Necessary Illusions

Between 1972 and 1979, the United States and the Soviet Union entered into one of the most cooperative phases of the Cold War. During détente, the superpowers reached more than 150 agreements, established consultative committees, regularly held summit meetings, and engaged in crisis management. The turn from enmity to rivalry was so deep that many commentators predicted the Cold War’s end. Richard Nixon summarized it as a historic shift, from an “era of confrontation” to an “era of negotiation.” Why did U.S.-Soviet relations change so significantly during détente, moving from confrontation to cooperation?Many International Relations (IR) scholars argue that increased information, common norms, or culture explain cooperation. Misperception causes conflict while mutual understanding contributes to peace. Against this received wisdom, the central claim of this dissertation is that cooperation can be enhanced when actors believe that intersubjectivity or common knowledge exists, even when they are wrong. This inaccurate belief that intersubjectivity is shared, which I term putative intersubjective beliefs (PIBs), is in many cases crucial to cooperation. A theory of PIBs provides a novel and understudied route to cooperation. This dissertation is interested cases of imagined intersubjectivity (one of three types of PIBs). Imagined intersubjectivity occurs when actors inaccurately believe that they know what another will do, and also inaccurately believe they know why another will do it. It is necessary for cooperation in cases in which revelations of either the future behavior or the reasons for an action in the present would undermine cooperation.The dissertation tests a theory of PIBs against liberal institutionalist and constructivist arguments. The test operates at two levels. First, I analyze the macro changes in the U.S.-Soviet relationship during détente, testing a theory of PIBs against Wendt’s cultural theory of cooperation. The rules of rivalry during détente were not intersubjective. The superpowers held different principles concerning their relations; Brezhnev believed that the United States had accepted Soviet political parity, while Nixon and Kissinger believed that the superpowers were entering a period of competition for supremacy. This had consequences for their expectations of the behavior of the other. The Nixon administration believed détente meant issue-linkage; the superpowers would exert pressure to obtain dominance, and when negotiations failed, would resort to military threats. The Politburo did not share this prediction; they believed that the era of linkages and threats was over and that the United States accepted Soviet influence in the Third World. Through a structured, focused comparison, I show that these misperceptions promoted cooperation.To show that imagined intersubjectivity plays a role at the micro level, I test imagined intersubjectivity against liberal institutionalism through an analysis of the ABM Treaty negotiations. Using process-tracing and counter-factual analysis, I argue that at three moments of the negotiations—Kissinger’s decision to offer to negotiate ABMs, the May 20th, and Nixon’s decision meeting with Brezhnev during an escalation in Vietnam—concessions were made because of a lack of mutual understanding. Only because of these mistakes was the ABM Treaty reached.