Hedging for Better Bets: Power Shifts, Credible Signals, and Preventive Conflict

Abstract

How can declining states reliably infer the intentions of rising states? One prominent line of argument maintains that because declining states face intractable uncertainty about rising states’ future intentions, preventive war is often unavoidable even between states with truly compatible goals. This article presents a dynamic model of reassurance in which actors are uncertain whether or not their interests conflict. The model shows that by adopting a hedging strategy of limited containment short of war, declining states can reduce risers’ incentives to send dishonest cooperative signals. This, in turn, makes cooperation more credible as a signal of risers’ benign intentions. Moreover, these signals are sufficiently informative to dissuade the decliner from escalating to preventive war even under large power shifts. Thus, although power shifts promote limited competition among states with compatible goals, preventive war rationally occurs only in a bargaining context when the riser’s goals are known to be incompatible.

Trust, cooperation, and the tradeoffs of reciprocity

“…Beyond these purely exogenous factors contributing to non-reciprocity, prior research has explored the conditions under which power shifts can induce declining states to adopt both cooperative and non-cooperative strategies unconditionally. Most prominently, the literature on commitment problems and preventive conflict has long held that under large power shifts, declining states have incentives to adopt unconditionally competitive strategies-either preventive war or containment short of war-in order to reduce their vulnerability to future exploitation by potentially hostile rising states (Copeland 2000;Edelstein 2002;Levy 1987;Powell 1999;Wolford et al 2011;Yoder 2019a).…”

Signaling under the Security Dilemma: An Experimental Analysis

“…Kydd (2005, 201) states this conclusion emphatically: “cooperation is possible between [benign states] no matter how mistrustful they are to begin with …if they are genuine security seekers, [states] can find an appropriate set of costly signals that will enable them to reassure each other and cooperate completely over time” (emphasis in original). Recent work has extended Kydd’s insights to conditions of shifting power, which offensive realists have rightly pointed out pose additional barriers to credible signals (Haynes 2019; Yoder 2019a, 2019b; Haynes and Yoder 2020). This research demonstrates that reassurance remains theoretically feasible even under the most difficult conditions for credible signaling identified by offensive realists.…”

Power Shifts, Multiple Audiences and Credible Reassurance

“…For example, one strategy for the decliner to elicit credible signals is to retrench from a particular region of high value to the rising state, to remove constraints over the riser's behavior and observe whether it continues to behave cooperatively given high freedom of action(Yoder 2019a). Yet retrenchment is only in the declining state's interests if several conditions are satisfied, such as the region of retrenchment having asymmetrically low value to the declining state and low impact on the distribution of power elsewhere 5.…”