Playing Chicken with Coercive Diplomacy
Coercive diplomacy has been used eight times since the end of the Cold War, with mixed results.
August/October 2003
What is coercive diplomacy? How can its success be measured? What are the best situations in which to make use of it?
These issues and more were weighed at a Current Issues Briefing on June 17 that also served to launch a new Institute book, The United States and Coercive Diplomacy.
Robert Art of Brandeis University, who co-edited the book with Patrick Cronin, former Research and Studies director at the Institute, led a panel of experts to consider the record of and lessons from the use of coercive diplomacy. Research and Studies director Paul Stares moderated the panel, which also featured Arnold Kanter, resident senior fellow at the Forum for International Policy, and Robert Gallucci, dean of the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Research and Studies deputy director Bill Drennan, who wrote the book's chapter on Korea, provided his insights as well.
Coercive diplomacy is the threat or use of limited force to compel or motivate a change of behavior of a target state or group. Resorting to war means coercive diplomacy has failed.
In each of the eight cases examined in the book, the authors analyzed what the United States was trying to achieve using coercive diplomacy and whether it was successful. Success or failure depends on numerous factors, such as the objectives and motives of the government invoking coercive diplomacy and how long the process is allowed to go on. Coercive diplomacy has been used in such varied places as Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, North Korea, and the Taiwan Strait. Martha Crenshaw, international expert on terrorism, also provided a chapter on the use of coercive diplomacy in response to global terrorists.
It is not easy to "code" cases of coercive diplomacy according to their success or failure, said Art. However, the editors found that coercive diplomacy works between 25 and 31 percent of the time: in other words, it fails more often than it succeeds.
Why is coercive diplomacy so difficult?
Top, left to right: Arnold Canter, Robert Gallucci.
Bottom: Robert J. Art.
- It is more difficult to compel than to deter.
- The three ways to coerce—denial, punishment, and risk—can go only so far or can be viewed as a bluff.
- It is a game of chicken, a test of wills. It is difficult to estimate who has the stronger resolve.
- The credibility and power of the target is at stake: "What will the United States do next if we give in?"
- Multiple coercers (a coalition) and multiple targets complicate coercive diplomacy.
- The target may believe it has techniques to counter coercion. This is "a perverse dynamic" that can foil coercive diplomacy.
