Michael W. Doyle Inaugural Lecture

Credibility Reversed: Coercive Diplomacy in an Age of Unpredictability

This talk examines coercive diplomacy through the lens of credibility, signaling, and leader perception. Traditional theories of statecraft assume that effective coercion depends not only on material capabilities, but on leaders’ ability to communicate intentions clearly and convincingly, so that both threats and assurances are believed by adversaries. Yet research on credibility suggests that it is not a fixed attribute derived from reputations or past behavior alone. Rather, credibility is constructed through how signals are interpreted by decision–makers under conditions of uncertainty, as well as filtered through beliefs about resolve, intentions, and political constraints. In recent years, however, US foreign policy has increasingly embraced unpredictability as a strategic tool, deploying economic coercion broadly, including against allies. This raises a fundamental question: What happens when inconsistency and ambiguity are not byproducts of policy, but deliberate features of it? The talk will focus on the longstanding debate over credibility, examining the risks and potential opportunities that emerge when its traditional logic is inverted. By exploring the paradoxes created by strategic ambiguity and inconsistency, it highlights how such an approach reshapes adversaries’ interpretations of resolve and reassurance, altering the conditions under which coercive diplomacy succeeds or fails.