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The difference between war and peace can be a matter of trust. States that trust each other can cooperate and remain at peace. States that mistrust each other enough can wage preventive wars, attacking now in fear that the other side will attack in the future. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Kydd develops a theory of trust in international relations and applies it to the Cold War. Grounded in a realist tradition but arriving at conclusions very different from current realist approaches, this theory is the first systematic game theoretic approach to trust in international relations, and is also the first to explicitly consider how we as external observers should make inferences about the trustworthiness of states.
Kydd makes three major claims. First, while trustworthy states may enter conflict, when we see conflict we should become more convinced that the states involved are untrustworthy. Second, strong states, traditionally thought to promote cooperation, can do so only if they are relatively trustworthy. Third, even states that strongly mistrust each other can reassure each other and cooperate provided they are trustworthy.
The book's historical chapters focus on the growing mistrust at the beginning of the Cold War. Contrary to the common view that both sides were willing to compromise but failed because of mistrust, Kydd argues that most of the mistrust in the Cold War was justified, because the Soviets were not trustworthy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691188515 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/05/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Trust and Mistrust in International Relations
By Andrew H. Kydd
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2005 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-12170-3
Chapter One
INTRODUCTIONWHEN MIKHAIL GORBACHEV came to Washington D.C. in December 1987 for a summit meeting with Ronald Reagan, the U.S. President took the opportunity to repeat for the cameras one of his favorite Russian proverbs. The phrase, doveryai no proveryai (trust but verify), became indelibly associated with the two men and the end of the Cold War. The phrase nicely captured the mistrust that plagued the superpower relationship while at the same time suggesting that trust could be rebuilt if words were accompanied by deeds that could be verified. As if inspired by the proverb, the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty signed at the summit contained verification provisions that were unprecedented in U.S.-Soviet arms control.
This book is about the role of trust and mistrust in international relations and the Cold War. I define trust as a belief that the other side is trustworthy, that is, willing to reciprocate cooperation, and mistrust as a belief that the other side is untrustworthy, or prefers to exploit one's cooperation. The topic is important because trust and mistrust can make the difference between peace and war. States that trust each other sufficiently can cooperate; states that do not may endup in conflict. As a result, states constantly make inferences about each other's motivations. In the Cold War, for instance, from George Kennan's famous 1947 article on the sources of Soviet conduct to the debates over Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika, the United States was obsessed with the question of whether the Soviet Union was innately expansionist and whether and over what it could be trusted (Kennan 1947; Allison 1988).
Indeed, trust is central to our understanding of the Cold War. Two of the most important questions asked about the Cold War are why it began and why it ended when it did. Another key question is how the European states managed to cooperate with each other and eventually with Germany so soon after a devastating war that sowed deep fears and hatreds. These three questions are all related to international trust. With respect to the origins of the Cold War, many authors in the "post-revisionist" school of Cold War historiography have traced the origins of the Cold War to mistrust (Gaddis 1983; Leffler 1992). These authors argue that the Soviet Union and the United States were both animated by a search for security-a defensive goal-but that their desire for security propelled them into conflict. Thus, the Cold War takes on a tragic cast, because if only the two sides could have trusted each other, the conflict could have been avoided (Collins 1997). For instance, Deborah Larson argues that there were "missed opportunities" to end the conflict when both sides' interests supported a cooperative deal but mistrust prevented them from realizing it (Larson 1997: 5). Some argue that the United States should have pursued a policy of reassurance, to overcome this mistrust (Lebow and Stein 1994: 375-76).
Ranged against this interpretation are both "traditionalist" and "revisionist" accounts. Traditionalists in the United States believe that the Cold War was driven by the expansionist goals of the Soviet Union. The Soviets are seen as genuinely aggressive, not reacting to the West in a defensive manner. Hence, the West had to firmly oppose the Soviet Union through the policy of containment (Feis 1970). The West mistrusted the Soviets, it is true, but this mistrust was fully justified because the Soviets were untrustworthy. The mirror-image revisionist thesis argues that the Soviet Union was primarily defensively motivated while the capitalist West was the imperialistic and aggressive party. The Soviet Union, devastated by the war and fearing that Germany would eventually rise again from the ashes, had legitimate security interests in controlling its periphery. The United States, driven by the quest for markets for goods and investment, sought to roll back the advance of socialism and make the world safe for international capital (Kolko and Kolko 1972). For the revisionists, the United States is the untrustworthy actor, and Soviet mistrust is justified.
The question of European cooperation and German rehabilitation is also a matter of trust. During the 1930s, the European states had moved from cooperation to conflict. Germany had proven itself extremely untrustworthy and attacked its neighbors with genocidal fury. The task of overcoming this mistrust was formidable. Yet the European nations gradually raised their level of cooperation to heights never before achieved. From the alliance Britain and France signed at Dunkirk in 1947 through the founding of NATO to the rearmament of Germany, the Europeans and Americans cooperated and built institutions to cement their cooperative relationships. U.S. hegemony is often credited with fostering this cooperation, but the mechanism by which hegemony can foster cooperation in the face of mistrust is poorly understood.
Trust also plays a prominent role in debates about the end of the Cold War. Some argue that the key factor in the end of the Cold War is Soviet economic decline. Because the Soviet economy was stagnant while the West continued to grow, the Soviets were simply forced to concede defeat in the forty-year struggle (Brooks and Wohlforth 2000/01; Wohlforth 1994/95). For these analysts, the end of the Cold War is characterized by capitulation, not reassurance. Others argue that trust building was central to the end of the Cold War. They claim that the Soviet Union changed fundamentally with Gorbachev's accession to power. The Soviets became less expansionist and more defensive in their international orientation (Risse-Kappen 1994; Checkel 1993; Evangelista 1999; Mendelson 1993, 1998; English 2000). This change led the Soviets to favor a more cooperative relationship with the West; in effect, it made them trustworthy. However, because preferences are not directly observable, the Soviets needed to take significant visible steps to reassure the West. Most important among Gorbachev's trust building initiatives were the INF treaty of 1987, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the eventual noninterference in the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 (Larson 1997: 221-34; Kydd 2000b: 340-51).
Thus, trust plays an important role in the debates about the beginning and end of the Cold War, and about European cooperation. The fact that many of these debates remain unresolved highlights the need for a better theoretical understanding of trust and cooperation in international relations. Toward this end, this book develops a theory of how trust affects cooperation between two actors as well as in larger groups, how it is eroded through aggressive behavior, and how it is enhanced through cooperative gestures designed to reassure.
There are four main implications of the theory of trust developed here. First, cooperation requires a certain degree of trust between states. The threshold of trust required for cooperation depends on a set of variables including a state's relative power and costs of conflict. Second, though conflict between trustworthy states is possible, when we see conflict it is a sign that one or both of the states are likely to be untrustworthy. Thus, we, as external observers, should become less trusting of the parties involved in a conflict, just as they themselves do. Third, in multilateral settings, hegemony-the presence of a very powerful state-can promote cooperation, but only if the hegemon is relatively trustworthy. Untrustworthy hegemons will actually make cooperation less likely. Fourth, if two parties are genuinely trustworthy, they will usually be able to reassure each other of this fact and eventually cooperate with each other. The key mechanism that makes reassurance possible is "costly signaling," that is, making small but significant gestures that serve to prove that one is trustworthy.
With respect to the Cold War, these implications support three arguments. First, the Cold War was most likely a product of expansionist drives on the part of the Soviet Union, not a mutual desire for security accompanied by mistrust. Soviet expansionist behavior increased the suspicions of contemporaries, and it should also increase our own, given the lack of contrary evidence that the Soviets were benignly motivated. Second, the European states were able to cooperate with each other, the United States, and Germany after World War II because the United States, as a trustworthy hegemon, enabled them to overcome serious mistrust problems. Contrary to prevalent explanations, the United States neither provided a free ride to the Europeans nor coerced them into accepting an American-preferred order. Finally, the Cold War was ended through a process of costly signaling. Gorbachev made a number of dramatic gestures that increased Western trust and dispelled the suspicions that underlay the forty-year conflict. Soviet economic decline, while important, does not by itself explain this process.
In this chapter I will first define what I mean by trust and distinguish this meaning from related ones. Second, I will discuss the role of trust in existing theories of international relations and lay out the essentials of my alternative approach. Finally, I will briefly discuss the methodological approach of the book.
DEFINING TRUST
Trust can be understood in many different ways. The definition that I will adhere to is that trust is a belief that the other side prefers mutual cooperation to exploiting one's own cooperation, while mistrust is a belief that the other side prefers exploiting one's cooperation to returning it. In other words, to be trustworthy, with respect to a certain person in a certain context, is to prefer to return their cooperation rather than exploit them. To be untrustworthy is to have the opposite preference ordering. Cooperation between two actors will be possible if the level of trust each has for the other exceeds some threshold specific to the situation and the actors.
Some concepts from game theory will help make this understanding of trust more precise. In the single play Prisoner's Dilemma, illustrated in Figure 1.1, each side has a dominant strategy to defect, that is, it is in their interest to defect no matter what they think the other side will do. Even if one side thinks the other will cooperate, it will want to defect. This means that actors with Prisoner's Dilemma preferences are untrustworthy as defined above because they prefer to meet cooperation with defection. As a result, in the Prisoner's Dilemma, mutual defection is usually thought to be unavoidable and it is the only Nash equilibrium in the game. Each player believes that the other side would prefer to exploit cooperation rather than reciprocate it, and they are right. Two untrustworthy actors facing each other will not cooperate.
In the Assurance Game, illustrated in Figure 1.2, the player's preferences are different. As in the Prisoner's Dilemma, each side prefers to defect if it thinks the other side will defect. However, if one side thinks the other will cooperate, it prefers to cooperate as well. This means that players with Assurance Game preferences are trustworthy. They prefer to reciprocate cooperation rather than exploit it. The fact that in the Assurance Game it makes sense to reciprocate whatever you expect the other side to do means there is a Nash equilibrium in which both sides cooperate. Cooperation is possible between trustworthy types who know each other to be trustworthy. There is also a Nash equilibrium in which the players do not cooperate, because each side prefers to meet defection with defection. However, in the Assurance Game as so far stated, this equilibrium seems unlikely given that both players prefer the equilibrium involving mutual cooperation and nothing is preventing them from coordinating on that one rather than the less desirable mutual defection equilibrium.
Players with Assurance Game preferences might fail to cooperate, however, if they were not sure that the other side had Assurance Game preferences. For instance, if one side thought the other might have Prisoner's Dilemma preferences, it would be natural to hesitate before cooperating, because the other side would then have a dominant strategy to defect. If the other side had Prisoner's Dilemma preferences, persuading them that you plan to cooperate would not induce them to cooperate in return, because they would prefer to exploit cooperation rather than reciprocate it. The Assurance Game player might then decide to defect, not because it prefers mutual defection, but because it fears that the other side has a dominant strategy to defect and therefore cannot be persuaded to cooperate. This is the problem of mistrust. Trustworthy Assurance Game actors may fear that they face an untrustworthy Prisoner's Dilemma player, and hence decide to not cooperate.
Along these lines, we can think of the level of trust one actor has for another as the probability it assesses that the other actor is trustworthy (Hardin 2002: 28). For instance, if player 1 thinks there is a [t.sub.2] chance that player 2 has Assurance Game preferences, we can think of [t.sub.2] as player 1's level of trust for player 2. Similarly, player 2 will think there is a [t.sub.1] chance that player 1 is trustworthy, and has Assurance Game payoffs, and a 1 - [t.sub.1] chance that player 1 is untrustworthy and has Prisoner's Dilemma payoffs. The greater [t.sub.1] and [t.sub.2], the more likely the other side is to be trustworthy, and the higher the level of trust.
Finally, cooperation is possible when the level of trust for the other exceeds a minimum trust threshold for each party (Luhmann 1979: 73). The minimum trust threshold will depend on the party's own tolerance for the risk of exploitation by the other side. In the example above based on the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Assurance Game, if each side anticipates that the other side will cooperate if they are an Assurance Game type and defect if they are a Prisoner's Dilemma type, cooperation gives player 1 (if it is an Assurance Game type) a payoff of [t.sub.2] x 4 + (1 - [t.sub.2]) x 1, while defection yields [t.sub.2] x 3 + (1 - [t.sub.2]) x 2; so cooperation will make player 1 better off than defection if the level of trust, [t.sub.2], exceeds 0.5 (the same calculation holds for player 2). Thus if the other side is at least 50 percent likely to be trustworthy, it is worthwhile cooperating with them, but if the level of trust falls below 50 percent, trustworthy actors will defect because of mistrust. The minimum trust threshold for the actors in this case is therefore equal to 50 percent, and cooperation is possible if the level of trust exceeds the minimum trust threshold.
To trust someone, then, as I will use the concept, is to believe it relatively likely that they would prefer to reciprocate cooperation. To mistrust someone is to think it is relatively likely that they prefer to defect even if they think one will cooperate. This conception of trust is related to but distinct from others in the literature. Two in particular are especially prevalent in the study of international relations: trust as belief that the other will cooperate in a Prisoner's Dilemma and trust as a belief about anticipated behavior rather than about preferences.
The Prisoner's Dilemma and similar extensive form games are the most common models used to analyze trust (Deutsch 1958; Dasgupta 1988; Kreps 1990: 65-72; Gibbons 2001; Camerer 2003: 83-92). However, these models fail to provide an adequate framework for understanding trust. In the single shot Prisoner's Dilemma and related extensive form games there is a dominant strategy to exploit the other side, and, hence, no reason to trust anyone. This makes trust irrational by definitional fiat, and forces those using such models to conceive of trust as a form of naiveté and trustworthiness as a species of irrationality (Camerer 2003: 85). It presupposes that no rational self-interested actor could possibly prefer mutual cooperation to exploiting the other side's cooperation. Yet examples of such a preference ordering are easy to come by, for instance a state that just wishes to be secure might rationally prefer not to develop an expensive new weapons system if it were assured that its neighbors would show similar restraint. That is, rational self-interest can support cooperation even in single shot games.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
List of Figures xiList of Tables xiiiAcknowledgments xv
PART I Trust and International Relations
CHAPTER 1: Introduction 3Defining Trust 6Trust and International Relations 12Methodology 22A Road Map 25Conclusion 26CHAPTER 2: Trust and the Security Dilemma 28The Security Dilemma Game 29Introducing Uncertainty 34Equilibria with Uncertainty 36Achieving Cooperation 38The Effects of Cooperation and Noncooperation 41Conclusion 44Appendix 45
PART II Fear and the Origins of the Cold War
CHAPTER 3: The Spiral of Fear 49The Spiral Model 50The Spiral Game 52Equilibria in the Spiral Game 59Defection and Fear 63The External Observer s Perspective 68Conclusion 77Appendix 77
CHAPTER 4: The Origins of Mistrust: 1945-50 79Explaining the Origins of the Cold War 80Setting the Stage: Motivations and Beliefs in 1945 87The Fate of Poland 92Bulgaria and Romania 98The Iranian Crisis 101The Turkish Crisis 105The Truman Doctrine 108Hungary and Czechoslovakia 110The Korean War 113Conclusion 115
PART III European Cooperation and the Rebirth of Germany
CHAPTER 5: Trust, Hegemony, and Cooperation 119Multilateral Cooperation 120The Multilateral Trust Game 123Equilibria in the Game 132The Payoffs and Cooperation 134Geography and Mistrust 136Hegemony and Cooperation 137Conclusion 139Appendix 140
CHAPTER 6: European Cooperation and Germany, 1945-55 142Explaining European Cooperation 143The Road to Bizonia 149The Origins of the Western Bloc: 1947 156The Brussels Pact and the London Accords 162The Birth of NATO and West Germany 165German Rearmament 168The Death of the EDC and the NATO Solution 173The Perspectives Revisited 177Conclusion 178
PART IV Reassurance and the End of the Cold War
CHAPTER 7: Reassurance 183Reassurance in International Relations 184The Reassurance Game 188Equilibria in the Reassurance Game 190Costly Signals versus Cheap Talk 197The Size of the Signal 198When Reassurance Works 200Conclusion 204Appendix 205
CHAPTER 8: The End of the Cold War: 1985-91 214
Explaining the End of the Cold War 215New Thinking before 1985 223The Advent of Gorbachev 225The INF Treaty 227Afghanistan, Liberalization, and the UN Speech 230The Sinatra Doctrine 234Less Socialism, More Unity 237The End of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire 240The Depth of Trust 242Conclusion 244
PART V Trust and Mistrust in the Post-Cold War Era
CHAPTER 9: Conclusion 247The Solitary Superpower 248The Post-Cold War Decade 251The Twenty-first Century 252
Bibliography 257Index 279
What People are Saying About This
The main virtues of this very clearly written book are its conceptual clarity and its ability to derive a large number of implications from relatively straightforward models. In addition to elaborating the author's own theory, each case history sheds light on existing debates about the events in question, such as the origins of the Cold War, the nature of America's hegemonic leadership, and the causes of the Cold War's peaceful denouement.
— Kenneth A. Schultz, Stanford University, author of "Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy"
This gem of a book is nothing less than a tour de force. Kydd's analysis of trust and mistrust is superb, provocative, and enlightening. From it he deduces a grand theory of international relations, a theory that not only challenges the most influential theories in the field but explains much of what is important in international relations. He concludes with a topical discussion of and helpful prescriptions for U.S. foreign policy in the contemporary era. What more can anyone ask of a work of social science?
— Randall L. Schweller, Ohio State University, author of "Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler's Strategy of World Conquest"
"This gem of a book is nothing less than a tour de force. Kydd's analysis of trust and mistrust is superb, provocative, and enlightening. From it he deduces a grand theory of international relations, a theory that not only challenges the most influential theories in the field but explains much of what is important in international relations. He concludes with a topical discussion of and helpful prescriptions for U.S. foreign policy in the contemporary era. What more can anyone ask of a work of social science?"—Randall L. Schweller, Ohio State University, author of Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler's Strategy of World Conquest"The main virtues of this very clearly written book are its conceptual clarity and its ability to derive a large number of implications from relatively straightforward models. In addition to elaborating the author's own theory, each case history sheds light on existing debates about the events in question, such as the origins of the Cold War, the nature of America's hegemonic leadership, and the causes of the Cold War's peaceful denouement."—Kenneth A. Schultz, Stanford University, author of Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy