307 Carlos Javier Frías Sánchez Conventional deterrence Many authors therefore believe that reputation plays an important role in deterren-ce. To quote Herman Kahn, sometimes U.S. security depends on61: «…a willingness to incur casualties in limited wars just to improve our bargaining position (with the Soviet Union)». Kahn is of the same opinion as Thomas C. Schelling62: «We lost thirty thousand dead in Korea to save face for the United States, not to save South Korea for the South Koreans, and it was undoubtedly worth it». However, both Tang63 and Mercer64 believe that the reputation a state earns as a re-sult of its behaviour in past conflicts has no real influence on the strategic calculations other states make in current conflicts. The reasons put forward by Tang are the anarchic nature of the international sys-tem, which forces states to always consider the worst case scenario where adversaries are concerned. As a result, in each conflict, states expect that their rivals will confront them, and that their allies will not support them as they should, regardless of the past behaviour of both the adversaries and allies.65. Mercer argues that the actions that build a reputation may be the result of very specific circumstances that might not occur again (consequently generating different responses) and that, moreover, governments change (and reputations can change with them66) and that because reputation is a perception by third countries, the actions taken to establish or maintain a reputation are not always interpreted correctly by the intended targets of the message67. Consequently, it can be concluded that of the three elements that help build credi-bility (military capability, interests and reputation), reputation is much less influential http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee than one might think. 61 KAHN, Herman. On Thermonuclear War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 566. 62 SCHELLING, Thomas C. Arms and Influence, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, p. 124-125. 63 TANG, Shiping. Op. cit. (2005), p. 49. 64 MERCER, Jonathan. Op. cit., p. 4. 65 TANG, Shiping. Op. cit. (2005), p. 50. 66 An example of this would be the poor impression the U.S. President John F. Kennedy made on Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as a result of his interview in Vienna in June 1961. This impression may have influ-enced his decision to deploy ballistic missiles in Cuba, with the ensuing crisis. In this case, the «thirty thou-sand dead» Schelling mentions did not serve to establish a strong reputation. Source: THRALL, Nathan and WILKINS, Jesse James. Kennedy Talked, Khrushchev Triumphed, article published in the digital version of the New York Times on 22 May 2008, at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/opinion/22thrall.html. 67 MERCER, Jonathan. Op. cit., pp. 6-11.
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