The Anti-Escalation Logic of Strategic Ambiguity: The Escalation-Reputation Dilemma and Why Saving the Face of Others can be Good for You, Too
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Abstract: The concept of “strategic ambiguity” is ubiquitous in policy debates over the U.S.’s posture over Taiwan. Yet the term remains undertheorized in both international relations and the broader policy world, leading both proponents and opponents to mischaracterize how strategic ambiguity is supposed to work. In this paper, we suggest that strategic ambiguity cannot be assessed on whether it enhances deterrence. Rather strategic ambiguity is a policy to help state leaders prevent entering into a bargaining crisis in the first place, without losing face at home or to allies. Drawing from organizational studies, we show that strategic ambiguity does this by making it possible to send a coded signal of one’s desire to de-escalate, so that both sides can plausibly deny knowing the other side’s weaknesses. Whereas strategic clarity involves issuing credible signals of resolve that goads the other party to issue credible signals of their own, strategic ambiguity works by taking away the necessity of the other state to signal toughness. While the former is an escalatory strategy that gambles both one’s reputation and peace with the hope of winning, the latter is a strategy to de-escalate tensions while reducing the cost of losing face. We illustrate this logic in three cases: the Cuban Missile Crisis; NATO expansion; and the Third Taiwan Straits Crisis.
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The problem of Interpretive Ambiguity for Constructivist Research: How Doublespeak elided the Taboo on Expressed White Supremacy at Little Rock and the Suez Crisis
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There is a taken-for-granted assumption in the constructivist literature is that we are hardwired to want to appear consistent. Yet the literature is rarely explicit on what exactly actors are trying to be consist with and why. In our review of the literature, there are two primary candidates: identity and talk. The former argues that norms involve compliance with behavior that is appropriate given one’s constitutive identity. The latter, pointing out that we cannot ‘get into other people’s heads,’ advocate that norms work by constraining actors to be consistent with what they have said. This paper argues that the primary problem with assessing consistency with respect to talk is the inherent ambiguity in the gap between words and their interpretations (which itself are conditioned by one’s identity). One statement can have two meanings to two audiences. While this may make the speaker-actor appear hypocritical to one audience, the speaker-actor may appear to be speaking/acting consistently with its constitutive identity to another audience with whom the speaker-actor shares an identity with. As such, whether rhetorical entrapment is considered a success or failure depends entirely on what one thinks is the speaker-actor’s constitutive identity. Therefore, we argue that identifying what exactly are these constitutive identities (many left unspoken in public settings) is more important than methodologically sidestepping the problem of getting inside their heads. We illustrate this using the case of how the Eisenhower administration elided the taboo on expressed white supremacy at Little Rock and the Suez Crisis using doublespeak.
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