Cuban Missile Crisis and Credibility

Following up on yesterday's post on credibility, here is a very interesting paper by Daryl Press (a professor at Dartmouth) which I see later became a book about how leaders assess credibility. He argues that prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union had bluffed several times and had not followed through with threats. Yet U.S. policy makers were unanimous in believing that Soviet credibility was very high, meaning that any wrong move and they would attack.

Why? Because assessment of power and interests is far more important. The Soviets might have been bluffing before, but that doesn't mean they would be bluffing now. In fact, Soviet credibility grew even as Khruschev bluffed all over the place.

In the case of Syria today, the Obama administration has made abundantly clear that it believes U.S. credibility is on the line. If we do not attack now when we said we will, then no one will believe us in the future. There is, however, simply no evidence or even logic behind this. The world knows that the United States, like the Soviet Union in the example above, will not hesitate to bomb just about any adversary for just about any reason, real or imaginary. We have plenty of examples just in recent years. Not following through with this one particular especially ill-made threat will not change that.