To mobilize or not to mobilize: Catch-22s in international crises

In his classic novel Catch-22 (1961), Joseph Heller describes a thoroughly frustrating situation faced by a combat pilot in World War II. This is gene ralized to a "generic" 2 x 2 strict ordinal game, in which whatever strateg y the column player chooses, the best response of the row player is to infl ict on the column player a worst or next-worst outcome, and possibly vice v ersa, In the 12 specific games subsumed by the generic game, which are call ed catch-22 games, "moving power" is "effective," based on the theory of mo ves (TOM). A generic "Mobilization Game" applicable to international crises, in which the rules of TOM are somewhat modified, is used to divide the catch-22 game s into two mutually exclusive classes. Predictions for each class are compa red with the behavior of decision-makers in two Egyptian-Israeli crises. In the 1960 Rotem crisis, Egypt retracted its mobilization after- a discreet countermobilization by Israel, which is consistent with being in a class I game in which a status-quo state has moving power. In the 1967 crisis, esca lation moved up in stages from a class I to a class II game, which precipit ated war and is consistent with cycling wherein both a status-quo and a rev isionist state think they have moving power. It is argued that catch-22 gam es better model the dynamics of conflict spirals than does the usual static representation of the security dilemma as a Prisoners' Dilemma. How such c onflict spirals might be ameliorated is discussed with respect to recent co nflicts in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and the former Yugoslavia.