specific geographic area. Instead the United States could be forced to intervene in
unexpected crises against opponents with a wide range of capabilities.’^49
Third, fear may become a self-sustaining climate, almost independent of its initial
trigger, and difficult to dislodge even in the face of evidence that the threat has
diminished. Emotions and charged emotional relationships may permeate the
international system and long outlast initial cause for emotions. There may, in other
words, be an international climate of fear and distrust that is beyond any structural
or material reasons that states may have to fear other states. Narratives of historical
enmity, harm and aggression will rehearse and reinforce the fearful relationship. On
the other hand, the development of a positive emotional relationship may help
diminish or render irrelevant the structural reasons that states leaders might have to
distrust and fear each other. In this way, emotions can create their own dynamics
or spirals of action and reaction.
All these effects of fear are potentially self-reinforcing. Initial fear may be
institutionalized in the adoption of an emotional attitude about the other and the
world (that it is threatening), which affects the intelligence gathering and assessment
functions of organizations. Fear may be institutionalized in the adoption of
technologies (for example, fences, and x-rays of baggage at airports), rules of
procedure and military doctrines that are intended to reduce the subjective sense of
threat and fear, but which may simultaneously and inadvertently heighten fear. Fear
determines perceptions and the responses to perceived threats (whether actual or
anticipated).
The deliberate production of fear in others is thus very risky, and likely does not
operate in the way that deterrence theory predicts. But the deliberate production of
fear is at the root of deterrence and compellence strategies – the rational actor will
respond to credible threats of unacceptable damage by backing down. In Arms and
Influence,Thomas Schelling suggests that, ‘it is the threatof damage, or of more
damage to come, that can make someone yield or comply. It is latentviolence that
can influence someone’s choice... It is the expectation of moreviolence that gets
the wanted behaviour, if the power to hurt can get it at all.’^50 Sometimes.
The traditional rational actor view of foreign policy decision-makers de-
emphasizes the effects of fear on perception, cognition and memory on the
assumption that humans are rational calculators. Yet threats may only increase the
adversary’s intransigence precisely because the target is actually frightened and angry,
triggering a cascade of both individual and institutional responses.^51
Threats against authoritarian regimes may be particularly prone to failure because
those regimes’ decision-makers are already operating at high levels of fear. The
already (individually and institutionally) fearful and stressed may be unable to
distinguish between neutral and threatening stimuli and may overreact to either.
Simple balancing strategies may be seen as aggressive, and trigger a hyper-active
response. For example, Nikita Khrushchev may have felt the deployment of missiles
in Cuba in 1962 was equivalent to the US missiles already deployed in Europe and
a signal that US threats to Cuba would not to unanswered. Fear on the US side led
to perception that the weapons were an immediate threat.
Rethinking ‘man’ 169