In the first year of the Russian invasion, as Ukrainian cities endured relentless bombardment, a notable discursive pattern began to crystallize in Washington. U.S. officials and legislators did not merely underscore the unprecedented scale of American assistance; they also began to articulate expectations of gratitude. By mid-2022 and throughout 2023, several congressional voices in the United States and EnglandFootnote 1 suggested that Kyiv should demonstrate greater appreciation, with U.S. National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, insisting that the ‘American people do deserve a degree of gratitude.’Footnote 2 These early articulations framed U.S. support as a voluntary and benevolent gift, thereby implicitly locating Ukraine in a position of moral indebtedness. This emotional script intensified in the U.S. domestic arena in 2024 and peaked in 2025, when Donald Trump publicly accused Ukraine of showing ‘zero gratitude’Footnote 3 and repeatedly asserted that President Zelensky should be more gratefulFootnote 4 for American help. By invoking ingratitude at precisely the moment when Ukrainian dependence was most acute, U.S. political elites mobilized gratitude discourse to signal that continued aid was contingent on the appropriate emotional performance.
This dynamic is not without precedent. Six decades earlier, in the aftermath of the 1962 Missile Crisis, Soviet leaders framed their assistance to Cuba, such as nuclear deployment, military equipment, oil shipments, preferential sugar purchases, and diplomatic backing, as an existential and costly gift that Havana was implicitly expected to honor. When Castro denounced the secret U.S.-Soviet settlement negotiated without Cuban participation and defended Cuba’s sovereign right to an independent foreign policy, Soviet officials did not primarily frame his stance as a strategic miscalculation. Instead, they interpreted it as a breach of emotional appropriateness, an implicit violation of the moral expectations embedded in the alliance. Khrushchev and Mikoyan repeatedly emphasized Soviet ‘efforts,’ ‘sacrifices,’ and assistance ‘given without counting,’ articulating a narrative in which Soviet aid created a normative structure of indebtedness. While rarely phrased as direct demands for gratitude, these emotives carried clear disciplinary undertones. Cuban resistance was thus read not merely as political defiance but as a failure to respond appropriately to generosity, as a form of emotional deviance within a hierarchical relationship Moscow sought to stabilize.
These episodes reveal a puzzle that conventional International Relations theories are poorly equipped to explain. Great powers facing subordinate resistance dispose of multiple instruments of pressure, such as material conditionality, institutional leverage, and reputational sanctions. Yet in both cases examined here, they consistently reached for the language of moral indebtedness and emotional obligation rather than naked coercion. Why do great powers moralize their leverage through the vocabulary of gratitude? What does framing resistance as ingratitude accomplish that material conditionality alone cannot? This article argues that gratitude discourse does something qualitatively distinct: unlike material pressure, which constrains what subordinate actors can do, gratitude discourse delegitimizes dissent by framing political disagreement as moral failure, thereby constraining what subordinate actors can say, claim, and be within the relationship. Emotional demands for gratitude thus constitute a distinct mode of hierarchical governance, one that emerges precisely when influence falters and great powers seek to reassert authority through moral and affective means rather than material ones.
This article makes three interrelated contributions to IR theory.Footnote 5 First, it places gratitude, arguably the emotion most closely associated with reciprocity at the center of the ‘emotional turn’ in IR. While research has illuminated the role of fear, anger, empathy, shame, and humiliation in foreign policy and norm dynamics,Footnote 6 gratitude has remained conspicuously undertheorized. Recent historical scholarship has begun to explore the role of gratitude in diplomacy and transatlantic political relationships, particularly as a symbolic and emotional mediator of asymmetric alliances.Footnote 7 Yet gratitude remains undertheorized in IR as a mechanism of disciplinary power and hierarchical governance. Drawing on classical moral philosophy, sociological and psychological research on indebtedness, and contemporary IR scholarship, this article conceptualizes gratitude as a moralized and coercive emotion,Footnote 8 one that simultaneously affirms virtue and generates powerful expectations of return. In asymmetric relations, ‘debts of gratitude’ create moral vulnerability for recipients and enable donors to transform beneficence into authority.
Second, the article integrates debates on gifts, reciprocity, and hierarchy into an explicitly emotional register. Building on Mauss’s account of the don and its triad of obligations (to give, to receive, to reciprocate), IR scholars have shown how aid, security guarantees, and diplomatic support function as morally saturated exchanges.Footnote 9 Anthropological critiques, from ParryFootnote 10 to DerridaFootnote 11, underscore the impossibility of the ‘pure’ gift and the inevitability of expectation and obligation. Extending these insights, the article identifies gratitude as the affective hinge through which political gifts become binding in world politics. Prescribed displays of appreciation, and accusations of ingratitude, function as sanctions that police the boundaries of acceptable behavior within hierarchies and stabilize asymmetry by moralizing political dependence. Third, the article advances scholarship on hierarchy and authority by foregrounding the emotional mechanisms through which hierarchical orders are reproduced and contested. Hierarchy is commonly theorized in terms of material capabilities, relational authority, or shared legitimacy.Footnote 12 This article demonstrates that hierarchy also rests on ‘emotional regimes’Footnote 13 and ‘feeling rules’Footnote 14 that prescribe what subordinate actors ought to feel, when they should express it, and how. Within these regimes, gratitude becomes a required emotional script for recipients of security guarantees or economic aid. Failure to perform it, whether through silence or insufficient appreciation, is interpreted not as a minor etiquette lapse but as disrespect, unreliability, or disloyalty. Great powers respond by tightening emotional expectations: reprimanding, shaming, or threatening to withdraw support. Gratitude thus acts as a disciplinary emotion embedded in the governance of hierarchy.
Analytically, the article synthesizes three strands of theory to identify the mechanisms through which gratitude operates as disciplinary power: Maussian gift logics, emotional-regime analysis, and speech-act approaches to emotion (emotives). Empirically, it adopts a comparative emotional-discursive methodology,Footnote 15 juxtaposing the Soviet-Cuban relationship during the 1962 Missile Crisis with the contemporary U.S.-Ukraine alliance (2022–2025). Despite stark differences in ideology, polarity, and geopolitical context, both great powers framed their assistance as a costly gift and mobilized gratitude most forcefully at moments of subordinate resistance. The Soviet Union invoked gratitude when Cuba rejected the terms of the U.S.-Soviet settlement in 1962. The U.S. political leaders did so when Ukraine resisted conditionality and rejected pressure to negotiate with Russia. Across both cases, gratitude appears not as a diffuse moral virtue but as a reactive instrument deployed to discipline deviance, reassert moral authority, and translate material support into political compliance. The empirical analysis relies on official speeches, press conferences, and diplomatic exchanges as primary sources. While the Soviet-Cuban case is contextualized through archival scholarship, the U.S.-Ukraine case is based exclusively on primary discourse and media releases, reflecting both its unsettled nature and the article’s focus on tracing the performative construction of gratitude as a technology of discipline.
Gratitude as a moral and coercive emotion in international politics
Gratitude occupies a paradoxical position in social and political life. It is almost universally celebrated as a virtue, yet it simultaneously produces one of the strongest forms of moral constraint. Across psychology,Footnote 16 philosophy,Footnote 17 sociology and anthropology,Footnote 18 and even primatology,Footnote 19 scholars identify gratitude as a key mechanism that sustains reciprocity, moral order, and cooperative behavior. That this emotion, so central to the fabric of social relations, has received little attention in International Relations is analytically striking, particularly given the sophistication of the emotional turn in examining fear,Footnote 20 passion and resentment,Footnote 21 empathy,Footnote 22 and humiliation or shame.Footnote 23 Among the moral emotions, gratitude is arguably the one most explicitly tied to expectation, obligation, and indebtedness and thus to the asymmetrical exercise of power. Precisely because it appears benign and virtuous, its coercive potential has remained largely overlooked and undertheorized within IR.
The theoretical framework developed here proceeds in four steps, each contributing a distinct analytical layer. The Maussian analysis establishes the structural preconditions: gifts generate binding obligations that exceed their material dimension and create moral asymmetry between donor and recipient. The virtue/vice section identifies what makes gratitude specifically powerful within this structure. Unlike other moral emotions, gratitude uniquely fuses appreciation with obligation, making its absence a moral violation rather than merely a social lapse. The emotional regimes section shows how these moral expectations are institutionalized into normative structures that prescribe, enforce, and police affective compliance. The emotives section, finally, identifies the micro-level speech acts through which these structural expectations are performed, enforced, and contested in concrete diplomatic and political interactions. Together, these four layers explain not only why gratitude generates obligation, but how obligations of gratitude become institutionalized, emotionally enforced, and politically mobilized to discipline dissent, moralize asymmetrical dependence, and stabilize hierarchical orders.
The Maussian logic: to give, to receive, and to return
Mauss’s Essai sur le don Footnote 24 remains an indispensable reference point for understanding how exchange, obligation, and authority become intertwined in world politics. Gifts, Mauss famously argued, are ‘total prestations’ governed by a triad of obligations that produce enduring social bonds and hierarchical relations: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. Although Mauss attributed the binding force of the gift to the hau, the ‘spirit of the given thing,’ subsequent scholarship has secularized this insight arguing that what compels reciprocity is a socially enforced normative expectation. Indeed, gifts are moral projects that define, codify, and naturalize who owes what to whom.
IR scholars have taken up Mauss in multiple and sometimes divergent ways. Early work on reciprocity in international cooperation, most notably Keohane’s analysis of reciprocal arrangements in ‘international regimes’Footnote 25 and Baldwin’s formulation of power as ‘social exchange,’Footnote 26 implicitly rests on Maussian logic. In these accounts, reciprocity functions as a morally inflected quid pro quo through which cooperation is stabilized and expectations of return are embedded in institutional practice. More recent scholarship has crystallized a distinct research agenda on gift-giving in IR that explicitly returns to Mauss. Benabdallah’s work demonstrates that mainstream aid studies often flatten Mauss’s relational complexity by assuming donors who give unidirectionally to passive recipients, treating assistance as a purely material transfer, and presuming that donors do not expect returns.Footnote 27 Her ‘relational approach’ reinstates reciprocity at the core of donor-recipient dynamics, foregrounding nonmaterial forms of giving, such as solidarity, recognition, and diplomatic support. Over time, symbolic ‘paybacks,’ such as diplomatic alignment, voting behavior in multilateral forums,Footnote 28 or contributions to a donor’s international status, reciprocate earlier material transfers and help consolidate hierarchical bonds. Kustermans’s analysis of diplomatic giftsFootnote 29 further specifies the performative dimensions of exchange. Drawing on cases from the ancient Near East to early modern East Asia, he shows that ceremonial objects, ritual protocols, and stylized gestures do not simply accompany diplomacy; they constitute it. Authority, in this sense, is performative rather than merely institutional. It is enacted and recognized through repeated exchanges that define who may give to whom, under what conditions, and in what manner. Gift exchange thus becomes a mechanism for staging, testing, and stabilizing status hierarchies, rendering visible the normative asymmetries that underpin relations between great powers and subordinate states.
Anthropological critiques have further complicated the Maussian framework by demonstrating that reciprocity is neither universal nor uniform across cultural contexts. Parry’s analysis of Indian dāna traditions shows that unreciprocated gifts may intentionally repudiate return and therefore do not generate the binding obligations Mauss considered universal.Footnote 30 Laidlaw’s study of dān in Shvetambar Jain communities pushes this argument even further. He shows that the giving of alms to Jain renouncers is a highly institutionalized elaboration of the free gift, a gift that explicitly refuses to create personal bonds, obligations, or cycles of reciprocity.Footnote 31 As Laidlaw argues, ‘the free gift does not create connections and obligations’ between the parties.Footnote 32 Derrida radicalizes this challenge by interrogating the very possibility of the ‘pure gift.’ In Donner le temps ,Footnote 33 he argues that once a gift is recognized as such, either by the giver or the recipient, it ceases to be a pure gift and becomes entangled in circuits of obligation, expectation, gratitude, or counter-gift. Recognition itself introduces calculation, installing the very moral economy Mauss described. Rather than negating Mauss, Derrida sharpens him: if gifts inevitably generate expectation once acknowledged, then the pure gift remains a regulative ideal, and obligation, reciprocity, and gratitude emerge not as deviations but as constitutive features of gift-giving economies.
Taken together, these anthropological and philosophical critiques reinforce a central insight for IR: the gift is never politically innocent. IR scholars have emphasized that gifts in contemporary world politics continue to function as ‘total social facts’ whose significance exceeds their material dimension. Heins, Unrau, and Avram argue that unreciprocated gifts can ‘poison’ political relationships by humiliating recipients and violating expectations of balance, an affective dynamic that resonates strongly with accusations of ingratitude in asymmetric alliances.Footnote 34 Mallard shows how gift logics structured postwar economic governance and North-South financial solidarity.Footnote 35 Across these accounts, the Maussian insight is retained but refracted through a Derridean lens: the gift is always already embedded in normative and emotional regimes that produce an obligation of reciprocity. The affective hinge of this regime is gratitude, the emotion that signifies acknowledgment of a moral debt, enacts hierarchy, and legitimizes asymmetrical relations.Footnote 36 Far from being a benign sentiment, gratitude emerges as an ‘emotion norm’Footnote 37 through which political actors translate material transfers into moralized expectations, discipline deviance, and stabilize unequal relationships. It is the affective hinge through which hierarchy, reciprocity, and moral constraint are enacted and policed.
(In)Gratitude between virtue and vice
The moral tradition has long conceptualized gratitude as far more than an affective response. It is an ethical disposition central to the maintenance of social order. Seneca’s claim that ‘There will always be murderers, tyrants, robbers, adulterers, plunderers, temple-thieves, traitors. And lower than all these is ingratitude’Footnote 38 reflects the view that gratitude functions as the affective glue of communal life, sustaining the reciprocal recognition on which trust and cooperation depend. In this rendering, gratitude is a relational virtue. It acknowledges generosity, affirms the moral worth of the benefactor, and upholds the normative architecture of reciprocity. This is why Hobbes elevated gratitude to the status of a ‘law of nature,’Footnote 39 placing it alongside the imperative to seek peace. In Leviathan, gratitude is not a voluntary feeling but a requirement of civil coexistence, an affective assurance to the giver that benevolence was not misplaced and that cooperation remains possible. Ingratitude, by contrast, signals unreliability and threatens to unravel the fragile foundations of peace. Adam Smith similarly embedded gratitude within the fabric of ‘moral sentiments,’ treating it not as a transactional mechanism but as an internal virtue that sustains sociability. For Smith, ‘the sentiment which most immediately and directly prompts us to reward is gratitude.’Footnote 40 It honors the intention behind a gesture rather than merely its material consequences, and in doing so, it serves as a marker of moral character and of membership within a moral community. In his own words: ‘The man who does not recompense his benefactor, when he has it in his power, and when his benefactor needs his assistance, is, no doubt, guilty of the blackest ingratitude.’Footnote 41
Taken together, these classical traditions underscore a central insight: gratitude is a profoundly normative emotion. This claim requires clarification. Under any emotional regime, emotions carry normative expectations. Indeed, fear, anger, and empathy are all subject to feeling rules that prescribe appropriate expression. What makes gratitude distinctively normative is that its normativity is internal to its meaning as a ‘moral virtue.’Footnote 42 Gratitude is not merely expected; it is morally required by the very logic of beneficence. To withhold gratitude is to commit a moral offense against the benefactor. This internal moral compulsion gives gratitude a coercive force that other regulated emotions lack. It is not disciplined from outside by social norms alone. It disciplines from within by making the ungrateful person morally deficient rather than merely emotionally noncompliant. Komter highlights this ambivalence by noting that gratitude can shade into a ‘feeling of indebtedness,’Footnote 43 even though the two are conceptually distinct.Footnote 44 Whereas gratitude signals appreciative recognition, indebtedness foregrounds obligation and repayment. In practice, however, the boundary between the two is often blurred. McCullough and Tsang similarly note that gratitude occupies an uneasy boundary between appreciation and obligation,Footnote 45 a sentiment that can inspire ‘prosocial behavior’Footnote 46 but also compel compliance through ‘debts of gratitude.’Footnote 47 In this sense, gratitude disciplines by transforming generosity into a moral claim and by converting asymmetry into a structure of felt obligationFootnote 48. Indeed, ‘failure to express thanks is socially undesirable [and] a punishable offense.’Footnote 49
These dynamics become sharper in international politics. Economic aid, military assistance, and diplomatic protection are rarely exchanged among equal states. They are embedded in international structures of inequality, dependence, and authority. When a powerful state extends support to a weaker one, expectations of gratitude are overlaid onto these asymmetries. Expressions of appreciation do not merely acknowledge generosity; they tacitly affirm the donor’s superior position within the relationship. In fact, ‘helping is a manifestation of power since it participates in the construction of a social hierarchy between a resourceful actor and a dispossessed one.’Footnote 50 The emotional script of gratitude, therefore, reinforces hierarchy. It casts compliance, alignment, or restraint as morally appropriate responses while rendering autonomy, critique, or resistance morally deviant. In this sense, gratitude operates simultaneously as a celebrated virtue and as a technology of soft coercion. By converting assistance into a moral gift, gratitude generates expectations of acknowledgment and reciprocation. The fear of ingratitude then incentivizes costly compliance, thereby stabilizing hierarchical relations through moral rather than purely material means. And because ingratitude is morally coded as a vice,Footnote 51 deviation invites moral censure and political sanction.
The coercive potential of gratitude thus does not stem primarily from material threats but from the risk of moral disqualification. To refuse gratitude is to risk being marked as unreliable, unworthy, or deviant within the relationship. This moral-coercive duality is intrinsic to the disciplinary power of gratitude. By defining the boundaries of honorable behavior, gratitude translates material asymmetry into moral obligation. Assistance becomes a ‘moral gift,’ and gratitude becomes the ‘moral currency’Footnote 52 that legitimizes and stabilizes unequal relationships by making hierarchy appear appropriate, deserved, and even virtuous. In other words, ‘the politics of emotional obligation is a politics of duty.’Footnote 53
Emotional regimes: the disciplinary power of gratitude
To grasp the disciplinary power of gratitude, it must be situated within what Reddy terms an emotional regime; that is, ‘the set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them.’Footnote 54 As Reddy further argues, any enduring political order must institutionalize a normative emotional order as a constitutive element of its stability.Footnote 55 Therefore, emotional regimes do not merely reflect preexisting sentiments; they prescribe legitimate affective repertoires, reward emotional conformity, and sanction deviation. In this sense, they operate analogously to political or legal regimes by structuring the conditions under which emotional expression becomes socially intelligible and politically consequential. Such regimes may be ‘strict,’ requiring individuals to perform normative emotions and suppress deviant ones, or ‘loose,’ allowing greater emotional navigation and a more diverse repertoire of affective management tools. Crucially, strict emotional regimes ‘exploit the power of emotives to shape emotions’ while discounting or denouncing the disruptive potential of emotional activations that may generate unintended transformation.Footnote 56 They thus delineate the boundaries of acceptable emotional conduct and regulate the affective life of political communities.
Within this framework, gratitude is not a discretionary courtesy but an affective performance through which subordinate actors signal moral character, relational fidelity, and recognition of status hierarchies. For weaker states receiving military, economic, or diplomatic support, gratitude becomes an expected emotional posture. Conversely, failing to perform gratitude, or performing it in ways deemed insufficient, constitutes a breach of the emotional regime. Such deviations are seldom treated as minor lapses in etiquette. Rather, they are interpreted as indicators of disrespect, unreliability, or even disloyalty, thereby calling the subordinate actor’s trustworthiness and moral standing into question. Emotional regimes thus transform gratitude into a mechanism of emotional discipline through which dominant actors seek to impose specific affective expectations on subordinate ones. Actors who do not perform gratitude in accordance with prevailing emotion norms risk public admonishment, private rebuke, or more subtle forms of political marginalization.Footnote 57 In this way, gratitude operates as a norm-enforcing emotional obligation that legitimates and reproduces hierarchical relationships.
By rendering compliance morally appropriate and dissent morally suspect, emotional regimes endow gratitude with a disciplinary force that stabilizes asymmetry while obscuring its coercive dimensions. They regulate not only what subordinate states are expected to do but also how they are expected to feel and how those feelings must be publicly displayed to remain in good standing within hierarchical orders. Within such regimes, emotions cease to function as merely private psychological states and instead become socially mandated performances.Footnote 58 Hochschild’s notion of ‘feeling rules’Footnote 59 captures how actors are instructed on what they are supposed to feel and which emotional displays count as appropriate. These ‘emotion norms’Footnote 60 operate through ‘logics of appropriateness’Footnote 61: actors comply with emotional expectations not because doing so maximizes material utility but because they internalize socially legitimate modes of feeling and expression.
Emotional regimes are not, however, closed systems of domination. Subordinate actors are not passive recipients of emotional prescription but strategic agents who develop counter-emotional discursive practices that preserve agency within hierarchical constraints. Affective restraint involves selectively withholding the saturation of gratitude typically expected, thereby signaling dissatisfaction without open defiance. Moral counterclaiming involves reframing the subordinate’s own contribution as itself a form of gift deserving recognition, inverting the donor-recipient hierarchy by positioning the subordinate as also a benefactor. As Gustafsson and Hall observe, emotional obligations are ‘a site for contestation’Footnote 62 in which competing claims over who owes what to whom are actively negotiated. Subordinate actors can, therefore, mobilize rival ‘emotional narratives’Footnote 63 to contest the terms of their indebtedness. Understanding these counter-emotional practices is essential for a complete account of emotional discipline, since it reveals that gratitude’s coercive power is never total. It generates resistance precisely because it reaches into the moral self-understanding of its targets.
Emotives: how gratitude is performed and enforced
If emotional regimes provide the structural architecture of affective governance, ‘emotives,’Footnote 64 Reddy’s reinterpretation of Austin’s speech-act theory,Footnote 65 constitute their micro-level mechanisms. As Reddy notes, emotives are
a form of speech act that is neither descriptive nor performative … Emotives are translations into words about, into descriptions of, the ongoing translation tasks that currently occupy attention as well as of the other such tasks that remain in the queue, overflowing its current capacities. Emotives are influenced directly by, and alter, what they refer to. Thus, emotives are similar to performatives (and differ from constatives) in that emotives do things to the world. Emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful.Footnote 66
In the domain of gratitude, emotives such as ‘we are grateful,’ ‘we thank,’ or the prescriptive ‘they should be grateful’ accomplish several interrelated tasks. First, they enact gratitude by inscribing it into public and diplomatic records as the appropriate emotional stance. Second, they prescribe the emotional expectations governing subordinate behavior, signaling what recipients of assistance ought to feel and display. Third, they discipline emotional behavior by demarcating the boundary between adequate and inadequate expressions of appreciation. Finally, they reproduce hierarchy by positioning gratitude as the expected disposition of the subordinate and affirming the benefactor’s superior moral standing.
Negative emotives, such as accusations of ‘ingratitude,’ claims that a partner is ‘insufficiently grateful,’ or warnings that gratitude is ‘lacking,’ function as affective and social sanctions. They stigmatize deviation from emotional norms and impose reputational costs on the target. Because ingratitude is coded as a moral failing, such accusations exert significant moral pressure and serve as boundary-policing devices, demarcating reliable partners from deviant or untrustworthy ones. As William Hewitt notes: ‘A state with a reputation for ingratitude might find itself in evil case when it sorely needed help.’Footnote 67 These sanctioning emotives align with broader sociological accounts of moral emotionsFootnote 68 and IR work on shame, humiliation, and guilt,Footnote 69 all of which demonstrate how emotional censure can discipline political behavior. Through these mechanisms, emotives operationalize the disciplinary power of gratitude since they transform expectations into obligations and dissent into emotional impropriety. However, while Reddy’s formulation emphasizes what ‘emotives’ do to the speaker, the present analysis follows Ariffin in extending this insight toward the addressee. For Ariffin, emotives are best understood as ‘cognitions whose distinctive nature is to excite an emotion for political purposes.’Footnote 70 When successfully deployed, ‘they impart stimuli for behavior and can as a result be implemented in policies and eventually embedded in institutions.’Footnote 71 In asymmetric alliances, gratitude emotives operate precisely in this mode, directed not inward but outward, seeking to produce deference, compliance, and acknowledgment in the subordinate actor rather than to express the donor’s internal emotional state.
In international politics, emotives circulate through diplomatic exchanges, joint communiqués, press conferences, and media narratives that evaluate whether states have expressed the ‘right’ emotions. Such utterances are not incidental rhetorical flourishes. They constitute part of the machinery of emotional governance.Footnote 72 By transforming gratitude from a private sentiment into a publicly policed performance, emotives tie emotional expression to standards of appropriateness and legitimacy. In doing so, they narrow the range of acceptable emotional comportments available to subordinate states. Compliance thus becomes not merely a strategic choice but a morally desirable disposition, while dissent is reframed as emotional impropriety, a failure to feel and display what hierarchy demands. Through these mechanisms, emotives discipline subordinate actors and help sustain asymmetrical orders not through material coercion alone but through the moralized and affective regulation of what states must feel, express, and acknowledge in order to remain in good standing.
The disciplinary power of gratitude: summary and clarifications
The preceding sections have identified the distinct analytical layers through which gratitude operates in asymmetric international relationships. Bringing these elements together, the present section synthesizes the broader causal logic of gratitude as disciplinary power while clarifying the scope conditions and limits of the argument before turning to the empirical cases.
When the Maussian triad of obligation is combined with the structuring force of emotional regimes and the performative operation of emotives, gratitude emerges as a distinctive technology of disciplinary powerFootnote 73 that operates through a specific causal sequence: material assistance is framed as a morally valorized gift, which generates a debt of gratitude in the recipient, which prescribes an emotional performance of acknowledgment and deference, which in turn constrains the recipient’s capacity to contest, reframe, or resist the donor’s authority. Each link in this chain is analytically distinct. The gift framing is not automatic; it requires discursive work to moralize assistance as sacrifice rather than strategic interest. The debt is not material but moral. It operates through the risk of disqualification rather than through direct coercion. This sequential logic is what distinguishes gratitude as a disciplinary emotion from instrumental patron-client relationships.Footnote 74
Two scope conditions merit clarification. First, the disciplinary power of gratitude is not confined to wartime dependency, though acute material vulnerability does intensify its operation. As Bleiker and Hutchison observe, emotions become ‘particularly visible, acute, and politically relevant in situations of conflict,’Footnote 75 which is why wartime dependency relationships provide the clearest empirical window into the disciplinary power of gratitude. More precisely, the mechanism identified here operates most forcefully when three conditions converge: significant material asymmetry between donor and recipient, a gift-logic framing that moralizes assistance as voluntary sacrifice rather than strategic interest, and a moment of subordinate resistance that disrupts established hierarchical expectations. Where these conditions are absent or only partially met, gratitude discourse may still circulate but is less likely to function as a coercive emotion.
Second, gratitude expectations are not inherently unidirectional, and the politics of emotional obligation can generate rival and simultaneous claims within the same relationship. As Gustafsson and Hall demonstrate, the politics of emotion involves contests over ‘who can or should feel what and whose feelings matter,’Footnote 76 and these contests can run in multiple directions at once. European leaders have recently insisted that the continent owes Ukraine gratitudeFootnote 77 for bearing the frontline burden of resistance against Russian expansionism, even as they simultaneously expect Ukrainian gratitude for billions of euros in military and financial assistance. These competing emotional obligations do not neutralize one another. Rather, they reveal that gratitude operates within a field of rival claims in which actors contest not only what is owed but who has the authority to define the terms of the debt. What determines whether gratitude functions as coercive discipline rather than as reciprocal recognition is less the direction of material flow than the relative capacity of actors to institutionalize their emotional regime within the relationship. Great powers, by virtue of their centrality within international orders, are structurally better positioned to make their gratitude demands stick and to have accusations of ingratitude register as moral failures rather than as contestable political claims. As a result, accusations of ingratitude voiced by great powers are more likely to register as credible moral judgments rather than merely partisan claims within the relationship.
The argument is not that gratitude replaces material coercion or operates independently from it. Material dependence and emotional discipline are analytically distinct but empirically intertwined. Military aid, economic assistance, and security guarantees create structural asymmetries that make emotional obligations politically consequential. Gratitude functions not as an alternative to coercion but as a moralizing and legitimizing layer that reshapes how coercive relationships are interpreted, justified, and sustained. Whereas direct coercion constrains behavior through explicit threats or material penalties, gratitude discipline operates by narrowing the range of morally legitimate responses available to subordinate actors. It transforms compliance into virtue and dissent into emotional impropriety. In doing so, gratitude helps naturalize the coercive dimensions of hierarchy by reframing asymmetrical dependence as morally appropriate reciprocity rather than domination. I’m not saying that gratitude alone determines policy outcomes. Material dependence may constrain available strategic options regardless. What gratitude discipline reshapes is the political sustainability of those choices. It influences how constraints are interpreted, justified, and publicly performed. In doing so, emotional expectations align strategic adjustment with moral validation, narrowing the space for rhetorical autonomy or normative dissent. The coercive power of debts of gratitude, therefore, lies in the normative reframing through which hierarchical solidarity becomes morally appropriate.
Case I: ‘The Cuban revolution exists thanks to the USSR’
The disciplinary power of gratitude is most clearly visible in the formative years of the Cuba-Soviet Union relationship, particularly during and after the 1962 Missile Crisis. Whereas traditional U.S. historiography reduces the crisis to a bilateral nuclear confrontation resolved through a secret exchange between Washington and Moscow, revisionist scholarship has shown that such accounts erase Cuban agencyFootnote 78 and obscure the emotional economy that structured Soviet-Cuban interactions. For Havana, the crisis did not begin with the U-2 photographs of October 14th but with the Bay of Pigs invasion 18 months earlier,Footnote 79 a traumatic moment that convinced Cuban leaders that the Revolution’s survival depended on Soviet protection. This extreme asymmetry of vulnerability created fertile terrain for an emotional regime in which gratitude became an expected and policed moral posture. It was precisely when Cuba refused to perform this posture, after the secret U.S.-Soviet settlement, that Moscow escalated its use of (in)gratitude as a disciplinary emotional norm.
The sharpest tensions emerged in the immediate aftermath of the October 1962 settlement, when Cuba discovered that the USSR had negotiated a bilateral agreement with Washington without Cuban participation. The terms of the settlement required the withdrawal of Soviet missiles, a public commitment to on-site UN inspections, and, implicitly, Cuban endorsement of the superpower deal.Footnote 80 As Havana rejected each of these demands, deep tensions emerged within the alliance.Footnote 81 Archival conversations reveal that Castro and his leadership viewed inspections as a direct affront to Cuban sovereignty, a symbolic reduction of Cuba to a mere object of negotiation rather than an autonomous revolutionary state. Accepting inspections would have meant accepting subordination. For Soviet officials, however, appreciation was the expected counter-gift, the appropriate repayment for what Khrushchev repeatedly described as the USSR’s decisive role in ‘saving’ the Revolution. Thus, when Cuba resisted these obligations, the Soviet leadership interpreted the resistance not simply as a policy disagreement but as a failure to honor a moral debt of gratitude.
Throughout 1962, Soviet leaders increasingly named and moralized their military and economic support for Cuba as an existential gift. This shift was not incidental. It emerged precisely as Cuban leaders questioned the legitimacy of Soviet decisions and resisted the postcrisis settlement. In private conversations, Khrushchev responded by foregrounding sacrifice, cost, and existential risk, thereby transforming material assistance into a normative claim on Cuban conduct. By narrating Soviet protection as decisive for Cuba’s survival and by framing Cuban criticism as moral failure rather than political disagreement, Khrushchev articulated a logic in which gratitude became the expected response to protection. The following passage illustrates how Soviet assistance was discursively converted into moral entitlement:
We have never stated that the missiles would serve to convert Cuba to a military installation against imperialism. Only the foolish could argue that we placed the missiles there with the purpose of keeping them in that location. We think that we have gained a victory for Cuba and for the Soviet Union, and that the objectives that we sought in bringing the missiles there have been achieved … We have achieved our bottom line. Let us ask ourselves: Why did they not attack Cuba? The only answer is: because of the missiles … We have become bitter about the fact that after having made an extraordinary effort by situating the missiles in Cuba, the effort that brought us to move men, weapons, risk war and spend enormous sums of money, when we believed we had arrived at the end victorious, suddenly your rude criticism of us crops up. And afterwards, we have seen how your attitudes get in the way of solving problems, not only in Cuba but elsewhere … We are convinced that if we had not placed missiles in Cuba, Cuba would already have been crushed … We have ordered the Soviet troops to die alongside the Cubans. You can be certain that they would. In making our decisions, we have thought this action would be beneficial to Cuba, but it did not seem this way to you. You walked out in order to bring up our differences … We have sent men, weapons, and spent hundreds of millions of rubles on this war … Now there is the promise not to attack Cuba, now Cuba exists … We have dedicated all our efforts to saving Cuba … and all the efforts and expenditures will be justified, in our judgement, since Cuba exists … Only the missiles could contain the United States, only the fear … I did everything in the interest of Cuba … We are very pleased about Cuba, and at the same time, we are upset.Footnote 82
This formulation was not merely descriptive. It functioned as a performative utterance that actively sought to produce the emotional reality it named. By repeatedly emphasizing sacrifice, material cost, and existential risk, Khrushchev constituted the USSR as a selfless benefactor while positioning Cuba as the morally indebted recipient of that protection. Read through Mauss’s framework, Soviet assistance operated as a ‘total fact,’ binding Cuba not only materially but morally and generating obligations that exceeded any formal agreement. A Derridean perspective further clarifies the coercive structure of this gift economy: once assistance is named, moralized, and narrated as sacrifice, it ceases to be ‘pure’ and becomes embedded in circuits of expectation and counter-gift. Within this normative architecture, Cuban political autonomy became inseparable from emotional compliance. Resistance to Soviet preferences was no longer legible as legitimate disagreement, but as ingratitude, as a moral deviation that authorized corrective pressure. Gratitude thus operated as a disciplinary mechanism through which hierarchy was reaffirmed and dissent delegitimized.
Cuban criticism following the secret U.S.-Soviet settlement is analytically decisive not because it merely expresses frustration but because it openly contests the moral and political terms of Soviet protection. By framing the withdrawal of the missiles as a unilateral decision, a betrayal of solidarity, and an affront to sovereignty, Castro disrupted the implicit gift economy underpinning the alliance. In doing so, Cuban leaders challenged the Soviet claim to moral authority derived from protection and sacrifice. It is precisely this moment of critique, when Cuban agency is asserted against Soviet authority, that helps explain why Soviet officials subsequently intensified emotives of sacrifice and beneficence. The following statement, articulated privately by Castro to Mikoyan, illuminates the grievances that rendered gratitude a necessary disciplinary response rather than a spontaneous moral sentiment:
Concessions on the part of the Soviet Union produced a sense of oppressiveness. Psychologically our people were not prepared for that. A feeling of deep disappointment, bitterness and pain has appeared, as if we were deprived of not only the missiles, but of the very symbol of solidarity. Reports of missile launchers being dismantled and returned to the USSR at first seemed to our people to be an insolent lie. You know, the Cuban people were not aware of the agreement, were not aware that the missiles still belonged to the Soviet side. The Cuban people did not conceive of the juridical status of these weapons. They had become accustomed to the fact that the Soviet Union gave us weapons and that they became our property … Our people admire the policies of the Soviet government, learn from the Soviet people to whom they are deeply thankful for invaluable help and support. But at that difficult moment our people felt as if they had lost their way … Cubans were consumed by a sense of disappointment, confusion and bitterness … The feeling of disappointment, pain and bitterness that enveloped people could have been used by counter-revolutionaries to instigate anti-Soviet elements. Enemies could have profited because the legal rules about which we had been speaking with the people were being forgotten. The decision was made without consultation, without coordinating it with our government.… Since then our people began to address very sensitively the matter of sovereignty.Footnote 83
These remarks constituted a direct violation of the feeling rules governing the gift-based emotional regime, which prescribed gratitude, trust, and disciplined restraint rather than indignation or moral reproach. By articulating disappointment, bitterness, and renewed sensitivity to sovereignty, Cuban leaders refused to inhabit the affective position expected of a protected subordinate. In place of gratitude, Cuba performed autonomy, asserting interpretive authority over the meaning of Soviet assistance. It was precisely this affective insubordination that prompted Soviet officials to mobilize gratitude as a corrective device.
Faced with Cuban emotional insubordination, Soviet officials responded not by recalibrating policy concessions but by escalating the emotional governance of the relationship. Rather than engaging Castro’s critique on its substantive merits, they sought to reassert hierarchy through emotives that reframed Soviet assistance as sacrifice, generosity, and moral entitlement. Mikoyan’s November 1962 conversations with Cuban leaders are particularly revealing in this respect. Saturated with references to effort, deprivation, and existential commitment, his language did not merely recall what the USSR had done for Cuba. It actively sought to reorder the emotional field of the alliance by prescribing satisfaction, stigmatizing dissent, and reinscribing moral indebtedness. The following excerpts illustrate how gratitude was mobilized as a corrective response to Cuban criticism:
The meetings and conversations with Comrade Fidel Castro had for me very great significance. They helped me to understand more deeply the role of the psychological factor for the peoples of these countries … But we thought that you would be satisfied by our act. We did everything so that Cuba would not be destroyed. We see your readiness to die beautifully, but we believe that it isn’t worth dying beautifully … We are doing a lot to strengthen our unity, and with you, comrades, we will always be with you despite all the difficulties … Compare the situation of a year ago, and today. A year ago the presence of Soviet soldiers in Cuba would have provoked an explosion of indignation. Now, it is as if the right of Russians to be on this continent also is recognized … Cuba is powerful. You have no war. You have the support of the socialist camp … I thought that I understood the Cubans … I am afraid that when I return, I will say I don’t know them … Our stake in Cuba is huge in both material and moral sense, and also in a military regard. Think about it, are we really helping you out of overabundance? Do we have something extra? We don’t have enough for ourselves. No, we want to preserve the base of socialism in Latin America. You were born as heroes, before a revolutionary situation ripened in Latin America, but the camp of socialism still has not grown into its full capability to come to your assistance. We give you ships, weapons, fruits and vegetables.Footnote 84
These utterances were not neutral recollections of past events but coercive emotives that enacted discipline within the alliance. By repeatedly naming sacrifice, cost, and deprivation, Soviet leaders transformed material assistance into a morally charged prestation that demanded recognition. At the same time, they prescribed the legitimate emotional response, framing satisfaction and gratitude as the only appropriate affective stance in light of Soviet efforts. Through this emotional framing, hierarchy was reasserted and Soviet sacrifice became the source of authority. In this context, expressions of Cuban dissatisfaction could no longer be articulated as ordinary strategic disagreements. Instead, they were recoded as signs of emotional impropriety, failures to acknowledge a debt that had been discursively constructed as both existential and morally binding. As Komter suggests, debts of gratitude operate as experiences of moral indebtedness rather than as formal obligations.Footnote 85 Here, the invocation of sacrifice functioned precisely in this way, narrowing the range of legitimate political expression available to Cuban leaders. Gratitude discipline did not mechanically determine Cuban policy choices, but it shaped the terms under which dissent could be voiced without incurring reputational or relational costs.
On 4 November 1962, amid sustained tensions and unresolved Cuban dissatisfaction, Mikoyan announced a new package of military and economic assistance explicitly framed as gratis. Rather than signaling reconciliation on equal terms, the announcement functioned as a strategic intensification of the gift relationship. By emphasizing that the aid had been extended without request, calculation, or expectation of repayment, Soviet officials sought to deepen moral asymmetry and restore gratitude as the dominant affective posture. The renewed gift thus operated not as a concession to Cuban autonomy but as a disciplinary maneuver designed to foreclose dissent by enlarging the moral debt:
We were and are considering it to be our duty, a duty of communists, to do everything necessary to defend the Cuban revolution, to frustrate the imperialist plans. Some time ago our comrades informed us that the economic situation in the country [Cuba] had worsened. This deterioration was caused by pressure on the part of the Americans and large expenses for defensive needs. We were afraid that the worsening of the situation could be the result of the implementation of the [American] plan for the economic suffocation of Cuba. The CC CPSU discussed the situation in Cuba and decided, without your request – you are very modest and try not to disturb us by requests – to undertake some measures in order to strengthen our help to Cuba. If before you were receiving part of the weapons on credit and only a portion of armaments free of charge, now we decided to supply you gratis with weapons and partly with military uniforms – 100 thousand sets in two years – and equipment. We saw that the Cuban trade representatives, who were participating in the negotiations, were feeling themselves somewhat uneasy. They were short of more than 100 million dollars to somehow balance the budget. Therefore, we accepted all their proposals in order to frustrate the plan of Kennedy, designed for [causing] an internal explosion in Cuba. The same thing can be said regarding food and manufactured goods. In order to alleviate the economic situation in Cuba we sent there articles and food worth 198 million rubles. Speaking very frankly, we have been giving to you everything without counting.Footnote 86
Within the grammar of emotional regimes, renewed generosity recalibrated expectations of gratitude while narrowing the boundaries of legitimate dissent. Enlarging the gift effectively enlarged the moral debt, recoding continued assertions of autonomy as signs of emotional impropriety rather than as permissible political disagreement. In this way, gratitude discipline operated not by determining Cuban policy choices directly, but by shaping how autonomy could be justified and publicly performed without jeopardizing the moral foundations of the alliance.
By the end of 1962, sustained Soviet pressure had reshaped the emotional terrain of the alliance. Cuban leaders gradually privileged an emotional realignment, as Cuban officials privately acknowledged a sense of moral indebtedness ‘for all the efforts [the USSR] made [in] the name of the Revolution.’Footnote 87 A few months later, in April 1963, Castro publicly performed the gratitude that Moscow had sought, delivering a carefully staged declaration in Red Square during his first official visit to the Soviet Union. The speech functioned as a symbolic counter-gift, restoring moral equilibrium through public acknowledgment:
Many Soviets ask me how the Cuban Revolution was possible; how such a radical change was possible in a small, economically underdeveloped country that lay under the aegis of Yankee imperialism. It is possible that many Soviets admire our country for this reason, and that this is one of the reasons for the extraordinary sympathy they express toward our country. However, we never forget one circumstance: the Cuban Revolution was possible because long before that there was the Russian Revolution in 1917. Without the existence of the Soviet Union, the socialist revolution in Cuba would not have been possible! This does not mean that the Cuban Revolution was carried out by the Soviet Union. Amidst so many lies and slanders, the enemies of the USSR have not thought to claim such a thing. What it means is that, without the existence of the Soviet Union, the imperialists would have crushed any national liberation revolution in Latin America. And if they had crushed even a bourgeois revolution, if that revolution had affected their imperialist interests, they would have crushed a socialist revolution in Latin America much more expeditiously. But if the Soviet Union had not existed, the imperialists would not even have needed to resort to arms; they would have strangled that revolution through starvation, they would have crushed it with an economic blockade alone. But because the USSR existed, that revolution could not be crushed with an economic blockade! When the imperialists arbitrarily suppressed our sugar quota, that alone would have been enough to destroy the Revolution, plunging the country into hunger and ruin. And then the Soviet Union came to our aid, buying our sugar. When the imperialists suspended oil supplies, that would have been enough to destroy a country’s economy. But then the Soviet Union sent us oil. However, when the economic measures did not have the desired effect, interventionist plans began to be prepared. No capitalist country wanted to sell us weapons. It was then that the countries of the socialist camp, led by the Soviet Union, decided to facilitate the acquisition of the weapons we needed. And it was with that help and those weapons that we were able to repel the invaders at Playa Girón. If the Soviet Union did not exist, the imperialists would not have hesitated to attack our country militarily. It has been the power of the Soviet Union and the entire socialist camp that has held back imperialist aggression against our homeland. It is only natural that we feel deep and eternal gratitude toward the Soviet people.Footnote 88
This declaration is best understood not as an unprompted expression of admiration but as the culmination of a disciplinary process. By re-narrating the Cuban Revolution as structurally dependent on Soviet existence, power, and benevolence, Castro retrospectively validated Soviet claims of sacrifice and entitlement. The repeated counterfactual refrain – ‘if the Soviet Union did not exist’ – performed a decisive affective function, reframing material assistance as existential salvation. From the perspective of gift theory, this moment marks the completion of the Maussian cycle. Although Cuba did not reciprocate materially, it reciprocated symbolically through public deference and the acknowledgment of Soviet moral authority. Gratitude thus functioned as a counter-gift that transformed dependence into a relationship of normatively justified hierarchy while preserving the appearance of voluntarism. In doing so, it narrowed the range of legitimate political contestation by rendering potential dissent intelligible as moral impropriety rather than as strategic disagreement. The Cuban case, therefore, offers a paradigmatic illustration of gratitude as a technology of disciplinary power in world politics, one that converts assistance into moral authority and stabilizes asymmetry through affective means, particularly at moments of hierarchical strain.
Case II: Ungrateful Ukraine: U.S.-Ukraine, 2022–2025
The U.S.-Ukraine wartime alliance between 2022 and 2025 provides a contemporary illustration of how great powers mobilize gratitude as a disciplinary emotion in asymmetric relationships. As in the Soviet-Cuban case, gratitude did not operate as a diffuse moral background or benign sentiment but as a normatively charged expectation that could be activated to correct, constrain, and discipline subordinate behavior. From the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, U.S. political leaders framed American military, financial, and diplomatic support not merely as strategic necessity but as a costly and morally valorized gift undertaken ‘on behalf of freedom.’ This framing established the Maussian preconditions of obligation. Crucially, gratitude remained largely implicit as long as Ukrainian conduct aligned with U.S. preferences. It became explicit, politicized, and coercive only when Kyiv asserted agency by criticizing delays, demanding greater support, or resisting pressure to negotiate on terms Washington increasingly framed as prudent. In moments of such friction, gratitude emerged not as a spontaneous moral response but as a disciplinary instrument through which the United States sought to reassert authority and recalibrate Ukrainian behavior.
The emotional economy that later structured U.S. expectations toward Ukraine long predated the 2022 invasion. In the July 2019 phone call between President Donald Trump and the newly elected Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump articulated a hierarchical relationship grounded explicitly in gift logic. This exchange introduced a moralized narrative of American generosity and Ukrainian obligation, revealing how gratitude would later function as an instrument of discipline rather than appreciation:
I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than they are. Germany does almost nothing for you. All they do is talk and I think it’s something that you should really ask them about. When I was speaking to Angela Merkel she talks Ukraine, but she doesn’t do anything. A lot of the European countries are the same way so I think it’s something you want to look at but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine. I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.Footnote 89
This exchange operates as an early emotive in Reddy’s sense: an utterance that does not merely describe generosity but actively constitutes an emotional order. By contrasting American effort and sacrifice with alleged European indifference and Ukrainian insufficient reciprocity, Trump discursively positioned the United States as a wronged benefactor and Ukraine as a morally deficient recipient. In doing so, he introduced an affective hierarchy that recast material support as a source of normative entitlement rather than as a contingent strategic choice. Gratitude thus emerged as an expected emotional posture rather than an optional diplomatic courtesy. It shaped the moral grammar through which subsequent assistance would be interpreted, justified, and publicly performed.
This emotional architecture was significantly deepened after Russia’s full-scale invasion. In his 24 February 2022 national address, President Biden elevated American support for Ukraine into an act of civilizational responsibility, explicitly linking assistance to sacrifice borne by the American public:
I know this is hard and that Americans are already hurting. I will do everything in my power to limit the pain the American people are feeling at the gas pump. This is critical to me. But this aggression cannot go unanswered. If it did, the consequences for America would be much worse. America stands up to bullies. We stand up for freedom. This is who we are. … I spoke late last night to President Zelensky of Ukraine and I assured him that the United States, together with our Allies and partners in Europe, will support the Ukrainian people as they defend their country. We’ll provide humanitarian relief to ease their suffering … This is a dangerous moment for all of Europe, for the freedom around the world … And Putin’s aggression against Ukraine will end up costing Russia dearly, economically and strategically. We will make sure of that. Putin will be a pariah on the international stage. Any nation that countenances Russia’s naked aggression against Ukraine will be stained by association … And in the contest between democracy and autocracy, between sovereignty and subjugation, make no mistake: Freedom will prevail.Footnote 90
This discursive construction transformed U.S. support into a self-sacrificial offering that demanded acknowledgment. By foregrounding domestic economic hardship – ‘Americans are already hurting’ – Biden framed sanctions, military expenditures, and geopolitical risk as moral burdens voluntarily assumed on behalf of a vulnerable democracy. Material assistance was thus recast as an act of nationally embodied generosity rather than as a contingent strategic investment. In Maussian terms, the rhetoric articulated a gift embedded in collective identity and moral self-understanding, one capable of generating obligation even in the absence of explicit conditionality. Within this framing, Ukraine appeared as the deserving beneficiary of sacrifice, while the United States was positioned as the indispensable benefactor whose endurance sustained the international order. This affective hierarchy elevated gratitude from diplomatic courtesy to normative expectation, shaping the emotional terms under which Ukrainian agency could be expressed. In this way, gratitude discipline operated not by determining Ukrainian choices directly but by structuring how those choices could be justified and publicly performed without jeopardizing the moral legitimacy of continued assistance.
Biden’s subsequent public statements further entrenched this affective hierarchy by meticulously enumerating the scale, cost, and voluntariness of American assistance. In a major 2022 address detailing U.S. support, he explicitly named the gift:
In the years before the invasion, we, America, had sent over $650 million, before they crossed the border, in weapons to Ukraine, including anti-air and anti-armor equipment. Since the invasion, America has committed another $1.35 billion in weapons and ammunition. And thanks to the courage and bravery of the Ukrainian people, the equipment we’ve sent and our colleagues have sent have been used to devastating effect to defend Ukrainian land and airspace. Our Allies and partners have stepped up as well … I’ve announced, two days ago, we will welcome 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. We already have 8,000 a week coming to the United States of other nationalities. We’ll provide nearly $300 million of humanitarian assistance, providing tens of thousands of tons of food, water, medicine, and other basic supplies. In Brussels, I announced the United States is prepared to provide more than $1 billion, in addition, in humanitarian aid.Footnote 91
This recitation functions as a performative act of gift-naming in Derrida’s sense. By cataloguing assistance in quantitative detail, Biden transformed material support into a publicly valorized offering. Enumeration itself became disciplinary: by fixing the magnitude of the gift in collective memory, it intensified the recipient’s perceived emotional obligation. These utterances did more than describe assistance; they helped constitute the emotional regime governing cooperation. As American sacrifice was repeatedly foregrounded, expectations of gratitude became increasingly normalized, narrowing the range of responses that could be articulated without reputational cost. Gratitude was thus not merely encouraged but rendered morally appropriate, functioning as an affective condition for sustaining hierarchical solidarity.
President Zelensky’s December 2022 address to the U.S. Congress can be read as a conscious performance of the emotional script implied by this structure. Speaking at a moment of acute dependence, Zelensky explicitly enacted gratitude as a stabilizing ritual within an asymmetric alliance:
Dear Americans in all states, cities, and communities, all those who value freedom and justice, who cheer us as strongly as we Ukrainians in our cities, in each and every family, I hope my words of respect and gratitude resonate in each American heart … I would like to thank you, thank you very much. Thank you for both financial packages you have already provided us with and the ones you may be willing to decide on … Now, on this special Christmas time, I want to thank you. All of you. I thank every American family, which cherishes the warmth of its home and wishes the same warmth to other people. I thank President Biden and both parties, at the Senate and the House, for your invaluable assistance. I thank your cities and your citizens who supported Ukraine this year, who hosted our Ukrainians, our people, who waved our national flags, who acted to help us, thank you all, from everyone who is now at the front line from everyone who is evading victory.Footnote 92
This performance of gratitude temporarily stabilized the emotional order of the alliance. By saturating his address with expressions of appreciation directed at American families, legislators, and the president himself, Zelensky affirmed the hierarchical gift relationship and acknowledged the moral authority of the donor. Yet this performance did not resolve Ukraine’s existential vulnerability. Rather, it underscored it. Gratitude became both a necessary condition of continued support and a latent site of exposure, an affective posture that could be reinterpreted as insufficient whenever political disagreement emerged. By the end of 2022, gratitude had crystallized into a ritual of alliance maintenance and a potential lever of discipline.
However, Ukrainian resistance to U.S. emotional discipline did not take the form of open defiance but rather of calibrated affective restraint and procedural reassertion of agency. Instead of rejecting assistance or openly contesting alliance commitments, President Zelensky selectively withheld the performative saturation of gratitude typically expected. The Vilnius NATO summit of July 2023 marked a pivotal moment in this strategy. In public statements and social media interventions, Zelensky openly criticized allied deliberations over Ukraine’s membership trajectory as ‘absurd’ and ‘weak,’ stressing that key wording concerning Ukraine’s future was being discussed ‘without Ukraine.’Footnote 93 Crucially, his objection was not to continued cooperation or support, but to exclusion from decisions shaping Ukraine’s political and security destiny. By warning that ambiguity left a ‘window of opportunity’ to bargain Ukraine’s membership in negotiations with Russia, Zelensky reframed allied caution not as prudence, but as a violation of sovereignty. Analytically, this intervention closely mirrors Cuba’s post-1962 rejection of superpower settlements negotiated without its participation. In emotional-regime terms, it constitutes affective and procedural insubordination, a refusal to inhabit the deferential posture expected of a protected subordinate. It is precisely such moments of asserted agency, when the recipient challenges not the material gift itself but the authority it is meant to generate, that later activate gratitude as a disciplinary emotion. Donor actors can then recode dissent not as legitimate contestation but as moral impropriety.
The disciplinary power of gratitude reached its most explicit articulation during Donald Trump’s second administration. Beginning in 2024, gratitude was no longer implied or moralized indirectly. It was openly demanded and enforced. Senator J.D. Vance’s confrontation with Zelensky in the Oval Office exemplifies this shift:
I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country. Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come to the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president … To come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country … Have you said thank you once, this entire meeting? … Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who’s trying to save your country.Footnote 94
These utterances did more than express frustration. They reconfigured the emotional regime governing the alliance. Gratitude was recast from an expected affective response into an enforceable moral obligation, the absence of which could be framed as disrespect and evidence of unreliability. Within this logic, accusations of ingratitude functioned as disciplinary tools. By repeatedly asserting that Zelensky had shown ‘zero gratitude,’ Trump’s administration reframed strategic disagreement in quid pro quo terms, transforming assistance into a morally binding debt. In Maussian terms, the reciprocity cycle was rhetorically weaponized. Emotional noncompliance became grounds for coercive pressure, while continued Ukrainian demands for support were rendered intelligible as failures of recognition rather than as legitimate political claims. This reframing narrowed the range of acceptable diplomatic conduct available to Ukraine and reinforced the authority of the benefactor to define the emotional terms of cooperation.
This dynamic crystallized in November 2025, when Trump and senior advisers unveiled a 28-point peace plan explicitly tying continued U.S. military support to Ukraine’s ‘cooperative attitude’ and willingness to negotiate on terms shaped in Washington. Emotional expectation was here converted into formal conditionality, transforming gratitude from moral demand into an actionable lever of influence. The Geneva consultations of 23 November 2025 illustrate how gratitude functions as a performative requirement within hierarchical negotiations rather than as spontaneous diplomatic goodwill. Although officially described as ‘constructive’ and ‘productive,’ the meeting’s choreography revealed the extent to which emotional expectations had been institutionalized. American officials emphasized ‘alignment’ and progress toward the U.S.-designed framework, implicitly reaffirming the conditions attached to continued support. In this setting, the Ukrainian delegation’s closing expression of ‘gratitude for the steadfast commitment of the United States and, personally, President Donald J. Trump’Footnote 95 operated less as voluntary appreciation than as a required emotional performance. As in the Soviet-Cuban case, public gratitude functioned as the symbolic counter-gift that completed the circuit of obligation, stabilizing asymmetry while presenting coercion as benevolence.
Conclusion
This article has argued that gratitude is not a benign moral residue of cooperation in international politics but a technology of disciplinary power that becomes most visible at moments of hierarchical strain. By bringing together Maussian gift theory, analyses of emotional regimes, and speech-act approaches to emotives, the article conceptualizes gratitude as a moral and coercive emotion through which hierarchy is enacted and stabilized. When invoked, gratitude transforms material assistance into normative expectations of recognition, authorizes claims to emotional jurisdiction, and reinforces political authority. Across the Soviet-Cuban and U.S.-Ukrainian relationships, a consistent pattern emerges: gratitude is mobilized not in moments of routine compliance but precisely when subordinate actors resist, contest imposed settlements, demand additional support, or assert sovereign agency against the preferences of dominant powers.
Several broader implications follow. First, hierarchy in international politics is not only institutional or material but irreducibly emotional. Existing theories emphasize distributional incentives, relational authority, and legitimacy, yet they largely overlook the affective infrastructures that render these dynamics operative in practice. The stability of asymmetric alliances depends, in part, on feeling rules that define what subordinate actors owe emotionally to benefactors. When subordinate expressions fail to align with these expectations, great powers frequently interpret such deviations as disrespect, unreliability, or moral failure. Emotional impropriety becomes political impropriety. Hierarchical relations are, therefore, sustained not only through compliance with strategic demands but through conformity to emotional norms. Second, the disciplinary power of gratitude derives less from overt coercion than from its moralized framing. Because gratitude is widely coded as virtue and ingratitude as vice, its invocation allows political demands to be articulated in the language of moral correctness rather than strategic interest. In both cases examined here, appeals to (in)gratitude functioned as boundary-policing devices that scripted appropriate subordinate conduct while delegitimizing dissent as emotional deviance. This form of soft coercion can be particularly consequential because it targets not only policy preferences but the perceived moral character of subordinate actors, thereby reshaping the reputational terrain within which strategic bargaining unfolds.
Third, the comparative analysis highlights a reactive logic central to the operation of gratitude discipline. Gratitude remains largely implicit, while hierarchical arrangements proceed uncontested. It becomes explicit, moralized, and coercive when subordinate actors challenge expected emotional or strategic alignments. Soviet leaders intensified gratitude claims when Cuban officials condemned the terms of superpower accommodation and resisted inspection regimes. U.S. officials invoked gratitude most forcefully when Ukrainian leaders criticized delays in assistance, demanded expanded support, or resisted pressures to negotiate. In both contexts, gratitude functioned as a mechanism for disciplining deviance and reasserting authority at precisely those moments when donor influence appeared vulnerable to erosion. Gratitude, thus, operates not as a diffuse background norm but as a reactivated instrument calibrated to episodes of resistance. At the same time, the cases underscore the limits of emotional discipline. Subordinate actors are not passive recipients of affective governance. They develop counter-emotional strategies that seek to reframe, contest, or mitigate the constraining effects of gratitude expectations. Castro responded to Soviet pressure by recoding dissatisfaction as a sovereign moral grievance rather than as emotional impropriety. Zelensky repeatedly performed gratitude to maintain alliance cohesion yet embedded these performances within narratives of reciprocity, national sacrifice, and shared security that diluted hierarchical implications. Emotional regimes, in this sense, are negotiated arenas rather than closed systems of domination.
Taken together, the Cuban and Ukrainian cases demonstrate that gratitude functions as a disciplinary emotional regime through which hierarchical cooperation is morally stabilized. Material assistance does not automatically generate compliance, nor does gratitude mechanically determine subordinate policy choices. Rather, the invocation of gratitude reshapes the normative conditions under which dissent can be articulated without incurring reputational or relational costs. By reframing strategic disagreement as emotional deviance, dominant actors narrow the legitimate rhetorical space available to subordinate partners while reinforcing their authority to define appropriate conduct within the relationship. Hierarchical asymmetry thus persists not only through material leverage or institutional legitimacy but through emotional regimes that prescribe what actors ought to feel, display, and acknowledge.
Understanding the disciplinary power of gratitude, therefore, reveals a broader feature of contemporary international order. Authority is exercised not only through the distribution of resources or the design of institutions but through struggles over recognition, moral evaluation, and emotional performance. The emotional politics of gratitude is ultimately a politics of hierarchy and solidarity: a contest over who possesses the power to define what must be felt, whose emotional expressions count as appropriate, and how dependence is to be morally interpreted. Addressing these dynamics reveals new approaches to studying emotional governance in world politics. It also suggests that stabilizing cooperation often depends as much on emotional regimes as on strategic calculations.
Acknowledgments
I used AI-assisted language tools, including DeepL Write and ChatGPT, to support translation and improve stylistic clarity during the revision process. However, the analysis, arguments, and case studies are the result of a research agenda that I developed primarily during my PhD program and beyond.
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