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the adversaries on its own territory, providing them with a negotiating table, and even
deputizing myriad lawyers, envoys and diplomats to help facilitate a mutually acceptable
solution (Holbrooke 1999, Halberstam 2001, Clark 2001).
Did the Bosnian Serbs settle because the compromises they made represented a price
they were willing to pay for peace, or were they motivated by the fear of American
retribution? In other words, did they consider the Dayton settlement a facilitated one, or did
they view it as a diktat they were forced to accept? The puzzle is quite general: Are
superpowers that enter foreign conflicts biased against one of the adversaries ever truly able
to facilitate the bargaining process without employing the threat of military force? In this
paper, I present evidence that superpowers may only be capable of pure facilitation when they
remain impartial between crisis adversaries. I argue that only unbiased mediators can propose
agreements acceptable to both sides and resist the temptation to ensure a particular outcome
through the use of force. If the superpower favors one side, the process is inherently coercive,
whether or not the superpower issues an explicit military threat.
Why, then, would the United States facilitate in a lengthy settlement process if the
disfavored adversary can be bullied into an agreement? To answer this, I consider the costs an
intervening state incurs by publicly threatening or employing force. Facilitation, though a
frequently drawn-out and difficult process, is more economical than coercion because the
mediating state does not have to pay the costs of war or audience costs associated with issuing
empty threats (a detailed discussion of these concepts appears in the next section). Hence,
when a superpower decides to intervene in a foreign conflict, it should initially do so
diplomatically, by attempting mediation before resorting to coercion. The intervention process
proposed here consists of: (1) the superpower’s decision regarding whether or not to facilitate,
Tudjman that the United States would not intervene in his campaign or otherwise attempt to halt it (Watkins and
Convention