Read the rhetoric used by political and military leaders for wars in the past few decades, and you will be struck by the repeated references to ‘credibility’. The justification of war is very often that it is necessary to uphold our reputation for strength, without which we would become targets for attack. The Vietnam domino theory was a good example of this mode of thought, and similar thinking continues to drive foreign policy today. Yet academic studies into the origins of war suggest that upholding your ‘credibility’ does not actually make you less likely to be attacked. Would-be aggressors pay very little attention to whether you have proved willing to fight in the past. Authors such as Daryl Grayson Press in his book Calculating Credibility and Christopher Fettweis in a number of related articles, have illustrated this very well. What this means is that waging wars for reputation makes no sense. Why then do states persist in doing so? Continue reading
Why Leaders Really Care about ‘Credibility’
10 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted political science of honor
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