks?

In the case of the Falklands – and the junta’s assessment of British threat credibility in particular – there is some merit to this argument. Although the British had a superior military force to that of Argentina at the time of the invasion both qualitatively and quantitatively, the location of the Islands in the South Atlantic, the small British military presence in the form of the ice patrol ship HMS Endurance , and the difficulty in mounting a large-scale operation on the other side of the world meant that Buenos Aires had a local military advantage. Of course, if one were to perform a more detailed analysis to include British aircraft carriers, base access at Ascension, and global deployments from which it could divert resources, the picture becomes less rosy. In addition, since the

821 Press, Calculating Credibility , 20-24.

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islands were over 400 miles away from the Argentine mainland they were at the outer limits of combat range for Argentine aircraft, thereby diminishing some of the military government’s tactical advantages. 822

Nevertheless, for the sake of argument let us assume that the balance of forces in

March 1982 favored Argentina. The question then becomes whether the interests at stake were large enough for Great Britain to mount a costly war. It is here, as always, that the picture becomes a little murkier. The Falkland Islands were British territory and as such, an invasion would constitute an attack on British sovereignty. Furthermore, British politicians had repeatedly stated their commitment to defending the islands and the rights of its British inhabitants. Nevertheless, is also clear according to Press’s coding requirements that the Falklands did not constitute a threat to British state survival

(assuming that by “state” we meant the British homeland), and the economic value of the islands was certainly not enough to tip the scales. The Falklands, then, might be termed an “important” interest due to their sovereign status, and this combined with the limited

British presence in the region could plausibly lead to an assessment of low credibility.

Even if we accept this analysis, however, and sidestep the difficulty in combining the power and interest variables to form a precise expectation of British credibility,

Press’s theory only gets us so far in the case of the Falklands. According to his argument, once the British task force set sail for Argentina, the military balance tipped back in favor of the British. The task force, comprising 10,000 well-trained British troops and 28,000 personnel in total armed with a suite of modern military capabilities, was far superior to the poorly-trained conscript-based Argentine force which had not been equipped for

822 Paul, Asymmetric Conflict, 147.

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war. 823 From April 5 onwards, then, and certainly by mid-April when the task force is nearing its destination, the military leaders should have reassessed the British threat as credible. The fact that they did not do so creates a problem for the current calculus theory.

The second alternative explanation is based on theories of democratic credibility.

Since Great Britain is a democracy during this timeframe and Margaret Thatcher issued public threats that engaged the British domestic audience, this thesis would expect the

Argentine leaders to have assessed the British threat as credible.

There is little support for this theory in the case of the Falklands War. Galtieri and

Anaya appeared to take note of some debates in Britain, but mostly those that pertained to

British military planning and the deployment of forces. 824 There was little understanding of the strength of the Falkland Islands lobby or the Conservative Party’s support for retention of the islands. After Thatcher issued her threat on April 3, moreover, Galtieri and Anaya did not take into account the strong bipartisan support for the naval task force within the British parliament, nor did the military leaders pay attention to British public opinion. 825 As a result, neither the audience costs theory nor Schultz’s variant can account for the junta’s threat assessment.

823 Freedman, Britain and the Falklands , 47. For a good comparison of the imbalance of power between the British and the Argentine forces see Sang Hyun Park, “Cognitive Theory of War: Why Do Weak States Choose War With Stronger States.” PhD Diss. University of Tennessee, 2004, 164; Paul, Asymmetric Conflict , 146-47. The Argentine force was reinforced to a maximum strength of 12,000 men in May 1982. 824 Anaya paid attention to debates around the withdrawal of Endurance , for example. Charlton, The Little Platoon, 109. 825 Lebow, “Miscalculation in the South Atlantic,” 118; “The Falklands War Panel Survey.”

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The third alternative explanation is Mercer’s social-psychology argument.

According to this thesis, a state will use an adversary’s past behavior as a guide to future action only when that past behavior is perceived as undesirable by the state in question i.e. when a state faces an adversary that chooses to stand firm in a given dispute. However when an adversary’s behavior is perceived as desirable – i.e. the adversary shows weakness or concedes to threats – the target state will attribute this to situational factors and will not expect similar responses in the future. 826 When this occurs, target states will fall back on standard indicators of interests and capabilities in assessing an adversary’s resolve resulting in similar predictions to the current calculus theory.

This argument, however, does not seem to accord with the facts of the Falklands case. We know that British behavior in 1976 (and 1981) was viewed as highly desirable by the Argentine leadership given Britain’s lack of response to South Thule and the subsequent Davidoff landing. More importantly, Galtieri and Anaya used past British behavior as a clear guide to future action, basing future military plans on the presumption of a similar British response. In other words, an adversary’s desirable behavior did create an expectation of similar behavior in the future – an outcome that runs counter to

Mercer’s theory.

How does past actions theory account for this case? As with Press’s current calculus theory, it can explain some but not all of the story. According to this alternative, a state’s history of following through on commitments and/or threats to use force serves to increase (or decrease) the credibility of that state’s future demands in the eyes of target states. 827 In 1976 Great Britain did not issue an explicit threat over the Argentine landing

826 Mercer, Reputation and International Politics, 65-69. 827 Schelling, Arms and Influence , 55-59.

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in South Thule and so technically it did not fail to follow through on a promise.

Nevertheless, given a more generous reading of past actions theory one could argue that

Britain’s failure to uphold its commitment to defend the sovereignty of the South

Sandwich Islands reduced its future credibility in the eyes of the Argentine leaders. Since this is essentially the first step in my argument, I agree with the argument thus far. The problem with past actions theory, as with Press’s current calculus theory, is that it cannot account for the stickiness of these beliefs once they have formed and the inability of

Galtieri and Anaya to update their assessments over time. Past actions theory thus gets us half of the way there in this case, but fails to provide a complete explanation for the

Falklands case.

Table 5.2 Alternative Theoretical Predictions: Falklands War

1982 Prediction Theory Mechanism/s March 20-April 2 April 2-April 25 Current British-Argentine balance of Incredible Credible Calculus Thesis power and interests 1. British costly signals Regime-Type 2. The openness and Incredible Credible Thesis competitiveness of the British political system Reputations Desirability of British behavior Incredible Credible Thesis in past crises Past Actions History of British threat follow- Incredible Incredible* Thesis through 1. Argentine leaders’ previous Cognitive- experience of British resolve Institutional Incredible Incredible Thesis 2. Availability of new information * Past actions theory does not explain why this assessment would hold across time however.

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Finally, prospect theory has been cited by some scholars as providing a particularly compelling explanation for Argentine behavior during the Falklands War. 828

To recap, one of prospect theory’s key findings is that individuals are more risk averse when they are in the domain of gains, and more risk acceptant when in the domain of losses. 829 Applied to the Falklands case more specifically, prospect theorists would argue that the severe economic crisis in Argentina and decline in domestic support placed the military junta in the domain of losses. Needing to divert attention away from the mounting crisis at home, the Argentine military leaders adopted the risky strategy of invading the Falklands in the hopes of regaining domestic support.

I offer two possible responses. First, while this is an interesting explanation that has received some support, 830 it does not help us answer the question posed in this dissertation – namely, how do states assess the credibility of threats. Of course one might expect that a leader facing a credible threat would reside in the domain of losses and therefore take riskier actions. But as I explain in Chapter 2, this does not tell us how the leader came to this threat assessment, nor whether the riskier action that follows involves standing firm or conceding to the adversary. Second, the empirical claim that the

Argentine leaders were motivated to invade the Falklands due to domestic political circumstances and declining support has come into question. Critics of this argument claim the Argentine military had the coercive security apparatus available to suppress internal threats to the regime, rendering the domestic political motivation unconvincing.

Moreover, since internal instability was a constant feature of Argentine society, this

828 See e.g. Park, “Cognitive Theory of War.” 829 Tversky and Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions.” 830 Amy Oakes, “Diversionary War.” See also Levy and Vakili, “Diversionary Action by Authoritarian Regimes.”

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explanation alone cannot account for the timing of the invasion. 831 Prospect theory thus fails to offer significant theoretical leverage over the cognitive-institutional alternative, and the empirical claims upon which it is based are at least debatable.

8. CONCLUSION In this chapter I argue that the Argentine military leaders, General Galtieri and

Admiral Anaya, viewed the British Government has having weak status quo interests in defending the Falklands Islands. This belief formed as a result of Argentina’s crisis experiences with Great Britain in 1976 and again in 1981, during which time London was perceived as unwilling to absorb significant costs to achieve its foreign policy objectives in the South Atlantic. These beliefs informed Galtieri and Anaya’s military planning, and laid the groundwork for the subsequent invasion of Falklands Islands. During the crisis, the two military leaders continued to view the world in accordance with their prior expectations, sidelining and reinterpreting signals to fit with their expectations of British resolve. The domestic orientation of the Argentine security apparatus, combined with its rigid organizational structure, undermined the delivery of timely and accurate information during the crisis. As a result, the Argentine leaders continued to believe that war was unlikely and made little attempt to prepare militarily for the oncoming assault.

Great Britain successfully defended its rights to the Falkland Islands and declared victory over Argentina on June 14, 1982.

831 Fravel, “The Limits of Diversion,” 320-26.

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6. THE SUEZ CRISIS 1956

1. INTRODUCTION In this chapter I examine whether the cognitive-institutional theory developed in

Chapter 2 can explain Gamal Abdel Nasser’s assessment of Great Britain’s threat credibility during the Suez Crisis of 1956. This is a useful case insofar as Great Britain and Egypt experienced two crises over the Suez Canal, the first in 1951 and the second in

1956. According to the cognitive-institutional theory, such repeated interactions should in principle generate strong beliefs in a target state about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests that shape the outcome of subsequent threat assessments. In this case, however, Nasser did not hold a leadership position in 1951. He entered Egyptian politics after the coup of 1952, and became Prime Minister in 1954 some three years after the first Suez crisis. As a result of his career path, and due to the absence of a prior crisis experience, Nasser does not appear to have held strong, long-standing beliefs about the extent of British foreign policy interests prior to nationalizing the canal in July 1956.

Instead, lacking previous crisis experiences upon which to base his assessments, Nasser evaluated British threat credibility based on the current interests and capabilities at stake during the 1956 crisis absent the constraining effect of strong prior beliefs.

In addition to providing a useful case that can be accounted for by the cognitive- institutional theory, the Suez Crisis presents an opportunity to evaluate the performance of the four competing explanations for state threat assessments: the current calculus theory, the past actions theory, the democratic credibility thesis, and Mercer’s reputations theory. Out of the four, the current calculus and democratic credibility theses combined provide the most compelling accounts of Nasser’s threat assessment. Prior to announcing the nationalization of the Suez Canal on July 26, 1956, Nasser based his threat

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assessment on the strength of British material interests in the canal, and the military capabilities available to the British government to achieve those policy objectives. As the crisis continued, however, domestic (and international) politics became increasingly important to Nasser’s assessment of British resolve and credibility.

This chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 provides a brief discussion of case selection and explains why the Suez Crisis provides a useful test for my theory. Section 3 provides a brief case summary of the Suez Crises of 1951 and 1956. Section 4 turns to the cognitive-institutional theory and considers what beliefs we might expect Nasser to have held if he were leader during the previous crisis of 1951, and shows that he held quite different beliefs in the lead up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. Section 5 evaluates Nasser’s assessment of British threat credibility during the 1956 Crisis, while Section 6 addresses the importance of threat prioritization and institutionalization in explaining this outcome.

Finally, Section 7 concludes the chapter by considering how the alternative explanations account for the content of Nasser’s threat assessment in 1956.

2. CASE SELECTION AND METHODOLOGY The Suez Crisis meets important scope conditions for this project. Great Britain and Egypt experienced two international crisis over the Suez Canal, one in 1951 and then again in 1956. In addition, Gamal Nasser was the clear authoritative decision-making unit in Egypt during the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956. According to one source, when Nasser was confirmed president by popular referendum in June 1956, he “dominated the making of Egyptian foreign policy,” which “received little discussion unless Nasser chose to raise an issue.” 832 Finally, Egypt was the target of a clear coercive threat issued by Great

832 James P. Jankowski, Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism, and the United Arab Republic (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), 67.

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Britain and France during this period – specifically a compellent threat issued on October

30, 1956, in response to the nationalization of the canal.

In addition to satisfying the scope conditions listed above, the Suez Crisis serves two important purposes. First, this case provides an opportunity to evaluate a leader’s threat assessment absent the presence of strong prior beliefs. As a result, this case operates as a “negative case” insofar as an outcome expected by the cognitive- institutional theory (namely, a threat assessment based on prior beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests) does not occur, but can be accounted for by

Nasser’s lack of prior crisis interactions with Great Britain. 833

Second, given the absence of prior beliefs in shaping subsequent threat assessments, this case also provides a valuable opportunity to evaluate the performance of the alternative theories to see which best accounts for Nasser’s evaluation of British credibility. In this case, the current calculus and democratic credibility theories taken together appear to fare the best, providing the most accurate explanation for Nasser’s beliefs. However, neither explanation taken alone can fully account for Nasser’s final assessment, and both theories ignore the important role of international constraints on

British behavior that Nasser perceived as an important indicator of Great Britain’s lack of resolve.

As discussed in detail in Chapter 2, I engage in qualitative historical analysis to code leadership beliefs about the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests, and to

833 On the selection of negative cases, J. Mahoney and G. Goertz, “The Possibility Principle: Choosing Negative Cases in Comparative Research,” American Political Science Review 98, 4 (2004): 653-669. Since Great Britain and Egypt experienced two international crises in a six-year window during Nasser’s lifetime, it is at least possible that he could form beliefs based on this early interaction, and that these beliefs would influence his subsequent threat assessment. It is this “possibility principle” that guides the selection of the Suez Crisis as a negative case study for this dissertation.

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see what role (if any) these beliefs play in subsequent assessments of threat credibility. In the case of the Suez Crisis, there is a large body of secondary literature from which to evaluate Nasser’s beliefs. While there are few Egyptian documents available for analysis,

I partially overcome this obstacle by referring to the large body of archival material in the

United States and Great Britain covering this crisis period. 834 I review these primary and secondary documents in order to ascertain the key beliefs and perceptions of Gamal

Nasser prior to and during the Suez Crisis of 1956. As in previous chapters, in addition to looking for clear statements of Nasser’s own beliefs, I take into account the opinions and statements of his key advisors to evaluate the information available to the Egyptian leader, as well as policies that Nasser advocated in response to the British and French threat. The following section provides a brief summary of the key events in 1951 and 1956, followed by an analysis of Nasser’s assessments during this period of time.

834 Many documents are available through the United Kingdom House of Commons and House of Lords Parliamentary Archives, http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/parliamentary-archives/ . On the U.S. side, the majority of the documents are available online in FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments, and on the Public Papers of the President website, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ .

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3. CASE OVERVIEW

Figure 6.1: Map of the Suez Canal 835

3.1 The Suez Crisis of 1951 The Suez Canal officially opened on November 17, 1869, operated by the Suez

Canal Company. In return for operating the canal, the Suez Company paid taxes, rents and percentages of gross profits to Egypt, with an option for the canal to revert to

Egyptian control after 99 years. Initially managed by French authorities, the British did not have interest in the Suez Canal Company until November 25, 1875, when Egypt

835 Simon C. Smith (ed.), Reassessing Suez: New Perspectives on the Crisis and its Aftermath (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), digital location 165.

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turned over 177,642 shares to the British government in order to avoid bankruptcy. 836 In

1888 the Convention of Constantinople, signed by Turkey, Great Britain, France,

Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Holland declared free passage for all ships of all nations, ensuring that “the Suez Maritime Canal shall always be free and open, in time of war as in time of peace, to every vessel of commerce or of war, without distinction of flag,” and confirmed Britain’s de facto control of the canal. 837 The British led a force to defend the canal against the Turkish in 1915, and in 1936 the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty confirmed Britain’s special status by establishing a British military base in the Suez

Canal Zone. 838 In return for providing basing rights, Egypt was granted representation on the Suez Canal Company’s board of directors and received annual rental payments for the use of company facilities. In addition, a 20-year time limit was placed on the treaty, the size of the British peacetime garrison was limited to 10,000 troops and 400 pilots, and

British forces were to vacate the main cities and move to the Canal Zone once accommodation became available. 839

The Second World War disrupted normal interstate relations, and Britain quickly took control of the canal with the consent of the Egypt government and the Suez Canal

Company. 840 By the end of the war the Suez Canal Zone had become Britain’s largest

836 United States Cryptologic History, The Suez Crisis: A Brief Comint History (Washington, D.C.: National Security Agency, 1988), 2-3. 837 For the full text of the convention, see Anthony Gorst and Lewis Johnman, The Suez Crisis (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), digital location 158-198; Steve Morewood, “Prelude to the Suez Crisis: The Rise and Fall of British Dominance over the Suez Canal 1969-1956,” in Simon C. Smith (ed), Reassessing Suez 1956: New Perspectives on the Crisis and its Aftermath (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), digital location 599. 838 United States Cryptologic History, The Suez Crisis , 3. 839 Morewood, “Prelude to the Suez Crisis,” digital location 690. 840 Ibid., digital location 736.

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overseas base, comprising 10 airfields, 34 military stations, and over 50,000 troops. 841

With this military presence far exceeding the terms of the 1936 treaty, Egypt demanded the withdrawal of British troops. The British government announced its willingness to withdraw troops “in stages” in 1946, but the retention of a non-combatant force enabled

London to maintain a significant military foothold in Egypt. 842 In the face of a growing nationalist movement against the British troop presence, the Egyptian government ended diplomatic negotiations with Great Britain and referred the issue to the United Nations for resolution. The UN Security Council decided in favor of Britain in 1947, allowing

London to keep 193,398 troops in Egypt. The British government’s decision to withdraw its troops from Egyptian cities later that year failed to quell the rising resentment in

Egypt. 843

In January 1950 the Wadf political party was voted back into power based on its promise to evacuate the British troops. Prime Minister Mustafa al-Nahas immediately called for the withdrawal of British forces, which London rejected in April 1951. 844 On

October 8, 1951, Prime Minister Nahas declared the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty null and void and demanded the immediate evacuation of foreign forces. 845 The British government declared a state of emergency on October 16, reinforced its troops in the

Canal Zone, and prohibited the export of arms to Egypt. 846 Nahas gave the Muslim

Brotherhood guerrilla forces tacit approval to attack the British base, and serious clashes

841 W.R. Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East 1945-1951 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1984), 720-21. 842 Morewood, “Prelude to the Suez Crisis,” digital location 779. 843 Ibid., digitial location 794. 844 Robert MacNamara, Britain, Nasser, and the Balance of Power in the Middle East, 1952-1967 (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003), 18-19. 845 Morewood, “Prelude to the Suez Crisis,” digital location 809. 846 See ICB Case Summary, “Suez Canal,” http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/icb/dataviewer/ (accessed November 20, 2015).

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erupted between British forces and nationalist fighters. Britain’s refusal to withdraw its troops and to fight the nationalist movement caused significant chaos within Egypt. At the end of 1951, the British garrison had been reinforced from 33,500 to 64,000 troops, and a further 20,000 were on en route. 847 By this time over 100 Egyptians and 33 British servicemen had died. 848

The crisis peaked on January 25, 1952, when British forces attacked police barracks in Ismailia resulting in the deaths of 41 Egyptians. The next day – later known as “Black Saturday” – anti-Western riots erupted in Cairo causing large amounts of damage and the deaths of several foreigners, including 11 British citizens. 849 The onset of internal disorder gave the Egyptian King Farouk a perfect excuse to dismiss Nahas, whose regime “gave off the smell of death.” 850 After the removal of Nahas, King Farouk ended the crisis and resumed negotiations with Britain. 851

3.2 The Suez Canal Crisis 1956 The decision by King Farouk to dismiss Prime Minister Nahas in early 1952 had far reaching implications for the future of the Egyptian monarchy. At midnight on the evening of July 23, 1952, a group of nationalist Egyptian army officers, known collectively as the Free Officers Movement, seized the national army headquarters and demanded King Farouk’s abdication. The new regime was led by Army General Naguib and ruled by the new Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) – a group dominated by

847 Michael J. Cohen, “The Strategic Role of the Middle East After the War,” in Michael J. Cohen and Martin Kolinsky (eds.), Demise of the British Empire in the Middle East (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998), 33. 848 MacNamara, Britain, Nasser, and the Balance of Power , 23. 849 Ibid. 850 Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End Empire in the Middle East (London: Tauris, 1991), 41. 851 ICB Case Summary, “Suez Canal.”

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the more radical Free Officers of which Gamal Nasser was one. 852 By mid-1953, Nasser and the RCC had become frustrated with Naguib and demanded his resignation. In 1954

Nasser became RCC Chairman and Prime Minister of Egypt and quickly sought to fulfill the nationalist cause of the Free Officers Movement. 853

With a new leader in place, Great Britain agreed to reopen negotiations with

Nasser with the ultimate goal of reducing its military footprint in Egypt. The new Anglo-

Egyptian Agreement of October 1954 recognized that “the Suez Maritime Canal, which is an integral part of Egypt, is a waterway economically, commercially, and strategically of international importance” and expressed “the determination to uphold the Convention guaranteeing the freedom of navigation of the Canal signed at Constantinople on 29 th of

October 1888.” 854 The British agreed to withdraw the 70,000 excess troops over the proceeding 20 months, and by no later than June 1956. 855 The British reserved the right to reactivate the canal base and to redeploy British troops if an attack was made on Egypt, on any other country signatory to the Arab Mutual Security Pact, or on Turkey. 856

In addition to obtaining the withdrawal of British troops from the Canal Zone,

Nasser also had plans to boost Egypt’s economy with the construction of a large dam at

Aswan. 857 The United States and Great Britain had previously pledged support for the dam and promised financial assistance. On July 19, 1956, however, U.S. Secretary of

State John Foster Dulles rescinded U.S. financial support for the project in light of

Nasser’s close alignment with the Soviet Union and recently concluded arms deal with

852 MacNamara, Britain, Nasser, and the Balance of Power , 23-24. 853 Ibid., 25-26. 854 Morewood, “Prelude to the Suez Crisis,” digital location 903. 855 MacNamara, Britain, Nasser, and the Balance of Power, 35. 856 Mohamed H. Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail: Suez Through Egyptian Eyes (London: Andre Deutsch, 1986), 49. 857 Ibid., 47.

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Czechoslovakia. The U.S. decision placed immediate pressure on the Egyptian leader to secure additional funding for the construction of the dam and precipitated a domestic crisis. Nationalizing the Suez Canal – a prospect that had undoubtedly been on Nasser’s mind for some time prior to this event – would alleviate this pressure by providing Egypt with all of the revenue from the waterway. 858

On July 26, 1956, the fourth anniversary of the Egyptian military regime, Nasser publicly announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, sparking an immediate crisis for Great Britain and France. 859 The British responded forcefully. Prime Minister Eden addressed the House of Commons on July 30 declaring that all Egyptian assets in the UK had been frozen and that the export of war material to Egypt was banned. Within one week of Nasser’s announcement, 20,000 reservists were called up and military reinforcements sent to the Mediterranean. The French were more vehement still, calling for an immediate strike against Egypt. 860 The U.S. government’s response was more cautious, however. President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles expressed regret over Nasser’s actions, but warned its Western allies against the hasty use of force. 861

The United States tried to appease the interests of its allies during the Summer of

1956 with a series of diplomatic conferences in the hope of resolving the conflict prior to war. The first round of negotiations took place in London on August 15 in the absence of

858 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, digital location 1620. Nasser made this reasoning clear to the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt on July 30. See Telegram from the Embassy in Egypt to the Department of State, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 31. 859 Ibid., digital location 1637. Nasser stated: “We shall eliminate the past by regaining our right to the Suez Canal…At this moment as I talk to you some of your Egyptian Brethren are proceeding to administer the Canal Company and to run its affairs.” Quoted in Laura M. James, “When Did Nasser Expect War? The Suez Nationalization and its Aftermath in Egypt,” in Simon C. Smith (ed), Reassessing Suez 1956: New Perspectives on the Crisis and its Aftermath (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), digital location 4097. 860 Michael K. Carroll, Pearson’s Peacekeepers (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2009), 8. 861 Ibid., 9.

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Nasser. The majority of the parties to the conference agreed to a proposal to place the operation of the canal under an international Suez Canal Board. The proposal was presented to Nasser on September 3 by Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies and was swiftly rejected. 862 A second London conference convened from September 19-21,

1956, where the U.S. government put forward the idea of a Suez Canal Users Association

(SCUA) that would open on October 1 with the goal of ensuring the rights of canal users, and promoting safe, orderly and efficient passage. Nasser again rejected the SCUA proposal and maintained control of the waterway. 863

Frustrated with the lack of progress over the canal, the British and the French referred the issue to the United Nations to settle the dispute. The proposed resolution sought to reaffirm the freedom of navigation in accordance with the Convention of 1888, urged Egypt to negotiate a settlement based on the proposals of the first London

Conference, and recommended that Egypt cooperate with the SCUA. On October 13, private discussions between the Egyptian, French, and British foreign ministers resulted in agreement on ‘Six Principles’ for a future settlement. 864 Britain and France, dissatisfied with the negotiated outcome, introduced a new draft resolution to the UN Security

Council that contained not only the six principles, but also a statement of how those principles should be interpreted – namely, in accordance with the proposals accepted in

London during the first Suez Canal Conference in August. Since this proposal had

862 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, digital location 2148. 863 Cole Kingseed, Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana University Press, 1995), 75-76. 864 Ibid., 76.

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already been rejected by Egypt, the Soviet Union used its veto to prevent the French-

British amendment from passing. 865

With international negotiations stalled, Great Britain and France continued to actively pursue the possibility of military force. The two countries met with their Israeli counterparts at Sévres in Paris on October 22-24, 1956, where they decided to launch a joint covert campaign. The top-secret operation called for Israel to attack Egypt first from the east, and then Britain and France to use the Israeli invasion as a pretext for intervening and capturing control of the canal. 866 As planned, the Israeli forces moved into Egypt’s Sinai Desert on October 29, 1956. The British and French issued an ultimatum to Nasser on October 30 that contained three demands of Egypt. 867 First, the

Egyptians were told to halt all acts of war. Second, they were told to withdraw all of their troops ten miles from the canal. Finally, in order to “safeguard shipping and separate the belligerents” the Egyptians were directed to accept the “temporary occupation by Anglo-

French forces of key positions at Port Said, Ismailia and Suez.” If Egypt did not comply with these demands within 12 hours, the challenge continued, “U.K. and French forces will intervene in whatever strength may be necessary to secure compliance.” 868

Nasser rejected the terms of the British-French ultimatum and on October 31,

British bombers began attacking Egyptian airfields, followed by land forces on

November 5. 869 By this time, however, momentum behind the military invasion had slowed. On November 2, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for a

865 Arthur Lall, Modern International Negotiation: Principles and Practice (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1966), 97. 866 W. Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US, and the Suez Crisis (London: Sceptre, 1991), 243- 247. 867 Jeremy Pressman, Warring Friends: Alliance Restraint in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 62. 868 Kyle, Suez , 358-59. 869 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, digital location 2624.

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ceasefire and the withdrawal of British, French, and Israeli forces in favor of a UN

Emergency Force. 870 Just a few days later, on November 5, Moscow issued a threat to the three invading powers and the United States, referring to the "dangerous consequences" of the war in Egypt, warning that London, Paris, and Tel Aviv lay under the threat of

Soviet missiles, and stating a determination “to crush the aggressor and reestablish peace in the East by using force.” 871 Finally, the United States took immediate action against

Britain by threatening to bar British access to U.S. dollars from the IMF, denying British credit from the Export-Import Bank at a time when the pound was suffering, and refusing to satisfy Britain and France’s oil needs in order to compel a withdrawal. Acknowledging the failed intervention, the French and British quickly agreed to a ceasefire on November

5, and began withdrawing their forces from Egypt on November 6, 1956, less than one week after the onset of hostilities. The crisis ended and the international community confirmed Egypt’s ownership of the Suez Canal. 872

870 David Carlton, Britain and the Suez Crisis (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988), 71; UN General Assembly, Resolution 997, http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/dag/docs/ares1000e.pdf (accessed November 12, 2015). 871 Pressman, Warring Friends , 74; Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, digital location 2656. 872 Pressman, Warring Friends , 67-69.

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satisfied with the status quo or wanting (and willing) to revise the current international order

What does the cognitive-institutional theory have to say about the Suez Crisis of

1956? How would it expect Gamal Nasser to assess the credibility of the British threat?

The remainder of this section shows how Nasser’s lack of prior crisis experience with

Great Britain influenced the content of his beliefs in the lead-up to the Suez Crisis.

Section 5 then draws on available primary and secondary sources to evaluate Nasser’s assessment of British threat credibility in the summer and fall of 1956.

4.1 Nasser’s Beliefs Pre-1956 According to the cognitive-institutional theory, a past crisis interaction provides leaders with crucial information regarding the extent of an adversary’s foreign policy interests, and most importantly their resolve to either defend or revise the current status quo. In 1951, Egypt and Great Britain experienced a crisis that revealed British interests in defending its rights to operating the canal, and also its willingness to absorb costs in doing so. As documented in Section 3, during the crisis the British firmly rejected the

Egyptian call for the withdrawal of British forces, declared a state of emergency, prohibited arms exports to Egypt, and reinforced its troops in the Canal Zone by

20,000. 873 The British government instructed its forces to take aggressive measures against the Egyptians, and to fight the guerrilla war that was being waged. 874 The conflict resulted in casualties on both sides, peaking on January 25, 1952, with the deaths of 41

Egyptian policemen. 875 The British refused to back down during the riots following the attack, and the crisis finally came to an end on January 27 when King Farouk dismissed

873 ICB Case Summary, “Suez Canal”; Cohen, “The Strategic Role of the Middle East,” 33. 874 MacNamara, Britain, Nasser, and the Balance of Power , 23. 875 Ibid.

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Prime Minister Nahas and resumed negotiations with the British. 876 In light of these events and the theory developed in Chapter 2, a target state leader experiencing this crisis might be expected to formulate the following beliefs: 1) that Great Britain wished to maintain the status quo and preserve its rights to operate the Suez Canal; and 2) that

Great Britain was willing to absorb significant economic and military costs to achieve this end.

Gamal Nasser was not the Egyptian leader at this point in time, however, nor was he part of the country’s leadership. In 1951, Nasser was a member of the nationalist Free

Officers movement that subsequently overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in July 1952. It was after this point that Nasser became a key member of the Revolutionary Command

Council (RCC) that governed Egypt, and then assumed the position of RCC Chairman and Egyptian Prime Minister in April 1954. Since the cognitive-institutional theory requires that a target state leader experience a previous crisis either as the leader of the country in question, or at the very least as part of its senior leadership, Nasser’s beliefs about the extent of British foreign policy interests are not expected to be shaped by events in 1951, nor are his beliefs expected to exert a particularly strong influence on his assessment of British threat credibility during the Suez Crisis in 1956.

Indeed, evidence suggests that Gamal Nasser’s assessment of the extent of British foreign policy interests in the lead up to the 1956 crisis was based heavily on contemporaneous evaluations of Britain’s interests and capabilities, unfiltered by any long-standing beliefs. Prior to nationalizing the canal Nasser sat down to consider the possible responses of the key Western powers – the United States, Israel, Great Britain,

876 ICB Case Summary, “Suez Canal.”

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and France. 877 He later stated that he “became a staff officer again…I sat down to write an appreciation of the situation from the point of view of our opponents – Eden [British

Prime Minister], Peneau [the French Foreign Minister] and Ben-Gurion [Israeli Prime

Minister].” 878 In drawing up his “appreciation,” Nasser was careful to note the enabling and constraining influences on the foreign policies of each of the key powers. He thought that the upcoming domestic elections, international public opinion, and the Saudis would keep a check on any U.S. response to the planned nationalization, 879 and that the United

States would “give their blessing under the table.”880 He speculated that while the French might react strongly, their ability to participate in a military operation would be hampered by their heavy commitments to Algeria at the time. 881 Israel, he calculated, would be tempted to react quickly but Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s desire to be accepted as part of the Afro-Arabic world would temper his response. Nasser further believed that an alliance between Israel and Britain was unlikely due to such an arrangement compromising Great Britain’s position in the Arab world. 882

Of all of the countries considered in the appraisal, Great Britain received the most attention. Nasser was clearly aware of strong British interests in the Canal Zone and

London’s desire to preserve its position. The British government, along with the French, was one of the principal shareholders in the canal and as such Nasser’s plans for nationalization would directly threaten its strategic interests. In fact, over 60 percent of the 122 million tons of cargo that passed through the canal every year was oil, and 2/3 of

877 James, “When Did Nasser Expect War?” digital location 4189. 878 Quoted in Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 119. 879 Mohamed H. Heikal, The Cairo Documents: The Inside Story of Nasser and His Relationship with World Leaders, Rebels, and Statesmen (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 90-91; Heikal, Lion’s Tail , 122. 880 Quoted in Lucas, Divided We Stand , 138. 881 Owen L. Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 53. 882 Heikal, The Lion’s Tail , 122.

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all oil exported to Europe passed through the Suez waterway. Moreover the canal was the key route through which Britain was able to reach its Asian colonies, and 60 percent of the canal’s traffic was between Britain and the Commonwealth countries. 883 As a result,

Nasser believed that Britain had the most to lose in the nationalization of the Suez Canal, and would have the strong interest in defending the status quo. 884

However, Nasser also took interest in British domestic politics and believed that

Prime Minister Eden held a relatively weak position in parliament and lacked popularity among the broader British public. 885 Nasser thus surmised that if Britain were going to absorb the political and military costs of pursuing its policy objectives, Eden would need to act quickly in order to capitalize on the immediate outcry following Nasser’s nationalization. This would be necessary not only for domestic political reasons, but also to evade international opposition to an invasion that would likely build as time went on. 886

Crucial to the success of Nasser’s plan, then, was an accurate picture of Britain’s ability to mount a quick military reprisal. The closest British bases for land, sea, and air forces were in Malta and Cyprus – the location of Britain’s Middle East Headquarters following the withdrawal from the Suez Canal Zone in 1954. Egypt had liaison officers in the Maltese and Cypriot Egyptian consulates in order to monitor the strength and movement of the British forces. When contemplating the option of nationalization,

Nasser reached out to these liaison officers and also sent special emissaries to Malta and

883 Morewood, “Prelude to the Suez Crisis,” 965; Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, digital location 1612-1620. 884 Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 53. 885 Heikal, The Lion’s Tail , 119. 886 Heikal, The Cairo Documents , 89, 92; James, “When Did Nasser Expect War?” digital location 4209.

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Cyprus to report on the status of British forces. These reports would form the basis of

Nasser’s assessment of British resolve. 887

On Wednesday July 25 the emissaries returned and reported that Britain had one old aircraft carrier in Malta, one destroyer on patrol in the area between Cyprus, Haifa and Alexandria, and another destroyer on patrol in the Red Sea on its way from Port

Sudan to Aden. The British troops in Cyprus comprised the Third Guards Brigade, the

Third Commando Brigade, and elements from a parachute brigade, none of which were equipped or trained for operations outside of the island. Nasser also received reports from

Syria on British forces in Jordan and Libya. Eden could use the forces in Libya to mount a quick attack against Egypt, Nasser speculated, but if he did so that would likely mark the end of Kind Idris and the Senussi monarchy – a much greater loss to Britain, he believed, than the Suez Canal. 888

Based on these reports, Nasser assessed that it would take at least two months for the British to mobilize forces for any military attack, at which point sufficient time would have passed for domestic and international public opinion to have turned against the possibility of the use of force. 889 Given Eden’s weak position at home, Nasser believed that these political forces taken together would create too great a cost for the British

Prime Minister to endure. The Egyptian leader thus concluded that Britain would react to the nationalization, but that this reaction would fall short of a military invasion. 890 As

887 Heikal, The Lion’s Tail , 120; Mohammed H. Heikal, The Sphinx and the Commissar (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1978), 67-68; Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 53. 888 Ibid., 122; 889 Heikal, The Cairo Documents , 89, 92; Heikal, The Lion’s Tail , 119. Nasser thought that the risk of military force was greatest in August, immediately after his announcement, but that the British would not have the capability to act at this point. The chances of military intervention would then decline rapidly through to the end of the year when the mobilization of world opinion would bring the risk of military force down to zero. 890 Heikal, The Cairo Documents, 90-91.

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time passed, the pressures of public opinion would be too great to warrant any further action, and Britain would be forced to negotiate with Egypt. 891 He made this assessment clear when he informed the members of the Revolutionary Command Council of his decision. When asked whether he expected British reprisals, Nasser told his colleagues that “he had already calculated the risks and that the British Prime Minister, Anthony

Eden, the key player on the European side, would be too weak-willed to go to war.” 892

Thus in contrast to expectations based on an experience of the 1951 crisis, it appears that:

1) Nasser believed that Great Britain had status quo foreign policy objectives and wished to defend its interests in the Suez Canal Zone; but also that 2) Great Britain was not willing to employ military forces to achieve those ends.

According to the theory developed in Chapter 2, when a target state leader’s past crisis experience has led him or her to believe that an adversary has status quo foreign policy objectives but is not willing to devote significant resources to achieving those ends, future coercive threats will be interpreted in accordance with these prior beliefs. In this case, however, we know that Nasser had not experienced a prior crisis interaction with

Great Britain. As a result, these beliefs should be substantially weaker than those developed through the course of prior crisis experiences, and should have a less constraining effect upon Nasser’s assessment of British threat credibility once the crisis is underway.

In practice, this means that we should expect Nasser to exhibit the opposite traits of the target state leaders in previous chapters who had firmer, longer-standing beliefs.

Saddam, Galtieri and Anaya, and Khrushchev all appeared either closed-off to new

891 Lucas, Divided We Stand , 138. 892 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, digital location 1620-29.

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information, or made significant effort to filter and interpret signals in accordance with their prior expectations. By contrast, we should expect Nasser to be more open to a range of information and for his threat assessments to account for, and adjust to, changing circumstances as detected. In addition, given the absence of firmly held personal beliefs, we might also expect leaders in other states to arrive at similar threat assessments as

Nasser.

H1 Egypt : Nasser will update his beliefs as new information becomes available during the course of the 1956 crisis.893

5. THE SUEZ CRISIS OF 1956 5.1 Nasser’s Threat Assessment The first indicator of Nasser’s willingness to revise his threat assessment occurred immediately after he announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal on July 26. In a conversation with the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt on July 30, Nasser stated that the response of the British and French to his declaration “had been stronger than he imagined.” 894 Prime Minister Eden had received the news of Nasser’s speech while at dinner with Middle East leaders, including King Faisal of Iraq and Iraqi Prime Minister

Nuri al-Said. Nuri quickly advised British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd that “you have only one course of action open and that is to hit, hit now, and hit hard . . . If [Nasser] is left alone, he will finish us.” 895 Eden appeared to agree with this sentiment and was extremely reticent to grant Nasser any leeway over the canal. 896 His quick decision to

893 Note that this is the null hypothesis against which the cognitive-institutional theory is being tested, and is intended to capture a “rational” process of threat assessment. 894 Telegram from the Embassy in Egypt to the Department of State, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 31. 895 Quoted in Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, digital location 1705. 896 In 1954, when he was Churchill’s foreign secretary, Eden had negotiated the British military pullout from the Canal Zone over the objections of many opponents within the Conservative Party. Nasser’s subsequent decision to sign a Soviet arms deal, and Jordan’s decision to fire the British commander of King Hussein’s army at Nasser’s behest, came as harsh blows to Eden’s policy in the Middle East. The Suez

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stop all arms shipments to Egypt and to freeze all Egyptian private and public assets under British control seemed to shock Nasser, and resulted in a threat to close the canal to

British shipping. 897 France also responded swiftly by cooperating in the Canal

Company’s refusal to release French-held Egyptian assets to Nasser. 898

Perhaps more startling to Nasser was Britain’s quick decision to mobilize its military forces. Eden instructed the military chiefs to produce a plan of action on the forces necessary to retake the canal, and the timeframe for doing so. The French followed suit and started planning for joint military action. On July 27, just one day after Nasser’s declaration, the Mollet government formally decided to use force to reclaim ownership of the canal. French and British officials met in London on July 28 to make plans for their joint attack. 899 The two countries began moving military forces to the region in preparation for war shortly thereafter.

Although Nasser was likely unaware of the content of these initial private meetings, the military movements that followed were by no means kept secret. In fact, according to Soviet sources, the British forces were doing so much in the open that Soviet spies were not needed to report on their movements.900 British media reported on naval preparations in Portsmouth and three British aircraft carriers set sail in early August. By

August 5, the Royal Army’s Sixteenth Independent Parachute Brigade was onboard HMS

Theseus, one of the three carriers, and the army was apparently reinforcing its base in

Cyprus with infantry and marine units. While the British War Office called these nationalization was the last straw in a series of perceived betrayals, and Eden felt that he had no choice but to address the issue quickly and firmly. Ibid., digital location 1714-1722. 897 Speeches of Sir Anthony Eden, HC Deb 30 July 1956 vol 557 cc918-21, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/people/mr-anthony-eden/1956 (accessed November 13, 2015). 898 Special National Intelligence Estimate, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 40. 899 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, digital location 1731-47. 900 Heikal, The Cairo Documents , 51.

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“precautionary military measures” there was little doubt as to their purpose. 901 Between

July and September, the British government increased its troops in the region from

27,000 to 45,000, with the French contributing a further 6,000. British aircraft patrolled the area and there was a sharp increase in local airlift and sealift capabilities. The British and French put their regional military capabilities on show during a major exercise,

Septex 2, on September 13-14. 902

The rate of British and French military preparations had an immediate effect on the Soviet Union, which had initially been more relaxed in its approach to the crisis. The news of military mobilizations instilled in Moscow a sense of urgency to resolve the conflict peacefully and led to Soviet participation in the London Conference on August

15. Khrushchev informed Nasser that Soviet attendance was necessary in order “to foil

[the British and French] military plans.” 903 There is no doubt, moreover, that Nasser knew about the British and French military movements. Nasser’s self-proclaimed advisor,

Mohamed Heikal, confirms that Nasser knew that forces were assembling in the

Mediterranean and that he had asked Khrushchev if he could count on Soviet “volunteers” in the case of an attack – a sign that he believed the use of force was at least possible. 904

Nasser also received warnings of military movements from intelligence sources in

London, the Soviet KGB, CIA, and Australian Prime Minister Menzies when he delivered the London Conference proposal in early September 1956. 905

However British and French military movements took place within a broader political environment which appeared to undercut the credibility of their military threat.

901 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, digital location 1881. 902 Ibid., 2176-2172. 903 Ibid., 1890. 904 Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 140, 175; 905 Ibid., 140; James, “When Did Nasser Expect War?” digital location 4239.

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First, the British domestic political environment was not particularly supportive of the use of force to reclaim ownership of the canal. The Conservative Party had been returned to power with a comfortable but not overwhelming majority in the general elections of

1956, and had lost support in by-elections just prior to the Suez Crisis. The Labour Party under the leadership of Hugh Gaitskell was thus gaining momentum and proved a highly vocal opposition. The partisan lines became especially clear in the public debates between Gaitskell and Eden over how far the country should go to defend its rights in

Egypt. For although there existed little dissent from the view that Britain could not accept sole Egyptian control over the canal, there was much more division over what Britain should do absent the authorization of the United Nations. 906

As early as August 2, Gaitskell made public his view that while there were

“circumstances in which [Britain] might be compelled to use force, in self-defence or as part of some collective defence measures…that we are members of the United

Nations…[and] have steadfastly avoided any international action which would be in breach of international law or, indeed, contrary to the public opinion of the world.” 907

Gaitskell registered his displeasure with the continued signs of British-French collusion throughout the summer in private meetings and in letters to Eden. 908 His growing frustration, however, became public once again on September 12-13 when the Labour

Party made clear that any unprovoked use of force or action taken without prior authorization from the United Nations would have “disastrous” consequences. 909 Eden’s

906 Leon D. Epstein, British Politics in the Suez Crisis (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 63- 64. 907 Quoted in Epstein, British Politics , 66; Gorst and Johnman, The Suez Crisis , 64-65 908 Bertjan Verbeek, Decision Making in Great Britain During the Suez Crisis (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 92. 909 GB, Parl Deb 5s 558: 15-32, quoted in Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy , 217. See also Kyle, Suez , 189.

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decision not to inform the opposition of the Anglo-French ultimatum until 15 minutes before it was presented to the House of Commons reveals the degree of division between the political leaders in Britain at the time. Gaitskell quickly condemned the government’s decision to act outside of the auspices of the UN Security Council, and when the bombing campaign commenced on October 31, Labour politicians went on the offensive and called on Eden and his supporters to publicly defend their decisions. 910

The British political elite was not the only obstacle in the way of Eden’s plans for military action. Public opinion on the crisis was also well documented in the press, and revealed a strong aversion to the use of force. Polls carries out by the British Institute of

Public Opinion (BIPO) showed that there was not a single time during the crisis when a majority of voters favored military action. Prior to public debate surrounding the use of force, 59% of the British public approved of Eden’s handling of the crisis and the measures that had been taken, including freezing Egyptian sterling credit, recalling reserve forces, strengthening forces in the Mediterranean, cutting off British arms shipments to Egypt, and calling for an international conference. Approval rates dropped, however, when military options were placed on the table. From August 16-24, only 33% of the British public was in favor of the use of military force, with 47% preferring continued political and economic action. On September 5-6, only 34% approved of the use of military action, increasing only marginally to 37% after Britain intervened on

November 1. By November 5-6, disapproval ratings were as high as 49%. 911 In sum,

Eden faced significant domestic opposition to the use of force.

910 Epstein, British Politics , 68-69, 75, 80; Kyle, Suez , 361-62, 387-90; Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy , 218. 911 British Public Opinion Polls (August-November 1956) cited in Epstein, British Politics in the Suez Canal , 141-42. See also Snyder and Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats,” 445.

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The crucial question, however, is whether Nasser knew about this opposition, and if so, what inferences he drew from the British political climate in terms of Eden’s willingness to use force. In fact there are a number of pieces of evidence to suggest that

Nasser was aware of the domestic developments in Britain at the time. In a memo from

Dulles to Eisenhower on August 19, 1956, Dulles commented that, “the attitude of the

Labour Party is a hard blow for the government at this juncture when bi-partisan unity would give Britain the best chance of retrieving its position without actually having to use force. I have no doubt that Nasser is fully aware of the situation and may calculate that if he stands firm the result will not be solid strength against him but perhaps a

Labour government which would be softer.” 912 The U.S. government was thus convinced that Nasser not only knew about the domestic opposition in Britain, but also that the

Egyptian leader would infer a lack of British resolve from the position of the Labour politicians.

In addition to the Americans, the Soviets had also taken note of the growing political divisions in Britain. Given their close links to Nasser during the crisis and reports of intelligence sharing, it seems highly likely that these assessments would have made it to the Egyptian leader. 913 A Soviet analysis of the British political environment in

September showed Eden leading an increasingly divided government. The paper identified key opponents to the use of force, including Foreign Secretary Lloyd, and stated that the Conservative Party faced a Labour Party that was solidly against military action. Further evidence for Eden’s political weakness was found in the three month delay that had occurred between the departure of British warships for the Mediterranean

912 Message from Secretary of State to the President, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26- December 31 , Document 97. 913 Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 140; James, “When Did Nasser Expect War?” digital location 4239.

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and any use of force. In light of the British domestic opposition, the Soviets concluded that it was unlikely that Eden would take any further action without UN authorization. 914

Finally, more direct evidence comes from Egyptian leaders themselves. On

November 1, the Egyptian delegate to the United Nations made explicit references to the domestic political environment in Britain and quoted direct excerpts from the British

House of Commons debates. After making his statement, the Egyptian delegate concluded that, “even in the UK, public opinion by no means approves of the policy of

Sir Anthony Eden’s government.” 915 Nasser’s advisor, Mohamed Heikal, also states that the Egyptian leader knew about the domestic opposition to Eden during the crisis. On

November 4, just after the ultimatum and prior to the British land invasion, Heikal recalls

Nasser sitting and watching coverage of a large-scale anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar

Square at which Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State, Aneurin Bevin publicly criticized the government’s actions. According to Heikal, this grand display of public opposition convinced Nasser that the British attack was doomed to fail and the Egyptian leader subsequently canceled his preparations for a guerrilla campaign.916 Eden himself later speculated that the Labour opposition had led Nasser to doubt British and French credibility and encouraged him to stand firm against their demands. 917

In addition to taking account of the British domestic political opposition, Nasser also paid attention to the international political environment and incorporated this into his

914 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 2172-2181. Khrushchev also received intelligence from two former members of the British establishment – Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – who served as high-level advisors to the Soviet Foreign Minister. In mid-August, Burgess and Eden reported on a conversation they had with the deputy leader of the British Labour Party, Tom Driberg. Apparently Driberg had told Burgess that Eden was weak, that “it was all a bluff,” and that “Fleet Street does not expect a war in the Middle East now.” Ibid., digital location 2139 915 Quoted in Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, 219. 916 Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 195. 917 Epstein, British Politics , 76.

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threat assessment. The U.S. position against the use of force was a powerful signal for

Nasser, and further cast doubt on Britain and France’s ability to undertake military action.

President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles voiced their opposition to military force to Eden privately upon nationalization of the canal and after Eden’s swift mobilization of troops. On July 31 Eisenhower wrote to Eden, stating that “I cannot over- emphasize the strength of my conviction that some such method must be attempted before action such as you contemplate should be undertaken…I have given you my personal conviction, as well as that of my associates, as to the unwisdom even of contemplating the use of military force at this moment.” 918 He further advised that the

United States would not support any military action until all diplomatic options had been exhausted. In a conversation between Dulles and Eden on August 1, Dulles reaffirmed

“that United States public opinion was not ready to back a military venture by Britain and

France which, at this stage, could be plausibly portrayed as motivated by imperialist and colonialist ambitions” and added that undertaking “such an operation without at least the moral support of the United States would be a great disaster because it opened the way for many future evil consequences.”919

U.S. concerns were not limited to private correspondence with Eden, however, and sources suggest that Nasser was encouraged by clear public signals that Eisenhower and Dulles would not support the use of force. 920 Eisenhower stated his desire for a peaceful resolution of the dispute numerous times during August and September while negotiations were taking place at the London Conference. In a press conference on

918 Letter from President Eisenhower to Prime Minister Eden, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 35. 919 Memorandum of a Conversation Between Prime Minister Eden and Secretary of State Dulles, 10 Downing Street, London, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 42. 920 Kyle, Suez , 220-221.

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August 29, Eisenhower commented on progress in London and stated that, “the American nation completely supports the international proposal…which, fully respecting the sovereignty of Egypt, would assure a peaceful solution of this great problem.” 921 He refused to comment on the French military mobilizations in a second press conference on

August 31, adding that “for ourselves, we are determined to exhaust every possible, every feasible method of peaceful settlement. We believe it can be done, and I am not going to comment on what other people are doing. I am very hopeful that this particular proposal will be accepted, but, in any event, not to give up even if we do run into other obstacles.” 922 He continued to state that the United States had not given any orders to its military forces in the area and was committed to a peaceful settlement of this dispute.

These public statements were delivered alongside private assurances to Nasser “to convince [him that the] United States really stood for peaceful settlement.” 923 The U.S. position against the use of force was no clearer than on October 31, when Eisenhower issued a public statement criticizing the actions of Britain, France and Israel, clarifying that the United States would not be involved in the hostilities, and outlining U.S. plans for a UN General Assembly resolution that called for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of troops. 924

921 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Statement by the President Following Receipt of Secretary Dulles’ Report on the London Suez Conference,” August 29, 1956. The American History Project Public Papers of the President, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=10585&st=Suez&st1 (accessed November 12, 2015). 922 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The President’s News Conference,” August 31, 1956. The American History Project Public Papers of the President, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=10586&st=exhaust&st1 (accessed November 12, 2015). 923 Telegram from the Embassy in Egypt to the Department of State, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 141. 924 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Developments in Eastern Europe and the Middle East,” October 31, 1956. The American History Project Public Papers of the President, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10685 (accessed November 12, 2015). Eisenhower stated that, “the action taken can scarcely be reconciled with the principles and purposes of the United

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Finally, that Britain and France continued resort to international negotiations led

Nasser – as well as other international observers – to conclude that the rush to employ military force was losing steam. 925 The British and French had agreed to two conferences in London, finally referring the matter to the UN Security Council in September. The recourse to international conferences and diplomacy was interpreted as a signal of defeat by Nasser, bolstered by his knowledge that the British and French were increasingly isolated internationally. 926 Indeed, in addition to the restraint exercised by the United

States during this period, Nasser had also received significant support from other countries. The Soviets issued a public statement on July 29 noting that the Suez Canal was the property of Egypt and that nationalization would be of economic benefit to the

Egyptian people. China expressed its support on August 4, followed by an Iraqi statement of support on August 7. 927

In sum, domestic political divisions combined with the restraining effect of international public opinion – and especially that of Britain and France’s close ally, the

United States – led Nasser to severely doubt the resolve of London and Paris to resort to war. Egyptian Minister Sayyid Mar’i later stated that Nasser thought that “a solution to the crisis by peaceful means” was much more probable than war. 928 According to Sir

Humphrey Trevelyan, on August 30 Nasser “estimated the chances of an invasion at 10-1 against” and he still seemed sure of his assessment on September 19. 929 In late August,

Egyptian Intelligence apparently speculated that Israel might attack Gaza or Sinai, but

Nations to which we have all subscribed. And, beyond this, we are forced to doubt that resort to force and war will long serve the permanent interest of the attacking nations.” 925 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 2148. 926 James, “When Did Nasser Expect War?” digital location 4229. 927 Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 134. 928 Sayyid Mar’i, ‘Sayyid Mar’i’s Political Papers,’ in S. Ilan Troen and Moshe Shemesh (eds.), The Suez- Sinai Crisis 1956: Retrospective and Reappraisal (London: Frank Cass, 1990), 362-3. 929 Quoted in James, “When Did Nasser Expect War?” digital location 4258.

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they believed that if this occurred, it would be “some time later” and that the chances of an invasion were very low. As a result, the army reduced its level of alert and resumed standard training activities. 930 By October 16, following negotiations at the UN, the

Egyptian government informed the Soviets it was not concerned about an attack on the canal. The Egyptian Ambassador Mohammed el-Kouni told the Soviet Foreign Ministry that the matter “is in large measure settled.” 931

Nasser’s reaction to the Israeli attack on October 29, followed by the British and

French public ultimatum reveals his assessment of low threat credibility. According to

Egyptian Minister Mar’i, Nasser did not take the ultimatum seriously, an assessment confirmed by Nasser’s advisor al-Baghdadi. 932 Nasser still did not think that the British would cooperate with the Israelis, nor act against domestic and international public opinion. 933 In Nasser’s mind, the ultimatum violated Britain’s own self-interest and was

“quite mad.” 934 He later recalled that, “when we received the ultimatum we thought [it] was directed [at keeping] our troops out of Sinai…until [the] next day all our estimations were based on the idea that Britain would not participate in any attack.” 935 The final piece of evidence demonstrating Nasser’s assessment was the Egyptian government’s lack of preparation for attack, which would at the very least have involved evacuating the Sinai forces. 936

As expected based on this threat assessment, Nasser was extremely surprised when the British and French started bombing Cairo on the evening of October 31. The

930 James, “When Did Nasser Expect War?” digital location 4279. 931 Quoted in Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 2385. 932 Kyle, Suez , 368. 933 Ibid., digital location 4327; Kyle, Suez, 350. 934 Quoted in Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 179. 935 Quoted in Kyle, Suez , 368. 936 Ibid., 368.

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military found themselves unprepared for an attack, with many troops at risk of being cut off in the Sinai. Mar’i later noted that “we were surprised by a war at a level far higher than our direct capability.” 937 The Egyptian leader quickly proceeded to update his threat assessments based on incoming information. With the use of force now a reality, the

Egyptian leader prepared for war. Nasser quickly ordered the withdrawal of his troops from the Sinai and started preparations to go into hiding in the event that the army was defeated in Cairo. From there, Nasser planned to lead a guerrilla resistance movement against the British and French forces. 938

Yet as time progressed, Nasser started to doubt the ability of France and Britain to carry out their threat. The delay between the air campaign and the arrival of British and

French land forces created a window of opportunity for domestic and international opinion to rally against the allied powers. On October 31, President Eisenhower spoke out against the military invasion and the United States quickly pushed for a ceasefire under the auspices of the United Nations. This resolution, although vetoed initially by

Britain and France in the Security Council, passed in the General Assembly by an overwhelming 65 votes to 5 on November 2, 1956. 939 In addition to observing the international fallout, Nasser also paid close attention to the domestic environment in

Britain. The Labour Party opposition had been extremely vocal in the House of

Commons, and Anthony Nutting, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, had resigned his post in protest on October 25 – a decision made public one week later. Sir Edward Boyle of the Treasury also resigned. 940

937 Quoted in James, “When Did Nasser Expect War?” digital location 4360. 938 Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 180-181. 939 MacNamara, Britain, Nasser, and the Balance of Power , 57. 940 Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 195.

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The most telling information for Nasser, however, was the public demonstration against the use of force in Trafalgar Square on November 4, just prior to the British and

French troop landing. In light of such international and public opposition to the attack,

Nasser revised his threat assessment and returned to his previous evaluation. According to Heikal, by the time the troop landings took place “Nasser could see that their failure was inevitable. All plans for the Egyptian leadership to go underground and preparations for guerrilla war were cancelled.” 941 The British and French started withdrawing their troops on November 6, 1956.

6. NASSER ’S UPDATING In this section we turn to consider Nasser’s broader environment and how it might have assisted his updating throughout the crisis. To recall, in Chapter 2 I argue that to understand whether (and how) leaders update we need to look more closely at the information environment around them. More specifically, we need to look beyond the leader to the institutional environment in which he or resides, and in particular to the interactions between leaders and their security apparatus prior to, and during, crises.

6.1. Nasser’s Threat Environment and Prioritization From 1952 onwards, Geddes codes Egypt as a “single party/military/personal” regime, since it has experienced all of these types of rule at some point in time.942 The overthrow of King Farouk by the Free Officers’ movement in July 1952 saw the end of the Egyptian monarchy and its associated institutions. The Free Officers had effectively removed the old order and now faced important decisions about the kind of government

941 Ibid. 942 Geddes, “Authoritarian Breakdown,” Appendix.

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they wanted to create. 943 This period of “institutional flux” and uncertainty characterized

Egyptian politics from 1952 through to 1956 when Nasser was officially elected president. 944

As expected by the theory developed in Chapter 2, the low level of institutionalization post-1952 and the fluidity of the political environment after the coup increased the domestic threat to Nasser’s rule. Followers of the old regime, dissident military officers, communists, and the Muslim Brotherhood all posed threats to the Free

Officers. As a result, the new junta placed internal security and intelligence reform high on its lists of priorities, and it focused on suppressing domestic threats to its rule for the first two years in power. The Free Officers appointed Lt Col Zakaria Muhi as the new head of Military Intelligence (MID), tasked with protecting “the political work of the revolution at home and abroad.” 945 To combat the communist threat, the new regime created a secret committee that would arrest cadres and combat communist propaganda.

A new political police force, known as the General Investigations Directorate (GID) and later the State Security Investigations, was established in 1952 to carry out this task. 946

The junta’s anti-communist cause created useful opportunities to cooperate with Western intelligence services, and especially with the CIA which provided the Egyptian intelligence training school with equipment, training manuals, and managerial advice. 947

The Muslim Brotherhood posed another key threat to the junta and proved a formidable opponent. In August 1952, the regime crushed a coup conspiracy within the

943 Nathan J. Brown, Constitutions in a Non-Constitutional World (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 126. 944 Lisa A. Blades, “Competition without Democracy: Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt.” PhD. Diss., University of Califonia, Los Angeles, 2008, 282. 945 Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 29. 946 Ibid., 31. 947 Michael Copeland, Beyond Cloak and Dagger: Inside the CIA (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1975), 212- 13.

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army and in December of that year a second plot was uncovered among a group of air force mechanics. On January 14-15, 1953, the authorities arrested 35 artillery officers suspected of dissident activity with Muslim Brotherhood ties, and in December 1953 intelligence reports confirmed that the Brotherhood had infiltrated the army and the police forces. 948 When splits appeared between President and RCC Chairman

Muhammad Naguib and its Vice Chairman Nasser over future of Egyptian rule, the

Brotherhood sided with Naguib.

Nasser proceeded to wage a concerted campaign to remove Naguib from power and eradicate the Muslim Brotherhood. After demanding participation in government decision making and the establishment of an Islamic State, the Free Officers banned the

Brotherhood in January 1954. This was quickly followed by the sequestration of

Brotherhood-run schools and hospitals, and a propaganda campaign to spread the word of the junta’s accomplishments. The GID and MID carried out a purge of all Muslim

Brotherhood sympathizers within the police and armed forces, with approximately 400 of a total 3,000 police officers dismissed for having ties with the group. 949 Nasser also waged a campaign to remove Naguib from power following their rift in 1953. He targeted

Naguib’s followers with carefully organized mob and police attacks as well as media campaigns. He alienated Naguib’s support base by falsely promising to the lift the ban on the Brotherhood, and by bribing the unions. By March 1954, Nasser had built up so much support that opposition to his rule dissipated and Naguib collapsed from exhaustion. A failed assassination attempt on Nasser on October 26, 1954, by a member of the Muslim

Brotherhood gave him the perfect excuse to finally squash the opposition. He swiftly

948 Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 35-37. 949 Ibid., 37-38.

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jailed the Brotherhood leadership, arrested 7,000 suspects, and organized mobs to loot the

Brotherhood headquarters and offices. 950 The Interior Ministry of Egypt reported that by the end of November 1954 the Brotherhood was “broken” and Naguib was placed under house arrest. 951

After successfully removing Naguib as RCC Chairman and President of Egypt,

Nasser continued to consolidate his hold on power. In 1955, Nasser gathered all of the tools of state propaganda under his control. He shut down newspapers, arrested editors and used public speeches to rally support behind him. 952 He also moved to neutralize rivals within the ruling elite. The Minister of National Guidance, Saleh Salim, was forced to resign from the RCC, and his brother, Jamal Salim, was excluded from Nasser’s new cabinet upon his election. 953

By June 1956 Nasser was confirmed as president by popular vote and had eliminated all key internal threats to his rule. 954 With domestic politics under control, the

Egyptian leader started looking further afield towards the pursuit of foreign policy goals .955 One of Nasser’s overriding objectives was to establish Egyptian predominance in the Middle East and to bolster his regional credibility as leader of the pan-Arab world.

Israel presented a continued threat to this vision, with Ben-Gurion arming Israel for a war with Egypt. On March 2, 1955, Israel confirmed its status as a key external threat when

950 Joel Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement: Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992), 18; Robert Henry Stephens, Nasser: A Political Biography (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 136. 951 Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 37, 57. 952 Michael P. Colaresi, Scare Tactics: The Political of International Rivalry (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 121. 953 Jankowski, Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism , 67. 954 Ibid. 955 Matthew F. Holland, America and Egypt: From Roosevelt to Eisenhower (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 58.

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its forces attacked the Egyptian Army in the Gaza Strip, killing 36 soldiers, two civilians, and wounding eighty. 956

The presence of Western powers in the Middle East also represented a key obstacle for Nasser in achieving his foreign policy objectives. More specifically, Britain’s colonial legacy in Egypt, continued presence in the Canal Zone, and occupation of Sudan undermined Nasser’s credibility and created cause for continued domestic unrest. 957 After his accession to power in 1954, the Egyptian leader identified Britain as the key external impediment to his rule. 958 Indeed Nasser’s concern with Great Britain’s continued presence in the region is evident in his desire to negotiate the British evacuation of forces in 1954, 959 and in his reaction to the Baghdad Defense Pact between Iraq, Turkey, Iran,

Pakistan and Britain, which Nasser perceived as an attempt by London to perpetuate its regional dominance. 960 Finally, Nasser’s desire to rid his country of its colonial past was clear in his nationalization speech in July 1956, during which he gave a long review of

“imperialist efforts [to] thwart Egyptian independence,” and condemned British actions specifically. 961

In light of this discussion, I generate the following prediction regarding Nasser’s priorities and the corresponding orientation of Egyptian security apparatus at the time of the Suez Crisis:

H2 Egypt : Nasser’s belief that Great Britain posed at least equal to, if not more of a threat to his security than other internal or external threats will lead him to prioritize accordingly and devote domestic security resources towards addressing this external concern.

956 Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 65-66. 957 Michael N. Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War: Military Power, State, and Society in Egypt and Israel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 82–83. 958 Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 31; Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 41. 959 Heikel, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 49. 960 MacNamara, Britain, Nasser, and the Balance of Power 41. 961 Editorial Note, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 1.

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6.2 Institutionalization As discussed in the preceding section, the Free Officers were aware of the internal threat to their regime and quickly sought to establish institutions that would address those concerns. The Military Intelligence Directorate (MID) and the even more powerful

General Investigations Directorate (GID) had clear internal security roles and were tasked with rooting out dissident activity in the years immediately following the coup. 962 Once his position was more established, however, Nasser began developing institutions and intelligence relationships that would help him meet international threats. Operation

Susannah, carried out by Israel in the summer of 1954, proved a key turning point in this regard. Israel launched the operation in the hopes of halting Britain’s troop withdrawal from the Canal Zone. The plan was to send in sabotage teams to bomb key centers – the

Alexandria central post office, the U.S. Information Service libraries, movie theaters in

Cairo and Alexandria, and the Cairo Central Railway Station – with the aim of convincing London that Egypt could not maintain internal security. 963

Fortunately the operation failed, but it highlighted the poor state of Egypt’s foreign intelligence and gave Nasser a sense of what an adversary was able to accomplish covertly. 964 According to one scholar, Operation Susannah “marked a transition point when Egyptian intelligence, having overcome domestic opponents, turned to foreign operations with greater interest and capability.” 965 Nasser responded by accelerating the expansion of the GID, and creating the Egyptian General Intelligence Service (EGIS) in

March 1954. Prior to EGIS, Egypt did not have an organization explicitly responsible for

962 Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 29. 963 Ibid., 38. 964 Aviezer Golan, Operation Susannah (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1978), 61-72. 965 Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 40.

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conducting covert action, or for collecting and assessing political and economic intelligence. These were the new missions for EGIS. The organization was purposefully modeled after the CIA and acted as the lead collector and assessor of foreign political and economic intelligence, as well as playing a key role in counterintelligence. 966 In addition,

EGIS was responsible for the acquisition, translation, and analysis of foreign radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, and other journals. As a result of this demand, the agency employed civilians who were proficient in multiple languages. 967

In addition to creating an externally oriented intelligence agency, Nasser established a broad network of intelligence sources. He dispersed Egyptian military attachés throughout Europe and established strong connections with the U.S. and Soviet intelligence services. The Free Officers had turned to the United States for advice in 1952 when they sought to establish the GID, and the CIA provided significant intelligence training to Egyptian officers. 968 This relationship resulted in intelligence sharing between the countries and a network of powerful contacts.969 Nasser had also been careful not to alienate the Soviets with his anti-communist stance, and had sought an intelligence relationship with Moscow shortly after gaining power.970

Finally, not only was Nasser establishing externally-oriented institutions and intelligence networks from 1954 onwards, but there is also evidence that he was orienting at least some of these resources explicitly towards the British threat. In summer 1955,

Nasser tasked the Director of EGIS, Ali Sabri, with creating a special Suez Canal Office within the Military Intelligence Directorate to investigate the Canal Company's financial

966 Michael Copeland, Game of Nations (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 97-98. 967 Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 44. 968 Copeland, Beyond Cloak and Dagger, 212-13. 969 Wilbur Crane Eveland, Ropes of Sand (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1980), 137-138. 970 Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 36.

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position, and instructed the Foreign Ministry’s Research Bureau to examine the

Company’s international links. The intelligence produced helped inform Nasser’s thinking in the lead-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. 971 This leads to the following expectation regarding information availability to Nasser:

H3 Egypt : Nasser’s prioritization of the British threat and corresponding orientation of the Egyptian security apparatus externally will increase the likelihood of new information arising during the course of future crises with Great Britain.

6.3 Impact on Threat Assessment In Chapter 2, I outlined a number of pathways through which the process of threat prioritization can impact a leader’s information environment and subsequent threat assessment. More specifically, in cases where security resources – and especially intelligence agencies – are focused externally on the adversary in question, I argue that they will be more capable of: 1) receiving information; 2) providing a sound interpretation of that information when detected; and/or 3) making that information available to the leader. In order to determine whether threat prioritization and subsequent institutionalization had an effect on Nasser’s threat assessment in these ways, I ideally want to know whether the Egyptian intelligence community is detecting the signals being sent by the adversary, how the intelligence community is interpreting this information, and whether this information is being passed along to the key decision makers, and

Nasser specifically.

Unfortunately detailed data regarding the content and sophistication of Nasser’s intelligence reports during the Suez Crisis is not easily accessible. Nevertheless, while

971 Yigal Sheffy, “Unconcern at Dawn, Surprise at Sunset: Egyptian Intelligence Appreciation Before the Sinai Campaign, 1956,” Intelligence and National Security 5 (1990), 45.

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much of the specific content of the intelligence is still unknown, Nasser did appear to receive a significant amount of information throughout the crisis from a range of different sources. As discussed in the previous section, Nasser used his own intelligence service to collect and evaluate information on possible British, French, and Israeli reactions to nationalization upon which he based his own assessment. 972 In addition to tasking his domestic agencies with this mission, he also deployed MID officers to Malta and Cyprus to communicate with Egyptian military attachés, and MID apparently activated spies to report on British bases in Libya and Aden. 973 Thrawat Ukasha, the Egyptian attaché to

Paris, also met with several contacts who confirmed French military mobilizations. 974

The information gleaned from these sources proved crucial in Nasser’s assessment of

British and French military capability on the eve of the crisis and beyond. 975

Nasser also continued to receive updated reports from the Egyptian Intelligence

Directorates throughout the crisis. These memoranda included not only information on the adversaries’ military movements, but also the position of international allies and the status of domestic public opinion. In early October, for example, Nasser received a detailed report on the positions of Israel, Britain, and France. The report documented

British and French pressure on Israel to take part in military action, low public opinion in

Israel for the use of force against Nasser, and highlighted the restraining effect of the

United States on all parties. These frequent updates kept Nasser abreast of changes in the international political environment. 976

972 Ibid. 973 Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 120; M. Heikal, The Sphinx and the Commissar (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1978), 67-68. 974 Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 55. 975 Laura M. James, Nasser at War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 19. 976 Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 176.

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In addition to the information gleaned from his own intelligence service, the

Egyptian leader was also privy to information gathered by the CIA and KGB. Nasser was in regular communication with Khrushchev throughout the crisis, seeking out advice when necessary. At the end of August, for example, the Egyptian leader called the Soviet ambassador for a private conversation during which Nasser asked for his opinion “in connection with further steps and tactics” adding that “all Soviet advice would be received positively.” 977 Nasser also maintained contact with the CIA, and in fact used his contacts to secure back channel communication with the Eisenhower Administration. 978

Finally, the Egyptian leader had access to intelligence from other allies who passed on valuable information. India provided Egypt with information from its diplomats in London on British military plans in August. 979 Syrian intelligence passed on reports on Israel, British and French military movements in Cyprus, and even Jordan is reported to have shared intelligence on Israel’s movements. 980 Finally, King Saud of

Saudi Arabia passed on a letter to Nasser documenting a meeting between the U.S. ambassador in Saudi Arabia and the Saudi Foreign Minister. During the meeting, the U.S. ambassador had apparently informed the Saudi Minister that the U.S. wished to uphold

Egypt’s sovereign rights; that Washington did not think that the British would use force; and that Eisenhower was using all of his influence “to prevent Eden from doing anything rash.” 981

In sum, Nasser’s assessment of British threat credibility was strongly influenced by the intelligence he received from the Egyptian agencies and foreign contacts.

977 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 2098. 978 Ibid., digital location 2205; James, “When Did Nasser Expect War?” digital location 4239. 979 Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 140; Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 55. 980 Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service , 56. 981 Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail , 156.

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Although there is limited data available on Nasser’s reactions to each of these pieces of information, it is clear that at least the reports from his own agencies directly informed his assessment of the British and French threat. It is also likely that he paid attention to the intelligence provided by the CIA and KGB, though this is speculation given the lack of information currently available. These sources, combined with the amount of information readily available to Nasser through the openness of the British political system and the public nature of the military mobilizations, created a fertile information environment upon which Nasser could base his threat assessments.

6.4 Summary: Evaluating Nasser’s Threat Assessment The evidence presented indicates that Nasser was not overly constrained by his prior beliefs when he entered the crisis with Britain and France, that he was open to and influenced by incoming information, and that he updated his threat assessment based on changes detected in the international environment. In fact Nasser arrived at an assessment of threat incredibility in October 1956 for quite different reasons than those held in July when he issued the nationalization declaration. In July 1956, Nasser believed that Britain

(and France to some extent) had a political incentive to respond with force, but did not have the military capability available to do so without absorbing greater costs elsewhere in the region. By October this assessment had flipped. The British and French had publicly mobilized their armed forces and had capabilities in the region that could be used in Egypt. At this stage, however, Nasser believed that the political costs of action would be too great for Britain to withstand. This shift in the content of Nasser’s assessment is evidence of his receptivity to new information throughout the crisis.

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Moreover, although the quality of a leader’s assessment is not the chief outcome of interest for this dissertation, it is worth noting that in this case Nasser’s assessment of

British and French credibility was relatively sound. Although the two countries did employ force in the end – an event not expected by Nasser – France and Britain also withdrew their forces and failed to achieve their objectives for the very reasons the

Egyptian leader identified: international and domestic political pressure. 982 More important for the purposes of this project, however, are the threat assessments of other states at the time. Accounting for external appraisals in this way can help determine whether Nasser’s assessment was based on his prior individual beliefs, or represented a more “rational” process of updating as claimed in this chapter.

In fact, statements and reports issued by the Soviet Union and United States at the time of the crisis reveal that both countries shared Nasser’s assessment of British and

French credibility. On September 19, a U.S. Special National Intelligence Estimate stated that the use of military force by Britain and France “is likely only in the event of violent provocation – such as major violence to British and French nationals and property in

Egypt – which would unite British public opinion behind such action.” 983 Otherwise the risk of military action was deemed relatively low. The agreement on the six principles at the UN in October was taken as a strong sign that war would not break out.984 The CIA reported to Eisenhower that “deliberate initiation of full-scale Arab-Israeli hostilities

982 For a full account of the economic pressure placed on Britain by the United States in order to obtain the withdrawal of forces, see Pressman, Warring Friends , 62-77. 983 Special National Intelligence Estimate, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 236. 984 UN Security Council, Resolution 118 (1956), October 13, 1956, http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/118(1956 ) (accessed November 16, 2016); Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 2221.

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[was] unlikely in the immediate future.” 985 That same day, President Eisenhower stated publicly that, “the progress made in the settlement of the Suez dispute this afternoon at the United Nations is most gratifying. Egypt, Britain, and France have met through their foreign ministers, and agreed on a set of principles on which to negotiate; and it looks like here is a very great crisis that is behind us.” 986

The Soviet analysis was similar, and as time progressed the intelligence reports became less and less concerned with the possibility of military force. A political assessment in September informed the Kremlin that Eden lacked power and faced an increasingly divided Parliament. The three-month delay between the deployment of the warships and any military action also led the Soviets to doubt British credibility. 987

Finally, Khrushchev was privy to reports from two former members of the British establishment – Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – who had access to the deputy leader of the British Labour Party, Tom Driberg. According to their conversations, Eden was too politically weak to use force against Egypt. 988 In sum, external views tended to fall in line with those of Nasser, with U.S. and Soviet officials assessing the likelihood of an Anglo-

French-Israeli invasion as low.

985 Quoted in Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 2285. 986 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Television Broadcast: “The People Ask the President,” October 12, 1956. The American History Project Public Papers of the President, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=10640&st=&st1 (accessed November 12, 2015). 987 Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War , digital location 2172-2181. 988 Ibid., digital location 2139.

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Figure 6.2 Nasser’s Beliefs and Threat Environment

Leader has prior beliefs about external adversary

N Y

Beliefs exert no External threat constraining assessed as target influence on threat state's dominant assessment concern - Updating likely Suez Crisis 1956 N Y

7. ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS Given the absence of prior beliefs in shaping Nasser’s threat assessment, the Suez

Crisis provides a useful opportunity to evaluate the performance of the alternative theories to see which best accounts for the Egyptian leader’s evaluation of British credibility. The plausible candidate explanations considered throughout this dissertation are: 1) rationalist power-based theories that assess threat credibility according to the balance of power and material interests in a crisis; 2) rationalist (regime-type) theories that assess threat credibility according to the use of costly-signaling mechanisms; 3) the social-psychological theory that assesses threat credibility on the basis of the desirability

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of past actions; and 4) behavioral theories that assess threat credibility based on a state’s record of following through on past commitments.

The first possible explanation is the current calculus thesis posited by Daryl Press.

According to his argument, leaders assess a country’s threat credibility based on the balance of capabilities and interests at stake in a given confrontation. To determine this balance, each target state leader asks the following key questions: 1) Does the adversary have enough power to do what he threatens in order to achieve his objectives? And, 2) are the interests at stake large enough to justify the costs and risks? 989

The Suez Crisis provides some support for this argument. Nasser’s pre-crisis assessment makes clear that he evaluated the likelihood of a British response based on its interests at stake – which were significant – and British and French capabilities in the region – which were limited. It was this precise calculation that led Nasser to announce the nationalization of the canal. Interestingly, however, once the crisis gets underway the current calculus argument loses explanatory power.

According to Press, a target state leader evaluates an adversary’s interests according to whether they are “vital,” “important” or simply “concerns.” A country’s

“vital interests” include preserving its sovereignty and protecting its citizens. To safeguard these interests, countries care about large shifts in the balance of power and threats to their economic prosperity. “Important interests” include a broad set of material concerns that are not vital to a country’s survival, such as defending allies and trade partners, protecting the right of naval passage, and so forth. Finally, “concerns” includes

989 Press, Calculating Credibility , 20-24.

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the category of “nice to haves,” such as humanitarian interventions and preventing suffering abroad. 990

Based on this categorization, the Suez Canal would fall somewhere between a vital and important interest for Great Britain. It was clearly an extremely important waterway for London, and a key thoroughfare through which Britain accessed its colonies and trading partners. The nationalization of the canal thus threatened British economic interests directly and also threatened the rights of commercial shipping to navigate through this waterway. Indeed, it was because of these economic interests that

Nasser was worried about a possible British response and sought out more information on the balance of military power in the region. The problem for Press’s theory, however, is that British economic interests did not change during the course of the crisis, and the military balance of power actually became more favorable to Britain over time.

According to current calculus thesis, then, Nasser’s assessment of British credibility pre- nationalization should be low, but as the crisis progressed, he should have assessed the

British threat as increasingly credible. Unfortunately the evidence presented in Section 5 does not support this argument.

As discussed in Chapter 4, one of the key challenges for Press’s thesis is its focus on material factors as an indicator of a country’s interests. It is clear, however, that

Nasser looked beyond material indicators to the broader political environment when assessing Britain’s willingness to use force. In fact Nasser’s focus on British domestic politics during the crisis lends substantial support to a variant of the democratic credibility thesis that emphasizes the informative value of open and competitive

990 Ibid., 25-26.

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democratic states. 991 The evidence suggests that it was not the public nature of Eden’s statements that had most influence on Nasser during the crisis, nor is there anything in the records to indicate that he viewed the British Prime Minister’s public statements as hand- tying commitments to use force. 992 Instead, Nasser paid much more attention to the

Labour Party opposition and the anti-war sentiment of the British public opinion in undermining British credibility. 993 It should be noted, however, that domestic opposition was not the only indicator to which Nasser referred. As Section 5 reveals, the Egyptian leader also took careful note of broader international public opinion, and the position of

Britain’s key ally – the United States – in particular. The democratic credibility thus goes a long way towards explaining Nasser’s threat assessment, but does not account for all of the elements in his decision making.

This leaves us with the last two possible explanations for a target state leader’s threat assessment – the past actions thesis, and Mercer’s reputations thesis. To recall, the past actions thesis claims that a state’s prior fulfillment of commitments and threats to use force serves to increase the credibility of that state’s future demands in the eyes of target states, regardless of whether the target state leader is the same across both crises. 994

In the Suez case this is difficult to assess because Great Britain did not issue an explicit threat in 1951, however it did use force to defend its interests in the Canal Zone. If past actions theory is applicable at all in this case, then, Britain’s threat should be deemed more credible in 1956, not less so.

991 For a full account of this theory see Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy , 3-7. 992 For a more extended critique of audience costs theory as applied to the Suez Crisis, see Snyder and Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats,” 445-47. 993 Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy , 216-223. 994 Schelling, Arms and Influence , 55-59.

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Mercer’s social-psychology theory focuses on the relative desirability of an adversary’s past behavior in formulating reputations for resolve. According to this account, when an adversary stands firm in a dispute or carries out a threat to use force, that behavior is perceived as undesirable by a target state, is explained in dispositional terms, and the adversary gains a reputation for resolve. The opposite occurs when an adversary’s behavior is perceived as desirable. 995 In the Suez Case, the British use of force in 1951 and successful defense of its position in the Canal Zone was undesirable for the Egyptian leadership. As a result, Britain should have developed a reputation for resolve that would carry through to 1956. As we know, however, this account does not accord with Nasser’s assessment of British threat credibility. The following table summarizes the predictions for each theory.

Table 6.1 Alternative Theoretical Predictions: Suez Crisis

Theory Mechanism/s 1956 Prediction

Current Calculus Egypt-British balance of power and Credible Thesis interests

1. British public threats Regime-Type Credible 2. The openness and competitiveness of the Thesis Incredible British political system

Desirability of British behavior in past Reputations Thesis Credible crises

Past Actions Thesis History of British threat follow-through Credible

1. Nasser’s previous experience of British Cognitive- resolve N/A Institutional Thesis 2. Availability of new information

995 Mercer, Reputation and International Politics, 65-69.

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8. CONCLUSION In this chapter I argue that Nasser entered the Suez Crisis absent a prior crisis interaction with Great Britain and without long-standing beliefs about the extent of

British foreign policy interests. As a consequence, the Egyptian leader was more open to a range of information regarding the likelihood of war with Great Britain, and adjusted his threat assessment based on the availability of incoming information. On the eve of nationalization, Nasser based his assessment of British threat credibility on British interests in the canal, and on the capabilities that Britain had available to pursue these objectives. Once the crisis was underway, Nasser took note of the broader domestic and international political environment within which Britain acted to arrive at his ultimate assessment of low threat credibility. While Britain, France and Israel did eventually use force against Egypt, they were compelled to withdraw in defeat after only one week for the reasons Nasser identified in his threat assessment. Egypt emerged from the crisis victorious and won full control over the Suez Canal.

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7. CONCLUSION

1. INTRODUCTION The cognitive-institutional theory of threat assessment and the evidence offered in the preceding chapters allows us to draw conclusions about the ways in which leaders assess the credibility of threats during crises, and the role that individual beliefs play in this process. Most theories assume that leaders enter into crises with prior beliefs about their adversaries; much less is known, however, about how and when these beliefs actually influence leaders assessments and their subsequent behavior. One of the key contributions of the theory presented in this dissertation is to help parse out the various conditions under which we should expect these prior beliefs to matter. In this final chapter I summarize the findings of the dissertation, discuss the implications of this project for academic and policy worlds, and outline opportunities for further research.

2. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS This dissertation engages in a small n qualitative study and as a result there will inevitably be uncertainty regarding the interpretation of individual cases and the strength of inferences that we can draw about the impact of leaders’ prior belief on their threat assessments. Nevertheless, the weight of evidence supports the argument that I advance.

The cognitive-institutional theory performs well – though not perfectly – in each of the cases under consideration, and performs better than the alternative explanations

The Falklands and Iraq cases both demonstrate the importance of leaders’ broader threat environments in explaining the continued influence of prior beliefs. In the Iraq case, prior to the Gulf War of 1991 Saddam Hussein viewed the United States as a revisionist power and as an existential threat to his regime. The experience of the war, however,

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provided direct evidence of U.S. cost-intolerance and an unwillingness to expend large amounts of resources to achieve its broader objectives. In light of these events, Saddam assessed the United States as a credible but limited revisionist power. During the 1990s these revised belief about the extent of U.S. interests informed Saddam’s threat perception and led him to orient his security apparatus inwards to address more urgent domestic concerns. The Bush Administration’s subsequent threat to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam’s regime in 2002-03 exceeded the limited range of costs Saddam believed the U.S. would be willing to absorb to achieve its foreign policy objectives.

Lacking information to challenge these prior beliefs, Saddam proceeded to interpret U.S. signals in light of his own expectations, assessing the compellent threat as incredible and refusing to comply with U.S. demands.

The Falklands War presents operates in a similar fashion. In this case General

Galtieri and Admiral Anaya viewed the British Government has having weak status quo interests in the South Atlantic based on their experiences in 1976 and 1981. These beliefs informed Galtieri and Anaya’s military planning, and laid the groundwork for the invasion of Falklands Islands in 1982. During the course of the crisis, the domestic orientation of the Argentine security apparatus combined with its rigid organizational structure undermined the delivery of timely and accurate information to the military leaders. As a result, they the proceeded to view the world in accordance with their prior beliefs, sidelining and reinterpreting signals to fit with their expectations of low British resolve. As the crisis progressed, the Argentine leaders remained committed to their belief that war would not eventuate and made little attempt to prepare militarily for the subsequent British assault.

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The Cuban Missile Crisis and Suez case studies serve a different function in demonstrating the conditions under which leaders beliefs can update during crises. In the

Cuba case, Khrushchev’s prior crisis experience in 1961 led him to view the United

States as a strong state quo power, but one that was intent on avoiding war with the

Soviet Union. These beliefs set the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. During the crisis, Khrushchev initially interpreted U.S. signals in accordance with his prior beliefs, assessing the U.S. deterrent threat as credible but failing to believe that Washington would start a war over missiles in Cuba. The large influx of information available to

Khrushchev during the crisis, however, and in particular intelligence reports of an imminent invasion that activated a nuclear threat, quickly forced Khrushchev to update his assessment. The Soviet leader pledged to remove the missiles and the crisis ended abruptly on October 28, 1962.

The Suez case provides an opportunity to evaluate a leader’s threat assessment in the absence of prior crisis interactions. In this case, Nasser entered the crisis absent long- standing beliefs about the extent of British foreign policy interests. As a consequence, the

Egyptian leader was more open to a range of information regarding the likelihood of war with Great Britain, and adjusted his threat assessment based on the availability of new intelligence at the time. Once the crisis was underway, Nasser took account of the broader domestic and international political environment within which Britain acted and ultimately assessed the British threat as having low credibility. Although Britain, France and Israel eventually used force against Egypt, they were quickly forced to withdraw for the very reasons Nasser identified in his threat assessment.

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Taken collectively, the case study findings show that past actions play an important role in determining beliefs about the extent of an adversaries foreign policy interests, and that these beliefs can shape subsequent threat assessments. However, the cases also demonstrate that these beliefs will only carry through and influence future threat assessments under specific conditions. In particular, when leaders reside in complex threat environments and prioritize internal threats to their regimes, the quality and quantity of information available to assess the credibility of external threats diminishes. In these cases the lack of information creates a permissive environment in which leader’s prior beliefs and expectations play a stronger role in determining the reception and interpretation of coercive signals.

3. IMPLICATIONS OF THE ARGUMENT The cognitive-institutional theory and the findings of this dissertation contribute to a number of literatures within IR. First, and perhaps most generally, this project provides somewhat of a bridge between rational and cognitive theories of threat assessment, and the role that each attributes to leadership beliefs. Rationalist scholars agree that leaders enter crises with prior expectations, but argue that the availability of new information during these periods – and especially “costly” information – should increase the probability that beliefs will change.996 Cognitive scholars, on the other hand, view beliefs as stickier in nature, and more resistant to the kind of updating expected by rationalist theories. 997 This dissertation shows that both theories can shed light on processes of threat assessments, though the conditions under which each does so varies.

996 See e.g. Spence, “Job Market Signaling”; Schelling, Strategy of Conflict ; Schelling, Arms and Influence ; Fearon, “Signaling and Foreign Policy Interests.” 997 See e.g. Jervis, Lebow, and Stein, Psychology and Deterrence; Jervis, “Hypotheses on Misperception”; Jervis, Perception and Misperception ; Stein, “Building Politics into Psychology: The Misperception of Threat.”

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Cognitive theories are far better placed to explain the assessments of leaders who reside in complex threat environments, where the lack of information available permits the stronger influence of prior beliefs. When leaders (and their security agencies) are less constrained by domestic threat environments, however, information is more readily available and prior beliefs exert a weaker influence as expected by rationalist accounts of threat assessment.

Second, the findings of the case studies and the poor performance of the democratic credibility thesis in particular presents a challenge to rationalist accounts of crisis signaling that privilege the role of “costly” information. In all of the cases considered, leaders paid attention to both “costly” as well as “cheap” signals, and in most cases failed to make the inferences assumed by rationalist theories. One of the key contributions of this project is thus to emphasize the context dependence of crisis interactions and to reject the assumption that there is a “gold standard” for credible threats or one set of mechanisms that states can employ to make their intentions understood. Leaders do not always infer the same meanings or arrive at the same assessments of credibility from observing costly signals. Instead, leaders rely on a wide range of information to inform their threat assessments, and often select and interpret signals according to their prior beliefs and expectations about an adversary.

Third, this dissertation wades squarely into the debate over reputations and the importance of past actions in determining future assessments of threat credibility. Just over ten years ago Daryl Press presented a damming critique of past actions theory by showing that a state’s history of upholding commitments to use force did not affect its

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credibility in future crises. 998 This finding was surprising given that leaders often talk about the reputational consequences of their behavior, and worry that the actions they take now will influence their adversaries’ perceptions in the future.999

In contrast to Press’s argument, the findings of this dissertation suggest that a state’s past actions do matter, and that reputations can form in international politics, but perhaps through less direct ways than previously thought. A state’s previous interactions with a target state can serve to shape beliefs and set expectations about its interests – and how those interests will be pursued – with long-term implications for how that state’s threats are assessed and interpreted. This finding is contingent, however, on the quality and quantity of information available to target state leaders – a function, I argue, of their own domestic threat environments. The implications of this argument for policy makers thus pull in two directions. On the one hand, the argument suggests that policy makers are right to worry about the reputational consequences of their actions, especially given that once beliefs form they can be especially resistant to change. On the other hand, however, the circumstances in which leaders’ prior beliefs matter to their future threat assessments is circumscribed and limited. As a result, policy makers’ reputational concerns are valid, but perhaps pertain to a smaller set of cases than is often though to be the case.

The case study findings also offer valuable insights for recent literature linking regime types and war. First, as discussed already, democratic states are often touted as having the ability to issue more costly signals, and therefore deliver more effective threats, than non-democratic regimes. Yet this dissertation shows that the United States

998 Press, Calculating Credibility , 20-24 . 999 Ibid., 2, 158.

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and Great Britain both experienced varying degrees of success in delivering effective coercive threats over the past century. Despite leaders in both countries issuing clear public demands, and often receiving bipartisan political support, they failed to communicate credible threats to Saddam Hussein and the military junta in Argentina – two of the four cases examined. In fact the Suez Crisis is the only case in which Britain’s democratic political system appeared to influence a target state’s threat assessment, and in this case it served to undermine British credibility. Second, the Iraq, Falklands, Suez and Cuba cases also show that variation exists in the quality of threat assessments across authoritarian states. This finding accords with a recent wave of scholarship that demonstrates a much broader range of behaviors among non-democratic regimes than had previously been understood.1000

Finally, while comprising only a small part of this dissertation, the Cuban Missile

Crisis reveals the potential importance of variation in the types of coercive threats that states’ issue, and the differing impact that they can have on target state leaders’ threat assessments. This case also reveals that what constitutes a “nuclear crisis” or a “nuclear threat” is far from clear and may rest in important ways on leaders own theories about the process of escalation between the conventional and nuclear worlds. If true, this finding suggests that the universe of nuclear crises commonly used by scholars in IR is likely too broad to provide much analytic utility,1001 and that more care is needed to locate the cases in which leaders genuinely perceive a nuclear threat.

1000 See e.g. Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army ; Weeks, Dictators at War and Peace . 1001 For an example of such a dataset, see Kroenig, “Nuclear Superiority and the Balance of Resolve.”

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4. LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH This dissertation suffers from a number of limitations that leave open avenues for further research. The Suez and Cuba case studies both contain variables that are difficult to tease out empirically. The Suez crisis represents a case in which Nasser had weak prior beliefs about British interests and was also subject to a large quantity of information, making it difficult to know what best explains his updating. The speed with which

Nasser’s assessment changed during the crisis, combined with his strong personal interest in seeking out a wide range of information, points to the greater importance of weak prior beliefs in explaining his receptivity to the information available. 1002 Nevertheless analyzing additional cases with different values on these variables would help to tease out this causal chain. 1003

Similarly, in the Cuban Missile Crisis Khrushchev received a large amount of information due to the expansive Soviet intelligence network, but he was also faced with an overwhelming nuclear threat. Given the presence of both variables, it is difficult to determine whether it was the information or the nuclear threat that drove the Soviet leader’s assessment. Again, the timing of Khrushchev’s letters to Kennedy indicate that it was the content of the information that mattered most in this case, and Khrushchev’s fear that war was imminent. Nevertheless, including additional cases of nuclear threats, such as the Sino-Soviet border conflict of 1969 or the Kargil Crisis of 1999, would provide further support for these preliminary findings.

1002 Note that this is similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis during which Khrushchev also received a lot of information. In this case, however, Khrushchev’s strong priors led him to update more slowly. 1003 Extending the Iraq case to include more information on the intelligence available to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s is one possibility.

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Second, this dissertation only includes cases with non-democratic regimes as targets of compellent threats. While this is an interesting exercise in revealing variation across these regimes, the special powers of authoritarian leaders make these cases somewhat unique. To address this issue and ascertain whether the dissertation’s findings are generalizable beyond this group of authoritarian states, I plan to investigate a series of shorter case studies where democracies are the targets of coercive threats. 1004

Finally, as I explained in Chapter 2, I purposefully limit the scope of this dissertation to looking at targets of coercive threats and their assessments of threat credibility. In doing so, I bracket the intentions of the coercing states and look only at target state leaders’ assessments given the information available. However, it would be interesting to know what the coercing states thought they were signaling in each of these crises, and how successful these leaders thought they were in conveying their resolve to use force. This dyadic assessment, encompassing both sides of the crisis interaction, would provide greater insight into the pitfalls and promises of coercive diplomacy.

1004 Part of the difficulty lies in that fact that compared to authoritarian states, democracies have been the target of many fewer coercive threats. Nevertheless the onset of WWII provides an opportunity to assess British and French threat assessments, as does the Fashoda Crisis of 1898.

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Archival Documents

“Cable from Soviet ambassador to the U.S. Dobrynin to Soviet Foreign Ministry (2),” October 25, 1962, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Archive of Foreign Policy, Russian Federation (AVP RF), Moscow; copy obtained by NHK (Japanese Television), provided to CWIHP, and on file at National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.; translation by Vladimir Zaemsky. Accessed January 18, 2016. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/110449

“Cable from Soviet ambassador to the US Dobrynin to USSR Foreign Ministry (1),” October 25, 1962,bHistory and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Archive of Foreign Policy, Russian Federation (AVP RF), Moscow; copy obtained by NHK (Japanese Television), provided to CWIHP, and on file at National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.; translation by Vladimir Zaemsky. Accessed January 16, 2016. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111918

“Cable from Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko on 18 October 1962 meeting with President Kennedy (excerpts),” October 20, 1962, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, AVP RF; copy obtained by NHK, provided to CWIHP, and on file at National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.; translation by Vladimir Zaemsky. Accessed January 16, 2016. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111911

“Cable, Ambassador Dobrynin to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Meeting with Robert Kennedy,” October 27, 1962, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Russian Foreign Ministry archives, translation from copy provided by NHK, in Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), appendix, 523- 526, with minor revisions. Accessed January 18, 2016. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116955

CRRC SH-GMID-D-001-103, “A Report about the American Preparations and Troops "the army units and the naval ships" to attack Iraq,” September 5, 2002.

CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-533, “Meeting between Saddam Hussein and the Soviet Delegation,” October 1990.

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376

CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-814, “Saddam Hussein Meeting with the Revolutionary Council,” February 5, 1995.

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CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-210, “Saddam and His Inner Circle Discussing Upheaval and the Communist Coup Attempt in the Soviet Union,” circa August 19-21, 1991.

CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-241, “Iraqi Officials Briefing Saddam Hussein on the Performance of Iraqi Troops in Kuwait,” November 17, 1991.

CRRC-SH-SHTP-D-000-557, “Saddam and His Senior Advisors Discussing Iraq’s Historical Rights to Kuwait and the U.S. Position,” December 15, 1990.

Editorial Note, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 1.

“Franks Report” - Falkland Islands Review , Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors. Chairman: The Rt. Hon. The Lord Franks. London: HMSO, January 1983.

Letter from President Eisenhower to Prime Minister Eden, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 35.

Letter from President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev, FRUS, 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, Document 60.

Letter from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, FRUS, 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, Document 61.

Letter from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, FRUS, 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, Document 63.

Letter from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, FRUS , 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges , Document 66.

National Security Action Memorandum No. 62, FRUS , 1961-63 Vol. XIV, Berlin Crisis, 1961-62 , Document 80.

Memorandum of a Conversation Between Prime Minister Eden and Secretary of State Dulles, 10 Downing Street, London, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 42.

Message from Secretary of State to the President, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 97.

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“Rattenbach Report” - Brig General Benjamin Rattenbach, “Analysis and Evaluation of Responsibilities in the conflict in the South Atlantic,” December 2, 1982. Accessed March 5, 2016. http://seprin.info/wp- content/uploads/2012/02/Informe-Rattenbach.pdf

“Rattenbach Report,” Anexos Al Informe Final, Tomo III, #454, Puerto Belgrano, 12 Junio de 1981.

“Rattenbach Report,” Anexos No 11/25, 289-290, Conversacion Telefonica del Presidente Reagan con El Presidente Gatltieri El 01 Abril 82, Junta Militar, Comisión de Anális y Evaluación de las Responsabilidades del Conflicto del Atlántico Sur.

SH-GMID-D-000-132, “Hiding Equipment and Weaponry,” March 8-16, 2003.

SH-PDWN-D-000-130, “Formation of a Commission to Discuss a War with the United States,” March 2003.

SH-SHTP-A-000-753, “Saddam Hussein Meeting with Senior Advisor Regarding Bill Clinton's Administration and its Attitudes toward Iraq,” January 14, 1993.

SH-SHTP-A-000-756, “Saddam and Senior Advisors Discussing a Potential Military Conflict with the United States,” February 9, 1998.

SH-SPPC-D-000-304, “Meeting Between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Nijirfan Al ‐Barzani in 2002 discussing the possible attack from the USA,” March 14, 2002.

Special National Intelligence Estimate, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26- December 31 , Document 40.

Special National Intelligence Estimate, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26- December 31 , Document 236.

“Telegram from Fidel Castro to N. S. Khrushchev,” October 26, 1962, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Archive of Foreign Policy, Russian Federation (AVP RF). Accessed January 20, 2016. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114501

“Telegram from Soviet Ambassador to the USA Dobrynin to the USSR MFA,” October 24, 1962, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, AVP RF, copy courtesy of NSA; translation by Mark H. Doctoroff. Accessed January 16, 2016. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111625

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Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in the Soviet Union, FRUS, 1961- 63, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, Document 64.

Telegram from the Embassy in Egypt to the Department of State, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 31.

Telegram from the Embassy in Egypt to the Department of State, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. XVI, Suez Crisis July 26-December 31 , Document 141.

Telegram From the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, FRUS , 1961-63, Vol. VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges , Document 65.

Telegram From the Embassy in the United Kingdom to the Department of State, FRUS, 1955-57, Vol. X, Regulation of Armaments, Atomic Energy , Document 136.

Telegram, Falklands: CINCFLEET to HMS Endurance (“Illegal Landing on South Georgia”), March 20, 1982, PREM 19/613 f53. Accessed March 15, 2016. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/121941

Telegram, Falklands: FCO to Port Stanley (“Illegal Landing on South Georgia”), March 20, 1982, PREM 19/613 f56. Accessed March 10, 2016. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/121942

Telegram, Falklands: FCO to Port Stanley (“Illegal Landing on South Georgia”), March 20, 1982, PREM 19/657 f87. Accessed March 10, 2016. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/122486

Telegram, Falklands: FCO to UKE Buenos Aires (“Illegal Landing on South Georgia”), March 23, 1982, ALW 040/325/12 Part A 1-100. Accessed March 12, 2016. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/118396

Telegram, Falklands: FCO to UKE Buenos Aires (“South Georgia”), March 25, 1982, ALW 040/325/12 Part A 1-100. Accessed March 12, 2016. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/118401

Telegram, Falklands: UKE Buenos Aires to FCO (“South Georgia”), March 24, 1982, PREM 19/613 f40. Accessed March 10, 2016. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/121949

Telegram, Falklands: UKE Buenos Aires to FCO (Argentine Landing on South Georgia), March 23, 1982, ALW 040/325/12 Part A 1-100. Accessed March 12, 2016. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/118399

“U.S. Department of State Memorandum of Conversation: Secretary James A. Baker III and Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz,” The James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, January 9, 1991, Accessed February 4, 2015.

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UK Defence White Paper, UK Defence Programme: The Way Forward (London: HMSO, 1981), THCR 2/6/2/47. Accessed March 12, 2016. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/121307

UK National Archives, “Report on Southern Thule,” 21 November 1977, in “Dispute over the Falklands – Argentine Presence on the South Sandwich Island Dependencies,” FCO7/3375.

Speeches

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Bush, George H. W. "Remarks on the Persian Gulf Conflict 1991-02-22" The Bush Library, February 22, 1991. Accessed February 4, 2015. http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/publicpapers.php?id=2729&year=1991 &month=2

Bush, George H. W. "The President's News Conference on the Persian Gulf Crisis," George Bush Presidential Library and Museum: Public Papers, November 8, 1990. Accessed February 4, 2015. http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=2416&year=1990 &month=11

Bush, George H. W. "The President's News Conference, 1990-11-30," George Bush Presidential Library and Museum: Public Papers, November 30, 1990. Accessed February 4, 2015. http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=2516&year=1990 &month=11

Bush, George W. "President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat: Remarks by the President on Iraq, Cincinnati Museum Center - Cincinnati Union Terminal," White House Archives, October 7, 2002. Accessed February 5, 2015. http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/10/2002100 7-8.html

Bush, George W. "President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq Within 48 Hours: Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation," White House Archives, March 17, 2003. Accessed February 5, 2015. http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/2003031 7-7.html

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Bush, George W. "The President's State of the Union Address," The White House Archives, January 29, 2002. Accessed February 5, 2015. http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/2002012 9-11.html

Clinton, President William. "Remarks on Iraq," American Presidency Project, October 8, 1994. Accessed February 10, 2015. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=49261

Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Developments in Eastern Europe and the Middle East,” October 31, 1956. The American History Project Public Papers of the President. Accessed November 12, 2015. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10685

Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Statement by the President Following Receipt of Secretary Dulles’ Report on the London Suez Conference,” August 29, 1956. The American History Project Public Papers of the President. Accessed November 12, 2015. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=10585&st=Suez&st1

Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Television Broadcast: “The People Ask the President,” October 12, 1956. The American History Project Public Papers of the President. Accessed November 12, 2015. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=10640&st=&st1

Eisenhower, Dwight D. “The President’s News Conference,” August 31, 1956. The American History Project Public Papers of the President. Accessed November 12, 2015. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=10586&st=exhaust&st1

“George Bush's Speech to the UN General Assembly,” The Guardian , September 12, 2002. Accessed February 5, 2015. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/12/iraq.usa3

Kennedy, John F. "Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Berlin Crisis," July 25, 1961. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project . Accessed September 16, 2015. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8259

Kennedy, John F. “Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba,” October 22, 1962. Accessed September 16, 2015. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/sUVmCh-sB0moLfrBcaHaSg.aspx

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Speech by Margaret Thatcher to the House of Commons, April 3, 1982, Hansard HC [21/633-38], Margaret Thatcher Archives. Accessed March 15, 2016. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104910

Speeches of Sir Anthony Eden. HC Deb 30 July 1956 vol 557 cc918-21. Accessed November 13, 2015. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/people/mr- anthony-eden/1956

Statement by Minister of Foreign Affairs Richard Luce, “South Georgia (Incident),” House of Commons Debate, March 23, 1982. Accessed March 12, 2016. https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1982-03-23a.798.0

“Text of Bush's Speech at West Point,” The New York Times , June 1, 2002. Accessed February 5, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/international/02PTEX- WEB.html?pagewanted=all

Legislation

“Bill Text, 102nd Congress (1991-1992) H.J.RES.77.ENR,” The Library of Congress, January 12, 1991. Accessed February 2, 2015. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgibin/query/D?c102:3:./temp/~c102aEDht6

Government Printing Office, Jan 14, 1991. Accessed February 3, 2015. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/102/hjres77

H.J.Res.75, “Regarding Inspection and Monitoring to Prevent the Development of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq,” 107 th Congress (2001-2002), December 20, 2001.

“H.R.4655—Iraq Liberation Act of 1998,” October 31, 1998. Accessed February 15, 2015. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgibin/query/D?c105:4:./temp/~c105UzH1Tc

“Public Law 102-1: H.J. Res 77 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 1991,”

“Public Law 107-243: H.J. Res 114 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002,” Government Printing Office, October 16, 2002. Accessed February 5, 2015. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW- 107publ243/pdf/PLAW-107publ243.pdf

United Nations Resolutions

“Spain, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and United States of

382

America: Draft Resolution,” March 7, 2003. Accessed February 20, 2015. http://www.un.org/News/dh/iraq/res-iraq-07mar03-en-rev.pdf

UN General Assembly, Resolution 997. Accessed November 12, 2015. http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/dag/docs/ares1000e.pdf

UN Security Council. "Resolution 1441 (2002)," November 8, 2002. Accessed February 5, 2015. http://daccessddsny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N02/682/26/PDF/N0268226.pdf?OpenElem ent

UN Security Council. "Resolution 662 (1990)," August 9, 1990. Accessed February 4, 2015. http://daccessddsny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/575/12/IMG/NR0 57512.pdf?OpenElement

UN Security Council. "Resolution 678 (1990)," November 29, 1990. Accessed February 4, 2015. http://daccessddsny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/575/28/IMG/NR057528.pdf?O penElement

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UN Security Council. “Resolution 1137 (1997),” November 12, 1997. Accessed February 2, 2015. http://daccess-ddsny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N97/313/47/PDF/N9731347.pdf?OpenElement

UN Security Council. “Resolution 118 (1956),” October 13, 1956. Accessed November 16, 2015. http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/118(1956)

UN Security Council. “Resolution 1205 (1998),” November 5, 1998. Accessed September 10, 2015. http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/1205(1998)

UN Security Council. “Resolution 1284 (1999),” December 17, 1999. Accessed February 2, 2015. http://daccessddsny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N99/396/09/PDF/N9939609.pdf?OpenElem ent

UN Security Council. “Resolution 502 (1982),” April 3, 1982. Accessed March 15, 2016. https://documents-ddsny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/435/26/IMG/NR043526.pdf?Open Element

383

UN Security Council. “Resolution 660 (1990)," August 2, 1990. Accessed February 2, 2015. http://daccess-ddsny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/575/10/IMG/NR057510.pdf?Open Element

UN Security Council. “Resolution 661 (1990)," August 6, 1990. Accessed February 2, 2015. http://daccess-ddsny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/575/11/IMG/NR057511.pdf?Open Element

384

Appendix 1: ICB State Dyads with Repeated Crisis Interactions

State Dyad Crises and Years 1. USA - Cuba Bay of Pigs 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 2. Cuba - Dominican Republic Cuba/Dominican Republic 1947 Lupe Iron 1949 Central America/Cuba I 1959 3. Dominican Republic - Haiti Dominican Republic/Haiti I 1937 Dominican Republic/Haiti II 1963 4. USA - Panama Panama Flag 1964 Invasion of Panama 1989 5. Cuba - Nicaragua Central America/Cuba I 1959 Central American/Cuba II 1960 6. Cuba - Venezuela Cuba/Venezuela 1963 Essequibo II 1981 7. Honduras - Nicaragua Postage Stamp Crisis 1937 Mocoron Incident 1957 Contras I 1981 Contras II 1986 Contras III 1988 Contras IV 1989 8. Costa Rica - Nicaragua Costa Rican Coup 1918 Costa Rica-Nicaragua I 1948 Costa Rica-Nicaragua II 1955 Nicaragua Civil War II 1978 9. Venezuela - Guyana Essequibo I 1968 Essequibo II 1981 10. USA - Germany Pearl Harbor 1941 D Day 1944 11. Ecuador - Peru Ecuador/Peru Border I 1935 Ecuador/Peru Border II 1941 Ecuador/Peru Border III 1981 Ecuador/Peru Border IV 1991 Ecuador/Peru Border V 1995 12. UK - Guatemala Belize I 1975 Belize II 1977 13. Bolivia - Paraguay Chaco I 1928 Chaco II 1932 14. Argentina - Chile Beagle Chanel I 1977 Beagle Chanel II 1978 15. USA - Yugoslavia Trieste I 1945 Kosovo 1999 16. UK - Argentina Southern Thule 1976 Falklands War 1982 17. USA - Soviet Union/Russia Azerbaijan 1946 Communism in Poland 1946 Turkish Straits 1946 Communism in Hungary 1947 Truman Doctrine 1947

385

Marshall Plan 1947 Communism in Czech 1948 Berlin Blockade 1948 China Civil War 1948 Korean War I 1950 Korean War II 1950 Korean War III 1953 East German Uprising 1953 Guatemala 1954 Suez Nationalization War 1956 Syria/Turkey Confrontation 1957 Berlin Deadline 1958 Berlin Wall 1961 Cuban Missiles 1962 Gulf of Tonkin 1964 Congo II 1964 Pleiku 1965 Six Day War 1967 Cienfuegos 1970 October/Yom Kippur War 1973 War in Angola 1975 Shaba II 1978 Afghanistan Invasion 1979 Able Archer 1983 Nicaragua MIG-21s 1984 18. UK - Germany Remilitarization of the Rhineland 1936 Czech May Crisis 1938 Munich 1938 Entry WWII 1939 Finnish War 1940 Invasion of Scandinavia 1940 Fall of West Europe 1940 Battle of Britain 1940 Balkan Invasions 1940 Mid-East Campaign 1941 El Alamein 1942 Fall of Italy 1943 19. Germany - Netherland German Reparations 1921 Entry WWII 1939 Invasion of Scandinavia 1940 Fall of Western Europe 1940 20. Germany - Belgium German reparations 1921 Remilitarization of the Rhineland 1936 Entry WWII 1939 Fall of West Europe 1940 21. Germany - Luxembourg Entry into WWII 1939 Fall of West Europe 1940 22. Germany - France Rhenish Rebellions 1920 Ruhr I 1923 Ruhr II 1924

386

Ethiopian War 1935 Remilitarization of the Rhineland 1936 Czech May Crisis 1938 Munich 1938 Entry WWII 1939 Finnish War 1940 Invasion of Scandinavia 1940 Fall of West Europe 1940 23. UK - Italy Ethiopian War 1935 Invasion of Albania 1939 East Africa Campaign 1940 Balkan Invasions 1940 El Alamein 1942 Fall of Italy 1943 24. Germany - Poland Remilitarization of the Rhineland 1936 Danzig 1936 Entry WWII 1939 25. France - Italy Italy Threat/France 1938 Invasion of Albania 1939 26. UK - Yugoslavia Trieste I 1945 Kosovo 1999 27. Italy - Spain Spanish Civil War I 1936 Spanish Civil War II 1937 Spanish Civil War III 1938 Spanish Civil War IV 1938 28. Germany - Austria Austria Putsch 1934 Anschluss 1938 29. UK - Soviet Union/Russia Russian Civil War II 1918 Greek Civil War I 1944 Azerbaijan 1945 Berlin Blockade 1948 Suez Nationalization War 1956 Berlin Deadline 1958 Berlin Wall 1961 30. Germany - Czechoslovakia Austria Putsch 1934 Remilitarization of the Rhineland 1936 Czechoslovakia May Crisis 1938 Munich 1938 Czech Annexation 1939 31. France - Russia Russian Civil War I 1918 Berlin Blockade 1948 Berlin Deadline 1958 Berlin Wall 1961 32. UK - Iceland Cod War I 1973 Cod War II 1975 33. Germany - Yugoslavia Austrian Separatists 1921 Remilitarization of the Rhineland 1936 Balkan Invasions 1941 34. Cuba - South Africa War in Angola 1975 South Africa Intervention Angola 1987

387

35. Poland - Czechoslovakia Teschen 1919 Prague Spring 1968 Solidarity 1980 36. Germany - Soviet Union/Russia Munich 1938 Entry WWII 1939 Barbarossa 1941 Stalingrad 1942 Soviet Occupied E Europe 1944 Final Soviet Offensive 1945 37. USA - Libya Egypt/Libya Clashes 1977 Gulf of Syrte I 1981 Libya Threat/Sudan 1983 Omdurman Bombing 1984 Gulf of Syrte II 1986 Libyan Jets 1988 38. Germany - Lithuania Kuanas Trials 1935 Meme L 1939 Entry WWII 1939 39. Czechoslovakia - Hungary Hungarian War 1919 Karl’s Return to Hungary 1921 40. Russia - West Germany Berlin Deadline 1958 Berlin Wall 1961 41. USA - Iran US Hostages in Iran 1979 Iran Nuclear I 2003 Iran Nuclear II 2006 42. Germany - Sweden Entry WWII 1939 Finnish War 1939 43. Germany - Norway Entry WWII 1939 Invasion of Scandinavia 1940 44. Germany - Denmark Entry WWII 1939 Invasion of Scandinavia 1940 45. USA - Iraq Gulf War 1990 Iraq No-Fly Zone 1992 Iraq Deployment to Kuwait 1994 Desert Strike 1996 UNSCOM I 1997 UNSCOM II 1998 Iraq Regime Change 2002/03 46. USA - Egypt Baghdad Pact 1955 Iraq/Lebanon Upheaval 1958 47. USA - Syria Syria/Turkey Confrontation 1957 Black September 1970 48. Russia - Poland Polish/Russian War 1920 Ruhr I 1923 Poland Liberalization 1956 Solidarity 1980 49. Hungary - Yugoslavia Karl’s Return to Hungary 1921 Assassination of King Alexander 1934 50. Poland - Lithuania Vilna I 1920 Vilna II 1927

388

Polish Ultimatum 1938 51. Hungary - Rumania Hungarian War 1919 Romanian Territory 1940 52. Italy - Yugoslavia Hegemony over Albania 1926 Austria Putsch 1934 Balkan Invasions 1940 Trieste II 1953 Kosovo 1999 53. Greece - Italy Smyrna 1919 Corfu Incident 1923 Invasion of Albania 1939 Balkan Invasions 1940 54. Soviet Union/Russia - Hungary Soviet Occupied E Europe 1944 Communism in Hungary 1947 Hungarian Uprising 1956 Prague Spring 1968 55. Soviet Union/Russia - Marshall Plan 1947 Czechoslovakia Communism in Czechoslovakia 1948 Prague Spring 1968 56. Albania - Yugoslavia Albanian Frontier 1921 Hegemony over Albania 1927 Kosovo 1999 57. Croatia - Yugoslavia Yugoslavia I - Croatia/Slovenia 1991 Yugoslavia II – Bosnia 1992 58. Belgium - DRC Congo II 1964 Foreign Intervention in Zaire 1991 59. USA - Afghanistan US Embassy Bombings 1998 Afghanistan/US 2001 60. USA – China Korea War I 1950 Korea War II 1950 Korea War III 1953 Taiwan Strait I 1954 Taiwan Strait II 1958 Taiwan Strait III 1962 61. Soviet Union/Russia - Rumania Bessarabia 1919 Entry WWII 1939 Romanian Territory 1940 Soviet Occupied E Europe 1944 Communism in Romania 1945 62. Russia - Estonia Baltic Independence 1918 Entry WWII 1939 Soviet Occupied Baltic 1939 63. Russia - Latvia Baltic Independence 1918 Soviet Occupied Baltic 1939 64. Russia - Lithuania Baltic Independence 1918 Soviet Occupied Baltic 1939 65. USA - North Korea Korea War II 1950 Pueblo 1968 EC-1 21 Spy Plane 1969 Poplar Tree 1976

389

North Korea Nuclear I 1993 North Korea Nuclear II 2002 North Korea Nuclear III 2006 66. Soviet Union/Russia - Georgia Georgia/Abkhazia 2004 Pankisi Gorge 2002 S Ossetia/Abkhazia 2004 67. Soviet Union/Russia - Finland Finnish/Russian Border 1919 Entry WWII 1939 Finnish War 1939 Soviet Note to Finland I 1948 Soviet Note to Finland II 1961 68. USA - Japan Panay Incident 1937 Pearl Harbor 1941 Fall of Saipan 1944 Leyte Campaign 1944 Luzon 1945 Iwo Jima 1945 Okinawa 1945 Hiroshima/Nagasaki 1945 69. Soviet Union/Russia - Sweden Catalina Affair 1952 U-137 Incident 1981 70. USA - North Vietnam Dien Bien Phu 1954 Pathet Lao Offensive 1961 Viet Cong Attack 1961 Nam Tha 1962 Gulf of Tonkin 1964 Pleiku 1965 Tet Offensive 1968 Vietnam Spring Offensive 1969 Invasion of Cambodia 1970 Vietnam-Ports Mining 1972 Christmas Bombing 1972 71. Morocco - Spain IFNI 1957 Moroccan March 1975 Parsley Island 2002 72. UK - Iran Iran Nuclear I 2003 Iran Nuclear II 2006 73. France - Tunisia France/Tunisia 1957 Bizerta 1961 74. UK - Turkey Chanak 1922 Mosul Land Dispute 1924 75. France - Libya Chad/Libya III 1978 Chad/Libya IV 1979 Raid on Gafsa 1980 Chad/Libya V 1981 Chad/Libya VI 1983 Chad/Libya VII 1986 76. UK - Iraq Mid-East Campaign 1941 Kuwait Independence 1961 Gulf War 1990

390

Iraq No-Fly Zone 1992 UNSCOM I 1998 Iraq Regime Change 2003 77. France - Iran Iran Nuclear I 2003 Iran Nuclear II 2006 78. UK - Egypt Suez Canal 1951 Suez Nationalization War 1956 Iraq/Lebanon Upheaval 79. France - Turkey Cilician War 1919 Alexandretta 1936 80. UK - Afghanistan Third Afghan War 1919 Afghanistan/US 2001 81. Toga - Ghana Ghana/Togo Border Dispute 1960 Attempted Coup – Togo 1986 Ghana/Togo Border II 1991 82. UK - Japan Tien Tsin 1939 Closure/Burma Road 1940 Pearl Harbor 1941 83. Cameroon - Nigeria Cameroon/Nigeria I 1981 Cameroon/Nigeria II 1987 Cameroon/Nigeria III 1993 84. India - Portugal Goa I 1955 Goa II 1961 85. Greece - Turkey Greece/Turkey War I 1920 Greece/Turkey War II 1921 Greece/Turkey War III 1922 Cyprus I 1963 Cyprus II 1967 Cyprus III 1974 Aegean Sea I 1976 Aegean Sea II 1984 Aegean Sea III 1987 Aegean Sea IV 1996 86. Turkey - Cyprus Cyprus I 1963 Cyprus II 1967 Cyprus III 1974 Cyprus/Turkey Missile 1998 87. Soviet Union/Russia - Iran Persian Border 1920 Occupation of Iran 1941 Iran Oil Concessions1944 Azerbaijan 1945 88. Bulgaria - Turkey Bulgaria/Turkey 1935 Balkan Invasions 1940 89. Uganda - Kenya Uganda Claims 1976 Kenya/Uganda Border 1987 90. Soviet Union/Russia - Turkey Kars-Ardahan 1945 Turkish Straits 1946 Truman Doctrine 1947 Syria/Turkey Confrontation 1957 91. DRC - Rwanda Zaire Civil War 1996

391

DRC Civil War 1998 DRC/Rwanda 2004 92. Uganda - Tanzania Tanzania/Uganda I 1971 Tanzania/Uganda II 1972 Fall of Amin 1978 93. Somalia - Kenya Kenya/Somalia 1963 E Africa Confrontation 1980 94. Angola - DRC War in Angola 1975 Shaba I 1977 Shaba II 1978 95. Soviet Union/Russia - Israel Suez Nationalization War 1956 Six Day War 1967 War of Attrition 1970 October Yom Kippur War 1973 96. Somalia - Ethiopia Ethiopia/Somalia 1960 Ogaden I 1964 Ogaden II 1977 E Africa Confrontation 1980 Ogaden III 1982 Todghere Incident 1987 97. Algeria - Mauritania Moroccan March 1975 Nouakchott I 1976 Nouakchott II 1977 98. Indonesia - Netherlands Indonesian Independence I 1945 Indonesian Independence II 1947 Indonesian Independence III 1948 West Irian I 1957 West Irian II 1961 99. Eritrea - Ethiopia Eritrea/Ethiopia I 1998 Unknown 2005 Unknown 2007 100. Soviet Union/Russia - China Chinese Railway 1929 Ussuri River 1969 Sino/Vietnam War 1978 101. Mozambique - Zimbabwe Operation Thrasher 1976 Nago Mira Raid 1976 Mapa I Seizure 1977 Chim Oio – Tembue Raids 1977 Rhodesian Settlement 1979 102. Angola - South Africa War in Angola 1975 Cassinga Incident 1978 Angola Invasion Scare 1978 Raids on SWAPO 1979 Raid on Angola 1979 Operational Smokes Hell 1980 Operation Protea 1981 Operations Askari 1983 South Africa intervention in Angola 1987 103. Zimbabwe - Zambia Rhodesia’s UDI 1965 Zambia Raid 1973

392

Rhodesia Raid 1977 Air Rhodesia Incident 1978 Raids on ZIPRA 1979 Rhodesia Settlement 1979 104. Libya - Chad Chad/Libya I 1971 Chad/Libya II 1978 Chad/Libya III 1978 Chad/Libya IV 1979 Chad/Libya VI 1983 Chad/Libya VII 1986 Chad/Libya VIII 1986 105. Soviet Union/Russia - Japan Amur River Incident 1937 Changkufeng 1938 Nomonhan 1939 Entry into WWII 1939 106. Chad - Sudan Unknown 2005 Unknown 2006 Unknown 2007 107. South Africa - Zimbabwe Caprivi Strip 1971 SA Cross Border Raid 1986 108. Zimbabwe - Botswana Operation Tangent 1976 Rhodesian Settlement 1979 Maitengwe Clashes 1983 109. South Africa - Lesotho Lesotho Raid I 1982 Lesotho Raid II 1985 110. South Africa - Botswana Botswana Raid 1985 SA Cross Border Raid 1986 111. Soviet Union/Russia - Pakistan Afghanistan Invasion 1979 Soviet Threat - Pakistan 1979 112. Algeria - Morocco Algeria/Morocco Border 1963 Moroccan March 1975 Tan Tan 1979 Goulimme-Tarfaya Road 1979 Operation Iman 1980 Galtat Zemmour I 1981 Sand Wall 1987 Galtat Zemmour II 1989 113. Libya - Tunisia Raid on Gafsa 1980 Expulsion Tunisians 1985 114. Libya - Sudan Sudan coup attempt 1976 Libya threat Sudan 1983 Omdurman Bombing 1984 115. Egypt - Libya Egypt/Libya Clashes 1977 Unknown 1980 Libya Threat – Sudan 1983 Omdurman Bombing 1984 Egypt Air Hijacking 1985 116. Iran - Iraq Shatt-Al-Arab I 1959 Shatt-Al-Arab II 1969 Onset Iran/Iraq War 1980

393

Khorramshahr 1982 Basra-Kharg Island 1984 Capture of L-Faw 1986 Iraq Recapture of L-Faw 1988 117. Iraq - Syria Iraqi Threat 1976 Gulf War 1990 118. Iran - Saudi Arabia Unknown 1981 Basra-Kharg Island 1984 Capture of Al-Faw 1986 Mecca Pilgrimage 1987 119. Israel - Iraq PAL PRT/Israel Independence 1947 Qulqilya 1956 Iraq Nuclear Reactor 1981 Gulf War 1990 120. Egypt - Jordan Jordan Regime 1957 Formation of UAR 1958 Iraq/Lebanon Upheaval 1958 Yemen War I 121. Jordan - Syria Black September 1970 Jordan/Syria Confrontation 122. Iraq - Saudi Arabia Gulf War 1990 Iraq Deployment to Kuwait 1994 123. Egypt - Israel PAL PRT/Israel Independence 1947 Sinai Incursions 1948 Gaza Raid-Czech Arms 1955 Suez Nationalization War 1956 Rottem 1960 Jordan Waters 1963 Six Day War 1969 War of Attrition 1969 Israel Mobilization 1973 October/Yom Kippur War 1973 124. Israel - Syria PAL PRT/Israel Independence 1947 Hula Drainage 1951 Jordan Waters 1963 Six Day War 1967 Black September 1970 October/Yom Kippur War 1973 Lebanon Civil War 1976 Entebbe Raid 1976 Syria Mobilization 1976 Albiqa Missiles I 1981 War in Lebanon 1982 Albiqa Missiles II 1985 Operation Accountability 1991 Haifa Suicide Bombing 443 125. Iran - Kuwait Basra Kharg Island 1984 Capture of L-Faw 1986 126. Egypt - Saudi Arabia Yemen War I 1962 Yemen War II 1964

394

Yemen War III 1964 Yemen War IV 1966 127. Israel - Lebanon PAL PRT/Israel Independence 1947 Jordan Waters 1963 Beirut Airport Str. 1968 Litani Operation 1978 War in Lebanon 1982 Operation Accountability 1993 Operation Grapes of Wrath 1996 Israel Lebanon War II 2006 128. Israel - Jordan PAL PRT/Israel Independence 1947 Qibya 1953 Qalqilya 1956 Jordan Waters 1963 El Samu 1966 Six Day War 1967 Karameh 1968 129. Iraq - Kuwait Kuwait Independence 1961 Iraq Invasion of Kuwait 1973 Gulf War 1990 Bubiyan 1991 Iraq Deployment to Kuwait 1994 130. Saudi Arabia - Yemen Saudi/Yemen War 1933 Yemen War I 1962 Yemen War II 1964 Yemen War III 1964 Yemen War IV 1966 131. North - South Yemen North/South Yemen I 1972 North/South Yemen II 1979 132. Japan - China Shantung 1927 Mukden Incident 1931 Shaghai 1932 Jehol Campaign 1933 Marco Polo Bridge 1937 133. China - Taiwan Korean War I 1950 Taiwan Strait I 1954 Taiwan Strait II 1958 Taiwan Strait IV 1995 134. China - India China/India Border I 1959 China/India Border II 1962 Kashmir II 1965 135. South - North Korea Korean War I 1950 Korean War II 1950 Korean War III 1953 Pueblo 1968 N Korea Nuclear Crisis I 1993 N Korean Submarine 1996 136. Afghanistan - Pakistan Pushtunistan I 1949 Pushtunistan II 1955 Pushtunistan III 1961

395

Afghanistan/US 2001 137. India - Pakistan Junagadh 1947 Kashmir I 1947 Hyderabad 1948 Punjab War Scare I 1951 Rann of Kutch 1965 Kashmir II 1965 Bangladesh 1971 Punjab War Scare II 1987 Kashmir III – Nuclear 1990 India/Pakistan Nuclear Tests 1998 Kargil 1999 India Parliament Attack 2001 Kaluchak 2002 138. China - South Vietnam Sino/Vietnam War 1979 Sino/Vietnam Clashes 1984 Sino/Vietnam Border 1987 Spratly Islands 1988 139. Myanmar - Thailand Sleeping Dog Hill 1992 Myanmar-Thailand 2002 140. Cambodia - Thailand Cambodia/Thailand 1958 Vietnam Invasion/Cambodia 1978 141. Laos - Thailand Three Village Border I 1984 Three Village Border II 1987 142. North - Thailand Pathet Loa Offensive 1961 Namtha 1962 Viet Incursion of Thailand 1984 143. North Vietnam - Cambodia Invasion of Cambodia 1970 Final Vietnam Offensive 1975 Vietnam Invasion of Cambodia 1977 Cambodia Peace Conference 1989 144. North - South Vietnam Vietcong Attack 1961 Pleiku 1965 Tet Offensive 1968 Vietnam Spring Offensive 1969 Invasion of Cambodia 1970 Invasion of Laos II 1971 Vietnam Ports Mining 1972 Christmas Bombing 1972 Final Vietnam Offensive 1974 145. France - North Vietnam Invasion of Laos I 1953 Dien Bien Phu 1954

396

Appendix 2: ICB Repeated Crisis Interactions with MCT Threats

Type of State Dyad Crises and Years Challenger Threat 1. Dominican Dominican Republic/Haiti I 1937 - - Republic - Haiti Dominican Republic/Haiti II 1963 Compellent Dom. Rep. 2. USA - Panama Panama Flag 1964 - - Invasion of Panama 1989 Compellent USA 3. Costa Rica - Costa Rican Coup 1918 - - Nicaragua Costa Rica-Nicaragua I 1948 - - Costa Rica-Nicaragua II 1955 - - Nicaragua Civil War II 1978 Compellent Nicaragua 4. Argentina - Beagle Chanel I 1977 Compellent Argentina Chile Beagle Chanel II 1978 Compellent Argentina 5. USA - Trieste I 1945 - - Yugoslavia Kosovo 1999 Compellent USA 6. UK - Argentina Southern Thule 1976 - - Falklands War 1982 Compellent UK 7. USA - Soviet Azerbaijan 1946 - - Union/Russia Communism in Poland 1946 - - Turkish Straits 1946 - - Communism in Hungary 1947 - - Truman Doctrine 1947 - - Marshall Plan 1947 - - Communism in Czech 1948 - - Berlin Blockade 1948 - - China Civil War 1948 - - Korean War I 1950 - - Korean War II 1950 - - Korean War III 1953 - - E. German Uprising 1953 - - Guatemala 1954 - - Suez Nationalization War 1956 - - Syria/Turkey Confrontation 1957 - - Berlin Deadline 1958 - - Berlin Wall 1961 Deterrent USA Cuban Missiles 1962 Compellent USA Gulf of Tonkin 1964 - - Congo II 1964 - - Pleiku 1965 - - Six Day War 1967 - - Cienfuegos 1970 - - October/Yom Kippur War 1973 - - War in Angola 1975 - - Shaba II 1978 - - Afghanistan Invasion 1979 - - Able Archer 1983 - - Nicaragua MIG-21s 1984 - - 8. UK - Germany Remilitarization of the Rhineland 1936 - - Czech May Crisis 1938 Deterrent Germany Munich 1938 - - Entry WWII 1939 Compellent Germany

397

Finnish War 1940 - - Invasion of Scandinavia 1940 - - Fall of West Europe 1940 - - Battle of Britain 1940 - - Balkan Invasions 1940 - - Mid-East Campaign 1941 - - El Alamein 1942 - - Fall of Italy 1943 - - 9. Germany - Rhenish Rebellions 1920 Compellent France France Ruhr I 1923 - - Ruhr II 1924 - - Ethiopian War 1935 - - Remilitarization of the Rhineland 1936 - - Czech May Crisis 1938 Deterrent Germany Munich 1938 - - Entry WWII 1939 Compellent Germany Finnish War 1940 - - Invasion of Scandinavia 1940 - - Fall of West Europe 1940 - - 10. Germany - Remilitarization of the Rhineland 1936 - - Poland Danzig 1936 Compellent Germany Entry WWII 1939 Compellent Germany 11. Germany - Austria Putsch 1934 - - Austria Anschluss1938 Compellent Germany 12. Germany - Austria Putsch 1934 - - Czechoslovakia Remilitarization of the Rhineland 1936 - - Czechoslovakia May Crisis 1938 - - Munich 1938 Compellent Germany Czech Annexation 1939 Compellent Germany 13. UK - Iceland Cod War I 1973 Compellent Iceland Cod War II 1975 Compellent Iceland 14. USA - Libya Egypt/Libya Clashes 1977 - - Gulf of Syrte I 1981 Deterrent USA Libya Threat/Sudan 1983 Deterrent USA Omdurman Bombing 1984 - - Gulf of Syrte II 1986 Deterrent USA / Libya Libyan Jets 1988 - - 15. Germany - Kuanas Trials 1935 - - Lithuania Meme L 1939 Compellent Germany Entry WWII 1939 - - 16. Czechoslovakia Hungarian War 1919 - - - Hungary Karl’s Return to Hungary 1921 Compellent Czech. 17. Germany - Entry WWII 1939 - - Norway Invasion of Scandinavia 1940 Compellent Germany 18. Germany - Entry WWII 1939 - - Denmark Invasion of Scandinavia 1940 Compellent Germany 19. USA - Iraq Gulf War 1990 Compellent USA Iraq No-Fly Zone 1992 - - Iraq Deployment to Kuwait 1994 Deterrent Iraq Desert Strike 1996 - - UNSCOM I 1997 Compellent USA UNSCOM II 1998 Compellent USA Iraq Regime Change 2002/03 Compellent USA

398

20. USA - Syria Syria/Turkey Confrontation 1957 - - Black September 1970 Deterrent Syria 21. Russia - Poland Polish/Russian War 1920 Compellent Poland Ruhr I 1923 - - Poland Liberalization 1956 Deterrent Poland Solidarity 1980 - - 22. Poland - Vilna I 1920 - - Lithuania Vilna II 1927 - - Polish Ultimatum 1938 Compellent Poland 23. Hungary - Hungarian War 1919 - - Rumania Romanian Territory 1940 Compellent Hungary 24. Italy - Hegemony over Albania 1926 - - Yugoslavia Austria Putsch 1934 - - Balkan Invasions 1940 - - Trieste II 1953 Deterrent Italy Kosovo 1999 - - 25. Greece - Italy Smyrna 1919 - - Corfu Incident 1923 Compellent Italy Invasion of Albania 1939 - - Balkan Invasions 1940 Compellent Italy 26. Soviet Marshall Plan 1947 - - Union/Russia - Communism in Czechoslovakia 1948 - - Czechoslovakia Prague Spring 1968 Compellent USSR 27. USA - US Embassy Bombing 1998 Compellent USA Afghanistan Afghanistan/US 2001 Compellent USA 28. USA - China Korea War I 1950 - - Korea War II 1950 Deterrent USA Korea War III 1953 - - Taiwan Strait I 1954 Deterrent USA Taiwan Strait II 1958 Deterrent China Taiwan Strait III 1962 - - 29. Soviet Bessarabia 1919 Compellent USSR Union/Russia - Entry WWII 1939 - - Rumania Romanian Territory 1940 Compellent USSR Soviet Occupied E Europe 1944 - - Communism in Romania 1945 Compellent USSR 30. Russia - Estonia Baltic Independence 1918 - - Entry WWII 1939 - - Soviet Occupied Baltic 1939 Compellent USSR 31. Russia - Latvia Baltic Independence 1918 - - Soviet Occupied Baltic 1939 Compellent USSR 32. Russia - Baltic Independence 1918 - - Lithuania Soviet Occupied Baltic 1939 Compellent USSR 33. USA - North Korea War II 1950 - - Korea Pueblo 1968 Compellent USA EC-1 21 Spy Plane 1969 - - Poplar Tree 1976 - - North Korea Nuclear I 1993 - - North Korea Nuclear II 2002 - - North Korea Nuclear III 2006 - - 34. Soviet Georgia/Abkhazia 2004 - - Union/Russia - Pankisi Gorge 2002 - - Georgia S Ossetia/Abkhazia 2004 Deterrent Russia

399

35. Soviet Finnish/Russian Border 1919 - - Union/Russia - Entry WWII 1939 - - Finland Finnish War 1939 Compellent USSR - Soviet Note to Finland I 1948 - - Soviet Note to Finland II 1961 - 36. Soviet Catalina Affair 1952 - - Union/Russia - U-137 Incident 1981 Deterrent USSR Sweden USA – North Dien Bien Phu 1954 - - Vietnam Pathet Lao Offensive 1961 - - Viet Cong Attack 1961 - - Nam Tha 1962 - - Gulf of Tonkin 1964 Compellent USA Pleiku 1965 - - Tet Offensive 1968 - - Vietnam Spring Offensive 1969 - - Invasion of Cambodia 1970 - - Vietnam-Ports Mining 1972 - - Christmas Bombing 1972 - - 37. Morocco - IFNI 1957 Compellent Morocco Spain Moroccan March 1975 Compellent Morocco Parsley Island 2002 - - 38. UK - Turkey Chanak 1922 Compellent Turkey Mosul Land Dispute 1924 Compellent UK 39. France - Libya Chad/Libya III 1978 - - Chad/Libya IV 1979 - - Raid on Gafsa 1980 - - Chad/Libya V 1981 - - Chad/Libya VI 1983 Deterrent Libya Chad/Libya VII 1986 - - 40. UK - Iraq Mid-East Campaign 1941 Compellent UK Kuwait Independence 1961 Deterrent Iraq Gulf War 1990 - - Iraq No-Fly Zone 1992 - - UNSCOM I 1998 - - Iraq Regime Change 2003 - - 41. France - Turkey Cilician War 1919 - - Alexandretta 1936 Compellent Turkey 42. UK - Japan Tien Tsin 1939 Compellent Japan Closure/Burma Road 1940 Compellent Japan Pearl Harbor 1941 - - 43. India - Portugal Goa I 1955 - - Goa II 1961 Compellent India 44. Greece - Turkey Greece/Turkey War I 1920 - - Greece/Turkey War II 1921 - - Greece/Turkey War III 1922 - - Cyprus I 1963 Both Gre. / Turk. Cyprus II 1967 Compellent Turkey Cyprus III 1974 - - Aegean Sea I 1976 - - Aegean Sea II 1984 - - Aegean Sea III 1987 Deterrent Gre. / Turk. Aegean Sea IV 1996 Deterrent Turkey

400

45. Turkey - Cyprus Cyprus I 1963 Compellent Turkey Cyprus II 1967 - - Cyprus III 1974 - - Cyprus/Turkey Missile 1998 Deterrent Cyprus 46. Soviet Persian Border 1920 - - Union/Russia - Occupation of Iran 1941 Compellent USSR Iran Iran Oil Concessions 1944 Compellent USSR Azerbaijan 1945 Compellent USSR 47. Soviet Kars-Ardahan 1945 Compellent USSR Union/Russia - Turkish Straits 1946 Compellent USSR Turkey Truman Doctrine 1947 - - Syria/Turkey Confrontation 1957 - - 48. DRC - Rwanda Zaire Civil War 1996 Deterrent DRC DRC Civil War 1998 Compellent DRC DRC/Rwanda 2004 Deterrent DRC 49. Uganda - Tanzania/Uganda I 1971 Deterrent Tanzania Tanzania Tanzania/Uganda II 1972 Deterrent Tanzania Fall of Amin 1978 - - 50. Soviet Suez Nationalization War 1956 - - Union/Russia - Six Day War 1967 Deterrent Israel Israel War of Attrition 1970 - - October Yom Kippur War 1973 Deterrent Israel 51. Somalia - Ethiopia/Somalia 1960 - - Ethiopia Ogaden I 1964 - - Ogaden II 1977 - - E Africa Confrontation 1980 Deterrent Somalia Ogaden III 1982 - - Todghere Incident 1987 - - 52. Indonesia - Indonesian Independence I 1945 - - Netherlands Indonesian Independence II 1947 - - Indonesian Independence III 1948 - - West Irian I 1957 - - West Irian II 1961 Compellent Indonesia 53. Soviet Chinese Railway 1929 Compellent USSR Union/Russia - Ussuri River 1969 Compellent USSR China Sino/Vietnam War 1978 - - 54. Libya - Chad Chad/Libya I 1971 - - Chad/Libya II 1978 - - Chad/Libya III 1978 - - Chad/Libya IV 1979 Compellent Libya Chad/Libya VI 1983 - - Chad/Libya VII 1986 - - Chad/Libya VIII 1986 - - 55. Soviet Amur River Incident 1937 Compellent Japan Union/Russia - Changkufeng 1938 Compellent Japan Japan Nomonhan 1939 Deterrent Japan Entry into WWII 1939 - - 56. South Africa - Caprivi Strip 1971 - - Zimbabwe SA Cross Border Raid 1986 Compellent Sth Africa 57. South Africa - Lesotho Raid I 1982 - - Lesotho Lesotho Raid II 1985 Compellent Sth Africa 58. Libya - Tunisia Raid on Gafsa 1980 - - Expulsion Tunisians 1985 Compellent Libya

401

59. Iran - Iraq Shatt-Al-Arab I 1959 Compellent Iran Shatt-Al-Arab II 1969 Deterrent Iraq Onset Iran/Iraq War 1980 Compellent Iraq Khorramshahr 1982 - - Basra-Kharg Island 1984 - - Capture of L-Faw 1986 - - Iraq Recapture of L-Faw 1988 - - 60. Israel - Iraq PAL PRT/Israel Independence 1947 - - Qulqilya 1956 Deterrent Iraq Iraq Nuclear Reactor 1981 - - Gulf War 1990 - - 61. Jordan - Syria Black September 1970 - - Jordan/Syria Confrontation Compellent Syria 62. Egypt - Israel PAL PRT/Israel Independence 1947 - - Sinai Incursions 1948 - - Gaza Raid-Czech Arms 1955 - - Suez Nationalization War 1956 - - Rottem 1960 - - Jordan Waters 1963 - - Six Day War 1969 Compellent Israel War of Attrition 1969 Compellent Egypt Israel Mobilization 1973 - - October/Yom Kippur War 1973 - - 63. Israel - Syria PAL PRT/Israel Independence 1947 - - Hula Drainage 1951 - - Jordan Waters 1963 - - Six Day War 1967 - - Black September 1970 Deterrent Syria October/Yom Kippur War 1973 - - Lebanon Civil War 1976 - - Entebbe Raid 1976 - - Syria Mobilization 1976 - - Albiqa Missiles I 1981 Compellent Israel War in Lebanon 1982 - - Albiqa Missiles II 1985 - - Operation Accountability 1991 - - Haifa Suicide Bombing 443 Deterrent Syria 64. Egypt - Saudi Yemen War I 1962 - - Arabia Yemen War II 1964 - - Yemen War III 1964 - - Yemen War IV 1966 Compellent Egypt 65. Israel - Lebanon PAL PRT/Israel Independence 1947 - - Jordan Waters 1963 - - Beirut Airport Str. 1968 Deterrent Israel Litani Operation 1978 - - War in Lebanon 1982 - - Operation Accountability 1993 - - Operation Grapes of Wrath 1996 - - Israel Lebanon War II 2006 - - 66. Iraq - Kuwait Kuwait Independence 1961 - - Iraq Invasion of Kuwait 1973 Compellent Iraq Gulf War 1990 Compellent Iraq Bubiyan 1991 - -

402

Iraq Deployment to Kuwait 1994 - - 67. Saudi Arabia - Saudi/Yemen War 1933 - - Yemen Yemen War I 1962 Deterrent S. Arabia Yemen War II 1964 - - Yemen War III 1964 - - Yemen War IV 1966 - - 68. Japan - China Shantung 1927 - - Mukden Incident 1931 Compellent Japan Shanghai 1932 Compellent Japan Jehol Campaign 1933 Compellent Japan Marco Polo Bridge 1937 Compellent Japan 69. China - Taiwan Korean War I 1950 - - Taiwan Strait I 1954 - - Taiwan Strait II 1958 - - Taiwan Strait IV 1995 Deterrent Taiwant 70. China - India China/India Border I 1959 Compellent China China/India Border II 1962 Compellent India Kashmir II 1965 Compellent China 71. India - Pakistan Junagadh 1947 Compellent India Kashmir I 1947 - - Hyderabad 1948 - - Punjab War Scare I 1951 - - Rann of Kutch 1965 Compellent India Kashmir II 1965 Compellent Pakistan Bangladesh 1971 Deterrent India Punjab War Scare II 1987 - - Kashmir III – Nuclear 1990 - - India/Pakistan Nuclear Tests 1998 - - Kargil 1999 - - India Parliament Attack 2001 Compellent India Kaluchak 2002 Deterrent India 72. Myanmar - Sleeping Dog Hill 1992 Compellent Myanmar Thailand Myanmar-Thailand 2002 Deterrent Myan./Thai. 73. UK - Egypt Suez Canal 1951 - - Suez Nationalization War 1956 Compellent UK/France Iraq/Lebanon Upheaval - -

403