Paul Samuelson was allegedly asked if economics generated any propositions that were both true and not trivial. I think this is an excellent question, and I often wonder how we in international relations should respond were it posed to us. In fact, I think there are several possible retorts—we do occasionally come up with useful ideas in IR! But in this short post, I’m going to focus on one potential answer that I recently thought of while chatting with Ben Harack, another doctoral candidate here at Oxford. He pointed out that states might deliberately weaken themselves as a form of costly signaling, and that got me thinking more broadly about the unique nature of commitment problems in a system defined largely by anarchy. Thus, a potential (still tentative) answer I might offer were someone to pose the Samuelson question to me is that, in international relations, the existence of commitment problems means that weakness can actually be a source of strength.
Unlike domestic politics, international relations is characterized by anarchy. Concretely, this means that there is no higher authority above the state, and thus international politics is often characterized by self-help dynamics simply out of necessity. If an individual were to sign a contract with another party, and that second party then failed to abide by the contract’s stipulations, the individual could pursue legal recourse through the judicial system. While this notional person might not win in court, he or she could at least be confident in the knowledge that a whole infrastructure of police and judges is in place to adjudicate and punish potential misconduct. The same is not true for states, however. If a state is attacked, there is no international police force to enforce the peace. This is true even when international legal bodies do exist. By way of illustration, simply look at the case of Vladimir Putin’s war crimes. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Putin, but it has no police powers. Russia is a sovereign actor, and the ICC cannot compel it to hand over its president for trial at The Hague. If Putin ever does end up in front of the ICC, it will be because he was detained by agents of another state, not those of the supranational ICC. In international relations, states must take matters into their own hands; they cannot rely on any higher power to enforce laws and contractual obligations for them.
But this can create challenges for cooperation. As even the most libertarian-leaning individuals will concede, one obvious role of the state is contract enforcement. If individuals cannot be certain that agreements will be honored, they are likely to simply forgo entering into agreements at all. The same is true for states. Why agree to an arms control treaty if the other signatories might not comply and thus gain a battlefield advantage? Why sign onto a free trade agreement if your trading partner could secretly be subsidizing domestic industries?
Of course, some of the aforementioned stumbling blocks are information problems rather than commitment problems. And here, international institutions can play a role. They can serve as forums in which information can be shared, and they can provide impartial, third-party monitoring to ensure both sides abide by their commitments. But while these institutions can improve monitoring, they really cannot do much to actually punish treaty violations. If the IAEA, for instance, detects an illicit nuclear program, all it can do is report it. It is up to states to take actions, such as sanctions or military strikes, to punish the would-be proliferator. The WTO, which can authorize a member to impose retaliatory tariffs against another member state found to be in violation of its commitments, might seem to be an exception. But in practice, this is just another instance of a state solving its own problems. After all, the WTO granting a state permission to retaliate is a bit like a court finding that a thief has in fact robbed you, but, rather than imprisoning the perpetrator, simply authorizes you to rob him back.
The WTO model of retaliation can work in cases where states are mutually economically exposed to each other, but it is an almost entirely useless measure when there are substantial power asymmetries. For example, in the early 2000s the US subsidized cotton production in violation of its WTO commitments. The WTO ruled against the US and in favor of several West African countries, who were thus authorized by the WTO to impose retaliatory tariffs on the United States. But Washington did not care. The American economy was so much larger than those of the litigants, and American firms exported so little to them, that the tariff costs were imperceptible to American citizens. Thus, simply due to structural differences in economic power, the US was largely immune from punishment, and thus it could not credibly commit to abide by its trade obligations.
This is an issue in trade, but actually most of the IR literature on credible commitments deals with war. As Fearon points out in his seminal 1995 article, states’ inability to credibly commit to peaceful bargains can often lead to war. To illustrate this problem, consider two states competing over territory. State A is more powerful than state B and exploits this imbalance in power to demand some of state B’s territory. State B should, rationally, hand the territory over because, being the weaker side, it is unlikely to win a war. If it loses, it will have to relinquish the territory anyway while also suffering the economic and human costs of having fought a war. By simply handing over the territory, therefore, it can at least avoid the costs of war. But it is here that commitment problems emerge. With its newly acquired territory, state A is now even more materially powerful than state B, so what’s to stop it from coming back and demanding an even greater slice of territory? State A can promise not to do this, but this promise is unenforceable, and thus state B might choose to fight now rather than face the potential of having to fight from an even weaker position in the future.
Indeed, there is quite a lot of scholarship illustrating this problem. Dale Copeland has argued that many of the costliest wars between great powers emerge during periods of power transition. During these transitions, the incumbent great power fears that the rising power will someday supplant it and impose unfavorable demands. Thus, incumbent powers face a closing window of opportunity, incentivizing them to initiate a preventive war when they are still the materially stronger state. Of course, the rising power might try to assuage these concerns by promising not to abuse the power it will acquire once it becomes the hegemon, but these promises are unenforceable and thus lack credibility. Similar dynamics can operate in the opposite direction, too. Established powers, due to their economic and financial strength, struggle to reassure rising powers that they will not exploit these economic advantages to stymie the growth of potential challengers. Thus, rising powers face the risk that their growth with be impeded, and this may lead them to opt for war if the expected future losses from these potential economic restrictions exceed the expected losses from conflict. Indeed, Debs and Monteiro argue that this is why Japan attacked the US in 1941 despite being significantly weaker.
Commitment problems also explain why some wars last far longer than they seemingly should. This is particularly true when one conceptualizes of war as an information generating process. Countries all have hidden information about their level of resolve and military capabilities, and with few exceptions they have little incentive to reveal this information to adversaries because this might undermine their leverage during disputes. Thus, wars are fought to expose this information and ascertain the true balance of power. But this raises the question of why states that are revealed to be weak continue to fight rather than update their assessments and pursue negotiated settlements. One of the primary reasons is commitment problems. Even a weak state will prefer to fight on in the face of poor odds if the alternative is to make concessions that render it even more impotent and exposed to predation. As Dan Reiter points out, this logic is what drove the Soviet Union on in the months following the stunningly successful Nazi invasion of its territory.
Alex Weisiger makes a similar point in Logics of War, where he argues that wars fought over simple miscalculations or as the result of domestic political pressures tend not to escalate. As the costs of the conflict rise, overly optimistic estimates are revealed to be fallacious, and any domestic political gains are erased as the leader must justify the human and economic toll inflicted by the war. Leaders thus updated their cost-benefit estimate calculations and seek de-escalation. However, Weisiger argues that wars in which one or both sides are perceived to have extreme aims tend to escalate massively, as fears over the other side’s ultimate intentions lead the belligerents to be willing to absorb enormous costs rather than concede and potentially create space for further aggression in the future. This work is echoed by literature on madman tactics. As McManus shows, leaders that create a reputation of dispositional irrationality tend to underperform in bargaining contests. As Caitlin Talmadge and I argue, this is because a “leader who appears to have extreme preferences on every issue and to routinely deviate from consequence-based decision-making on all matters… is likely to have difficulty convincing opponents that he will suddenly start to behave reasonably and rationally after the target makes concessions or refrains from unwanted behavior.”
Up to this point, you may be thinking that all of this talk of credible commitments is true, but surely it’s also trivial. Perhaps, but there is a non-obvious (to me, at least) consequence of these dynamics. Namely, it can pay to be weak. This is true for at least two reasons. First, weak states can credibly commit to avoiding actions deemed concerning by others simply by virtue of lacking the material capability to take these actions. Whereas powerful states are always able to abuse their position, even if they never intend to, weak states cannot ever abuse their position, even if they wanted to! In some ways, this makes them more enticing partners, as their weakness eliminates one of the most intractable problems of international cooperation. The second reason is that states can deliberately create weaknesses and vulnerabilities as costly signals of their reliability. For example, as Dooley, Folkerts-Landau, and Garber argue, states might deliberately hold dollar reserves not simply for for their value as safe assets but also to intentionally expose themselves to the long arm of the US Treasury. After all, by increasing their vulnerability to US sanctions, these countries effectively tie their hands and can, therefore, credibly commit to abiding by American geopolitical and economic preferences.
The risk is that these strategies create vulnerabilities. A state that places itself in the hands of another actor that cannot credibly commit to not abusing its relative power must assume a great deal of risk. But, seemingly paradoxically, the state’s very ability to embrace this risk without creating symmetric risks for potential partners can significantly advantage it in bargaining contests and signaling. At the end of the day, the strongest states with the greatest material power are still the most politically significant actors in the international system. But it is important to realize that, in an anarchical system in which there are no higher powers of enforcement, their very strength can actually undermine their influence. Weaker states, simply by virtue of lacking the power to renege, can thus sometimes come out ahead.