What if a diplomatic backlash is not a failure, but the point? This paper argues that leaders can trade foreign condemnation for domestic support when the right voters are watching. Leaders nearly always claim that their diplomatic campaigns are intended to attract foreign support, yet many diplomatic campaigns fail spectacularly in this regard.

The central argument is that alienating the apparent target of an international diplomatic campaign can be a deliberate strategy leaders use to win domestic support. Under certain conditions, a costly backlash from a foreign actor can be a credible signal that the leader shares the domestic audience’s preferences.

By intentionally provoking a backlash from a valuable foreign actor, leaders can exchange foreign condemnation for an increase in domestic support. International public diplomacy is generally understood as an attempt to increase foreign goodwill and cooperation, but many diplomatic efforts fail to win foreign amity and some produce a negative backlash.

In 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to the United States to oppose a multilateral agreement with Iran, only to infuriate the Obama administration and polarize US support for Israel. In 2017, Donald Trump openly antagonized NATO leaders, chastising them over payment obligations and calling into question the principle of collective defense.

During Brexit negotiations, Theresa May took aggressive bargaining positions that alienated the international partners with whom she needed to strike a deal. The puzzle is why leaders so often appear to deliberately and publicly provoke foreign negotiating partners when diplomacy is supposed to attract foreign support.

These actions can be a purposeful strategy used to win support from segments of a domestic audience; this is called strategic antagonism. When a key domestic constituency opposes a foreign target, paying a cost in foreign support can serve as a credible signal that the leader is committed to the constituency’s preferred policy.

Viewed this way, international diplomacy provides leaders with a powerful and little-understood tool for achieving domestic goals. The framework is applied to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s provocative speech to the US Congress in 2015. To form a majority coalition, Netanyahu needed support from far-right Israeli voters whose preferences were antithetical to the US Democrats alienated by his speech.

Israeli reliance on US diplomatic and economic aid meant that a US backlash against Israel could be costly to Netanyahu. That backlash could therefore signal Netanyahu’s commitment to the ideals and policies of his ongoing electoral campaign. The high volume of media coverage, public attention, and public opinion surveys created an opportunity to identify patterns consistent with strategic antagonism.

The comparison uses individuals surveyed just before and just after Netanyahu’s visit to examine the speech’s predicted effect on key subsets of Israeli and US publics. The speech reduced support from US Democrats and Americans who approved of Obama, polarizing US support for Israel.

At the same time, the speech increased support for a Netanyahu-led coalition among far-right Israeli voters. The argument shifts attention from foreign states to domestic publics as the audiences leaders may be trying to reach through diplomacy. Leaders can benefit in their domestic sphere when a foreign actor imposes a cost on them, although the mechanism differs from the usual two-level-game logic.

When leaders prioritize communicating with their domestic audience, they may be less likely to successfully cooperate with international partners. The domestic audience is regularly a leader’s primary target when engaging in international diplomacy, while the foreign actor serves as the tool.

Rather than treating domestic costs as signals to international actors, the framework examines how paying a cost in foreign cooperation can signal credibility to domestic constituencies. This broader set of potential audiences expands the ability to dissect the complicated goals and implications of diplomatic activity.

Focusing on public antagonism shifts the question away from who can influence a foreign state and toward who would want to. The crucial condition for strategic antagonism is whether the leader benefits from provoking a foreign reaction, rather than simply whether the leader can provoke it.

For a leader to engage in the risky strategy of antagonizing a foreign actor, the domestic benefit must make the gambit worthwhile. To identify when this is true, the analysis adapts the logic of a signaling model. The section discusses the structure and implications of the model conceptually, while the model is presented formally in Online Appendix A.

The model considers a leader trying to win domestic support by convincing a key constituency, called the public, that the leader is more committed to a preferred policy than the opposition. The public may be the overall domestic constituency, a portion of that constituency, or a domestic political elite critical to the leader’s political goals.

This situation requires the public to be somewhat uncertain about the leader’s ideal policy on a key issue. Because leaders have an incentive to say whatever will earn public support, observers may question whether their words reflect the policies they will implement.

The framework assumes that leaders can elicit a costly, negative backlash from a foreign actor if they wish to do so; that actor may be a leader, an international organization, or a public. A foreign backlash is costly when the leader depends on that actor to achieve future foreign policy goals.

Achieving international goals depends on others’ beliefs that states are trustworthy partners that share their goals. Aggressive stances that alienate foreign governments or publics increase estimates that the leader is not on the same side of key issues, eroding future cooperation.

Leaders will be willing to provoke a costly foreign backlash when the domestic public’s preferences are misaligned with the foreign actor’s. The backlash must be sufficiently costly to inform the public, but not so costly that it outweighs the domestic benefits. Both conditions are shaped by the characteristics of the foreign actor imposing the backlash.

Strategic antagonism requires leaders to calibrate the size of the backlash, balancing international costs against domestic benefits. Unlike traditional public diplomacy, this strategy does not aim to maximize a positive shift in foreign sentiment. If the backlash is only trivially costly, the public may not update its beliefs about the leader’s preferences.

A leader must be able to provoke a foreign backlash, which requires sufficiently capturing the foreign actor’s attention. The domestic audience must also be able to interpret that the foreign backlash entails a cost for the leader, which is more likely when the audience has access to free media.

These factors define the scope of cases in which the argument is expected to hold. In March 2015, Netanyahu harshly criticized the Obama administration’s pending nuclear agreement with Iran in a speech to a joint session of Congress.

The US public reaction was mixed, but the speech elicited a backlash from Democratic politicians and voters while doing little to change Republicans, who already supported his position. Congress postponed a bill that would have allowed a vote denouncing the agreement, and the speech exacerbated polarization on policies regarding Israel among the US public and political elites.

Netanyahu’s speech took place just two weeks before an election in Israel, when his Likud party was just barely ahead of the opposing Zionist Union party. His campaign strategy relied on mobilizing right-wing voters who were not part of his previous coalition.

Facing a tight election at home, Netanyahu was in a position to pay a cost in international support from an important ally to win support from a key domestic constituency. The case provides clear US and Israeli subpopulations that the theory expects to be influenced by Netanyahu’s strategic antagonism.

The first expected pattern is a cost: the foreign actor should decrease support for the leader implementing strategic antagonism. Because US Democrats were largely in favor of the Iran agreement, Democrats and Obama supporters should decrease their support for Netanyahu after the speech.

Survey data asked Americans about Netanyahu shortly before and after his speech, showing marginal changes in support broken down by partisanship and support for Obama. Favorability toward Netanyahu decreased by twenty-one point one percent among US Democrats and by seventeen point one percent among Americans who approved of Obama.

Netanyahu did not exchange decreased Democratic support for increased Republican support, which was already very high, so the net change in US public opinion was decidedly against him. The chart’s rightmost Democrat points show the clearest separation between the red before-visit estimate and the blue after-visit estimate, with confidence intervals that remain distinct.

By contrast, the Republican estimates at the left are nearly overlapping, and their intervals overlap substantially. Figure 3 shows the marginal change in support for a Likud-led coalition among right-wing party supporters after Netanyahu’s speech, compared with voters who supported Likud or a different party in 2013.

The results show a large increase in support for a Likud-led coalition among right-wing Israelis following the speech. The speech was successful in mobilizing support for Netanyahu’s coalition precisely among the hawkish, right-wing voters he needed to win over.

Look at the rightmost, non-Likud coalition-party group: the blue after-speech estimate is around eight-tenths, while the red before-speech estimate is near one-third. Their ninety-five percent confidence intervals are visibly separated, unlike the much smaller change in the non-coalition-party group.

The analysis considers several alternative motivations that may have compelled Netanyahu’s actions. It does not claim to definitively rule out these alternative motivations. Provoking a foreign backlash can be a deliberate and beneficial strategy rather than a mere error in judgment.

When a valuable foreign actor opposes a key domestic constituency’s preferences, its backlash can be a costly signal of the leader’s commitment to that constituency’s preferred policy. Some leaders may accidentally provoke a backlash, but many actions that produce backlash are clearly antagonistic and generate responses that seem easily predictable.

The strategy requires the leader to draw the foreign actor’s attention, and the backlash must be large enough to be a credible signal but not so large that any leader would be dissuaded from paying it. The intended audience’s preferences must also be opposed to those of the alienated foreign actor.

The theory implies that diplomacy’s motivations need to be examined when strategies stray from leaders’ stated intent. Strategic antagonism can work when a leader’s domestic audience opposes a valuable foreign actor, and the backlash is costly enough to signal commitment but not so costly that it outweighs domestic gains.