ESSENCE OF VICTORY : WINNING AND LOSING INTERNATIONAL CRISES DOMINIC D. P. JOHNSON AND DOMINIC TIERNEY Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Epictetus 1 Both sides could thus emerge from the [Cuban missile] crisis claiming victory, but there was little doubt as to who the real winners and losers were. John Lewis Gaddis 2 T HIS ARTICLE USES the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis to illustrate the criteria by which victory and defeat are assessed in international crises. The evidence suggests that few objective criteria are actually used in such evaluations. Indeed, examination of the specific terms of crisis settlements can prove to be less important than a range of factors that do not conform to traditional rational actor assumptions. These include: i) prior biases in perception, ii) the experience of the crisis itself and the subsequent way in which it becomes framed, and iii) public opinion management during and after the crisis. This analysis has significant implications for policymakers who have to deal with the aftermath of a crisis, and also for the wider public and media, if governments are to be held accountable for their foreign policy. The literature on perception and misperception is an increasingly impor- tant part of international relations scholarship, but this literature has focused almost exclusively on the role of perceptions in the decisionmaking process. 3 In contrast, this paper examines the role of perceptions in evaluating the out- comes of crises. We are concerned primarily with evaluations by observers: Dominic Johnson is a member of the Princeton University Society of Fellows; Dominic Tierney is a post-doctoral fellow at the Olin Institute, Harvard University. 1. Epictetus (A.D. c. 50–c. 138), Discourses (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), chap. 27. 2. John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History (New York: Newbury Award Records, 1978), 239. 3. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1976); Pierre Allan and Christian Schmidt, eds. Game Theory and International Relations: Preferences, Information and Empirical Evidence (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1994). SECURITY STUDIES 13, no. 2 (winter 2003/4): 350–381 A Frank Cass Journal / copyright C  Taylor & Francis Inc. DOI: 10.1080/09636410490521190