Pathways to Fulfillment of Commitments in US Foreign Policy

Robert O. Keohane
Abstract

In international politics, no world government exists to enunciate binding rules, adjudicate their application, or enforce them on recalcitrant states. State sovereignty means that states can make legally binding commitments, but it also implies that they can renege on these commitments, since no more inclusive government exercises enforcement powers over sovereign states. Despite the absence of assured enforcement, however, states frequently make legally binding agreements with one another, and have entered into hundreds of multilateral agreements.

It is not surprising that states are willing, in return for benefits received from others, formally to commit themselves to take future actions that may be costly, or to refrain from behavior that could be profitable. Commitments, after all, are a major currency of influence in foreign policy. Promises of future action by one state may lead others to cooperate with it.

It may seem more puzzling that states’ commitments are frequently accepted by the states to which they are directed. Unlike domestic legal contracts, international commitments cannot be enforced by recourse to a hierarchical legal system able to call upon effective means of authority. In the absence of credible centralized enforcement, reneging on commitments remains possible; governments contemplating entering into agreements will have to reflect on the probability of reneging by their partners, and its costs to them. Hence questions of ex post fulfillment of commitments, and issues of their ex ante credibility, are closely connected to one another, and together constitute what I call the "commitment problem."