Diplomacy, security, and the “Art of Coercion”

DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards.

On the first page of Watson political scientist Reid Pauly's new book, The Art of Coercion, he gives a pretty straightforward definition of the concept. Coercion is, quote, "the practice of convincing a target by the use of threats to bend to your will." He goes on to provide some examples in both politics and in life. Countries coerce other countries. Countries coerce their own citizens. And individuals can coerce each other, even on your daily commute.

REID PAULY: The credibly contingent threat of harm, if you were to drive in the wrong side of the road, has convinced you to drive on the correct side of the road. So in a sense, you're coerced by law and the threat of harm to drive on the correct side of the road.

DAN RICHARDS: However, despite its ubiquity and apparent simplicity, it's actually difficult to do well, especially in Reid's area of expertise, the world of international security and diplomacy.

According to Reid, most efforts at what experts call coercive diplomacy fail to achieve their goals, which is a problem, and not just for the countries that are attempting to bend the will of others. It's also a problem because when coercion fails, countries often find themselves one step closer to using violence to achieve their goals. In other words, one step closer to war.

So why does coercion so often fail in international relations? And why, occasionally, does it succeed? The answers Reid found may surprise you. On this episode, Reed Pauly on the subtle art of coercion in international diplomacy-- why it's so difficult, the surprising trait that many successful attempts at coercion share, and how these lessons might be applied to addressing present and future conflicts around the globe.

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Reid Pauly, thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

REID PAULY: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

DAN RICHARDS: So listeners will be familiar with the word and the concept of coercion. And while there are lots of nuances to it, as we'll get into in this conversation, one of the most important points you make at the beginning of the book is a surprising claim that in the world of international affairs and international diplomacy, coercion often doesn't work. Why is that?

REID PAULY: The history of coercive bargaining and coercive diplomacy is really a litany of mostly failures. On average, about one-third of the time, threats work to compel an adversary to change their behavior. But the much more surprising thing when you dig down into the history of coercion is whose threats work, because you might think that a stronger state would make more credible threats. It can threaten more severe consequences. It can threaten to go to war against almost anybody it wants because it's a great power in the international system. It's probably going to win those wars. And so it should have a higher success rate when it makes threats.

It turns out that's not true. The United States' threats work only about a third of the time.

DAN RICHARDS: So why is that? Because you're right. It's not an intuitive finding.

REID PAULY: Yeah. It's not particularly intuitive. When it comes to coercion, the credibility or severity of the threat itself, which is what we almost always focus on when we think about when threats work or how to make effective threats, the credibility or severity of that threat is only one side of the coin. A target, when it is observing or perceiving a threat made against it, is evaluating both, will I be punished if I do not comply? And secondly, they are evaluating, am I going to be punished, even if I comply? Am I damned if I do and damned if I don't?

Weak states often look at threats made by strong governments and say, OK, I believe you. I actually do think that sanctions or military force is forthcoming, if I don't comply. But I'm also pretty sure that you mean to do me harm anyway. Coercion works in the minds of its target. It's a perception. So the evaluations of credibility, we like to think, boil down to whether I am strong and whether I know that I am not bluffing. But that's not true. Coercive diplomacy is necessarily a game of strategic empathy of trying to see the world through the lens of the person that you are threatening in order to try and manipulate their incentives in such a way that they will comply.

DAN RICHARDS: So this gets to a key part of your book, which is that in a coercive negotiation, not only do your threats need to be credible, your assurances that the threats will go away also need to be credible. And that's why you call it assurance, credibility. And this then leads into a key concept in your book, which you call the assurance dilemma. So what is the assurance dilemma?

REID PAULY: Yes. So the assurance dilemma is a core concept and argument in the book. And it's pointing out that the actions we take to try and increase or augment the credibility of our threats in the eye of the target, or the severity of the punishment in the eye of the target, that those same actions that we have taken on that side of the equation end up undermining the assurance signals that are received by the target.

DAN RICHARDS: According to Reid, this dilemma can take many forms. The movement of troops can increase the credibility of a threat in coercive diplomacy, but it can also create the feeling that the target of these threats might be attacked no matter what happens. Another example, when attempting to coerce a country through the use of economic sanctions--

REID PAULY: We often like to construct coalitions to bring more pressure to bear, to choke off strategic substitution. Sometimes if you don't do a lot of business with the United States, and there isn't actually a lot of pain to be had from being cut off with American markets, so how do we make sanctions work better? Well, we get a lot of people on board with the sanctions campaign. But in constructing those correlations, we also often to get everyone on board, we do what's called log rolling, which is put everyone's issue on the table, which is to say, I want to punish this state over its nuclear program. I want to focus on constraining a proliferation in, let's say, Iran.

And then people join the campaign. And they say, that's great. And we also want to pressure Iran for its human rights violations or support for terrorism, whatever. So you've got this then basket of issues that coercion becomes all about, and they become what the book calls entangled. You have done something, perhaps quite successfully, trying to improve or augment the credibility or severity of the threat side of things, but you have made it then harder in the long run, on the assurance side of things, to assure your target that the pain is actually avoidable.

DAN RICHARDS: It reminds me of however many movies have this scene, someone is surrounded by a bunch of people holding bow and arrows. And they're being told they have to do something or not do something or drop their weapons or whatever. And you see one person's arrows starting to quiver. And it's that feeling of oh, no, no one wants that to happen right now. But if that person sees that that's happening or that happens, all our efforts at coercion, it's going to collapse into violence. And the more people you add, the more likely there could be a quivering arrow or something like that.

REID PAULY: Yeah. I think that's a good analogy. And I call it coercive control that if you are engaged in a strategy of coercion, you should also worry about being in control of the terms and tools of punishment for the purpose of sending assuring signals to the target that they can actually avoid it by talking to you, and that if you come out and say, they have complied, then others who are in the course or coalition will follow your lead and agree. That's not always the case.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, let's turn to one of the examples you cover in the book that looks at the importance of assurance in coercive diplomacy. And the one I want to look at primarily is the multi-decade effort by a group of nations led by the US, to get Iran to end its nuclear program.

And this culminated under the Obama administration in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in Twenty Fifteen, known by its acronym, the JCPOA. Most of us might know as just the Iran nuclear deal, which was a groundbreaking deal, where Iran agreed to really restrict its nuclear program.

Today, we are in a very, very different place. President Trump withdrew from the JCPOA during his first term in office. And then, of course, this summer, Israel, and then the United States, bombed Iran with a goal of destroying their nuclear program. And I want to talk about that a little bit later. But let's start with how this deal originally came to pass, and why the Obama administration was able to succeed in this type of coercive diplomacy, where so many others had failed.

REID PAULY: Sure. The book starts the case back in Two Thousand and Two, when there was a revelation of the first covert uranium enrichment facility in Natanz. That really thrust the issue into the public. That's when most scholars date the beginning of the Iranian nuclear crisis to that revelation in Two Thousand and Two.

And things started to ramp up again in Two Thousand and Nine with the revelation of another covert uranium enrichment facility called Fordow. And the Obama administration came into power and initially wanted to do what you might call just more traditional diplomacy diplomacy, which is they reached out to Iran and they asked to have talks. And that did not go as they were expecting. And that was the Obama administration learning in the beginning of their first term that the Iran nuclear problem was going to take more coercive diplomacy than diplomacy.

And so they put effort into increasing economic pressure on Iran, and that meant primarily getting governments like, Russia and China to get on board. And they were remarkably successful at getting broad international cooperation to pressure the Iranians to negotiate.

There was a successful effort to get severe and broadly supported sanctions, especially passed at the UN Security Council, to bring pressure on Iran and really plummet Iran's sale of oil, which is the lifeblood of their regime. So that was successful. But then you still saw Iranian defiance until there was a breakthrough in backchannel diplomacy.

The Obama administration communicates pretty effectively. Look, we want to talk about your nuclear program. We want to verify that you're enriching uranium for peaceful uses only. We want to have an incredibly transparent monitoring regime for that. And in negotiations that take place between that backchannel breakthrough and the ultimate deal, which is signed in Twenty Fifteen, it's almost two years. It's a really long extended effort that is mostly full of reassuring Iran.

It's not threatening Iran anymore, or, at least, any more than that side of the coin is already covered. It's the other side. It's trying to convince through a series of careful and professional negotiations, that the United States actually intends to follow its side of this agreement. And that comes to fruition in Twenty Fifteen as a great success.

DAN RICHARDS: So how they able to assure Iran, in this case? What were the tools in their assurance credibility toolkit?

REID PAULY: One of the key ways was disentangling the nuclear issue from other demands that had been made over time of the Iranian government. We also know that the Iranians commit human rights violations on a daily basis, and would love to negotiate with them over that, but that's an impediment to talking about the nuclear issue. So they put it aside.

Same thing with Iranian malign behavior in the region, support for Hezbollah and Hamas at the time.

DAN RICHARDS: Right. So they made it very specific. This sanction or this punishment, threat is the result of something you're doing with your nuclear program.

REID PAULY: Yeah. So disentangling the specific punishments from the specific demands to make it clear at the outset of negotiations that it was actually going to be possible to lift these sanctions. Again, this is the assurance dilemma, where the sanctions campaign that was put together to compel Iran to come to the table, it was put together to maximize the pressure on Iran in as many ways as we could possibly come up with. But it was not structured to be easy to unwind.

That happens to sanctions all the time. They're very sticky. You tend to imposed more sanctions than you ever lift. So what the negotiations with a target of those sanctions end up being is like, the target trying to understand how it is actually possible through the legal or domestic political systems of the other governments, that they are going to unwind those.

I'll give you an example. The central bank of Iran was labeled a money launderer. If you talk to the people who were ticketing these sanctions on Iran, they will tell you, most of the time, these sanctions were put in place to bring pressure on the Iranian government for its nuclear program. But if I then sign an agreement as the Iranian government and say, we've solved the nuclear issue, I'm going to allow 24/7 cameras and the weighing of my nuclear material, and we're going to sign this agreement that ensures my peaceful uses of nuclear technology, how is it that I have solved the money laundering problem?

I've not actually conceded that I am a money launderer, or that I'm going to change that behavior in any way. And so there were these series of nitty gritty bargains that had to be made between the Iranians and the P5+1 about how to reword some of that, how to get the UN to pass new sanctions authorities that would allow for the existence of some sanctions to remain in place, but also the relief of all the ones that were being defined in the negotiation as nuclear related.

DAN RICHARDS: Another tool or issue in assuring Iran revolved around, like neutralizing the threat that some other parties could have had acting as spoilers, as blowing up this potential deal. In this example, what did that look like? Who were the spoilers? And how was that addressed?

REID PAULY: Sure. So a big one was the government of Israel. So remember, Iran's negotiating with the P5+1. The P5 plus Germany. And Israel is not officially a party to the bargaining process, but Israel is in the back of everyone's minds. They are clearly an unofficial party of the bargaining, because if they do not go along or accept an agreement that Iran makes, they can act as a spoiler.

And the Israeli government was threatening to use force if Iran didn't concede. And they were threatening to do so even without coordinating with the United States, which is to say, they'd rather that the United States military were to do it. But even if they had to do it on their own, they were claiming they'd be willing to do it.

And so there were lots of ways in which the Obama administration was really aware of this and was trying to restrain the Israeli government, and more importantly, to show the Iranians that it was restraining the Israeli government. And that if the Iranians were to agree to a coercive bargain with them, that the Israelis would not act to spoil it.

So what did the United States do to try and restrain the Israelis? Well, first of all, the Israelis wanted the United States to provide lots of military equipment to assist in a mission that would involve airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. A big one was tanker support. You need tanker aircraft to refuel jets in the air, if you want to arrange that distance. And at the time, the Israelis were really constrained in the aerial refueling capacity.

They also wanted the United States to provide the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker buster bombs that the United States had specifically built for the purpose of holding at risk underground targets like the Fordow fuel enrichment plant. The United States didn't provide this equipment, of course. It did, however, do some buying off of the Israeli government in the sense of providing a boost in military aid. So there was about a 25% increase in conventional military assistance to the Israeli government, that was seen at the time as a bribe to get the Israelis on board to say, and you don't have to use that word, but essentially, provide aid to your ally to reassure them that you still have their back, even though you're negotiating with their enemies.

DAN RICHARDS: And so these were arms that were though, not going to be threatening to Iran. It was its own--

REID PAULY: Well, in general, yes. They are about maintaining the qualitative military advantage for Israel in the region. And yes, they are for supposedly for the defense of Israel and will not be used offensively.

Another big interesting thing that really comes up a lot in the interviews I did with Obama administration officials is that they were very closely monitoring and coordinating with the Israelis while they were negotiating with the Iranians to come back after every meeting with the Iranians and then consult with the Israelis privately and say, look, this is where we're headed.

And the Israelis then, who I interviewed, were telling me that the thing that changes over time, that they were tracking most closely was whether the United States had its own military contingency plan that they were satisfied by. Early on in the Obama administration, the Israelis were clearly not satisfied by what they had seen the US government invest in and exercise and be ready to carry out, as a military back up plan to destroy the Iranian nuclear program.

And that changed over the course of the first Obama administration, where they were trying to show the Israelis that, no, we have taken this military problem very seriously, and we have invested the money and the training time into developing the military plan that would be used in the absence of coming up with a course of bargain.

And that's not just for the purpose of threatening the Iranians. It's also for the purposes of hugging the Israelis closer and bringing them along and saying, look, we have a plan, if this doesn't work. But we are going to prioritize the coercive route and coercive diplomacy, and you have to get on board with that route.

DAN RICHARDS: You don't need to do your own offensive actions, because we've shown you we have a plan that is going to keep you safe.

REID PAULY: Absolutely. One of the last things I'd highlight is that this comes up in interviews with Obama administration officials, but they were quite clearly thinking down to the days and weeks about when it looked like the Netanyahu government was most likely or closest to getting the eight votes necessary in the Israeli security cabinet to get approval to conduct their own independent strikes on Iran.

DAN RICHARDS: So Netanyahu kept wanting to do this, if he could get away with it--

REID PAULY: Exactly.

DAN RICHARDS: --this whole time.

REID PAULY: Exactly. The United States is trying to intervene in this internal debate in Israel in a way that sways enough people, especially in the national security establishment, against airstrikes. And one of the ways they did this was quite literally with skin in the game, where if it looked like, on a moonless night, when it would have been tactically advantageous for the Israelis to go if they were ever going to go, the Obama administration was saying, someone needs to get on the plane and go be on the ground in Israel.

DAN RICHARDS: In Israel?

REID PAULY: In Israel. And it's not just for the messages they were conveying. It's literally also for the purpose of your physical presence on the ground. Because it would be harder politically for the Israeli government to go to war against Iran, while an American official, an American leader, was on the ground in harm's way for retaliation.

There are weeks when the National Security advisor is sent for the purpose of being vulnerable and in the region. And then when they come home, the Secretary of Defense has to go. And there's this clear calculation of restraining the Israelis down to that level of days and weeks, where it looked most critical that they had to be restrained.

DAN RICHARDS: Another facet of assurance or addressing the assurance dilemma involved the US communicating to Iran that the more they disclose, they're not going to necessarily get in more trouble for any new information they share in the process. Adjacent to this wonderful phrase you quote in the book of the cheater's dilemma.

REID PAULY: That's [INAUDIBLE] [? Herkomer's ?] phrase.

DAN RICHARDS: So what exactly, again, put us in the example of the Iran deal to help make sense of this. How was this issue addressed in this deal?

REID PAULY: One of the things that's helpful to assuring targets of coercion is to convince them that through their concessions, they will not be inviting further predation by giving you evidence to use against them to incriminate them in front of others or the world or the UN.

So in the Iran case, what we have are these documents that the Israeli government stole from Iran in Twenty Eighteen. And it's possible to compare them to IAEA records. That's the International Atomic Energy Agency that conducts inspections frequently in Iran. No longer. They've been kicked out after the recent war with Israel.

DAN RICHARDS: But back then.

REID PAULY: But back then. Yeah. And it's one of the best eyes on the Iranian program that we have. And it's possible to compare IAEA records to these stolen Israeli documents that can provide a glimpse into how much did coercers know about the Iranian nuclear program, the former Iranian nuclear weapons program? How much did Iran have to admit, if anything, as part of the deal?

And so it's pretty clear, first of all, that there was not much that coercers didn't know. We had pretty darn good intelligence about the Iranian nuclear program. And more importantly, for the strategic uses of that for coercion and coercive assurance, the Obama administration went to the Iranians and told them how much we know, and, therefore, what we would want you to be transparent about and what you might not necessarily have to be transparent about. Because we can essentially all be on the same page with an agreed upon fiction that there wasn't a nuclear weapons program, when, in fact, we all that there was.

DAN RICHARDS: That they had a program.

REID PAULY: That they had a nuclear weapons program.

DAN RICHARDS: Even before Two Thousand and Three.

REID PAULY: Yes, exactly. And we can move forward as long as we can account for the fact that in the future, it will not be started again. So the aspects of the deal that are about transparency and verification are all about this. To say, we can allow you to deny some of the past, as long as you're fully transparent in the future, and we can ensure that there is no nuclear weapons program.

DAN RICHARDS: So literally, we, the US, know you Iran are lying to the public, to the international community. And we'll lie with you, as long as you'll then go forward with us on good faith on the rest of this deal.

REID PAULY: Yeah. I'd say it is. We will let you lie. And Jake Sullivan, who was the VPs National Security advisor at the time, told me in an interview, a quote that I just loved about this. It became the title of the chapter about it, that quote, "the Iranians asserted from start to finish that all of this was a bunch of bunk that they had never attempted to weaponize. But we knew and they knew we knew. And we knew that they knew, we knew." I just love the way he put that.

DAN RICHARDS: That's how international arms agreements are made. In this example, there are all these different tools the US and their allies were using to reassure Iran that there was a clear path out of the economic pain they were being put in. And this stands in a really stark contrast to another example you look at in the book. All your examples are looking at nuclear non-proliferation efforts.

And another example you look at is the efforts to get Iraq to end its nuclear program in the '90s and the early Two Thousand, which was also done largely using threats of sanctions. But in this case, it all led to a situation where the leadership in Iraq and, really, Saddam Hussein was convinced that no matter what, they were going to continue to suffer. And there was no path out for them.

You have this great quote in the book, literally a recording of Saddam Hussein apparently saying something like, well, either we live with sanctions and outside inspections of our nuclear facilities or sanctions, and no outside inspections of our nuclear facilities. As in, we're damned if we do and damned if we don't.

REID PAULY: Yeah. This is something that Saddam Hussein told his advisors in the mid Nineteen Nineties that they're thinking behind the scenes. These are recordings we have now, by the way, of Saddam Hussein talking to his closest advisors. And so, as a scholar, it's amazing when you come across a paranoid actor like Saddam, who decided that he was going to tape record all of these meetings with his advisors since he came to power in the late '70s.

And after the US invasion of Iraq in Two Thousand and Three, the US military took these records home. They invaded palaces and government offices and took these records. It's actually a very controversial thing to do, because this is the sovereign property of the Iraqi people, and it should be in an archive that is public and they should have access to. But it led to this proliferation of scholarship that had a better capacity than normal in trying to put together this tragedy, really, the other side of the curtain of this tragedy of what was Saddam really thinking.

So in one of these records, you can see Saddam throughout the Nineteen Nineties thinking to himself, look, yeah, sanctions are hurting. We really don't want to go back to the first Gulf War. We really don't want to have see renewed military violence on Iraqi soil. We really want to improve the economy and get these sanctions relieved. And we really do think that it's possible for us to comply with the UN inspections.

ing to comply. And by the mid: 1990

That's not to say cooperation was ever perfect. They were essentially testing things out like, is this enough compliance? That wasn't enough compliance. Is this enough compliance? Here's two more facilities. And here's four more facilities. And then there's a big trove in Nineteen Ninety-Five, where the Iraqis come out and admit they had a biological weapons program.

And so you can basically see the pattern over the '90s including through this behind the curtain tape recordings in these records where the Iraqis are learning over time of just how damned if they do and damned, if they don't they are.

DAN RICHARDS: And so as you chart in the book, this lack of assurance that the pain will end in the Iraq example is one of the key differences between it and the example of the negotiations with Iran in the Twenty Tens. And that in the Iraq example, it pushed the Iraqi government to leave the negotiating table, which opened up new levels of uncertainty and suspicion and antagonism that, ultimately, then drove the US and Iraq into tragedy, into war.

REID PAULY: Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. So, look, there's no kind of normative judgments here. And it's just an analysis, a book that's about strategic analysis and how to do strategy well and how to coerce effectively. So, obviously, it is the case that Saddam Hussein was an awful leader, who is better off not being in power anymore.

But the tragedy of the case is that it was a war that did not have to happen. Two Thousand and Three ends up being a war, where the government go to war, think that they are doing so to stop a proliferation threat. And in reality, they had already stopped it long before. You get a tragedy of a war that didn't need to happen.

DAN RICHARDS: One thing I did just want to touch on, though, was the idea that, I think, a lot of Americans feel like the Iraq war was entered into in such bad faith, people who are critical of the Iraq war, that it maybe had not much to do with the escalated suspiciousness of Saddam Hussein's regime in those critical years, and that it was a familial grudge from a president who was itching for war.

Do you buy any of that view? Or do you think, even if there is some of that view, maybe this assurance stuff was still playing a role. It just there was more to it.

REID PAULY: Yeah. I'll say that, look, the evidence we have access to so far shows quite clearly that George W. Bush thought he was engaged in coercive diplomacy. It's interesting that he actually got a supposedly a briefing from Condoleezza Rice, who's a political scientist. She has a PhD. And so she was like teaching the president the term coercive diplomacy.

And he was like, that, I like that. That's what I'm engaged in. I am threatening war. I don't want to go to war, but I'm threatening war to try and get this crazy dictator to give in.

The White House was focused entirely before the Two Thousand and Three invasion on trying to make credible threats to Saddam. And every time Saddam defied, they blamed it on their lack of credibility. They blamed it on like how, oh, he thinks we're bluffing. So let's mobilize and show them we're not bluffing or let's increase the severity of our punishment in some way. Let's get a coalition together. Show him that this is not a bluff.

But behind the curtain on the other side, Saddam is saying to himself things like, yeah, they're probably not bluffing. This is probably going to inevitably end in war. Our current evidence suggests they are doing things that they think are going to prevent war, but they're pulling on this just one lever that's like, let's get we've got to show them we're not bluffing.

And that's not the lever that they needed to pull. That was just more banging your head against the wall. And that's one of the things this book is trying to improve in American foreign policy.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, and regardless of what the president and the administration back then was thinking, the efforts that were made to change Saddam Hussein's behavior failed, coercion failed. And we got a war.

Back to the Iran example, though, we saw just this summer how success in coercive diplomacy and diplomacy, in general, is, is temporary. What happened in Twenty Fifteen was the agreement was undone by President Trump in his first term. And then this summer, Israel and the United States both did resort to violence. They both did bomb Iran.

I wonder how has that changed how you view this example in the book. And also, how do you think about President Trump generally as someone who seems incredibly interested in coercion as an approach to international relations.

REID PAULY: Yeah. So on the Iran case, in particular, before we get to Trump, in general.

DAN RICHARDS: Sure.

REID PAULY: What we just saw in June with the Israeli started airstrikes, and then the United States coming in to support the Israeli war is very much a culmination of what we were talking about that led to the JCPOA. At the time, you might have said it in the following ways that if you don't like this agreement, then you have to appreciate that the alternative to it is war.

And there were lots of things that were imperfect about the agreement. You could criticize it for having not gotten enough. But this is how the president and his team basically talked about it is supposedly there was a call between Kerry and his team in Vienna, calling back to the president on the last days of the negotiations to say, like, is this enough?

And the president asks Secretary Kerry, did we get enough? Secretary Kerry says, yes, I think we got enough. And so the president says, OK. Then it's done. Then let's make this deal. And they're thinking in their minds and all supporters of the agreement are thinking in their minds that it may not be exactly what you want. But if the alternative is war, then it is good enough.

Now, you don't often get tests of that logic. But I do think that fast forward to today, we got a bit of a test of it. We have now shown in the last 10 years that the alternative to that agreement was probably war. Because now, we are experiencing the alternative. I put some of that on the feet of the Trump administration, because this is a big part of assurance in the Iran chapter in the book.

One of the major things that the Obama administration was trying to do in the culminating moments of the JCPOA was to reassure the Iranians that the Israelis would not spoil the agreement, to show that they had control over the situation. That if you strike a bargain with us, the Israelis are not going to attack you anyway.

So there was this line of nitty gritty day-to-day restraining the potential spoiler that was important to the success of that diplomatic agreement, that led to the JCPOA. And that it doesn't seem like the Trump administration tried to do in Twenty Twenty-Five. Again, that's this logic of let's work on the threat side of things. The Israelis will help us to boost the credibility and severity of the threat. That way, the Iranians will give in. But it didn't work that way at all.

The Israelis were the spoilers, and they ended up rolling the president into using American military power abroad in a way that he did not want to, which is pretty incredible.

DAN RICHARDS: As I was reading this, I couldn't help but think about so many different struggles internationally and where coercion seems to be at play and where threats are being made across borders. I wonder where is somewhere in the world, that when you're reading about in the news today that you see most clearly, I wish these actors were thinking about assurance more, that it is missing, and we are in danger because of that?

REID PAULY: The two that I'd highlight are deterrence on the Korean Peninsula and deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. The United States has been doing a lot of work with its South Korean allies to try and figure out how to deter North Korea from ever using those nuclear weapons, or using conventional force behind the shield of its new nuclear arsenal, much like Russia and Ukraine. That's what they're doing.

That's a deterrence challenge. And it comes with a series of new foreign policy challenges and military signaling policies on the peninsula about how to communicate effective deterrence. But at the very same time, we have not gotten rid of our policy of seeking the denuclearization of North Korea.

That is a demand that communicates that if you do not comply, as in if you do not negotiate with me to reduce and, eventually, eliminate your nuclear weapons, then I will hurt you. And that undermines the assurance of the deterrent signals we want to send, which is to say, if you sit on your hands, and you do nothing, we won't hurt you. If you're sitting in North Korea and you're evaluating these two threats at the same time, you have to think about whether doing nothing, preserving the current status quo, is actually going to keep you safe, because that would be successful deterrence.

If they abide by the current status quo and never use military force and don't engage in any provocative or annoying behavior on the Korean Peninsula, then they should find safety in that. That's the assurance of the deterrent threat. But they have to simultaneously think to themselves, how seriously is the United States and their partners taking this denuclearization goal? If we do not change that status quo, they are telling us that they intend to hurt us.

DAN RICHARDS: So it's an entangled demand in some ways.

REID PAULY: You could think about it that way. Yeah.

DAN RICHARDS: All right. Well, let's turn just briefly to Taiwan. How do you see the assurance dilemma playing out in the relationship between Taiwan and the US and China?

REID PAULY: I do a simulation with my students every year in the political science lecture on nuclear weapons about a Taiwan Straits crisis, because this is a highly likely crisis to happen in their lifetimes about the long-term status of Taiwan. It doesn't necessarily have to look like a Chinese invasion of the island, which is the contingency that a lot of people are worried about. But it doesn't have to look like that. It could look like a blockade of the island smoldering crisis that leads to this confrontation directly between the United States and China.

And it's a key flashpoint for the 21st century. The assurance side of this is particularly interesting, though, because, again, deterrent threats preserve a status quo. They say don't do anything. Do not attempt to change the status quo in Taiwan or else you will suffer. And so currently, the Pentagon is worried about helping the Taiwanese to defend themselves, bolstering American military power in the Western Pacific, such that we would have the capacity to defend Taiwan, but also arm the Taiwanese to defend themselves against a Chinese invasion.

And that's all well and good, but it's all on the threat side of the equation that we want to improve the capacity of the deterrent threat. The assurance side, though, is about the preservation of the status quo over Taiwan, which is intentionally ambiguous. It's the Nineteen Seventies, Nixon to China moment that results in this Shanghai Communiqué that says, there is but one, China and Taiwan is a part of it. And the whole point of that constructively ambiguous sentence is that the Chinese in Beijing can read that sentence and say, a-ha, yes, we agree. Taiwan is a part of our country.

And the Americans and Taiwanese can read that from the other side and say, yes, Taiwan is the legitimate government of the whole of China. So there is but one China and Taiwan is part of it. So that one China policy is the status quo, and it's an intentionally ambiguous status quo. If in the process of trying to improve the credibility of one's deterrent threat, we end up changing the relationship between the United States and Taiwan into one that is no longer constructively ambiguous, that the United States is turning Taiwan into an explicit, overt ally.

Then, they could interpret that not as deterrence, but as a fait accompli, that the United States, in an attempt to preserve a status quo, has changed the status quo. Well, then all you've done instead of deter is you provoke.

DAN RICHARDS: So in the process maybe of arming and aiding Taiwan, the US doesn't see it as fully changing the status of Taiwan vis-a-vis China. But maybe, China does, because of that ambiguity in there. And so it's risking, doing something where then China thinks the worst has already happened.

REID PAULY: Yeah. So this is what I worry about. I fundamentally believe that logic of the case, which is that the Chinese don't want to fight a bloody war over Taiwan. But what would provoke someone who is thinking along those lines is if one day, they get a briefing that says, oh my gosh, I'm going to be the leader to lose Taiwan.

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By doing nothing, by being deterred, I am allowing the fait accompli loss of Taiwan in perpetuity, and I am losing the prospect of peaceful reunification with Taiwan one day. If that perception metastasizes in Beijing, then one day, you might get a government, Xi Jinping or otherwise, that says to itself, well, our hands are tied. We have to go and try and forcibly retake Taiwan, because, otherwise, we're going to lose it permanently.

And they would blame it on the United States and say, because the Americans are conducting a fait accompli, essentially, to change the status quo themselves. And so we better change the status quo forcibly before they change the status quo. So reassurance is extremely important to the prevention of a war over Taiwan.

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DAN RICHARDS: Well, it's a sobering example to contemplate. But once again, it underscores, I think, the importance of your framing of assurance and the role of assurance in international relations. So thank you so much for writing this book. And thank you so much for talking with us about it on Trending Globally.

REID PAULY: Thank you.

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This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards, with production assistance from Errol Danehy. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music from the Blue Dot Sessions. If you liked this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do that too. If you want to learn more about The Art of Coercion, we'll have links to read more of Reid's work and purchase his book in our show notes.

And if you have any questions for us, or comments, or ideas for guests or topics for the show, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that's all one word, trendingglobally@brown.edu.

We'll be back soon with another episode of Trending Globally.

Thanks for listening.

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