Wednesdays with SSP

EUROMISSILE program's impact on NATO in the 1980s - Prof. Susan Colbourn

Europe was the principal battleground of the Cold War. Theater nuclear forces trained on targets across the continent, both east and west-the Euromissiles-highlighted how the peoples of Europe were dangerously placed between hammer and anvil. For those within NATO, the Euromissiles highlighted the fault lines of their alliance. Euromissiles is a history of diplomacy and alliances, social movements and strategy, nuclear weapons and nagging fears, and politics. To tell that history, Colbourn takes a long view of the strategic crisis-from the emerging dilemmas of NATO's defenses in the early 1950s through the aftermath of the INF Treaty thirty-five years later. Bio Susan Colbourn is the Associate Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS), based at the Sanford School. A diplomatic and international historian, she is interested in questions of strategy and security in the atomic age. She specializes in the history of the Cold War with a focus on NATO, the politics of European security, and the role of nuclear weapons in international politics and society. Prior to joining TISS, she held fellowships at Yale University's International Security Studies program and at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Toronto.

Tyler Jost - Bureauocracy's role in miscalculating international crisis

When does bureaucracy make states prone to miscalculate in international crisis? International relations scholarship often assumes that bureaucracy increases the propensity for miscalculation, but offers comparatively few insights into what makes bureaucracy in some states more prone to miscalculation than in others. I develop a theory of crisis miscalculation that emphasizes variation in institutional relationships between political leaders and foreign policy bureaucracies. I argue that two dimensions of these institutions -- the capacity for information search and inter-bureaucratic information sharing -- help explain why some states are more prone to miscalculate than others. To test my argument, I introduce a novel data set that measures these institutional differences across the globe from 1946 to 2015. Contrary to canonical theories that argue that bureaucratic advice undermines strategic judgment, the analysis finds that institutions that integrate bureaucrats into a leader's decision-making process tend to perform better in international crises than those that exclude them. The theory and findings improve our understanding of how bureaucracy shapes the crisis behavior of modern states.