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Description
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Why was the United States, despite its overwhelming superiority in power, unable to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons? Why did North Korea persist in its nuclear pursuit in the face of U.S. opposition? In this article, we represent nuclear proliferation and counter-proliferation as situations of subjective strategic interaction between states. We measure preferences over strategies and outcomes using operational codes of the leaders of each country, derived via linguistic analysis. Our results indicate that neither the U.S. nor North Korea accurately understood the other side’s preference ordering, and that their operational codes interacted in such a way as to produce an outcome favorable to North Korea – the weaker party - and unfavorable to the U.S. – the stronger. The wider contribution is to show that (mis)perceptions of the goals and resolve of the opponent play a crucial role in the success or failure of strong states to compel weak states and vice versa. (2023-08-21)
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Notes
| Scores for each text file were generated using Profiler Plus version 5.8.4. The summary totals marked "raw" scores are the average of all coded speech files for each leader, for each operational code variable. "Relative" scores are the raw scores relative to the norming group data in Malici and Walker, Role Theory and Role Conflict in U.S. - Iran Relations. Malici and Walker report a 255 leader reference group with the mean scores I1 = 0.33, P1 = 0.25, P4 = 0.21. Therefore, for example, President Barack Obama's reported raw I1 score of 0.60 is a relative score of 0.27 (0.60 - 0.33). The relative scores are used to construct the theory of moves games in the manuscript. |
