I use a game theoretic model of diversionary war incentives to help explain the lack of a consistent empirical relationship between domestic conditions and the use of force abroad. I argue that when diversionary behavior is about demonstrating competence rather than creating a short-term ''rally round the flag'' effect, a leader has incentives to use force against a challenging target, and this may dissuade many would-be diversionary uses of force. I then combine the diversionary model with the bargaining approach to war and show that when war is costly and bargaining is allowed, the diversionary leader can be peacefully appeased short of war as long as the benefit of holding office is not too large compared with the cost of war and other factors. However, when the office holding benefit is sufficiently large, the diversionary incentive emerges as a new domestic politics based ''rationalist explanation for war.''The well-known diversionary theory of war (Levy 1989) stipulates that domestic problems lead to incentives for a nation's leader to engage in aggressive foreign behavior, perhaps even war, to boost the nation's cohesiveness, to enhance the leader's popularity, and to thus increase her chances of remaining in power. There is now an immense empirical literature that attempts to ascertain whether or not leaders are more likely to be involved in foreign disputes when facing domestic problems. However, the empirical findings on this matter are quite inconsistent. While many studies find evidence for the diversionary hypothesis (e.g., Ward and

We use a formal bargaining model to examine why, in many domestic and international bargaining situations, one or both negotiators make public statements in front of their constituents committing themselves to obtaining certain benefits in the negotiations. We find that making public commitments provides bargaining leverage, when backing down from such commitments carries domestic political costs.However, when the two negotiators face fairly similar costs for violating a public commitment, a prisoner's dilemma is created in which both sides make high public demands which can not both be satisfied, and both negotiators would be better off if they could commit to not making public demands. However, making a public demand is a dominant strategy for each negotiator, and this leads to a suboptimal outcome.Escaping this prisoner's dilemma provides a rationale for secret negotiations.Testable hypotheses are derived on the nature of the commitments and agreements made in equilibrium. 2In many domestic and international bargaining situations, we often observe one or both negotiators making public statements in front of their constituents about the share of the benefits that they expect to obtain in the negotiations. For example, before the Copenhagen summit of the European Union (E.U.) in December 2002, the Turkish government asked the E.U. to choose a date to start membership negotiations with Turkey.Anticipating that it was more likely that the E.U. would instead simply select a date to review whether Turkey had met membership conditions, the leader of Turkey's incumbent Justice and Development Party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, publicly announced that a review date was "not acceptable." 1 Similarly, in the negotiations surrounding a peace deal in Northern Ireland in the mid 1990s, all of the parties involved made numerous public statements about their bargaining positions. For instance, in the lead-up to the negotiations that culminated in the "Good Friday Agreement" of April 1998, Prime Minister John Major of Britain declared that all of the Irish paramilitaries had to "decommission" their weapons before negotiations could begin. Similarly, the leader of the pro-union Ulster Unionist Party (U.U.P.), David Trimble, publicly stated that there was "no question of negotiations without decommissioning." Meanwhile, Gerry Adams, head of the Irish Republican Army's (I.R.A.) political wing, Sinn Fein, publicly announced that the I.R.A.'s weapons would be decommissioned only after the conclusion of the negotiations. 2As a final example, since a tentative peace dialogue began between India and Pakistan in January 2004, each side's government has repeatedly rebuked the other for presenting its bargaining position and intentions directly to the press rather than privately to the other government. Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf has publicly stated that unless a final 3 agreement is reached on the disputed region of Kashmir, talks on all other issues between the two sides, include trade, cross-border terrorism, and nuclear...

We present a unified theory and test of extended immediate deterrence-unified in the sense that we employ our theoretical deterrence model as our statistical model in the empirical analysis. The theoretical model is a straightforward formalization of the deterrence logic in Huth (1988) and Huth and Russett (1984) (1988) and Huth and Russett (1988). We find that many of the variables involved in the deterrence calculus are nonmonotonically linked to the probability of deterrence success or war. We illustrate the results with case studies of the Soviet-Japanese dispute over Manchukuo (1937Manchukuo ( -1938 and the Berlin Blockade (1948). W hat factors affect deterrence success or failure?The deterrence literature is one of the most exhaustive in international relations, and the logic of deterrence has been extensively studied within both government and academia by scholars from a variety of disciplines. Scholars have investigated the impact of conventional and nuclear balance of forces, interests at stake, reputation from past crises, crisis bargaining strategies, military alliances, geographic contiguity, degree of uncertainty, international system structure, and domestic politics (e