Baglione - To agree or not to agree: leadership, bargaining, and arms control

After the collapse of the USSR, some scholars believed that traditional security issues, like arms control, would fade in importance in the post-Cold War era. Recently, however, observers have come to recognize that this optimism was premature. In fact, the leakage of nuclear materials from the territory of the former Soviet Union, the Russian governments decision to sell reactors to Iran, its failure to ratify the START II treaty, and the Western decision to expand NATO suggest that Russian and American nuclear policies and their security relationship will continue to be of concern to students of international relations.

Despite more than 50 years of American-Soviet arms bargaining, however, we still do not fully comprehend why military rivals with fundamental differences in interests, domestic institutions, and values pursued negotiations to limit a principal source of their security and prestige. This book advances a framework for understanding that endeavor: the leadership model, developed from bargaining theory, constructivism, cooperation theory, and studies in comparative politics on the sources of power in the United States and the Soviet Union. From bargaining theory comes the insight that the key factors in determining strategy are the alternatives that a party has to arms control and the value that it places on a particular accord. a partners concerns without expecting an adjustment in return, refuse to compromise, participate in negotiations only as part of a public relations campaign, or eschew talks altogether. Clearly, policy choice was a complex decision, and preferences were often contingent upon the expected effects on the opponent.

International concerns, however, were just one set of issues facing officials as they chose negotiating strategies. As specialists on interstate cooperation assert, bargaining is a two-level game, and elites had to consider international and domestic factors simultaneously when charting the national course. was accountable and the date for choosing the leader was in the distance, he had the freedom to pursue the policy options that he favored. Conversely, when support was low and an election or selection was fast approaching, the executive tended to tailor his program to address the preferences of other powerful actors in the system. Thus, these factorssupport and timinginteracted to determine a leaders autonomy, his ability to define policy independently in his system.

An executives level of autonomy and preferred strategy together affected the national approach to arms control. When autonomy was low, leaders tended to doubt their ability to overcome the ideological and structural impediments to following anything other than a positional strategy at the table, regardless of their own preferences. Under those conditions, the chief governmental official engaged in transactional leadership, trying to please constituents and other powerful actors in the system in exchange for their support. A strong executive, however, could choose an approach depending on his assessment of the alternatives his state faced and the value of an arms control agreement. With traditional perceptions of the insignificant value of an arms control agreement, a leader would typically implement a strategy that would enhance the states position relative to the opponent, regardless of his assessment of alternatives. Conversely, a highly autonomous executive who perceived an accord as valuable could elect to pursue an approach that he believed was beneficial for his state, regardless of its impact on the relative balance of power. Such leaders followed

To test the validity of the leadership model against existing approaches, this book examines several cases of Soviet and American arms control decision making: (1) the test ban negotiations of 195860 that ended in failure, (2) the resumption of talks that produced the Limited Test Ban Treaty, (3) the breakdown of discussions on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) from 198183, (4) the resurrection of negotiations and successful conclusion of an INF agreement from 198487, and (5) the steps taken as the USSR collapsed, including the completion of the START I agreement and the unilateral American and Soviet decisions to reduce strategic readiness and nuclear stockpiles.

I chose the test ban and INF cases because those sets of negotiations allowed me to examine opposite outcomes of the bargaining process while keeping the historical context as similar as possible. During the periods 195863 and 198087, the Americans and Soviets were engaged in negotiations to institute a test ban and to reduce intermediate-range nuclear forces, respectively. Each set of discussions, then, provides for the analysis of an arms control failure (1960 and 1983) as well as a success (1963 and 1987). In addition to maintaining similarities in the cases across the test ban and INF issues, these two historical periods provide interesting comparisons. During both the test ban and the INF talks, many participants in the discussions felt that the United States and USSR were contesting for predominance in the international system. Moreover, throughout these periods, there was also diversity in the nature of the leaderships and their corresponding ideological or bureaucratic bases. These cases, then, provide challenging tests of the leadership model versus the alternative approaches and give the investigator insight into the impact of international-and domestic-level variables on interstate bargaining behavior and outcomes.

In addition, while the last pair, the minicases of 1991, are both examples of arms control success, they permit me to examine bargaining behavior in a period in which the international system was undergoing enormous upheaval (bipolarity was disintegrating) and the Soviet state was experiencing national and political revolutions. These cases also help me explore further the influence of the competing variables compared to that of autonomy and preferred strategy. Moreover, including these instances of arms bargaining allows for the examination of a greater variety of strategies; in 1991, the United States and the USSR both made decisions to reduce their arsenals unilaterally.