Astate bargains tacitly with another state when it attempts to manipulate the latter's policy choices through its behavior rather than by relying on formal or informal diplomatic exchanges. The process is tacit because actions rather than rhetoric constitute the critical medium of communication; it is bargaining and not coercion because the actions are aimed at influencing an outcome that can only be achieved through some measure of joint, voluntary behavior. Obviously, states rarely rely on either purely tacit or purely formal negotiation. However, the theory of tacit bargaining does not become totally inapplicable when there is verbal or written communication between the principals. It simply becomes increasingly relevant as states rely more on actions than on conventional negotiation. Examples of tacit bargaining are plentiful in international relations: a retaliatory tariff is announced in response to trade barriers; a state at war refrains from using chemical weapons or from bombing nonmilitary targets in the hope that its opponent will behave similarly; an austerity program is implemented by a financially troubled government in order to convince foreign banks that they should continue to extend credit.

WHEN leaders extend deterrence, they attempt to prevent a military attack against an ally by threatening retaliation should force be used against their protégé. At present, most analysts locate extended deterrence at the intersection of nuclear and conventional force in Europe; the United States relies heavily on this strategy to protect its allies. The extension of deterrence to Europe, however, is only one among several possible applications of the strategy. It has been widely used by the United States, for example, to manage conflict in the Middle East. We propose to examine this wider extension of deterrence.

International relations scholars do not agree on the connection between the balance of power and war. They question whether or not an equal distribution of power among states or alliances leads to stability, whether the preponderance of power in favor of one actor or alliance leads to peace, or whether the key lies in the transition of preponderance from one power to another. Everyone is familiar with these questions; yet, more than twenty years of rigorous elaboration and sophisticated quantitative testing have done little to produce the answers.1 Do these inconclusive results suggest that there is no relation between the distribution of power and war?

SINCE World War II, Soviet policy in the Third World has gone through regular, frequent cycles, marked by different emphases in the choice of foreign policy targets and by different expectations about the nature and magnitude of the gain to be had from foreign policy initiatives. Stalin was generally disinterested in global competition in regions that were assumed to be dominated by the “imperialist” camp; he tended (with some exceptions) to deny support to nationalist regimes and radical social movements alike. Khrushchev's break-out into the Third World in the 1950's focused on nationalist regimes (India, Indonesia, Ghana, etc.) as well as radical social movements (“national liberation movements”); it was based on the expectation that, in the near future, there would be a large number of socialist states in the Third World, and that they would become allies of the socialist camp against the imperialist camp.