Are Red Lines Red Herrings?

• In Event: Disaggregating the State: Leaders, Policy Elites and Small Groups in IR

Abstract

If an older conventional wisdom in scholarly and policy-making circles held that reputation was “one of the few things worth fighting for,” a more recent argument holds that past actions are relatively costless. Using archival evidence, reputation critics have argued that a country’s credibility is rarely at stake, as foreign observers discount an actor’s actions in the past when calculating her credibility in the present. We introduce a new type of evidence into this debate, presenting the results from original surveys fielded on four samples (from foreign decision-makers, foreign publics, and American IR scholars) to study the reputation costs incurred by various actors as a result of the Russian invasion of Crimea and the ongoing Syrian civil war. Our results suggest that reputations costs do indeed exist, that they are worse in cases of failed threats, and that they attach to both leaders and the countries they represent. Finally, our studies revealed the existence of a “home-away gap”: compared to foreign observers, American IR scholars seem to underestimate the magnitude of reputation costs the US has incurred by backing down on threats.

Authors

• Jonathan Renshon, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Keren Yarhi-Milo, Princeton University