Magnified Coercion: The Effect of Sanctions on Nuclear States’ Crisis Outcomes

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Abstract

The efficacy of nuclear weapons in compellent threats has long been the center of the debate regarding coercive diplomacy. Nevertheless, the imposition of sanctions in nuclear crises has received little scholarly interest. With a game-theoretic model, this article argues that the imposition of sanctions increases credibility of the nuclear threat by escalating the crisis with actual costs, which addressed the nuclear superior states’ advantage in risk-taking. Using a purposefully created data set covering 52 symmetric nuclear dyad cases and 133 asymmetric nuclear dyad cases, this article conducts empirical analysis to examine whether the nuclear state’s compellent threats enjoy magnified coercive effect in conjunction with sanctions, and how that effect differs in symmetric and asymmetric nuclear dyads. The empirical findings suggest that the imposition of sanctions significantly enhances the effect of nuclear threats for nuclear superior states, improving the probability of winning by 24%. However, the magnifying effect for nuclear superior states does not extend to asymmetric nuclear dyads. This article further illustrates how the sanctions address the nuclear weapons’ coercive effect in the complex real political environment through the qualitative case study of the DPRK denuclearization.

Author

• Yueyi Li, Duke University