The Suez Crisis: Country Breakdown

The inflexible position of the multiple actors during the Suez Crisis made military aggression all the more precarious within a post‐Hitler world. Britain and France attempted to make multiple connections between Nasser and Hitler in order to engage the United States in their endeavor. Instead Eisenhower searched for a diplomatic solution in order to ensure the Soviet Union would not be allowed to infiltrate the Middle East. No matter the efforts of the countries involved, the final solution was only found within the United Nations. Issues of sovereignty collided with international law erupting in a military attack that was ultimately unsuccessful in serving the goals of the aggressors

Incorporating Misperception into the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution

A flexible hypergame methodology is designed and implemented for modeling misperceptions by participating decision makers (DMs) in a conflict having two or more DMs within the framework of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR). This comprehensive approach allows one or more of the DMs to have misunderstandings about the actual situation. Moreover, the methodology can account for misperceptions founded upon other misunderstandings such that different levels of misperception exist. This improved methodology can handle a DM's misperception about itself as well as its perceptions about its opponents. To accomplish this, the options or courses of action of each DM in a conflict are categorized according to various types of misperceptions that can occur either due to others or the particular DM. Furthermore, the union of all possible kinds of option perceptions creates the universal set of options for each DM, which in turn can be extended across all DMs in the dispute to generate the universal set of states or possible scenarios for the hypergame. The universal set of states permits the DMs to experience and view the dispute independently, yet allows an analyst to distinguish between the states that are commonly recognized by all DMs and those that are individually misperceived. Furthermore, DMs' preferences are expressed in a relative fashion by pairwise comparisons between any pair of states, thereby allowing the hypergame in graph form to accommodate both transitive and intransitive preference structures. A general stability analysis procedure is developed to analyze a hypergame under any level of perception. Within this approach, two techniques are developed: one to analyze each DM's subjective game or hypergame and another to analyze and predict the equilibria for the overall hypergame. Moreover, to study the effects of DMs' misperceptions on the outcomes of the dispute, the overall hypergame equilibria are categorized based on the type of misperceptions into eight classes of equilibria. To test and refine the hypergame methodology as well to apply it in practice, three case studies are investigated. In particular, the 2011 conflict between North and South Sudan over South Sudanese oil exports, as well as the 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal dispute, are investigated within the paradigm of a first-level hypergame in graph form, which is a decision situation in which at least one DM has a misperception about the conflict situation, and neither the DM who misperceives the circumstance nor any of the other DMs are aware of this misunderstanding. Additionally, a detailed case study about the hydropolitical conflict among the Eastern Nile Countries over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is investigated within the structure of a second-level hypergame in graph form, in which at least one DM is aware of another DM's misperception. Interesting strategic insights found in these case studies confirm the distinct advantages of utilizing the new hypergame methodology in graph form

A Temporal Framework for Hypergame Analysis of Cyber Physical Systems in Contested Environments

Game theory is used to model conflicts between one or more players over resources. It offers players a way to reason, allowing rationale for selecting strategies that avoid the worst outcome. Game theory lacks the ability to incorporate advantages one player may have over another player. A meta-game, known as a hypergame, occurs when one player does not know or fully understand all the strategies of a game. Hypergame theory builds upon the utility of game theory by allowing a player to outmaneuver an opponent, thus obtaining a more preferred outcome with higher utility. Recent work in hypergame theory has focused on normal form static games that lack the ability to encode several realistic strategies. One example of this is when a player’s available actions in the future is dependent on his selection in the past. This work presents a temporal framework for hypergame models. This framework is the first application of temporal logic to hypergames and provides a more flexible modeling for domain experts. With this new framework for hypergames, the concepts of trust, distrust, mistrust, and deception are formalized. While past literature references deception in hypergame research, this work is the first to formalize the definition for hypergames. As a demonstration of the new temporal framework for hypergames, it is applied to classical game theoretical examples, as well as a complex supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) network temporal hypergame. The SCADA network is an example includes actions that have a temporal dependency, where a choice in the first round affects what decisions can be made in the later round of the game. The demonstration results show that the framework is a realistic and flexible modeling method for a variety of applications

Arguing about intervention: a comparison of British and French rhetoric surrounding the 1882 and 1956 invasions of Egypt

This article compares the rhetorical justifications surrounding two landmark instances of Western imperialism. In 1882, the British occupied Egypt, ousting indigenous proto-nationalist forces that supposedly threatened British and other foreign interests. The consequences of this intervention were still being worked out in 1956 when, in the wake of the Cairo regime's nationalization of the Suez Canal, the British again invaded. France participated on this occasion, with serious but differing political consequences for both. We suggest that comparing how the British and French argued about these issues, and also examining how the rhetoric of the later crisis contrasted with the earlier one, offers useful insights into the two nations' respective imperial cultures. Specifically, we suggest that the latter-day imperialists Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet couched their actions in internationalist rhetoric reminiscent both of the Gladstone government's justifications for intervention in 1882 and of French official explanations for their takeover in Tunisia a year earlier. Each claimed their actions were taken both to uphold better standards of governance and to restore regional order, itself a highly loaded concept. The language of imperial domination was eschewed; but the ends of empire were served by the use of this rhetoric of ‘liberal order’

The permanence of power : postcolonial sovereignty, the energy crisis, and the rise of American neoliberal diplomacy, 1967 - 1976

textThe dissertation addresses the causes and consequences of the 1973-1974 energy crisis. A new postcolonial concept of sovereignty, "permanent sovereignty over natural resources," challenged the structure of the international economy in the early 1950s. The proponents of permanent sovereignty identified the relationship between the industrial nations and raw material producers as a vestige of empire. By gaining control over national resources, Third World leaders hoped to reset the relationship between the developing and developed nations. The concept of permanent sovereignty authenticated new definitions and goals of decolonization and statehood. A new middle ground between U.S. diplomacy and Third World economic thought emerged in international oil politics. Chapters on the 1967 Arab oil embargo, Saudi and Iranian demands in the wake of imperial Britain's Persian Gulf withdrawal, the legal battles over the Iraqi Ba'ath regime's nationalized oil, and the reverberating effects of newly radical Libyan politics, explain how members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) remade permanent sovereignty between 1967 to 1972. OPEC underscored the salience of permanent sovereignty in the international political economy, but it also undermined it. The built-in tension culminated in the 1973-1974 energy crisis. The final chapters discuss how the impregnable sovereignty preached by OPEC and its transnational backers in the New International Economic Order engendered a strategic response from the United States: neoliberal diplomacy. OPEC's cartel politics became a scapegoat for policymakers who simplified and codified neoclassical economic ideas. Market-centered reform developed into an analytical refuge in the political-economic wreckage of the energy crisis. American strategy toward the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations reveal that neoliberal diplomacy became widely influential in U.S. foreign policy.Histor

Cognitive Theory of War: Why Do Weak States Choose War against Stronger States?

The key question to be addressed in this paper is why weaker states with a slight chance of winning do not avoid war against stronger states. Even though most war theory does offer a few insights about the conditions under which weak states choose war when there is only a slight possibility of winning, explanations based on either emphasis on rationality or ignorance of “interacting structure” of international relations leave many practical remedies unexplained. This paper explains asymmetric conflict on the combination of Prospect theory and Game theory. The interacting game structure of asymmetric conflicts can be summarized. Under the threat of massive retaliation by a strong state, a weak state is forced to choose between war (defection) and withdrawal (cooperation). In asymmetric conflicts, defection (war against a strong state with a slight chance of winning) is a risky gamble, and cooperation is safe choice. In contrast to Expected Utility theory, this paper argues that weak states in a loss frame chooses risky war (defection) against a superior adversary in the hope of recovering from their crisis. This paper follows crisis analyses of other Prospect theorists. The nature and seriousness of the crisis of a weak state are analyzed. The rare occurrence and deviant characteristics of a weak state’s war choice make it suitable to use a qualitative structured analysis. The research hypothesis is applied to three case studies: the Gulf War between Iraq and the United States-led alliance in 1990, the Falkland/Malvinas Island war between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982, and the Middle East War between Egypt and Israel in 1973. The implication of this study is that enforcing strategy based on superior capability is not a reasonable means to prevent a weak state in a loss frame from choosing war against superior adversary

Waiting for the energy crisis: Europe and the United States on the eve of the first oil shock

A global economic crisis is the most difficult kind of event to predict. This article asks a straightforward question: did anyone come close to anticipating the oil crisis of 1973/74, which represented a new type of historical sequence? Was the likelihood of an oil shock self-evident at the time? To answer this, I examine the degree of awareness in Europe and the United States of the three possible triggering factors: Egypt’s disposition to start a war and enlist the support of oil-producers; the Arab interest in oil conservation and long-term income maximization; and the imbalance in the oil market and the delayed adjustment of oil prices. For each of these topics, I set out both what was expected and what was actually in the offing; the information available to Western analysts and that unknown; the communication noises and the flagrant bias. The conclusion pays tribute to three men – James Akins, Pierre Wack, and Ted Newland – who had guessed what was coming ahead, and explains why their predictions almost succeeded, while others failed

Dictators, Ministerial Cronyism, and International Conflict

My dissertation examines an underexplored actor on the world stage: the personalist dictator. Personalist dictators are leaders that have consolidated all domestic power for themselves. Idi Amin, Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, and Benito Mussolini are all examples of these heads of states. Their names often live in infamy, etched in the history books with the blood they spilt. Although these regimes are usually remembered for the violence they exhibited within their own regimes, recent studies have found that these leaders also show a proclivity for conflict at the international level. In this dissertation, I ask, “Why are personalist dictators so conflict-prone?" To answer this question, I show how domestic institutions vary across autocracies in response to leaders’ incentives and how this variation can be used to explain the propensity of international conflict. In particular, I investigate the role that advisers play in conflict occurrence and outcomes. Often, leaders rely on individuals, such as defense ministers, to give them assessments on the potential outcomes of conflicts. Little attention has been paid to the effects these ministers have. However, if we believe that war may be the product of miscalculation of capabilities or resolve, then we might expect that states with less capable advisers are more likely to experience international conflict. Using this logic, I argue that personalist dictators are more likely to experience conflict, because they are more prone to employ incompetent advisers and ministers. My theoretical argument starts with the assumption that personalist dictators live in constant fear of being overthrown. In comparison to other leaders, the despot can expect that his removal will more likely end in a negative post-tenure fate: exile, imprisonment, or death. The reason for this propensity is that a personalist leader’s legitimacy is uniquely tied to personal traits. So long as the despot is living, he poses a threat to his successors. The extreme costs for removal and the proximity of the likely culprits result in the dictator’s regime being characterized by paranoia and mistrust. In order to protect himself, the personalist dictator surrounds himself with small, exclusive circles of crony advisers whose loyalty is ensured through bloodlines or long-standing friendships. In utilizing this lever, the dictator trades bureaucratic independence and competence for loyalty and survival. This loyalty-competency tradeoff results in a personalist leader’s inability to get accurate and honest assessments of his opponents from these advisers, making him more likely to underestimate his opponents, experience war (particularly ones in which his state is the weaker party), and incur worse conflict outcomes. After constructing an original cross-national dataset of over 1500 defense ministers from 1945 to 2005, and performing in-depth examinations of the Gamal Abdel Nasser and Saddam Hussein regimes, I provide evidence that personalist leaders are more likely to place cronies in advisory positions, and these advisers undermine the ability for personalist leaders to form accurate war-time assessments, leading to bargaining breakdowns, and subsequently, war

Deception in Game Theory: A Survey and Multiobjective Model

Game theory is the study of mathematical models of conflict. It provides tools for analyzing dynamic interactions between multiple agents and (in some cases) across multiple interactions. This thesis contains two scholarly articles. The first article is a survey of game-theoretic models of deception. The survey describes the ways researchers use game theory to measure the practicality of deception, model the mechanisms for performing deception, analyze the outcomes of deception, and respond to, or mitigate the effects of deception. The survey highlights several gaps in the literature. One important gap concerns the benefit-cost-risk trade-off made during deception planning. To address this research gap, the second article introduces a novel approach for modeling these trade-offs. The approach uses a game theoretic model of deception to define a new multiobjective optimization problem called the deception design problem (DDP). Solutions to the DDP provide courses of deceptive action that are efficient in terms of their benefit, cost, and risk to the deceiver. A case study based on the output of an air-to-air combat simulator demonstrates the DDP in a 7 x 7 normal form game. This approach is the first to evaluate benefit, cost, and risk in a single game theoretic model of deception