Question

What does Schelling mean by the interdependence of commitments? What does it tell us about how we should conduct foreign policy?

Answer 1

The notion that credibility is important in international politics, and maintaining it requires following through on threats and commitments to establish a reputation for resolve, has been standard diplomatic savoir-faire for decades, with its most influential articulation in the work of Thomas Schelling. According to a new consensus it also is wrong; credibility is linked exclusively to the relative capabilities and interests a state can bring to bear. The new consensus was invoked to criticize the Obama administration's coercive strategy against Syrian chemical weapons use in 2013. This article revisits Schelling to determine whether critics have an accurate depiction of coercive diplomacy theory. The analysis show that many of Schelling's specific arguments related to American–Soviet Cold War rivalry were mistakenly offered as general statements about reputation in all coercive bargaining encounters. A more nuanced interpretation stresses commitment of reputation operating within the complexity of the particular bargaining situation. Reputations are relevant but do not determine credibility in international politics; they matter more, relative to other factors, in iterated encounters (and the expectation of future crises) between the same two actors, a situation that approximates Schelling's ‘continuous negotiation’, as well as across fundamentally similar crises between an adversary and a third party. This qualified position was missing in the debate over Syrian chemical weapons in 2013, and should be embraced to better manage tense diplomatic relationships and periodic crises with other potentially hostile world powers. Schelling's work shows that reputation can be an ingredient for peace, and not merely a pretense for war.Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict carries significant behavioral implications which have been overlooked by economic readers. I argue that these implications are central to Schelling’s vision of game theory, that they fit well with recent advances in experimental psychology and behavioral economics, and provide a comprehensive framework that can inform research on strategy. In my view, Schelling develops a non-mathematical approach to strategy which anticipates on Gigerenzer and Selten’s “ecological rationality” program. This approach maps the processes involved in strategic reasoning and highlights their reliance on the particular information structure of interactive social environments. Building on this approach, I model strategy as a heuristic form of reasoning that governs the way in which individuals search for and provide cues in situations of mutually contingent choice. I conclude by examining how the reference to ecological rationality can help clarify Schelling’s contribution to game theory and outline potential avenues of research into strategic reasoning and interaction. This project presents Schelling’s metaphysics as a power-based system and explores its implications for his conception of freedom. I draw parallels between Schelling’s ontology and contemporary pan-dispositionalism, arguing that Schelling’s philosophy highlights problems which apply to all pan-dispositionalist accounts. A power-based ontology provides the space to hold a libertarian conception of freedom but alone is insufficient, as demonstrated by the failure of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie to account for human freedom. This highlights problems with accounting for individuation and control which arise directly from Schelling’s power-based ontology, and will therefore arise for any similar ontology. I take the changes in Schelling’s system as reflecting his attempts to tackle these problems.
The reading of Schelling I advance thus identifies a strong continuity: although there are changes in Schelling’s system I argue that these are motivated by his enduring interest in a cluster of problems surrounding the relationship between freedom and system, and his willingness to attempt new solutions to these problems. I provide an account of Schelling’s philosophical progression between the Naturphilosophie and the Freiheitsschrift, drawing attention to the centrality of powers throughout the changes in his system.  
I then present my reading of Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, arguing that the dominant interpretations in the literature fail to capture Schelling’s account of freedom here, as they overlook the centrality of reciprocity for Schelling’s philosophy. I demonstrate that by paying careful attention to Schelling’s conception of the natural process we can provide a libertarian reading of the Freiheitsschrift which makes sense of this text as a progression, rather than a break from, Schelling’s previous works.Underlying many of the arguments to stay out of the Syria crisis was the notion that following through on red-line threats would not enhance American credibility (in Syria or elsewhere) because the scholarly evidence did not support such a claim. This left aside the issue of whether responding to Assad's chemical weapons use or intervening in Syria more generally was in and of itself in the national interests of the United States (that is, whether intervention would have been justified even in the absence of the initial red-line threat). In this sense, it was not the critics political preferences but an objective invocation of extant academic work—what Christopher Fettweis has characterized as the ‘mountain of research from political science to suggest that [reputation] is an illusion, that credibility earned today does not lead to successes tomorrow and therefore is never worth fighting for’—that determined their policy advice.15 In this most pressing of issue areas—the application of military force in support of coercive diplomacy—the knowledge gap between practitioners and scholars must be closed. As Fettweis argues elsewhere. The dilemma regarding relative power capabilities that provide an
effective deterrent is another issue that has dominated the con›ict and
deterrence research. In strategic studies, the emphasis has been on the
precarious nature of deterrence brought up by the advent of nuclear
weapons. The idea that the strategic balance between superpowers,
forged by their second-strike capabilities, assured deterrence stability,
found both its advocates and skeptics. Critics of the MAD strategy
pointed to its inadequacy to respond to limited attacks or solve the
credibility problem. Instead of relying on the strategic balance of terror, they advocated nuclear superiority as a means of solving the credibility problem of nuclear threats in a nonsuicidal manner. The disagreement over the adequate balance of nuclear power that can provide an effective deterrent roughly corresponds to one of the major debates
about the relationship between power distribution and war in the general international relations literature. The realists are divided over the question of whether power balance or imbalance is more likely to lead to deterrence failure and ultimately to war. However, whether considered in the nuclear or nonnuwar clear setting, the analysis of relative power alone can provide only partial understanding of con›ict behavior. It misses the motivational aspect or, in other words, the important factor of each side’s willingness to ‹ght over an issue. An asymmetry of motivation, for instance,can reverse the impact of capabilities on the probability of war.