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Costly Concealment: Secret Foreign Policymaking, Transparency, and Credible Reassurance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Brandon K. Yoder Open the ORCID record for Brandon K. Yoder [Opens in a new window]  and
William Spaniel Open the ORCID record for William Spaniel [Opens in a new window]
Brandon K. Yoder*
Affiliation:
Lecturer (Assistant Professor), School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University, Canberra, AUS
William Spaniel
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: brandon.k.yoder@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article presents a formal model that shows how states can credibly reassure each other simply by maintaining a cooperative outward narrative. The reassurance literature to date has focused largely on costly signaling, whereby benign states must distinguish themselves by taking specific actions that hostile types would not. The mere lack of overtly expressed hostility without costly signals has been considered “cheap talk,” on the assumption that this behavior is costless for hostile states and thus uninformative. In contrast, this paper argues that maintaining a cooperative façade while secretly formulating and executing exploitative policies carries inherent trade-offs, and thus constitutes a credible reassurance signal. Foreign policy planning and implementation requires communication among various individuals, groups, and organizations, which has some probability of being observed and punished by outside actors. Yet efforts to conceal the policymaking process and reduce this probability are costly—they require investments in internal monitoring and restrictions on internal communication that can substantially degrade policy outcomes. Thus, to the extent that a state's foreign policymaking process is transparent—that is, that concealing internal communications is difficult—the absence of positive signals of hostility is a credible signal of its benign intentions. The argument is illustrated with a case study of German reassurance signals during the July Crisis preceding World War I.

Keywords

Costly signalingcredibilitycovert actiondiplomacysecrecyJuly Crisisgame theoryreassurancetransparencyWorld War I
Type
Research Article
Information
International Organization , Volume 76 , Issue 4 , Fall 2022 , pp. 868 - 900
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The IO Foundation

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