President Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union kisses U.S. President Jimmy Carter while still holding the documents of the SALT II Treaty that they had both signed in Vienna's Imperial Hofburg Palace, June 19, 1979.
AP Photo
PAST EVENT
Knowing Thy Adversary: Assessments of Intentions in International Politics
Brown Bag Lunch
Series: International Security Brown Bag Seminar
Open to the Public - Belfer Center Library, Littauer-369
October 2, 2008
12:15-2:00 p.m.
| Speaker: | Keren Yarhi-Milo, Research Fellow, International Security Program |
Related Project: International Security
Description:
This seminar deals with one simple, but important and understudied, question: how do decision-makers and intelligence communities infer the political and military intentions of the adversary. To address this question, the speaker will develop and test three alternative theses about the perception of an adversary's intentions — the "capabilities" thesis, the "strategic-military doctrine" thesis, and the "behavioral-signals" thesis.
Using wide-ranging declassified primary documents from presidential archives, intelligence assessments, and interviews with U.S. decision-makers and intelligence analysts, the speaker will test the three alternative theses against two Cold War episodes. The first analyzes the process by which assessments of Soviet intentions were evaluated and reevaluated by key decision-makers in the Carter administration and by the intelligence community in the United States between 1977 and 1980. This is followed by a shorter discussion on the sources of the change in the way decision-makers in the Reagan administration and the U.S. intelligence community assessed the Soviet intentions during the waning years of the Cold War from 1985 to 1989. In each case, the speaker will conduct a thorough process tracing where she examines 1) what decision-makers and intelligence agencies said and wrote about Soviet intentions; 2) the reasoning they provided; and 3) the policies decision-makers advocated and rejected.
The seminar will show that fundamental and systematic differences exist in the way intelligence communities on the one hand, and decision-makers within the same country on the other hand, infer the intentions of the adversary. The speaker will argue that this variation in assessments of intentions is a function of the indicators each set of actors employs to draw inferences about intentions. In both episodes, when assessments of decision-makers are evaluated, the evidence lends strongest support to the "behavioral-signals" thesis; whereas evidence from the U.S. intelligence community's estimates of Soviet intentions provides overwhelming support in favor of the "capabilities" thesis. Further, contrary to the expectation of some realist theories, decision-makers in both episodes appear to have paid very little attention to either the adversary's doctrine or his capabilities to revise perceptions of intentions. Additionally, the empirical evidence calls into question the assumptions of those theories focusing on the importance of costly behavioral signals in changing perceived intentions.
These and other counter-intuitive findings that emerge from the empirical analysis, while presenting a new puzzle, have important implications on a range of contemporary policy debates, as well as on the soundness of some existing theories in international relations.
Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.
Contact:
ISP Program Coordinator
International Security Program,
79 John F. Kennedy St., Mailbox 53,
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
Harvard University
Kennedy School of Government
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Email: susan_lynch@ksg.harvard.edu
Phone: 617-496-1981
Fax: 617-495-8963
Url: http://www.belfercenter.org/ISP/
