Escalation Or De-escalation

The existing coercion research focus more on the effectiveness of coercion.But the research on why a country quit the coercive diplomacy is still underestimated.Therefore,this paper attempts to study how the coercing country withdraws from coercive attempts after their failure.By analyzing the cases of coercive diplomacy carried out by the United States in the post-Cold War era(1990-2015),this paper finds that in most of the failed cases,the United States chooses to fulfill its commitment and resort to the direct use of force;but at the same time,a small number of cases also show that after explicitly issuing the threat of force,the United States finally backs down.In order to explain why coercers make different choices after coercion failure,this paper puts forward the concept of coercion exit mechanism,which is a process between the coercion failure and termination.In this mechanism,the coercer is faced with two exit paths: escalation and de-escalation.Based on the poliheuristic theory and the trireference point theory,this paper holds that the decision to quit the coercion goes through a two-stage decision-making process: in the first stage,the decision-making is minimum-requirement-based.Decision makers carry out the non-holistic strategy based on three key dimensions,and exclude all alternatives that may make their bottom line unprotected.In the second stage,the final scheme,which would maximize the probability of success and minimize the risk,is selected from the subset of surviving alternatives.In order to verify this argument,this paper uses the process tracing method to analyze the decision-making of Obama administration in the Syria chemical weapons crisis.Due to the constraints of the three key dimensions,especially the political dimension,the Obama administration chose limited military intervention with congressional authorization on the basis of rationally weighing the effectiveness of each plan.The opportunity of diplomatic resolution created by Russian mediation finally led to the change of American policy because it provided the possibility of achieving policy objectives and had a lower risk level than the escalation path.