H-Diplo/ISSF Forum on “Audience Costs and the Vietnam War”

H-Diplo | ISSF Forum, No. 3 (2014) A production of H-Diplo with the journals Security Studies, International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, and the International Studies Association’s Security Studies Section (ISSS). http://issforum.org H-Diplo/ISSF Editors: James McAllister and Diane Labrosse H-Diplo/ISSF Web and Production Editor: George Fujii Commissioned for H-Diplo/ISSF by James McAllister Introduction by James McAllister H-Diplo/ISSF Forum on “Audience Costs and the Vietnam War” Published by H-Diplo/ISSF on 7 November 2014 Stable URL: http://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Forum-3.pdf Contents Introduction by James McAllister, Williams College ................................................................ 2 Essay by Marc Trachtenberg, University of California, Los Angeles ......................................... 6 Essay by Bronwyn Lewis, University of California, Los Angeles .............................................. 43 Comments by Richard K. Betts, Columbia University ............................................................. 70 Comments by Robert Jervis, Columbia University .................................................................. 75 Comments by Fredrik Logevall, Cornell University ................................................................. 80 Comments by John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago ....................................................... 86 © 2014 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. H-Diplo/ISSF Forum, No. 3 (2014) Introduction by James McAllister, Williams College -Diplo/ISSF is honored to publish a very special forum on “Audience Costs and the Vietnam War.” The foundation for the forum is two original essays on the topic by H Marc Trachtenberg and Bronwyn Lewis. Richard Betts, Robert Jervis, Fredrik Logevall, and John Mearsheimer then offer their own thoughts on both the theoretical and historical issues raised by the authors. We believe these essays, as well as the commentaries, will be of great interest to both political scientists and historians. Most historians are probably unfamiliar with the concept of ‘audience costs’ despite its increasing importance to the field of international relations theory. Originally developed by James Fearon in a 1994 article in the American Political Science Review, and expanded upon by many other theorists over the last decades, audience costs became a central component in the political science literature on international crises and bargaining.1 The basic insight of this literature is that democracies have a distinct advantage over autocracies in international crises because of the fact that democratic political leaders cannot avoid paying a serious domestic cost if they fail to back up their threats or commitments. Since democratic states must pay a serious cost with their own public for backing down in a crisis, their threats to stand firm, unlike those of autocratic regimes, are much more credible and send a more powerful signal to their adversaries. Does the concept of audience costs help us account for the foreign-policy decisions of American policymakers at crucial moments in the Vietnam War? This forum builds on earlier work by Trachtenberg on the historical relevance of the concept.2 His essay examines the historical debates and evidence surrounding President John F. Kennedy’s often debated intentions regarding deepening the American involvement in Vietnam. Many of these historical arguments, as Trachtenberg notes, are directly relevant to political science debates over the importance of audience costs. While it is by no means certain that Kennedy was intent on withdrawing from Vietnam after he would have been reelected in 1964, Trachtenberg argues that despite his strong public rhetoric, Kennedy was not and did not perceive himself to be locked into a policy of preventing the defeat of South Vietnam at any cost. Other officials might have been willing to ‘pay any price,’ but President Kennedy did not share this view. 1 James Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 3 (September 1994), 577-92. For a small sample of research drawing on the concept of audience costs, see Kenneth Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Matthew Baum, “Going Private: Public Opinion, Presidential Rhetoric, and the Domestic Politics of Audience Costs in U.S. Foreign Policy Crises,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 5 (October 2004), 603-631; and Alastair Smith, “International Crises and Domestic Politics,” American Political Science Review , Vol. 92, No. 3, 623-638. 2 Marc Trachtenberg, “Audience Costs: An Historical Analysis,” Security Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January 2012), 3-42. The entire issue of the journal is devoted to commentaries on Trachtenberg’s article. H-Diplo/ISSF Forum, No. 3 (2014) Bronwyn Lewis’s essay examines the strategy of President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger for ending the Vietnam War. Like Kennedy before him, Nixon made frequent public pronouncements that suggested his willingness to do what was necessary to preserve the independence of South Vietnam. While some historians, most notably Larry Berman, believe that Nixon and Kissinger were sincere about using American military power to indefinitely preserve South Vietnam, many historians are more convinced that Nixon and Kissinger merely sought a ‘decent interval’ before the inevitable collapse of the Thieu regime.3 Lewis concludes that the preponderance of the evidence strongly supports the latter interpretation. In the end, both Lewis and Trachtenberg argue that both cases provide scant support for the explanatory power of audience costs. All the commentators believe that Trachtenberg and Lewis have effectively made the case for skepticism about the relevance of audience costs to understanding the Vietnam policies of Kennedy and Nixon. John Mearsheimer argues that both essays further undermine the merits of the theoretical literature based on the importance of audience costs. Richard Betts believes that both authors have made effective arguments, but he is only “half convinced” that “Kennedy and Nixon were ready to accept defeat in Vietnam despite their staunch public rhetoric to the contrary.” In his view, both essays tend to obscure what he believes is an important distinction between plans for a U.S. withdrawal without victory and plans to accept defeat in South Vietnam. While quite sympathetic to the idea that domestic political considerations were of central importance to Kennedy and other American policymakers, Fredrik Logevall agrees with the contention that the concept of audience costs can be overstated. Domestic concerns were certainly confining, according to Logevall, but he agrees with Trachtenberg that they were not akin to a “straitjacket” depriving Kennedy of all flexibility on Vietnam policy. Robert Jervis adopts a position quite similar to Logevall in his commentary. Domestic politics and public opinion were indeed important to both Kennedy and Nixon, but their concerns about both were far more complicated and broader in scope than is suggested by the concept of audience costs. H-Diplo/ISSF thanks Marc Trachtenberg and Bronwyn Lewis for allowing us to publish their important essays on audience costs and the Vietnam War. We hope other scholars will follow their lead and consider publishing original research with H-Diplo/ISSF. We are also grateful to Richard Betts, Robert Jervis, Frederik Logevall, and John Mearsheimer for their incisive commentaries on both of the essays. Participants: Marc Trachtenberg, an historian by training, is now a professor of political science at UCLA. He is the author of a number of books and articles dealing mostly with twentieth century international politics. His book on historical method, The Craft of International History, was published in 2006. His most recent book—a collection of his articles called The Cold War and After—was also concerned in large part with issues of method. One of his 3 Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York: The Free Press, 2001). H-Diplo/ISSF Forum, No. 3 (2014) main goals nowadays is to show political scientists how historical analysis can shed light on many of the issues that interest them; an article of his dealing with the audience costs theory was published in Security Studies in March 2012. Bronwyn Lewis is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in political science and second-year M.S. student in statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include diplomacy, conflict resolution, and international environmental politics, and her methodological interests range from in-depth archival work to cutting-edge statistical methods. She received her M.Sc. in comparative politics from The London School of Economics and Political Science in 2011 and her B.A. in political science from Duke University in 2008. Richard K. Betts is the Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies in the political science department, Director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and Director of the International Security Policy program in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. His first book, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises (Harvard University Press, 1977) was issued in a second edition by Columbia University Press in 1991. He is author

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