Alleati, avversari e segnali: una casistica storico-comparata

States who agree on their relative strenght and resolve can go a crisis due to mistakes in the negotiations; a state can feign weakness (as B. Slantchev has argued), but can also strive to appear much stronger than it really is; states can also be considered stronger or weaker for historical and psychological reasons; and they can manipulate costly signals in order to mislead their opponent and lurking it into a false sense of security. A state can monitor the domestic audience of its enemy in order to decide whether the enemy's private promises of cooperation are credibile or not. A state who promises of cooperating with an enemy can mobilize its own domestic audience to make such a promise credibile; but this strategy can also backfire and ruin the prospect of cooperation between enemies. A state can send a costly signal apparently aimed at deterring an enemy and protecting its ally; but the real purpose of the signal is to excite its ally's domestic audience, in order to make it more costly for the ally's leaders to negotiate with the enemy. If two states have a main opponent, a state's refusal to provide support to its ally against the enemy may not be credible; the state would thus send costly signals in order to credibly signal to its ally that it will not support it (public statements in favor of accomodating the enemey; withdrawing troops, instead of sending troops). A state can at times go to war against an enemy for the sole or main purpose of restraining an ally; this implies that current models of war termination are incomplete. A state can arouse public emotions at home in order to credibily signal its determination to an ally, and gain bargaining power vis-à-vis the ally during a inter-allied crisis.