Much has been written about deterrence, the process of committing to punish an adversary to prevent an attack. But in sufficiently rich environments where attacks evolve over time, formulating a strategy involves not only deterrence but also appeasement, the less costly process of not responding to an attack. This paper develops a model that integrates these two processes to analyze the equilibrium time paths of attacks, punishment, and appeasement. We study an environment in which a small attack is launched and can be followed by a larger attack. There are pooling and separating equilibria. The pooling equilibrium turns the common intuition that appeasement is a sign of weakness, inviting subsequent attacks, on its head, because appeasement is a sign of strength in the pooling case. In contrast, the separating equilibrium captures the common intuition that appeasement is a sign of weakness, but only because deterrence in this equilibrium fails. We interpret several episodes of aggression, appeasement, and deterrence: Neville Chamberlain's responses to Hitler, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Israel's response to Hamas, Turkey's invasion of Cyprus, and Serbia's attacks in Kosovo.
Authors
- Acknowledgements & Disclosure
- We would like to thank Rohan Dutta, Andrea Mattozzi, Salvatore Modica and Dan Treisman. We gratefully acknowledge support from the MIUR PRIN 2017 n. 2017H5KPLL_01. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. David K. Levine Leverhulme Trust
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3386/w32280
- Published in
- United States of America