Public Threats, Private Assurances: Dimensions of Diplomacy in Crisis Trajectory

• In Event: Authoritarianism, Populism, and Foreign Policy

Abstract

Current literature agrees that countries can prevent crisis escalation by exchanging costly verbal and material signals. Although interstate communication is vital immediately prior to and during a confrontation, it plays an equally significant role during the pre-crisis stage: when a contentious issue first gains prevalence within the day-to-day dialogue. I argue that everyday diplomatic signals convey information not only through their content or tone but also through the channel of communication, frequency, and volume of messages. To analyze the dimensions of low-level diplomacy and shed light on crisis trajectory, I construct a unique data set of roughly 20,000 public and private messages exchanged by the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. I apply supervised and semi-supervised learning methods, such as keyword-assisted topic modeling, to identify contentious issues that arise in the diplomatic dialogue, and classify the messages into threats and assurances. I find that an increase in the total volume of messages on a contentious issue tends to precede sender-initiated material confrontations. This relationship is particularly strong when the issue consistently gains prominence in private channels, but not when the topic prevalence fluctuates across channels. These results lend significant support to my argument that early diplomatic exchanges matter greatly for the crisis trajectory.

Author

• Yana Otlan, University of California, Los Angeles