Fear, Appeasement, and the Effectiveness of Deterrence1 Ron Gurantz2 and Alexander V. Hirsch3 April 1, 2015 1We thank Robert Trager, Barry O'Neill, Tiberiu Dragu, Kristopher Ramsay, Robert Powell, Doug Arnold, Mattias Polborn, participants of the UCLA International Relations Reading Group, Princeton Q-APS International Relations Conference, and Cowbell working group, and two anony- mous reviewers for helpful comments and advice. 2Corresponding Author. University of California, Los Angeles. Department of Political Sci- ence, 4289 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472. Phone: (310) 825-4331. Email: rongu-
[email protected]. 3Associate Professor of Political Science, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Cali- fornia Institute of Technology, MC 228-77, Pasadena, CA 91125. Email:
[email protected]. Abstract Governments often fear the future intentions of their adversaries. In this paper we explore how this fear affects their willingness to fight, and thus ability to credibly deter, and show that it can make deterrent threats credible under seemingly incredible circumstances. We consider a model in which a defender seeks to deter a transgression that has both intrinsic and military value, and examine how the defender's fear that the challenger will exploit her gains in a future military confrontation affects the credibility of his deterrent threat. We derive conditions under which even a very minor transgression can effectively become a \test" of the challenger's future belligerence. As a result, the defender's deterrent threat of war becomes credible in equilibrium, even when the transgression does not immediately appear to be worth fighting over, and the ex-ante likelihood that the challenger is belligerent is infinitesimally small.