On the Brink of War: Explaining Asymmetric Brinkmanship Crises

Abstract

Saddam Husseins brinkmanship behaviour during the Gulf Crisis 1990-91 which eventually resulted in a disastrous defeat of his army or the stubborn resistance of the North Korean regime to yield U.S.-led demands to verify the nature of its nuclear development program (1993-94) which almost ended in a shooting-war on the Korean Peninsula, are both examples of puzzles in international relations. Thus, the study aims to uncover patterns of behaviour which drive less powerful states in escalatory behaviour vis-à-vis a much more powerful adversary. While debates in systemic and decision-level theories often discount the behaviour of certain states as irrational or erratic, there is ample evidence that brinkmanship, i.e. challenging an important commitment of an adversary by going to the brink of war, has repeatedly been used by smaller powers to compel or deter greater powers. Examining the processes of such seemingly irrational decisions taken by leaders of certain states in conflict with much more militarily potent adversaries contributes to IR theorization in various ways. In the selected case studies of Iraq and North Korea, it is revealed that policies are executed primarily conforming to regime security considerations, i.e. there is a clear ordering of preferences among the available policy choices in crisis. Since asymmetric brinkmanship has not been studied systematically so far, the study is an effort to both add to the brinkmanship crisis conceptualization, and to unearth potential causalities by the application of a paired comparison.