CRISIS MANAGEMENT

Crisis management is often defined as an attempt to avoid war while maintaining one's vital interests (George, 1991a).¹⁶ Thus, crisis management has dual objectives, and there is a tension between them.

Scholars began to think seriously about systematizing a theory of crisis management after the Cuban missile crisis. Perhaps the most useful theory is the “provisional theory” provided by George (1991a), who aimed to explain the behavior of actors and to provide a useful guide for policy makers. George identified both political and opera­tional requirements for crisis management. Political requirements include the limitation of objectives pursued in the crisis and the limitation of the means employed on behalf of those objectives. George (1991a: 24) recognized, however, that avoiding war does not always take priority over maintaining or even advancing one's interests, that actors are often willing to go to war to secure or advance their interests, and that not all wars result from a failure of crisis management. He knew that in addition to identifying the strategies most conducive to successful crisis management and the conditions that facilitated those strategies, a theory of crisis management also had to explain when political leaders made no effort to manage a crisis to avoid war. Thus, he emphasized the importance of actors' incentives to avoid war, their opportunities for doing so, and their level of skills.

Even if political leaders on both sides have incentives to avoid war, a peaceful outcome is not guaranteed, and George (1991a: 25) constructed a list of “opera­tional” principles or requirements for suc­cessful crisis management.

This general emphasis on the control of military force by political leaders for the purposes of advancing the broader political objectives of the state lead George to suggest a number of more specific operational requirements of crisis management. In order for political leaders to be able to tailor their military actions to specific political objectives, they must possess a range of military options commensurate with those objectives. They must select military actions and threats of force that are appropriate to limited crisis objectives. Their military actions should signal their limited objectives and their interest in negotiating a way out of the crisis, and make it clear that they do not seek a military solution or are about to resort to large-scale warfare.

A number of scholars have used George's (1991a) framework in their own case study analyses of crisis management. Here I focus on case studies of the two leading interstate crises of the 20th century: the July 1914 crisis and the Arab-Israeli crisis of 1967 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

July 1914 crisis

In applying George's crisis management framework to the July 1914 crisis, Levy

(1990-91) asked whether the outbreak of war was due to a failure of crisis management or to a more basic conflict of fundamental interests. Employing a modified rational choice frame­work, he identified four possible outcomes of the crisis initiated by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand: a negotiated settlement between Austria and Serbia; a local war in the Balkans between Austria and Serbia; a continental war resulting from the intervention of Russia, Germany, and then France; and a world war resulting from the intervention of Britain. Levy rank-ordered the preferences of each of the European great powers (plus Serbia) over these possible outcomes, argued that they were stable over the course of the crisis, and then noted an interesting puzzle: each of the major actors preferred a negotiated settlement to a world war, yet the outcome of the crisis was a world war.

Levy identified a series of critical decision points in the escalating crisis, and at each of these key points identified the choices available to each of the major actors, the international and domestic constraints on their actions, and the available information. He concluded that nearly all the decisions by each actor at each critical decision point were basically rational given actors' interests and constraints.

The key actor was Germany, who continued to encourage Austria to initiate a war in the Balkans. Germany hoped would eliminate the ongoing threat to the internal stability of Germany's only great power ally in Europe and precipitate a diplomatic realignment in Europe, thus eliminating the encirclement of Germany by the Franco-Russian alliance at a time that Russian power was grow­ing rapidly. If that diplomatic alignment failed to materialize, Germany was willing to adopt a strategy of preventive war to defeat Russia and its French ally before that combination grew too strong for Germany by 1917.

Repeated British attempts to manage the crisis, including the famous “Halt-in- Belgrade” proposal, were rejected by German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg because he preferred a local war and even a continental war to a negotiated settlement, and because he was reasonably confident that Britain would stand aside in a continental war, or at least stand aside long enough for Germany to achieve an irreversible advantage in the war. This was a critical misperception. Like a modest number of other misperceptions, however, it was not unreasonable given the information available at the time. Britain had not joined the Franco-Russian defensive alliance, made any commitment to intervene in a war on the continent, or made any effort to deter Germany from war against either France or Russia. Even Britain's allies in Paris and St. Petersburg had no idea what Britain might do in the event of war, and British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey himself was not certain if he would be able to secure a vote for military intervention from the Cabinet. Thus, Germany's critical misperception can hardly be described as lacking in any rational basis.

Once German leaders learned (late on July 29) that Britain would probably intervene in the war, they reversed course, tried to hold Austria-Hungary back, and even threatened to abandon its Austrian ally if it did not accept the Halt-in-Belgrade plan. By that time, however, it was too late. After Austrian-Hungarian leaders had taken the politically difficult decisions to issue the ultimatum, declare war, and begin mobilization, they felt they could not reverse course without undermining Austrian credibility, upsetting a coalition of domestic political interests that had been very difficult to construct, and breaking a serious psychological commitment.

The primary explanation for the escalation to war, Levy argues, was not the failure of political leaders to manage the crisis, but the lack of incentives to manage the crisis to begin with, given the structure of power and alliances and the interests of the actors (as they defined them) in place at the onset of the crisis. His case study shows that the actors in 1914 faced a social dilemma, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma but involving a number of choices by different actors at different decision points. The structure of the situation in conjunction with actors’ preferences induced each actor to make choices that were rational when they were made but that narrowed the range of future choices and led through a process of entrapment in escalating conflict to outcomes all actors would have preferred to avoid.¹⁸

Cuban missile crisis

George (1991b) used his framework to explain the peaceful outcome of the Cuban missile crisis, which he regarded as a case of highly successful crisis management. After noting the incentives that Kennedy and Khrushchev each had to avoid war, particular given the incalculable costs of escalation, George emphasized the limited nature of Kennedy’s objectives - to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba, and not to overthrow the Castro regime or to eliminate Soviet influence from Cuba (as some of his advisors recommended).¹⁹ The means employed, particularly by Kennedy, were also limited.²⁰ The US blockade strategy avoided the likely escalatory effects of the air strike or invasion options, and it also served as a signal of both resolve and a willingness to find a way out of the crisis.

As for Khrushchev, while many have regarded the initial Soviet decision to place offensive missiles in Cuba as quite risky, George proposed a more nuanced interpreta­tion Building on George and Smoke (1974: 489, 527-30), he introduced an additional dimension by distinguishing between actors’ perceptions of the magnitude of the risks and their assessment of the controllability of the risks through the evolution of the crisis.²¹ In some (but not all) cases where leaders anticipate that a particular course of action runs high risks later in the crisis, they may nevertheless be willing to embark on that course of action if they are confident that they can manage and control those risks as part of a strategy of limited probes or controlled pressure. There is some evidence in support of the wider validity of this proposition. In their case studies of a number of instances of failures of deterrence, George and Smoke (1974: 527) found that in nearly all their historical cases “the initiator tried to satisfy himself before acting that the risks of the particular option he chose could be calculated and... controlled by him so as to give his choice of action the character of a rationally calculated, acceptable risk.”²²

George (1991b) also examined the bargain­ing dimensions of the interactions between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and in doing so suggested an interesting line of interpretation and some interesting theoretical propositions that went beyond his “principles of crisis management.” He acknowledged the lack of theory or evidence suggesting that there is an optimal combination of coercion, persuasion, compromise, and positive inducements that is likely to lead to successful crisis management, though he argued that coercive or bullying strategies are not optimal under most condi­tions (Leng, 1993). George stressed, among other things, the importance of the sequencing and timing of different actions. He argued that while Kennedy was quite willing to be conciliatory toward Khrushchev, the president also believed that is was essential to begin with coercive threats and actions at the onset of the crisis, in order to demonstrate his own credibility and reverse any image of weakness in the mind of the adversary. Only then was he willing to discuss concessions.

George basically accepted the rationale behind Kennedy's strategy, and argued that had he begun with a purely diplomatic strategy without coercive threats, he would have reinforced Khrushchev's image of Kennedy as weak, lead to less compromising behavior by Khrushchev. That would have prolonged the crisis and increased the likelihood that it would have escalated to risky military action.