UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Crisis Bargaining and War Initiation Before a Domestic Audience A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science by Ron Moti Gurantz 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Crisis Bargaining and War Initiation Before a Domestic Audience by Ron Moti Gurantz Doctoral Candidate in Political Science University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Arthur A. Stein, Chair Studies of crisis bargaining have traditionally focused on the strategies for signaling re- solve to other states, even when incorporating a domestic audience into the analysis. In this dissertation, I examine crisis bargaining strategies meant primarily to send signals to the domestic audience. Using game theoretic models, historical case studies and a survey experiment, I show that governments can successfully bait adversaries into minor incidents and deceive the public into authorizing war even though minor incidents can also be highly informative about an adversary's intentions under certain conditions. I also show that pub- lic opinion can lead governments to forgo preemptive strikes and preventive war, and that democracy can therefore reduce public welfare in some circumstances. I discuss the impli- cations of these findings for the conventional wisdom on crisis behavior and on the value of democracy in foreign policy. ii The dissertation of Ron Moti Gurantz is approved. Barry O'Neill Stergios Skaperdas Marc Trachtenberg Robert Trager Arthur A. Stein, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2014 iii Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Provoked Incidents as Pretexts for War 20 2.1 Aggression and Self-Defense in International Politics . 23 2.2 Provoking Attacks . 26 2.3 Model: Provocations, Incidents and War . 28 2.3.1 Equilibrium Analysis . 31 2.3.2 Misleading the Legislature and Baiting the Adversary . 34 2.3.3 The Visibility of the Provocation and the Probability of Deception . 35 2.3.4 Extending the Model to Preemption . 37 2.4 Survey Experiment: War with Iran . 39 2.4.1 Hypotheses . 41 2.4.2 Research Design . 43 2.4.3 Results . 45 2.4.4 Discussion . 48 2.5 Case Study: U.S. Entry into WWII . 51 2.6 Conclusion . 60 iv 2.7 Appendix A . 63 2.7.1 Characterization of Equilibrium in Proposition 1 . 63 2.7.2 Characterization of Second Pure Strategy Equilibrium . 65 2.7.3 Comparative Static that Higher cA leads to weakly higher φ . 66 2.7.4 Comparative Static that Higher π leads to weakly lower φ . 66 2.7.5 Characterization of Equilibrium in Preemption Extension . 66 2.8 Appendix B . 68 2.8.1 Survey Experiment Text . 68 2.8.2 Balance and Parametric Regression . 70 3 Fear, Appeasement and the Effectiveness of Deterrence with Alexander V. Hirsch 74 3.1 Introduction . 74 3.2 Example . 82 3.3 The Model . 85 3.4 Results ...................................... 91 3.5 The Turkish Straits Crisis of 1946 . 103 3.6 Robustness . 106 3.7 Conclusion . 109 3.8 Appendix . 114 3.9 Supplemental Appendix . 118 3.9.1 Robustness to challenger backing down . 118 3.9.2 Game with interdependent war values . 118 3.9.3 Game with two-sided uncertainty . 123 v 3.9.4 Robustness to Alternative Protocols . 127 4 War Initiation Before a Domestic Audience 135 4.1 Democracy and War . 139 4.2 Model . 143 4.2.1 Sequence and Payoffs . 143 4.2.2 Equilibria . 145 4.3 Discussion . 150 4.3.1 Equilibrium Comparison . 150 4.3.2 Welfare Analysis . 151 4.3.3 Security Dilemma Reversal . 158 4.4 Conclusion . 160 4.5 Appendix . 163 4.5.1 Proof of Proposition 1: Equilibrium E1 . 163 4.5.2 Proof of Proposition 2: Equilibrium E2 . 164 4.5.3 Proof of Proposition 3: Equilibrium E3 . 165 4.5.4 Proof of Proposition 4: First Welfare Result . 165 4.5.5 Proof of Proposition 5: Second Welfare Result . 166 4.5.6 Proof of Proposition 6: Third Welfare Result . 167 4.5.7 Proof of Proposition 7: Fourth Welfare Result . 167 4.5.8 Proof of Proposition 8: Security Dilemma Reversal . 167 5 Conclusion 168 5.1 Implications . 171 5.2 Further Research . 176 vi Bibliography 178 vii List of Figures 2.1 Provocation Model Game Tree . 31 2.2 Approval of Military Action by Treatment Group . 46 3.1 Deterrence Model Game Tree . 86 3.2 Deterrence Model Equilibria . 94 3.3 Probability of deterrence as function of δm δm . 98 C − C 3.4 Probability of Deterrence when Challenger's Gains = Defender's Costs . 100 3.5 Probability that Challenger Wins in Generalized Example . 128 4.1 War Initiation Model Game Tree . 145 4.2 War Initiation Equilibria . 149 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee chair Arthur A. Stein and committee members Barry O'Neill, Stergios Skaperdas, Marc Trachtenberg and Robert Trager for their guidance. My appreciation goes to Tiberiu Dragu, Robert Powell and Mehdi Shadmehr for their comments on parts of the dissertation, and Albert Carnesale and Barbara Geddes for the opportunities they gave me in graduate school. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues in graduate school who helped me in my work and my life, Liana Maris Epstein, Matthew Gottfried, Alexander V. Hirsch, Andrew MacDonald, Sarah Leary, Dov Levin, Chad Nelson, Steve Palley, Bradford Stapleton, Laura Weinstein and Lauren Wong. For their support, my gratitude goes to my family, Devorah, Itzhak and Maya Gurantz. Chapter 3 is a version of Fear, Appeasement and the Effectiveness of Deterrence, co- written with Alexander V. Hirsch, that has been invited for resubmission at International Organization. ix RON MOTI GURANTZ EDUCATION University of California, Los Angeles M.A., Political Science, October 2008 University of California, Berkeley B.A., Political Economy, May 2004 WORK IN PROGRESS \Fear, Appeasement and the Effectiveness of Deterrence" with Alexander V. Hirsch Revise and resubmit at International Organization. \War Initiation Before a Domestic Audience" \Provoked Incidents as Pretexts for War" \Mutual Optimism and the Vietnam War, 1964-1968" \Commitment Problems and Neutralization in Laos and South Vietnam" CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Ill., April 2013 \Military Incidents as a Pretext for War" American Political Science Association, Washington D.C., September 2010 \Deterrence with a Self-Enforcing Threat," with Alexander V. Hirsch x Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Ill., April 2010 \War as a Self-Enforcing Threat," with Alex V. Hirsch RESEARCH EXPERIENCE Prof. Barbara Geddes, September 2009-October 2010 Data collection and coding for NSF-funded project, Authoritarian Regimes and Time Horizons. Prof. and Chancellor Emeritus Albert Carnesale, July 2007-December 2007 Research for projects on missile defense, nuclear forensics, homeland security spending and U.S. nuclear weapons posture. FELLOWSHIPS Charles F. Scott Fellowship, UCLA Graduate Division Endowed Fellowship, 2010-2011 Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, UCLA Graduate Division, 2009 Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, UCLA Graduate Division, 2008 xi Chapter 1 Introduction Studies of crisis bargaining have understood crises primarily as contests of resolve between states, and have focused their attention on strategies used to signal resolve and influence the beliefs of adversaries. When they have examined the role of the domestic audience, as in the audience cost and opposition signaling literatures, the focus has still been on how these actors influence the ability of states to signal resolve to opponents (Fearon 1994, Schultz 1998). While the study of crisis bargaining has centered on signaling between the participant states, crisis events often have multiple audiences and the signals have multiple targets. Governments may be interested in signaling resolve to their adversaries, but they may also be interested in signaling other qualities to other states or to domestic audiences. Signaling to third parties can even become the primary objective in a crisis, for example, if a government has decided that war is inevitable but still wants to convince the international community that diplomacy cannot resolve the dispute. Observers sometimes voice the suspicion that governments provoke crises to manipulate or divert the attention of a domestic audience, with the adversary being largely irrelevant to the objectives of the provoking state. 1 A number of behaviors observed in particular crises - or discovered after the fact - cannot be understood except as attempts to manipulate the beliefs of a third party. Governments have conducted \counterfeit diplomacy," engaging in negotiations they fully expect to fail or even negotiations they don't want to succeed, as the United States did prior to the Persian Gulf War (Montgomery 2013). They have allowed themselves to be attacked rather than launching preemptive strikes, as Israel did at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War (Reiter 1995). They have exaggerated or even provoked enemy attacks before adopting policies that were already decided upon, as the United States government did in the Gulf of Tonkin incident (Moise 1996). They have even conducted false flag operations, staging incidents as enemy attacks before initiating war, as Germany did before invading Poland (Allen 2005). In none of these examples is one state attempting to convey its resolve to an opponent. Instead, the common thread is that one government is attempting to make another party view its opponent as belligerent. Rather than signaling their willingness to fight, they are seeking to convey to a third-party observer the enemy's eagerness to fight and their own willingness to settle the dispute peacefully. In some of these cases, the strategy had major political consequences, and in the Yom Kippur War case, the behavior had major military consequences as well. The existence of these strategies has potentially far-reaching consequences for our un- derstanding of crisis bargaining. They challenge the notion that crises should always be understood as contests of resolve between states and introduces the possibility that crises may be more important for the information they convey to third parties.