Lessons in deterrence: Evaluating coercive diplomacy in Syria, 2012–2019
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper assesses deterrence efforts against the use of chemical weapons in Syria through the framework of rational deterrence theory (RDT). Deterrence succeeds and fails over stages and across time. In Syria, periodic deterrence breakdowns were linked to insufficient (or weakening) US commitment and resolve, which undermined US credibility. More broadly, the Syria case demonstrates the continued relevance of RDT, as well as the difficulties associated with establishing – and maintaining – successful deterrence. Policymakers must approach coercive diplomacy systematically, specifying the purpose of their strategy and weighing the goals of deterrence against alternative and additional political and/or military considerations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it