Changing Commitments: US Support to Rebels in Syria and Nicaragua

The provision of external state support to non-state actors in civil wars is a dynamic process. The calculus of state sponsors varies over time, which means that assistance provided to the armed opposition fluctuates. This is rarely recognized in existing research, which has focused more on the initiation of support and its subsequent effects on conflict dynamics. While we know many of the motives behind decisions to provide support, we know less about why state sponsorship of rebels changes over time. To address this, I propose a theoretical argument that is able to account for policy adjustments over time. The theory builds on the notion that leaders change their support commitment when there is adverse feedback and that support increases as long as the causes of policy failure can be attributed to external actors, while cutbacks occur when failure is attributed to the state sponsor’s own actions. The latter prompts domestic audiences to act in order to force leaders to back down. Process tracing is used to explore the value of this framework in within-case analyses of the United States’ support commitments to insurgent groups in Nicaragua during the 1980s and in Syria during the 2010s. The study demonstrates the utility of focusing on shifts in leaders’ perceptions rather than structural features of the international system or rebel behavior to understand temporal variation in external support.