1 Introduction

In theory and practice, conflict management strategies have been analyzed and practiced in a compartmentalized manner. This is particularly true of deterrence, seen by many as the principal strategy for conflict management and war avoidance. I argue that deterrence should be practiced in a more calibrated, cautious, and restrained way and, of equal importance, in conjunction with other strategies of conflict management. My plea is for a more holistic approach to conflict management that addresses the causes and manifestations of international conflict and embraces and coordinates deterrence, reassurance, and traditional diplomacy. Effective conflict management requires a solid understanding of how these strategies can reinforce or undercut one another. This requires not only a strong conceptual understanding, but also intimate knowledge of political context and skillful diplomacy.

I begin with an overview of my critique of deterrence and compellence. I then examine reassurance and diplomacy. All three strategies attempt to manipulate the cost calculus of adversaries; deterrence and compellence to raise the cost of non-compliance, and reassurance and diplomacy to make it more attractive. Their mechanisms differ and they rely on different psychological dynamics, which have important implications for their relative risks, side effects, and chances of success. After analyzing the three strategies in isolation, I make connections among them and suggest ways they can be productively combined or staged.

Conflict management is no silver bullet. Even the most sophisticated and best-coordinated strategies can fail, and for multiple reasons. Many conflicts are not ready for serious amelioration because leaders have aggressive goals, do not have sufficient authority or control over their governments or armed forces, fear losing control if they appear weak or compromising, or believe the risks and costs of any move toward peace greater than those of enduring the status quo.

Conflict management strategies generally take time to produce positive effects. General deterrence aims to discourage an adversary in the long-term from considering the use of force as a viable option, and immediate deterrence seeks to prevent a specific use of force when a challenge appears likely or imminent. Ideally, the two strategies work together to prevent challenges, but also to convince adversarial leaders that the military option is fruitless and that their national and political interests are best served by some kind of accommodation. When successful, deterrence can not only forestall armed conflict but also provide an incentive for adversaries to seek accommodation. Reassurance and diplomacy also take time, but have the potential to produce more significant results.

We must distinguish conflict management from conflict resolution. Conflict management is a general term applied to efforts to keep a conflict contained. It aims to reduce the manifestations of conflict. This can mean preventing its military escalation (e.g., the use of armed force or development, the deployment of new weapons, or the forward deployment of existing weapons) or political escalation that extends a conflict to new regions or participants. Both kinds of escalation are, of course, related.

Conflict resolution seeks to reduce tensions by addressing the causes of conflict. Minimal conflict resolution efforts aim only at reducing or removing the likelihood of war between adversaries. The 1978 agreement between Israel and Egypt, backed by the United States, achieved this goal. Relations between these countries have not significantly improved. By contrast, relations between the US and China in the aftermath of the Kissinger visit, and post-Cold War relations between the US and Soviet Union (subsequently Russia), became more or less normal; leaders cooperated in multiple problem areas, barriers to trade, immigration, and tourism came down, and stereotypy in media about the other declined. These accommodations, alas, proved only temporary. Relations between Britain and France following the 1904 Entente Cordiale grew positively warm and have remained this way.

2 Coercive strategies

Deterrence aims to prevent a specified action by threatening resistance or punishment of the offending party. It rests on the assumption that credible threats can make the contemplated action too costly to carry out. The historical record of deterrence is mixed. It often fails or helps to provoke the very behavior it is intended to prevent. Janice Stein, a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, and I have developed a critique of deterrence that explains its seemingly hit-or-miss effects. It has three interlocking components: political, psychological, and practical. Each exposes a different set of problems of deterrence in theory and practice.

The political component examines the motivations behind foreign policy challenges. Deterrence is unabashedly a theory of “opportunity.” It asserts that adversaries seek opportunities to make gains, and that when they find these opportunities they pounce. Accordingly, it prescribes a credible capacity to inflict unacceptable costs as the best means to prevent challenges. Empirical investigations point to an alternative explanation for a resort to force, which I call a theory of “need.” Historical evidence indicates that strategic vulnerabilities and domestic political constraints often constitute incentives to use force. When leaders become desperate, they may resort to force, even when the military balance is unfavorable and there are no grounds to doubt adversarial resolve. Deterrence may be an inappropriate and even dangerous strategy in these circumstances. If leaders are driven less by the prospect of gain than they are by the fear of loss, deterrent policies can provoke the very behavior they are designed to forestall by intensifying the pressures on an adversary to act.

The psychological component is directly related to the motivations for deterrence challenges. To the extent that leaders believe in the necessity of challenging the commitments of their adversaries, they become predisposed to see their objectives as attainable. This encourages motivated errors in information process. Leaders can distort their assessments of threat and be insensitive to warnings that the policies to which they are committed are likely to end in disaster. They can convince themselves, despite evidence to the contrary, that they can challenge an important adversarial commitment without provoking war. Because they know the extent to which they are powerless to back down, they expect their adversaries to recognize this and be accommodating. Leaders may also seek comfort in the illusion that their country will emerge victorious at little cost if the crisis gets out of hand and leads to war. Deterrence can and has been defeated by wishful thinking.

The practical component describes some of the most important obstacles to the successful implementation of deterrence. These derive from the distorting effects of cognitive biases and heuristics, political and cultural barriers to empathy, and differing cognitive frames of reference that the deterrer and would-be challengers use to frame and interpret signals. Problems of this kind are not unique to deterrence and compellence; they are embedded in the very structure of international relations. They nevertheless constitute particularly severe impediments to these strategies because a deterrer needs to understand the world as it appears to the leaders of a would-be challenger to manipulate effectively their cost–benefit calculus. Failure to do so correctly can result in deterrent policies that make the proscribed behavior more attractive to challengers, or the required restraint less attractive in the case of compellence.

Case studies of international conflict indicate that a vulnerable commitment is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for an aggressive challenge. At different times in history, “vulnerable” commitments have not been challenged and commitments that most observers would consider credible have. The evidence suggests, then, that deterrence theory at best identifies only one cause of aggression: outright hostility. It reflects a Cold War mentality. Deterrence theorists took for granted, like the American national security elite more generally, that Hitler was motivated by hatred of his neighbors and intent on conquering the world. They assumed that Stalin, Khrushchev, and Mao Zedong were cut from the same mold. This homology was a matter of belief, not the product of careful analysis. They generalized from these cases to conflict in general, another unwarranted leap. The theory and practice of deterrence are accordingly rooted in and inseparable from a view of the Cold War subsequently refuted by evidence.

Deterrence theory takes for granted that when leaders undertake a cost calculus and conclude that they confront a credible commitment by a stronger adversary to defend its commitment, they will not initiate a challenge, at least not an irreversible one. However, there are many conflicts where weaker states challenged stronger ones. Leaders convinced themselves that they could design around their adversary’s advantage, as the Southern Confederacy did in 1861, the Japanese in 1941, or Egypt in 1973 (Barnhart 1987; Weinberg 1994; Stein 1984). In A Cultural Theory of International Relations and in Why Nations Fight? I document how honor, anger, and national self-respect can push leaders into starting wars they do not expect to win (Lebow 2008).

Deterrence mistakes the symptoms of aggression for its causes. It ignores the political and strategic vulnerabilities that can interact with cognitive and motivational processes to prompt leaders to choose force or challenge and adversarial commitment. This can be attributable to hubris but is more often the result of their perceived need to carry out a challenge in response to pressing foreign and domestic threats. In contrast to the expectations of the theory and strategy of deterrence, there is considerable evidence that the leaders considering challenges or the use of force often fail to carry out any kind of serious risk assessment. In Between Peace and War, I documented the French failure to do in 1897–98, the Austrian, German, and Russian failure in 1914, India’s failure in 1962, and the Soviet Union’s failure in 1962 (Lebow 1981). In Psychology of Deterrence, chapters by Stein, political science professor Jack Snyder of Columbia University, and I do the same for Russia in 1914, Israel in 1973, and Argentina and Britain in 1981 (Jervis et al. 1984). A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Lebow 2008) offers more evidence on 1914 and the Anglo-American decision to attack Iraq in 2003.

When challengers are vulnerable or feel themselves vulnerable, a deterrers’ efforts to make important commitments more defensible and credible will have uncertain and unpredictable effects. At best, they will not dissuade. They can also intensify those pressures that are pushing leaders toward a choice of force. Great power interactions in the decade prior to World War I and the US oil and scrap metals embargo against Japan in 1940–41 illustrate this dynamic (Barnhart 1987; Weinberg 1994).

Once committed to a challenge, leaders become predisposed to see their objective as attainable. Motivated error can result in flawed assessments and unrealistic expectations; leaders may believe an adversary will back down when challenged or, alternatively, that it will fight precisely the kind of war the challenger expects. Leaders are also likely to become insensitive to warnings that their chosen course of action is likely to provoke a serious crisis or war. In these circumstances, deterrence, no matter how well practiced, can be defeated by a challenger’s wishful thinking. Motivated bias blocks receptivity to signals, reducing the impact of efforts by defenders to make their commitments credible. Even the most elaborate efforts to demonstrate prowess and resolve may prove insufficient for discouraging a challenger who is convinced that a challenge or use of force is necessary to preserve vital strategic and political interests (Lebow 1981; Jervis et al. 1984; Lebow and Stein 1994).

Deterrence is beset by a host of practical problems. Theories of deterrence assume that everyone understands, so to speak, the meaning of barking guard dogs, barbed wire, and “No Trespassing” signs. This assumption is unrealistic. Signals only acquire meaning in the context in which they are interpreted. When sender and recipient use quite different contexts to frame, communicate, or interpret signals, the opportunities for misjudgment multiply. Receivers may dismiss signals as noise, or misinterpret them when they recognize that they are signals. This problem is endemic to international relations and by no means limited to deterrence because of the different historical experiences and cultural backgrounds of policymaking elites. It is, however, more likely in tense relationships, where both sides use worst-case analysis, and are emotionally aroused.

If credible threats of punishment always increased the cost side of the ledger—something deterrence theory takes for granted—it would be unnecessary for would-be deterrers to replicate the value hierarchy and preferences of target leaders. This convenient assumption is belied by practice. As we have seen, leaders may be driven primarily by “vulnerability,” not by “opportunity.” When they are, raising the costs of military action may have no effect on their unwillingness to tolerate what are perceived as the higher costs of inaction. Even when motivated by opportunity, leaders may reframe their cost-calculus in the opposite direction than intended in the face of threats. They may conclude that giving in to such threats is more costly than resistance, especially if they believe that compliance will be interpreted by their adversary as a sign of weakness and give rise to new demands (Lebow and Stein 1994).

Deterrence focuses on credibility and credibility, in turn, gives rise to symbolic commitments. A case in point is American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s efforts to defend the Taiwanese occupied offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu (Halperin and Tsou 1967). Such commitments easily become entangling, because they tend to become at least as important to leaders as commitments made in defense of substantive interests. Their exaggerated importance is probably due in large part to the pernicious effects of post-decisional rationalization. Once a commitment is made, leaders, understandably uncomfortable about risking war for abstract, symbolic reasons, seek to justify the commitment to themselves and to others. This need motivates them to “discover” important substantive reasons for these commitments reasons absent in and irrelevant to their original calculations.

In the case of the Taiwan Strait, top-level administration officials, who previously had questioned the importance of the offshore islands, subsequently came to see them as the linchpin of security throughout Asia. Most senior policymakers subscribed in all solemnity to an astonishing version of the “domino” theory. In a classified policy statement meant only for internal use, Eisenhower and Dulles both argued that loss of the islands would likely not only endanger the survival of the Nationalist regime on Taiwan, but also that of pro-American governments in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, and would bring Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia under the control of communist forces (Halperin and Tsou 1967). The most far-reaching expression of this “logic” was Vietnam. American leaders had no substantive interests in the country but committed forces to its defense in large part because they were persuaded that failure to defend their commitment in Southeast Asia would encourage Moscow to doubt US resolve elsewhere in the world (VanDeMark 1995; Logevall 2001).

Case evidence of deterrence suggests that it has a chance of success in a narrow range of conflicts: those in which adversarial leaders are motivated largely by the prospect of gain rather than by the fear of loss, have the freedom to exercise restraint, are not misled by grossly distorted assessments of the political–military situation, and are vulnerable to the kinds of threats that a would-be deterrer is capable of credibly making. Deterrence must also be practiced early on, before an adversary commits itself to a challenge and becomes correspondingly insensitive to warnings that its action is likely to meet with retaliation. Unless these conditions are met, deterrence will at best be ineffective and at worst counterproductive.

3 Reassurance

Strategies of reassurance begin from a different set of assumptions than deterrence. They presume ongoing tensions but root them in feelings of acute vulnerability. Reassurance requires defenders to communicate to would-be challengers their benign intentions. They must attempt to reduce the fear, misunderstanding, and insecurity that can be responsible for escalation and war. Reassurance seeks to reduce the expected gains of challenges and increase those of cooperation. Even when leaders consider a conflict to be unresolvable, they can still practice reassurance with the goal of avoiding accidental or miscalculated war. In so doing, they may simultaneously help alleviate the underlying causes of conflict (Stein 1991).

In the most ambitious applications of reassurance leaders attempt to shift the trajectory of the conflict and induce cooperation through reciprocal acts of de-escalation and bargaining over substantive issues. They may begin with unilateral and irrevocable concessions. If they are pessimistic about the likely success of this approach, or politically constrained from attempting it, they can pursue more modest variants of reassurance. They can exercise self-restraint in the hope of not exacerbating the foreign or domestic pressures and constraints pushing an adversary to act aggressively. They can try to develop informal “norms of competition” to regulate their conflict and reduce the likelihood of miscalculated escalation. They can attempt, through diplomacy, informal or formal regimes designed to build confidence, reduce uncertainty, and diminish the probability of miscalculated war. These strategies are neither mutually exclusive nor logically exhaustive.

Strategies of reassurance, like those of deterrence and compellence, are difficult to implement successfully. They too must overcome strategic, political, and psychological obstacles. Cognitive barriers to signaling, for example, can just as readily obstruct reassurance as they can deterrence (Jervis 1976; Lebow 1981). Other obstacles are specific to reassurance, and derive from the political and psychological constraints that leaders face when they seek to reassure an adversary. Nevertheless, reassurance can be used effectively and was a significant component of resolution in all long-standing rivalries.

There are many mechanisms of reassurance. Among the most common and least costly is reciprocity. It requires contingent, sequential, reciprocal steps among adversaries. Reinforcing initiatives of this kind by the US and Soviet Union helped to end the Cold War (Garthoff 1994; Herrman and Lebow 2003; Service 2016).

A second mechanism is reassurance through “irrevocable commitment.” When leaders recognize that misperception and stereotyping govern their adversary’s judgments, they can try to break down this wall of mistrust by making an irrevocable commitment (Schelling 1960). In effect, they attempt to change the trajectory of the conflict through “learning” and to make a cooperative, reciprocal strategy more feasible. If successful, learning about adversarial intentions reduces the cost of moves toward peace because it decreases the likelihood, in the estimate of leaders, that they will be exploited or misinterpreted, prompting new demands (Stein 1991). President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt publicly announced his willingness to travel to Jerusalem and make a speech with peace as its theme to the Israeli parliament. It was a dramatic, and risky concession because of its cost and irreversibility. For both reasons, he hoped it would be seen as a valid indicator of Egyptian intentions rather than an ambiguous signal, or one whose meaning could be manipulated subsequently by the sender. It gained additional power by Sadat’s ability to speak successfully over the heads of Israel’s leadership to its public. By mobilizing support for peace among the Israeli people, he removed a constraint on the country’s leaders and created a political inducement to reciprocate (Stein 1991; Telhami 1992; Bar-Simon-Tov 1994).

Gorbachev also made an irrevocable commitment. He publicly promised to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan and began to do so without any prior promise from the West not to exploit this reversal. In October 1989, he made a speech in Finland, which in some ways was the equivalent of Sadat’s in Jerusalem. He disavowed any right of the Soviet Union to intervene militarily in other countries, a promise that rapidly accelerated political change in Eastern Europe and the end of pro-Soviet communist regimes throughout the region. He also introduced political changes within the Soviet Union, associated with his programs of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”), that further demonstrated his bona fides. These actions, together with arms control agreements, broke the logjam of the Cold War (Brown, 1996; Service 2016).

Irrevocable commitment is risky because it is irreversible. This is why Sadat secretly sounded out the Israelis prior to announcing his intention to come to Jerusalem. The Americans and Chinese also held clandestine talks before China issued its invitation to Henry Kissinger to come to Beijing. Success of that visit led to a subsequent invitation of President Nixon to visit China (Goh 2005; Macmillan 2006). Before making any irrevocable commitments, leaders must assure themselves that their adversary is likely to respond positively and has equal incentives to reach meaningful accommodation.

A third and more elaborate form of reassurance attempts to establish “norms of competition.” Adversaries develop informal or explicit norms of competition in areas of disputed interest. Informal, shared norms may prevent certain kinds of mutually unacceptable action and consequently reduce the risk of crisis and war. Informal norms may also establish boundaries of behavior and reduce some of the uncertainty that can lead to miscalculated escalation (Stein 1991).

The United States and the Soviet Union attempted to develop explicit understandings of the limits of competition in the Middle East. They tacitly acknowledged that each of them could come to the assistance of its ally if it was threatened with a catastrophic military defeat by the ally of the other. To avoid such an intervention, the superpower would compel the regional ally who threatens to inflict such an overwhelming defeat to cease its military action (Dismukes and McConnell 1979; George 1986). The Soviet Union invoked this tacit norm in 1967 and again in 1973, and although the United States attempted to deter Soviet intervention, it simultaneously moved to compel Israel to cease its military action and to reassure the Soviet Union immediately of its intention to do so. Deterrence and reassurance worked together and, indeed, it is difficult to disentangle the impact of one from the other on the effective management of that conflict (Stein 1987).

Reassurance through limited security regimes is a more elaborate strategy requiring explicit negotiation and cooperation. Fear of a surprise attack can encourage leaders to try to build limited security regimes. Such regimes may permit the countries involved to monitor each other’s actions with increased confidence by providing more complete and reliable information, by increasing surveillance capabilities for all parties, or by invoking the assistance of outsiders as monitors. In the limited security regime in place between Egypt and Israel since 1974, the United States routinely circulates intelligence information about the military dispositions of one to the other. Such a regime can give leaders more leeway than they otherwise would have to meet a prospective defection by increasing available warning time. This makes estimation of capabilities and intentions less difficult and reduces the likelihood of miscalculation (George 1986; Stein 1991).

Reassurance through the creation of limited and focused security regimes can be of considerable help in the longer term in reducing fear, uncertainty, and misunderstanding between adversaries. At a minimum, adversaries gain access to more reliable and less expensive information about each other’s activities, which can reduce uncertainty and the incidence of miscalculation. In a complex, information-poor international environment, valid information can be a considerable advantage in more effective conflict management.

Another form of reassurance seeks to reduce conflict by means of trade-offs: It has the short-term advantage of removing sources of conflict between adversaries and holds out the longer term prospect of building trust and cooperation in other areas. It might be regarded as the international equivalent of David Mitrany’s functionalism (Steffek 2015). The great example of reassurance by trade-offs is Anglo-French reconciliation. Anglo-French hostility had deep historical routes going back to the Hundred Years’ War. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their colonial rivalry was acute and an extension of their conflict in Europe. The Fashoda crisis of 1898 was the culmination of their competition for influence in Africa and nearly led to war. The coalition that came to power in France after the crisis sought an accommodation with Britain because its members regarded Germany as their principal foe. The British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, held out the prospect of British support for a French protectorate in Morocco in return for France giving up any claims to the Sudan or Egypt. This colonial quid pro quo provided the basis for cooperation on European security issues where the two countries shared common interests (Brown 1970; Lebow 1981).

Quid pro quos also played an important part in the Egyptian–Israeli accommodation. The initial accord between the two countries required Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt to recognize the state of Israel. Implementation of these commitments built the modicum of trust necessary to move on to other issues and ultimately a peace treaty (Telhami 1992; Bar-Simon-Tov 1994). Taiwan had been a principal point of contention between Beijing and Washington since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. China claims Taiwan as a province, but the US supported its de facto independence and provided arms and military protection to its nationalist regime. Kissinger’s and Nixon’s visits to China led to the 1972 Shanghai Communique, which in effect glossed over Chinese–American differences. The document was read differently—at least in public—by the two governments, and it provided the basis for subsequent economic, political, and strategic cooperation (Goh 2005; Garthoff 2011). There is no quid pro quo here, but an attempt to finesse continuing differences between the two governments, and there to reduce the salience of symbolic issues that have poisoned relations in the past.

4 Diplomacy

Diplomacy is the third generic strategy of conflict management and resolution. It has long been recognized as critical in this regard, and there are many classical works extolling its positive role in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, and globally in the twentieth century (Leguey-Feilleux 2009; Berridge 2015). In the last few years, international relations theory has become more interested in how diplomacy works (Sharp 2009; Sending, Pouliot, and Neuman 2015). The so-called diplomatic turn emphasizes the ways in which diplomacy constitutes states and others as actors, the independent role of diplomats, and how diplomatic arguments affect and are affected by shared understandings of what means and ends are legitimate.

There is an extensive literature on mediation, Track Two diplomacy—talks among private individuals and groups—and other forms of unofficial, people-to-people diplomacy (Davidson and Montville 1981; Montville 2003; Agha et al. 2003; Diamond and MacDonald 2006). I limit myself here to official diplomacy, because I am interested in how it can best be coordinated with other strategies, and this involves governments. They may, however, make use of non-governmental organizations or private individuals for informal soundings and discussions. These can offer the advantage of trust—as did the community of Soviet and American scientists involved in decades of Pugwash talks (Evangelista 2002). They allow leaders to back away and disavow such talks or their resultant recommendations if they prove politically difficult or inadvisable.

It is impossible to reduce and resolve international conflicts without diplomacy. Even unilateral actions require explanation and interpretation to achieve their desired effects. They are likely to be opening moves, as they often are in the strategy of reassurance. They require follow-up and diplomacy to move from successful ice-breaking to substantive achievements.

Accommodations are most likely to be sought when new leaders come to power with strong domestic or external incentives for winding down an existing conflict. Sadat was keen to reorganize the Egyptian economy and jumpstart it with Western aid, investment, and technology. For the French and Gorbachev there were foreign as well as domestic incentives. French leaders wanted to make peace with Britain in proportion to the degree that they perceived Germany as a threat. They also wanted to do this to advance their domestic programme, which involved curtailing the power of the pro-German colonial ministry and the anti-Dreyfus Catholic Church. For Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the incentives were primarily external; as China’s conflict with the Soviet Union became more acute, it was strategically advantageous to draw closer to the US (Garver 1992; Ross 1993; Goh 2005).

Additional evidence about the importance of new leadership can be drawn from divided nations and partitioned countries. The former are once-unified countries that were divided due to the Cold War. They are—or were—the two Germanies, Koreas, Chinas, and Vietnams. Partitioned countries are products of the breakup of former colonial empires and the division of disputed territory between rival ethnic groups. They include the two Irelands, Greek and Turkish Cyprus, Israel–Palestine, and India–Pakistan. Movement toward normalization of relations in West and East Germany, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China, the two Irelands, and in Cyprus could only begin when the generation of leaders and other important political and military officials associated with partition passed from the scene (Henderson et al. 1974).

Diplomacy has the potential to be more fruitful when war, other forms of violence, or arms races and threatening deployments, have proven counterproductive—and are widely recognized as counterproductive. The Fashoda crisis drove this home to French leaders, the 1973 War to Egyptian and Israeli leaders, and NATO’s forward deployment of Pershing II missiles and ground launched cruise missiles in Western Europe to Soviet leaders. Ireland conforms to this pattern, too, but in a more complicated way. The war of independence with Britain provoked an Irish civil war between moderates who were willing to settle for 26 of the 32 countries, and hardliners who insisted on fighting on to gain control over the entire island. More recently, the failure of either Irish nationalists or Ulster Protestant paramilitaries to impose their will in Northern Ireland, and their ultimate loss of support within their respective communities, split these groups to some degree and opened space for more moderate actors (Cochrane 2010).

Diplomacy is important in its own right. As noted, it played a critical role in all accommodations. Willingness of France to renounce any interest in Egypt and the Sudan, and British willingness to support France’s colonial claims in Morocco paved the way for the Entente. This clever quid pro quo was not an obvious one; it required imagination and skill to implement. The Entente was solidified by bad diplomacy—on the part of Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm and Foreign Minister Bernhard von Bülow provoked a crisis over Morocco in 1904 that pushed France into Britain’s arms, and the British backed the French, transforming their relationship from one of cautious accommodation to de facto alliance. Students of the Sino-American accommodation also credit leaders with careful, step-by-step soundings, mostly in secret, that led to trips to China by Kissinger and Nixon, followed by rapid and effective diplomacy on both sides that clarified issues and led to an understanding that each side described its own way in separately issued communiqués (Ross 1995; Goh 2005).

Leaders must be flexible in their thinking, as French Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé and his British counterpart were in the aftermath of the Fashoda crisis. Delcassé did an about-face after Fashoda, and Salisbury, who had been on the verge of going to war with France, was remarkably open to his post-crisis overtures (Brown 1970). Nixon and Kissinger overcame their enemy images of China; as early as the 1950s, Nixon was willing to go beyond rigid Cold War thinking and explore other explanations than Communist ideology for Chinese hostility (Goh 2005). When he came to office, his view of China’s leaders and their motivations was primed for positive change by his desire to find a so-called “honorable” way out of the Indochina war with their assistance. Personal contacts led to significant shifts in Nixon’s and Kissinger’s perceptions of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai (Goh 2005). I previously noted Reagan’s receptiveness to Gorbachev in contrast to that of his Vice President and many of his advisors. Had George Bush been President, rather than Ronald Reagan, it seems unlikely that there would have been much progress toward accommodation (Breslauer and Lebow 2003; Service 2016). The least flexible leader in these several accommodations was Menachem Begin, who was only brought around in the end by prodding and promises by President Jimmy Carter (Telhami 1992; Bar-Simon-Tov 1994). He was nevertheless more open to the prospect of peace with Egypt than his colleagues in Likud.

Finally, leaders must have the political room to extend the olive branch or grasp it when offered. Leaders may sometimes carve out room for themselves to maneuver by clever tactics such as sidetracking adversaries, positive coalition-building, and masterful appeals to public opinion. Richard Nixon benefitted from being a Republican, but still had Cold War opinion and right-wing opposition with which to contend. In July 1971, 56 percent of Americans branded China the world’s most dangerous state (Kusnitz 1984). Nixon and Kissinger successfully used realist arguments to isolate opposition from pro-Taiwan, anti-communist, and certain business interests, and a pro-peace discourse to win over moderate Republicans and Democrats (Goh 2005). Following Nixon’s highly televised trip to Beijing, a Gallup Poll revealed that 96 percent of the public had a favorable view of the Chinese people. Gorbachev was less successful, as many elements of the Soviet military, industry, and the Communist Party remained hostile to his domestic reforms and foreign policy. He set in motion a process that ultimately undermined his support (Garthoff 1994; Brown 1996). Sadat faced even greater obstacles; he failed to win over much of Egypt’s political–military elite or public opinion and was assassinated.

Accommodation is a reciprocal process. Following their 1959 Camp David meeting, President Dwight Eisenhower and General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev seemed on the verge of achieving major tension reduction in the Cold War. Eisenhower’s efforts came to naught because of his continued support of U-2 over flights of the Soviet Union and his need to placate a West German ally whose Christian Democratic leadership opposed accommodation. Khrushchev had gone out on a limb and Ike in effect sawed it off. By contrast, Lyndon Johnson and Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev, negotiated a détente because both leaders had strong domestic backing, and Johnson had international support as well (Lebow and Stein 1994; Garthoff 2011).

The Eisenhower counter-example, the seeming Johnson-Brezhnev success, and the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, reveal the down side of stalled diplomatic progress. The U-2 affair led Khrushchev to torpedo the 1960 Paris Summit, in part to protect himself against Soviet hardliners (Lebow and Stein 1994; Taubman 2003). Détente raised expectations that were not fulfilled, leading to an intensified Cold War (Garthoff 2011). The Oslo Accords unraveled for a different reason: hardliners opposed to accommodation used violence to polarize public opinion and cut the ground out from underneath moderates. The key event was the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 by a Jewish ultranationalist. Hardliners on both sides in the Northern Irish conflict periodically tried and succeeded in sabotaging any move toward peace. Violence rose in proportion to the perceived likelihood of political cooperation across sectarian lines (Cochrane 2010; English 2003).

These failed attempts at accommodation suggest several lessons for leaders and diplomats. First and most importantly is the need to make hard choices about accommodation versus other goals. Leaders who express willingness to wind down tensions, or respond to adversarial overtures to do so, make themselves vulnerable to political recrimination if they fail, and possibly also if they succeed. Extending or grasping an olive branch also raises the possibility of exploitation by the other side. Eisenhower was trying to protect himself and his country against the later threat when he authorized one final U-2 overflight because he sought reassurance that the Soviets had not deployed their first-generation intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Eisenhower knew there was a risk because the Soviets had deployed a new surface-to-air missile, but he allowed the CIA to convince him that they could get away with it. Motivated bias can also work in favor of accommodation. In the mirror image of deterrence challenges, leaders who make peace overtures can convince themselves that they will succeed. Sadat and Gorbachev were confident beyond what the available evidence warranted and helped to make their optimism self-fulfilling (Lebow and Stein 2003).

Efforts at accommodation should move both slowly and quickly. Caution and secrecy are necessary to assure leaders that they are on firm ground at home and not likely to be exploited abroad. Once overtures become known, leaders must move as quickly as possible to limit the possibility of opposing coalitions forming and mobilizing public opinion through the media or violence. The Oslo Accords were intended to be a prelude to a peace treaty that would be reached by direct negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. Each side knew that both wanted peace and would be politically exposed if they failed to reach an agreement. Each accordingly expected the other to make additional concessions and the negotiations dragged on long enough for Israeli hardliners to derail the peace process. President Bill Clinton played a central role in bringing about the famous 1993 Rabin-Arafat televised handshake and the Oslo Accords, but the President and his diplomats failed to keep the pressure up on both sides to reach a quick agreement. As the negotiations dragged on, Arafat got cold feet, and the assassination of Rabin changed the political calculus on the Israeli side. The failure of the Oslo process intensified conflict to the degree that subsequent diplomatic initiatives have had no positive effect (Seliktar 2009; Rothstein and Ma’oz 2014).

Peace overtures require careful assessment beforehand of their domestic and foreign risks. How will important foreign and domestic audiences respond? How much latitude will leaders have to pursue accommodation once their efforts become known? These assessments can be hit-and-miss because the goals and risk assessments of others are often opaque, and more so when based on different assumptions. As we have seen, this problem often confounds deterrence or compellence; it is an equal challenge for reassurance. Reassurance has a relative advantage in that it can often be practiced in small steps, which are reversible at low cost, and elicit some indication of how at least an adversary will respond. Cases in point are the secret consultations among diplomats prior to the Anglo-French Entente and Nixon’s visit to China. However, irreversible, unilateral steps towards accommodation are more credible and may be necessary to break through solid walls of distrust. They arguably served this purpose for Sadat and Gorbachev. A major strand of contemporary Russian opinion regards Gorbachev as a traitor, or at least a naïf, who was exploited by the West (RT Question More 2013; Quora 2015). Even successful accommodations are reversible, and for many reasons.

5 Thinking holistically

To this point, I have analyzed deterrence, reassurance, and diplomacy in isolation from one another. Any sophisticated strategy of conflict manage must combine them, because acute conflicts invariably have causes or manifestations to which they are all relevant. The key task of policymakers is to fathom the causes of the conflict they are addressing, which strategies of conflict management are relevant to them, and how they might be used in a synergistic manner.

A useful starting point is the recognition that most conflicts have primary and secondary causes, by which I mean original causes and follow-on ones. Consider the Cold War. Its principal and original cause, in my judgment, was the power vacuum that opened in central Europe with the collapse of Germany. The Soviet Union and the US reached an agreement beforehand on their respective zones of occupation, but conflict arose as each sought to govern these territories in a manner consistent with its perceived interests. Conflict was most acute in what quickly became a divided Germany, which was the focus of three war-threatening crises between 1949 and 1962. Ideology might also be considered an underlying cause of conflict to the extent that it prompted different and incompatible occupation policies. What began as a European conflict quickly spread to other parts of the world: Korea became a divided country, so did China, and later, Vietnam (Henderson et al. 1974). The Soviet Union and the U.S. backed opposite sides in the Arab–Israeli conflict, and later, in South Asia and Africa. The Cold War gave rise to an arms race, which intensified after the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear device in 1949 and both countries sought to develop thermonuclear weapons.

By the time Gorbachev came to power in 1986, nuclear arsenals and their delivery systems, which had the potential to decapitate both leaderships in a first strike, had become the principal bone of contention between the two sides. The 1975 Helsinki Accords resolved territorial European questions, and the manifestations of that conflict—arms racing and competition in the developing world—now become causes in their own right (Garthoff 2011). The Cold War indicates that conflicts accrue causes as they develop, and that resolution of their original causes may have no significant ameliorating effect on their secondary causes. It further reveals that primary and secondary causes can become connected in multiple ways.

Leaders’ intent on managing conflicts or resolving them must accordingly fathom their likely causes, make some assessment of their relative importance, and decide the order in which they should be addressed. In some conflicts, overcoming fundamental causes successfully makes it easier to address knock-on causes or manifestations. The resolution of boundary disputes often has this positive effect, as it did in post-independence relations between Britain and the United States. Conversely, the resolution of border disputes can pave the way for better relations with neighbors (Lebow 2019). In the 1960s, China took the lead in attempting to settle border disputes with its 12 neighbors. India and Vietnam aside, where conflict escalated, successful negotiations with other neighbors normalized relations and helped China break out of American-imposed encirclement (Fravel 2008; Hongy 2009).

It is sometimes more productive to address secondary causes before primary ones. This was the case in the Anglo-French Entente, Egyptian–Israeli, and Sino-American accommodations. Taiwan was the principal bone of contention between China and the U.S., and the two Taiwan Straits crises in the 1950s had threatened to provoke a war between them. Ping-pong diplomacy, as noted, allowed China and the U.S. to finesse their differences over Taiwan, which allowed them to normalize relations and reduce fear and hostility. Unlike the territorial issue between Germany and its neighbors, the Taiwan question remains unresolved and periodically inflames Sino-American tensions, as it did after Donald Trump’s pre-inaugural telephone conversation with Taiwan’s “president” (Landler and Sanger 2016).

These several conflicts suggest that there is no general rule about which cause to address first. Opportunity must dictate strategy. Leaders should be guided by their judgment of which cause of conflict is easiest to address. These judgments are never scientific but reflect, or should, politically informed understandings about the causes of conflict, their openness to resolution, and all the conditions, noted earlier, for setting a process of accommodation in motion. Analysis is useful, but leadership is critical.

Different strategies are more appropriate to different causes of conflict. We might frame these choices in terms of a conflict triangle with each vertex representing a generic source of conflict. I focus on standing/status, and fear, because appetite, in the form of the quest for material wellbeing, has not been an acute source of conflict between the great powers since the late eighteenth century (Lebow 2010). Hostility can be a source of conflict, as it was for Hitler’s Germany vis-a-vis its neighbors, if not the world. More often, hostility is a follow-on effect of conflict. Leaders, and perhaps public opinion as well, become convinced that their adversary is unremittingly hostile and committed to their demise. We observed this phenomenon in the Cold War. Americans believed the Soviet Union and China sought to destroy their political system, a belief reciprocated by Soviet and Chinese leaders (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Conflict triangle

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Deterrence is the appropriate strategy to use against a hostile adversary whom it is believed only superior force can restrain from attacking. But it is only likely to work when this perception is accurate, which, as we have seen, is often not the case. Deterrence is only likely to succeed when adversarial leaders are motivated largely by the prospect of gain rather than by the fear of loss, free to exercise restraint, are not misled by rosy assessments of the political–military balance, and are vulnerable to the kinds of threats a deterrer is capable of credibly making. If challengers do not share these motivational, cognitive, and political attributes, the strategy of deterrence is more likely to intensify conflict. The timing of deterrence is also important. Its effectiveness is enhanced if it is used early; that is, before an adversary becomes committed to a challenge or the use of force and becomes correspondingly insensitive to warnings and threats.

Fear and hostility are closely related. To the extent that leaders believe an adversary is hostile, they become fearful. Reassurance seeks to reduce fear by changing this perception. It can be used duplicitously, as Hitler did to encourage French and British appeasement. More frequently, it is intended to reduce tensions by demonstrating benign or cooperative intentions. As noted, attempts at reassurance must overcome disbelief on the part of target leaders. They may believe, rightly or wrongly, that their adversary is unremittingly hostile, and interpret communications and behavior to the contrary as nefarious and designed to lull them or public opinion into letting down their guard. Key members of the Reagan administration felt this way about Gorbachev and tried to prevent and then to sabotage arms control negotiations (Service 2016).

My several examples of successful reassurance achieved major breakthroughs that led to at least the first level of accommodation: a significant reduction in the likelihood of war. I want to stress that reassurance is a useful strategy even when accommodation is not a feasible goal. When would-be challengers are motivated largely by need and are seriously constrained at home and abroad, variants of reassurance can supplement deterrence or compellence. They may reduce to some degree the distrust and fear that can propel a challenge.

The best historical example is the coupling of reassurance with compellence in the Cuban missile crisis. It demonstrates how compellence in the form of the naval quarantine of Cuba and the threat of an invasion of Cuba and air strike against the Soviet missile bases on that island raised the risk of war, and reassurance, as practiced by President Kennedy, reduced the cost of concession to Khrushchev. The Soviet premier came to believe that Kennedy was not a tool of the American military and Wall Street bankers but someone with a fair degree of independence and committed, as he was, to avoiding war. By withdrawing the missiles in Cuba, he would not invite new demands but rather resolve the crisis and reduce the likelihood of a future one. Khrushchev and Kennedy became partners as much as adversaries in the end game and aftermath of the crisis, paving the way for a subsequent détente (Lebow and Stein 1994; Garthoff 2011).

Threat-based strategies and reassurance engage status and standing in positive and negative ways. Deterrence, and even more so compellence, threaten the self-esteem of actors because they demand that they give in to threats, and sometimes suffer public humiliation for doing so. Visible subordination makes actors angry, if not defiant. When this happens, they may reframe the conflict in ways that make it more acute. This is because the goal of not giving in to adversarial threats becomes more important than any substantive interests at stake. Threat-based strategies can also generate strong desires for revenge, as German threats in the Bosnian Annexation crisis of 1908–09 did for the Russians, and the American deployment of Jupiter missiles in Turkey did for Khrushchev (Lebow and Stein 1994).

Reassurance and diplomacy are the strategies relevant to the status/standing vertex of the triangle. Competition for recognition, honor, and standing is always intense, and conflict arises to the extent that actors feel they are denied or slighted. There is a growing literature on recognition in international relations and its relevance to conflict reduction (Honneth 1996; Lebow 2003; Honneth and Fraser 2003; Lindemann and Ringmar 2012). Recognition, honor, and standing are often described as “symbolic” goals, implying that they are less important than “substantive” ones. Nothing could be further from the truth. In Why Nations Fight (Lebow 2010), I constructed a dataset of all inter-state wars involving great and aspiring rising powers from 1648 to the present. The dataset identifies initiators of war (often multiple); their motives (security, material advantage, standing, revenge and domestic politics); the outcome (win, lose or draw); the nature of the rules, if any, governing warfare; the duration and intensity of the war; and the character of the peace settlement. Contrary to realist expectations, I found security responsible for only 19 of 94 wars. Material interests were an even weaker motive for war, being responsible for only eight wars, and most of them in the eighteenth century. Standing, by contrast, was responsible for 62 wars as a primary or secondary motive. Revenge, also a manifestation of the spirit, is implicated in another 11. There can be little doubt that status/standing is the principal cause of war across the centuries, and that it and its consequences, until now, have been almost totally ignored in the international relations literature (Lebow 2010).

Concern for recognition, honor, and standing, can sometimes be addressed without making serious trade-offs in other goals. President Eisenhower’s gracious reception of Khrushchev on his visit to the US, where he was treated as a head of state, although only general secretary, is a case in point. Ike invited him to the presidential retreat at Camp David, which had a demonstrably positive effect on the insecure Soviet leader’s estimate of his and his country’s worth. It made him more receptive to cooperation (Khrushchev 1975; Lebow and Stein 1994). In May 1972, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev and President Richard Nixon met in Moscow, where they signed the first important strategic arms-limitation agreement and discussed ways of preventing war-threatening crises. Preventing war was obviously an overriding goal of both superpowers, and Soviet leaders hailed the détente as a significant achievement (Arbatov 1973; Garthoff 2011). They also emphasized the coequal superpower status they had gained by virtue of these agreements. Especially important to Moscow was the second article of the Basic Principles Agreement that referred to the “recognition of the security interests of the parties based on the principle of equality and the renunciation of the use or threat of force,” and recognition “that efforts to obtain unilateral advantages at the expense of others, directly or indirectly, are inconsistent with these objectives” (TASS 1973). For Politburo members, these agreements symbolized their long-standing goal of American acceptance of their country as a co-equal global power. Speaking for Brezhnev, Leonid Zamyatin, Chairman of the International Information Department of the Central Committee, explained that as America’s recognized equal, the Soviet Union now expected to participate fully in the resolution of major international conflicts (Marder 1973; TASS 1973; Garthoff 2011). The clear implication was that the Soviet Union would act more like a satisfied power once its status claims were recognized and honored.

These examples are nevertheless sobering, because the Eisenhower-Khrushchev thaw and the Johnson-Brezhnev détente were regrettably short-lived. So too it appears was Sino-American accommodation. They aroused false expectations, and détente allowed, perhaps encouraged, conflicting interpretations, that not only contributed to its demise but also to a sense of mutual betrayal, anger, and heightened tensions. There can be no doubt, however, that recognizing adversaries as equals—or with equal rights—and building a degree of personal trust with their leaders, is critical to meaningful accommodation. Diplomacy is central to these efforts. Diplomats and other emissaries must pave the way for the kinds of encounters and agreements that build positive relationships, and leaders in turn must develop them as far as possible. Good personal relationships between Lord Salisbury and French ambassador Paul Cambon, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and Gorbachev with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Reagan, were arguably essential to the Anglo-French, Sino-American accommodations and the end of the Cold War. Such relationships are not absolutely necessary, as the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty and Sino-American accommodation indicate. At Camp David, President Jimmy Carter met separately with Begin and Sadat and functioned as a critical go-between, as they were unable to reach an agreement on their own (Telhami 1992; Bar-Simon-Tov 1994).

Successful conflict management must combine components of deterrence, reassurance, and diplomacy, a necessary but difficult task. There are formidable obstacles to the success of these strategies, individually and collectively. No single strategy is likely to work across cases under different strategic, political, and psychological conditions. Nevertheless, sensitivity to the limiting conditions of each strategy, to their relative strengths and weaknesses, and to their interactive effects is the first step in managing and resolving conflicts, and in preventing them from escalating to dangerous levels.