Credible Commitments and Nuclear Disarmement

• In Event: Demonstrations of Reputation and Commitment in Foreign Policy

Abstract

International relations scholarship has long debated the importance of one’s keeping commitments. On the one hand, influential work by Thomas Schelling suggests that states must be always prepared to fulfill their promises if they do not wish to appear weak or irresolute before international audiences. On the other hand, more recent research has shown that states do not uniformly downgrade the credibility of others’ commitments based on their record of previous actions. Indeed, according to Jervis, beliefs about the interdependence of events are just that — beliefs — which can vary among individuals. How do beliefs about interdependence affect individuals’ weighting of past behavior when assessing others’ credibility? We address this question using a novel, vignette-based survey experiment that asks 3,000 Americans to evaluate one nation’s hypothetical commitment to lift sanctions on another hypothetical rogue state in exchange for the latter’s commitment to dismantle its nascent nuclear program. We vary the proposing state’s past behavior (whether it followed through on lifting sanctions the last time it made such a commitment) in addition to its regime type (an authoritarian dictatorship, a Western democracy, or the United States), its interests regarding the commitment (whether experts in the proposing state suggest that upholding the deal lifting sanctions would be beneficial or detrimental), and the political identity of proposing state’s leader (an ally of the current regime, an opponent, or the current regime itself). We then measure a variety of outcomes, including respondents’ estimates of the proposing state’s credibility and whether they believe that the rogue state should accept the commitment. We find strong, negative, and statistically significant effects for the proposing state’s past actions on respondents’ estimates of that state’s credibility and whether the rogue state ought to accept the commitment. Further, we identify a robust interactive effect between the proposing state’s past actions and respondents’ self-reported beliefs about interdependence, with those who score high on this scale imposing dramatically greater credibility costs on the proposing state. Our findings therefore make three contributions to the study of commitment-keeping in international politics. First, we offer microfoundational evidence for a link between individuals’ beliefs about interdependence, their views about the importance of past actions, and their assessments of credibility while demonstrating that the strength of this belief varies across individuals. Second, we show that while beliefs about interdependence matter for judgments about credibility, they only affect views on other policy matters, like whether the rogue state should accept the commitment, under certain conditions — such as when the proposing state is a dictatorship rather than a parliamentary democracy or the United States. Third, we furnish evidence on a question of substantial policy relevance regarding nuclear disarmament commitments. Commentators frequently suggest that the United States will struggle to convince Iran or North Korea to renounce its nuclear program given its past history with Libya and Iraq, while both of the former countries have themselves cheated on related commitments. Our work substantiates this concern, showing how broken commitments can interact with beliefs about the importance of interdependence to seriously influence assessments of credibility and judgments about appropriate policies.

Authors

• Donald Casler, Columbia University

• Keren Yarhi-Milo, Princeton University

• David Ribar, Princeton University