Fear, Appeasement, and the Effectiveness of Deterrence

Abstract

Governments often fear the future intentions of their adversaries. In this article we show how this fear can make deterrent threats credible under seemingly incredible circumstances. We consider a model in which a defender seeks to deter a transgression with both intrinsic and military value. We examine how the defender’s fear of the challenger’s future belligerence affects his willingness to respond to the transgression with war. We derive conditions under which even a very minor transgression effectively “tests” for the challenger’s future belligerence, which makes the defender’s deterrent threat credible even when the transgression is objectively minor and the challenger is ex ante unlikely to be belligerent. We also show that fear can actually benefit the defender by allowing her to credibly deter. We apply the model to analyze a series of historical cases and show the robustness of our results to a variety of extensions.