The Exercise of State Power 161For either compellence or deterrence to be effective, states must lay the ground-
work. They must clearly and openly communicate their objectives and capabilities,
be willing to make good on threats or fulfill promises, and have the capacity to follow
through with their commitments. In short, a state’s credibility is essential for compel-
lence and deterrence. Yet this is not a one- sided, unilateral pro cess; it is a strategic
interaction where the be hav ior of each state is determined not only by each state’s own
be hav ior, but by the actions and responses of the other.
Compellence and deterrence can fail, however. If they do, states may go to war, but
even during war, states have choices. They choose the type of weaponry (nuclear or
nonnuclear, strategic or tactical, conventional or chemical and biological), the kind of
targets (military or civilian, urban or rural), and the geographic locus (city, state, region)
to be targeted. They may choose to respond in kind, to escalate, or to de- escalate. In
war, both implicit and explicit negotiation takes place, over both how to fight the war
and how to end it. We will return to a discussion of war in Chapter 8.
Democracy, autocracy, and foreign Policy
Although all states use diplomacy, the economy, and force to conduct foreign policy,
do policy choices vary by type of government? Specifically, do demo cratic states conduct
foreign policy and make policy choices that are any diff er ent from the choices and poli-
cies authoritarian states and leaders make? We might expect that in demo cratic states,
the intangible sources of power— national image, public support, and leadership—
would matter more, because the leaders are responsible to the public through elections.
If that expectation is true, then does the foreign policy be hav ior of demo cratic states
differ from the be hav ior of nondemo cratic or authoritarian states?
This question has occupied phi los o phers, diplomatic historians, and po liti cal scien-
tists for centuries. In Perpetual Peace (1795), Immanuel Kant argued that the spread of
democracy would change international politics by eliminating war. He reasoned that
the public would be very cautious in supporting war because they, the public, would
likely suffer the most devastating effects. Thus, leaders would act in a restrained fashion
and tend to abstain from war because of domestic constraints.^19 Since Kant’s time, other
explanations have been added to the democratic- peace hypothesis. Liberals point to
the notion of shared domestic norms and joint membership in international institu-
tions to explain peace among democracies. And because demo cratic states trade more
with each other than with nondemo cratic states, they prefer to benefit from those
economic gains made during peacetime. Many of these ideas found resonance with
Woodrow Wilson, a major advocate of the demo cratic peace. Realists, too, add to the
democratic- peace explanation. By belonging to the same alliances, demo cratic states
are more effective at practicing balance of power, decreasing the probability of war.