buck-passing

President Truman with "The Buck Stops Here" sign on his desk

Buck passing or passing the buck is the action of transferring responsibility or blame onto another person. It is also used as a strategy in power politics when the actions of one country/nation are blamed on another, providing an opportunity for war.

The latter expression is said to have originated with the game of poker, in which a marker or counter, frequently in frontier days a knife with a buckhorn handle, was used to indicate the person whose turn it was to deal. If the player did not wish to deal he could pass the responsibility by passing the "buck", as the counter came to be called, to the next player.

Historical Examples

Passing the buck in international relations theory involves the tendency of nation-states to refuse to confront a growing threat in the hopes that another state will. The most notable example of this was the refusal of Great Britain, France, or the Soviet Union to effectively confront Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Joseph Stalin believed, somewhat justifiably, that the Western allies wanted the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to fight it out and thereby weaken each other. By signing the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, Stalin effectively passed the buck to the Western allies for two more years, until Germany launched an invasion of the Soviet Union.^[1]

The Buck Stops Here

The famous "The Buck Stops Here" sign from President Harry Truman's desk. The reverse of the sign says "I'm From Missouri".

"The buck stops here" is a phrase that was popularized by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who kept a sign with that phrase on his desk in the Oval Office. (Footage from Jimmy Carter's "malaise speech" shows the sign still on the desk during Carter's administration.) The phrase refers to the fact that the President has to make the decisions and accept the ultimate responsibility for those decisions. Truman received the sign as a gift from a prison warden, who was also an avid poker player.^[2]

See also

• scapegoat
• Button (poker)

References

1. ^ Christensen, Thomas; Jack Snyder (1990). "Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity" (PDF). International Organization 44 (2): 137–168. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~olau/ir/archive/chr1.pdf. Retrieved June 2007. 
2. ^ Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History by Jan R. Van Meter

• "The Buck Stops Here" Desk Sign on trumanlibrary.org
• Mitford M. Mathews, ed., A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951), I, pages 198-99.

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