Mediated Audience Costs: Jordan–Israeli Diplomacy before the 1967 Arab–Israeli War

Abstract

Abstract Audience cost theory remains prominent in scholarship on international crises. However, the theory suffers from several weaknesses, including a lack of historical evidence and concerns about the visibility of audience costs to foreign adversaries. This article engages with both concerns. I theorize that third-party diplomacy can help leaders signal their audience costs by corroborating their vulnerability to domestic punishment. I illustrate this mediated audience cost mechanism with an archival case study of Jordan–Israeli relations surrounding the 1966 Samu incident. I find that US crisis diplomacy helped Jordanian King Hussein to signal his vulnerability to a military coup d’état, and thus his resolve to retaliate against Israeli aggression, which in turn led Israel to refrain from further counterterror raids into the West Bank. The analysis integrates audience cost theory with crisis diplomacy in practice, and suggests several implications for future audience cost scholarship.