Essence of Victory: Winning and Losing International Crises

THIS ARTICLE USES the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis to illustrate the criteria by which victory and defeat are assessed in international crises. The evidence suggests that few objective criteria are actually used in such evaluations. Indeed, examination of the specific terms of crisis settlements can prove to be less important than a range of factors that do not conform to traditional rational actor assumptions. These include: i) prior biases in perception, ii) the experience of the crisis itself and the subsequent way in which it becomes framed, and iii) public opinion management during and after the crisis. This analysis has significant implications for policymakers who have to deal with the aftermath of a crisis, and also for the wider public and media, if governments are to be held accountable for their foreign policy. The literature on perception and misperception is an increasingly important part of international relations scholarship, but this literature has focused almost exclusively on the role of perceptions in the decisionmaking process. In contrast, this paper examines the role of perceptions in evaluating the outcomes of crises. We are concerned primarily with evaluations by observers: