At 10:50 p.m. on 30 april 1945, triumphant Soviet soldiers raised a fluttering hammer and sickle over the Reichstag in Berlin. In a ferocious war, the Red Army had ground the Germans back all the way from the gates of Moscow. Around the world, people celebrated the fall of Berlin as a defining moment in the destruction of the Nazi regime. It was a classic case in which perceptions of victory matched the result on the battlefield.

But people do not always judge victory this way. Observers’ perceptions of who won and who lost in a war or a crisis...

In this chapter we examine the hypothesis that people’s judgments of victory and defeat simply reflect the material outcome: a phenomenon we call score-keeping. But first there is a very basic question to answer: Do we know that observers actually make judgments about success at all? It could be that people typically decline even to reach an evaluation about international events. Americans, for example, differ markedly in terms of their interest, attention, and involvement in politics. The political scientist W. Russell Neuman divided the American population into three categories: 5 percent who are political activists, with high levels of interest...

In john hughes’s 1986 movieFerris Bueller’s Day Off, the dean of students, Ed Rooney, is in search of his wayward pupil, Ferris Bueller. On his travels, Rooney visits a fast-food restaurant, where a grease-covered television set broadcasts a Chicago Bears game. Rooney glances at the screen and asks, “What’s the score?” The server replies, “Nothin’ to nothin’.” Rooney, not really listening, asks, “Who’s winning?” The server pauses before replying, as if the answer is obvious: “The Bears!” After a moment’s surprise, Rooney nods and exits, just missing Ferris Bueller cheering in a close-up of the crowd.¹

Rooney’s experience at...

We have laid out the argument that people sometimes score-keep and sometimes match-fix when evaluating victory and defeat. But what determineswhenpeople score-keep andwhenthey match-fix? Furthermore, if matches are fixed, what type of country tends to be the beneficiary and what type of country tends to be the victim? In other words, whose performance is judged more favorably than the scorecard suggests, and whose performance is judged more critically? When is a match most likely to be fixed as a victory, and when is it most likely to be fixed as a defeat? In this chapter, we...

In this chapter we examine people’s evaluations of the U.S.-Soviet clash over nuclear missiles installed in Cuba in 1962. As one of the most important and best-documented crises of the century, the Cuban missile crisis represents a valuable case for examining our hypotheses about perceptions of victory and defeat. Observers around the world came to view the crisis as a triumph for the United States. The question is, why?

In mid-October 1962 U.S. intelligence discovered that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba. The missiles had sufficient range to threaten nearly all major American cities....

On 30 January 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war, communistled forces launched a massive military onslaught against hundreds of major cities, towns, and villages throughout South Vietnam.¹ The attack achieved considerable surprise, falling during the traditional cease-fire of the Tet holiday. However, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces pushed back the offensive across the country in a devastating counterattack that left tens of thousands of enemy dead.

Despite this battlefield outcome, the Tet offensive was widely judged in the United States as a massive setback for the U.S. war effort. Just as the battles of Stalingrad and Midway were...

Operation badr, named after the first victory of the Prophet Muhammad, was a coordinated surprise attack launched by Egypt and Syria against Israel on the afternoon of 6 October 1973. The day was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. The Arabs achieved considerable strategic surprise, and the thinly spread Israeli defenders initially lost territory in both the Sinai on the southern front and the Golan Heights on the northern front. Within a couple of weeks, however, Israel’s mobilized reserves had counterattacked and attained substantial military victories over both Egypt and Syria, encircling the Egyptian Third Army and...

A tragic case of match-fixing in international relations concerned the U.S. intervention in Somalia in 1992–1994. It was tragic because perceptions that the intervention had failed would have dramatic and negative consequences for future international responses to humanitarian emergencies, especially in Rwanda in 1994. The U.S. involvement in Somalia produced a number of substantial successes, including saving the lives of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Somalis. Despite these accomplishments, in the minds of observers the outcome became fixed as a debacle for the United States. In particular, the infamous October 1993 firefight in the Somali capital, Mogadishu,...

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush declared a global war on terror. Coalitions led by the United States subsequently invaded the Islamic states of Afghanistan and Iraq, and numerous clandestine operations were mounted around the world. To keep American hearts and minds committed to the fight, the Bush administration has strongly encouraged the belief that the United States is winning these conflicts.¹ In this chapter we examine how the U.S. public has perceived the success or failure of President Bush’s wars. Our analysis focuses on the period up to the...

Nikita khrushchev, lyndon johnson, and Golda Meir form an unlikely triumvirate, but they share at least one characteristic: they were all victims of match-fixing. This was not match-fixing in the sense familiar from the 1919 World Series, where some of the players conspired to arrange the result. Rather, it was psychological match-fixing, with actual successes on the ground perceived as failures, as if the Boston Red Sox won a four-game sweep of the World Series in 2004, but across America the St. Louis Cardinals received the laurels of victory. In such a case, the Red Sox might think they really...