Deescalating a Trade War

Amid the US-China trade war, this Element reveals how different strategies of reciprocation shape the public dynamics of deescalation.

Deescalating a conflict requires some positive signal from one side and reciprocation by the other. How a country reciprocates and how its rival respond to its reciprocation is critical to deescalation. Existing scholarship focuses on balanced reciprocity. This Element theorizes and tests two other forms: semi-reciprocity and super-reciprocity.Reciprocation is central to conflict deescalation. How a country reciprocates-and how its domestic public and international rival respond to its reciprocation-can play an important role in shaping the trajectory of conflicts. Moving beyond conventional understandings in international relations that focus on balanced reciprocity between states, we propose two additional general forms of reciprocation: semi-reciprocity (reciprocation perceivably less than received) and super-reciprocity (more than received). We situate our theory in a hard case for deescalation, the US-China trade war, where relative-gains concerns are salient amid great power rivalry. Employing novel dyadic experiments that capture strategic interactions between states, we show, for the first time, how different strategies of reciprocation shape the domestic feasibilities of deescalation. The findings reveal how different forms and sequences of reciprocation shape the prospect of rapprochement, shedding light on the public dynamics underlying different pathways of deescalating a trade war that has profoundly impacted the world.