Narangand Mehta ‘17 (Neil Narang and Rupal N. Mehta, *Department of Political Science @ UC Santa Barbara; **Department of Political Science @ the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, "The Unforeseen Consequences of Extended Deterrence: Moral Hazard in a Nuclear Client State," SAGE Journals, 9-27-2017, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022002717729025, Date Accessed: 7-17-2019, SB).
In contrast to the conventional expectations above, we argue that it is unlikely that a client state protected under a nuclear umbrella will exhibita greater propensity to engage in violent conflict. This is not because nuclear weapons have no impact on crises, nor is it because the logic of moral hazard in alliance politics does not apply in the specific domain of extended nuclear deterrence. Rather, we follow Gartzke and Jo (2009) in positing that the perverse consequence of moral hazard from nuclear security assurances will be observable in the crisis bargaining and subsequent distribution of benefits within negotiated settlements, if not the likelihood of violent conflict. Consider the simplest model of crisis bargaining. Fearon (1995) suggests that coherent rationalist explanations for war will fall into one of two categories: actors can fail to find a settlement because they have private information with incentives to misrepresent or because they are unable to credibly commit to the agreement. According to the first explanation, sides have asymmetric information about their own capabilities and resolve and they often have an incentive to misrepresent their ability on these dimensions to secure a better settlement. As a result, while the costs of fighting open a range of settlements both sides should prefer to war, sides also have the incentive to bluff in order to shift the bargaining range in their favor (N. Narang 2015). The second explanation is that sides may prefer to fight now if their opponent is unlikely to honor a settlement in the future (Fearon 1998; Fortna 2003; Leeds 2000; Narang 2014; Walter 1997). The bargaining logic of war has important observable implications for the impact of nuclear weapons and—by extension—nuclear umbrellas on crisis outcomes. Historically, states that have acquired nuclear weapons have generally been quick to reveal their newfound capability, so the risk of bargaining failure from private information about these capabilities is relatively remote.5 Furthermore, doubts about the credibility of a nuclear rival’s commitment to a negotiated settlement are unlikely to be sufficient to motivate a game-ending nuclear war. Together, the conditions under which crisis bargaining occurs between nuclear states—or asymmetrically between nuclear states and nonnuclear states—highly incentivizes a negotiated settlement. As Jervis (1976, 96) notes, “no country could win an all-out nuclear war, not only in the sense of coming out of the war better than it went in, but in the sense of being better off fighting than making the concessions needed to avoid the conflict.”