¹ Helena Smith and Chris McGreal, ‘Russian Spy Ring’, The Guardian (1 July 2010).

² Larson, Deborah Welch, Anatomy of Mistrust: U.S.-Soviet Relations During the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Hoffman, Aaron M., ‘A Conceptualization of Trust in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 55:1 (2002)Google Scholar; Kydd, Andrew H., Trust and Mistrust in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Booth, Ken and Wheeler, Nicholas J., The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation, and Trust in World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)Google Scholar; Ruzicka, Jan and Wheeler, Nicholas J., ‘The Puzzle of Trusting Relationships in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’, International Affairs, 86:1 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rathbun, Brian C., ‘Before Hegemony: Generalized Trust and the Creation and Design of International Security Organizations’, International Organization, 65:2 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Our article takes states as the dominant units of analysis. This allows us to engage directly with the scepticism about the possibility of achieving trusting relationships under the conditions of international anarchy. Importantly, the analytical choice of the state level also enables us to study long-term processes, which would not be possible if the relevant units of analysis were individual leaders.

⁴ For instance, these questions have arisen in security community literature, see Adler, Emanuel and Barnett, Michael, ‘A Framework for the Study of Security Communities’, in Adler, Emanuel and Barnett, Michael (eds), Security Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 45–6Google Scholar.

⁵ Booth and Wheeler, The Security Dilemma.

⁶ We are not the first to differentiate between trust and confidence. Niklas Luhmann similarity differentiated between confidence and trust, adding a third category that he called familiarity, although he proceeds to differentiate the three concepts in a way dissimilar to us. See Luhmann, Niklas, ‘Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives’, Gambetta, Diego (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 97–100Google Scholar.

⁷ Luhmann, Niklas, Trust and Power (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), p. 15Google Scholar.

⁸ Levi, Margaret and Stoker, Laura, ‘Political Trust and Trustworthiness’, Annual Review of Political Science, 3 (2000), p. 476CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In contrast, within International Relations, Brian Rathbun has presented a powerful argument that deploys the concept of ‘generalised trust’ to explain the different preferences between Democrats and Republicans with respect to cooperative ventures in foreign policy. See Rathbun, Brian C., Trust in International Cooperation: International Security Institutions, Domestic Politics and American Multilaterialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

⁹ J. David Lewis and Andrew Weigert, ‘Trust as a Social Reality’, Social Forces (1985), pp. 968–70. As noted by Lewis and Weigert, all actors lay ‘somewhere between total knowledge and total ignorance’. If actors could not cognitively set aside risk and uncertainty, ‘the future would appear with such enormous complexity as to preclude rational action in the present … [as] we simply [would] not have the necessary time and resources to rationally predict and control the effects of oncoming futures’. Ibid. This can be read as not only a normative claim, but also an empirical claim about the existence and effects of trust.

¹⁰ For an empirical example of how trust might function to stabilise an international agreement, see Ruzicka and Wheeler, The Puzzle of Trusting Relationships. This argument is also supported by the research of Aaron Hoffman and Brian Rathbun, see Hoffman, Aaron M., Building Trust: Overcoming Suspicion in International Conflict (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Rathbun, Trust in International Cooperation.

¹¹ For instance, Hoffman has shown that ‘actors prefer trusting relationships to nontrusting forms of cooperation because the latter require more-extensive and, therefore, more-expensive monitoring devices’. Hoffman, Building Trust, p. 289.

¹² Kydd, Trust and Mistrust, p. 6; Rathbun, Before Hegemony, p. 5; Rousseau, D. M.et al., ‘Not So Different after All: A Cross-Discipline View of Trust’, Academy of Management Review, 23:3 (1998), p. 395CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hollis, Martin, Trust within Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Larson, Anatomy of Mistrust, pp. 12, 19; Coleman, James S., Foundations of Social Theory (London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 177Google Scholar; Dasgupta, Partha, ‘Trust as a Commodity’ Gambetta, Diego (ed.), in Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 50–1, 54Google Scholar; Gambetta, Diego, ‘Can We Trust Trust?’ in Gambetta, D. (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), p. 217Google Scholar; Rotter, Julian B., ‘Interpersonal Trust, Trustworthiness, and Gullibility’, American Psychologist, 35:1 (1980), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Several authors have also picked up on this distinction; see Mayer, Roger C.et al., ‘An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust’, Academy of Management Review, 20:3 (1995), p. 714Google Scholar; Rengger, Nicholas, ‘The Ethics of Trust in World Politics’, International Affairs, 73:3 (1997), p. 483CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rousseau, Denise M.et al., ‘Introduction to Special Topic Forum: Not So Different after All: A Cross-Discipline View of Trust’, Academy of Management Review, 23:3 (1998), p. 399CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Hardin, Russell, Trust and Trustworthiness (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), p. 1Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Kydd, Trust and Mistrust, p. 6.

¹⁶ Hoffman, Building Trust, p. 2.

¹⁷ Booth and Wheeler, The Security Dilemma, pp. 145–58.

¹⁸ Rathbun, Trust in International Cooperation, p. 25.

¹⁹ Thus, for example, Booth and Wheeler write: ‘Gorbachev later commented: “We had reached a new level of trust in our relations”. This growth in confidence was mutual.’ Booth and Wheeler, The Security Dilemma, p. 152, emphasis added. The interchangeability between trust and confidence also occurs in some non-International Relations scholarship, see Morgan, Robert M. and Hunt, Shelby D., ‘The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing’, The Journal of Marketing, 58:3 (1994), p. 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levi and Stoker, Political Trust, p. 482.

²⁰ Lewis and Weigert, Trust as a Social Reality, p. 976. See also Hoffman, A Conceptualization of Trust, p. 376.

²¹ Kydd, Trust and Mistrust, p. 3.

²² Ibid., p. 4.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 9.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 39.

²⁶ Good, David, ‘Individuals, Interpersonal Relations, and Trust’, in Gambetta, Diego (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 33Google Scholar. See also Hoffman, A Conceptualization of Trust, p. 384.

²⁷ Wheeler, Nicholas J., ‘Beyond Waltz's Nuclear World: More Trust May Be Better’, International Relations, 23:3 (2009), p. 436CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wheeler, Nicholas J., ‘“I Had Gone to Lahore with a Message of Goodwill but in Return We Got Kargil”: The Promise and Perils of “Leaps of Trust” in India-Pakistan Relations’, India Review, 9:3 (2010), pp. 329–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wallace, Donnel and Rothaus, Paul, ‘Communication, Group Loyalty, and Trust in the PD Game’, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 13:3 (1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Strategic language takes place where actors are not completely constrained by the preferences of the community, yet are concerned about their reputation and the legitimacy of their preferences and behaviour. Because they are attempting to demonstrate their strategic compliance with community values, the interview data will not necessarily reflect the ‘true motivations’ of the actors, but rather arguments that are tailored for current political purposes. See Schimmelfennig, Frank, ‘The Community Trap: Liberal Norms, Rhetorical Action, and the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union’, International Organization, 55:1 (2001), pp. 48, 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Luhmann, Trust and Power, p. 26.

³⁰ Mayer et al., An Integrative Model, p. 714; Hoffman, A Conceptualization of Trust, pp. 376–7; Booth and Wheeler, The Security Dilemma, p. 241.

³¹ The classic account of vulnerability in the study of international politics comes from Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, who define it as ‘an actor's liability to suffer costs imposed by external events even after policies have been altered’. Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., Power and Interdependence (2nd edn, New York: Harper Collins,1989), p. 13Google Scholar. In the strategic realm, Charles Kupchan has demonstrated that high levels of perceived vulnerability lead actors to ‘pursue self-defeating behavior’. Kupchan, Charles, Vulnerability of Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 15Google Scholar. The value of trusting relationships in international politics is precisely that they decrease perceptions of vulnerability.

³² Möllering, Guido, Trust: Reason, Routine, Reflexivity (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006), p. 9Google Scholar; Luhmann, Trust and Power, p. 43; Hoffman, A Conceptualization of Trust, p. 385; Kydd, Trust and Mistrust, p. 333.

³³ Rengger, The Ethics of Trust, p. 472.

³⁴ Levi and Stoker, Political Trust, p. 495.

³⁵ Hoffman, A Conceptualization of Trust, pp. 385–91.

³⁶ Mearsheimer, John J., ‘Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International Security, 15:1 (1990), p. 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kenneth Waltz, quoting William Fox, similarly noted that the structural limitations of anarchy made trust difficult, declaring that, ‘In a system of self-help, trust is no substitute for certainty.’ Waltz, Kenneth N., ‘Reason, Will and Weapons’, Political Science Quarterly, 74:3 (1959), p. 417CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Goh, Evelyn, Meeting the China Challenge: The U.S. In Southeast Asian Regional Security Strategies (Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2005), p. 2Google Scholar. defines hedging as ‘a set of strategies aimed at avoiding (or planning for contingencies in) a situation in which states cannot decide upon more straightforward alternatives … Instead they cultivate a middle position that forestalls or avoids having to choose one side at the obvious expense of another.’ Some scholars have already examined hedging practices in international politics, but not in the context of using hedging to determine the presence of trusting relationships. Heginbotham, Eric and Samuels, Richard J., ‘Japan's Dual Hedge’, Foreign Affairs, 81:5 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goh, Meeting the China Challenge; Foot, Rosemary, ‘Chinese Strategies in a US-Hegemonic Global Order: Accommodating and Hedging’, International Affairs, 82:1 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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³⁹ Ibid., p. 187.

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⁴¹ Meyerson et al., Swift Trust, pp. 188–9.

⁴² This follows directly from our definition of trust as the ideational structure, which cognitively reduces risk. Security communities are an empirical demonstration of this claim. The probability of an armed conflict between the United States and Canada might be miniscule but the severity would be fatal, thus creating an obvious risk that Canadian decision-makers must be at least aware of. But precisely because the two countries are in a trusting relationship, this risk is not only discounted but also thought of as non-existent.

⁴³ This proposition does not depend on an assertion of a causal relationship leading from hedging to a trusting relationship, which might be considered tautological.

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⁴⁷ The risk averse nature of states is of course a staple of the defensive realist position, see Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Larson, Anatomy of Mistrust, p. 212.

⁴⁹ This claim is also made by Hoffman, who uses it to demonstrate how trust-as-confidence ‘admits an example it should not’. Hoffman, A Conceptualization of Trust, p. 381.

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