Scapegoating Your Ally: How Leaders Deflect Audience Costs by Blaming Allies for Not Supporting Them in International Crises

While the literature holds that audience costs tie leaders’ hands, an emerging body of scholarship explores ways in which leaders can strategically circumvent them. However, this research has not considered the strategy of ally-scapegoating or attributing blame to the ally for failing to support the state during crises. Leaders escape penalties for not carrying out threats, while domestic audiences hold the ally responsible. Ally-scapegoating is practiced by leaders who engage in blustering—provoking a crisis and then conceding—for the sake of boosting their domestic standing; and by those who unwarily contract audience costs by blundering into making commitments that are prohibitively expensive to fulfill. Ally-scapegoating is likely under power disparity between allies; and conviction that the ally would turn down requests to provide help. The paper illustrates ally-scapegoating through the 1964 Turkish non-intervention in Cyprus, caused by insufficient naval resources, but successfully blamed on the US opposition.