The Limits of coercive diplomacy Book

The authors note early on (Pages 18-19): "Coercive diplomacy seeks to make force a much more flexible, refined, psychological instrument of policy. Coercive diplomacy seeks to persuade the opponent to do something, or to stop doing something, instead of bludgeoning him into doing it or physically preventing him from doing it." In short, the use of threats or actual force as a tool of diplomacy, to get the other side to do what you want without resorting to full-scale combat.

This book uses several case studies to explore how this approach can succeed--or fail. The three case studies: Laos (1960-1961), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), and the Vietnam Intervention (1964-1965). In hindsight, we can say that the Cuban Missile Crisis represented a successful use (for the United States) of coercive diplomacy. The combination of threats, the blockade, and back channel diplomacy worked.

Vietnam? While one can argue that some benefits accrued, most would evaluate the effort at coercive diplomacy to have failed in that instance.

The final chapter tries to develop "lessons learned" through comparison of the case studies. This 1971 book is somewhat dated. Nonetheless, it still provides food for thought on how to use force (threatened or actual) to achieve diplomatic goals without falling into full scale warfare.