This article presents a formal model that shows how states can credibly reassure each other simply by maintaining a cooperative outward narrative. The reassurance literature to date has focused largely on costly signaling, whereby benign states must distinguish themselves by taking specific actions that hostile types would not. The mere lack of overtly expressed hostility without costly signals has been considered “cheap talk,” on the assumption that this behavior is costless for hostile states and thus uninformative. In contrast, this paper argues that maintaining a cooperative façade while secretly formulating and executing exploitative policies carries inherent trade-offs, and thus constitutes a credible reassurance signal. Foreign policy planning and implementation requires communication among various individuals, groups, and organizations, which has some probability of being observed and punished by outside actors. Yet efforts to conceal the policymaking process and reduce this probability are costly—they require investments in internal monitoring and restrictions on internal communication that can substantially degrade policy outcomes. Thus, to the extent that a state's foreign policymaking process is transparent—that is, that concealing internal communications is difficult—the absence of positive signals of hostility is a credible signal of its benign intentions. The argument is illustrated with a case study of German reassurance signals during the July Crisis preceding World War I.

本文提出了一个正式模型，展示了国家如何仅通过保持合作的外在叙事来可靠地相互保证。迄今为止的保证文献主要集中在代价高昂的信号上，良性国家必须通过采取敌对类型不会采取的具体行动来区分自己。仅仅缺乏公开表达的敌意昂贵的信号被认为是“廉价谈话”，假设这种行为对敌对国家来说是没有成本的，因此没有信息。相比之下，本文认为，在秘密制定和执行剥削政策的同时保持合作的外表会带来内在的权衡，因此构成了可靠的保证信号。外交政策的规划和实施需要不同个人、团体和组织之间的沟通，这有一定的可能性被外部行为者观察和惩罚。然而，隐藏决策过程和降低这种可能性的努力代价高昂——它们需要投资于内部监控和限制内部沟通，这可能会大大降低政策结果。因此，在某种程度上，一个国家' 美国的外交政策制定过程是透明的——也就是说，很难隐藏内部沟通——没有积极的敌对信号是其善意的可靠信号。这一论点通过对第一次世界大战前七月危机期间德国保证信号的案例研究加以说明。