Buck passing, or passing the buck, is the act of attributing to another person or group, one's own responsibility. It is often used to refer to a strategy in power politics whereby a state tries to get another state to deter or possibly fight an aggressor state while it remains on the sidelines.
The expression is said to have originated from poker, in which a marker or counter (such as a knife with a buckhorn handle during the American Frontier era) 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.
Another less common but arguably less fanciful attribution is to the French expression bouc émissaire, meaning "scapegoat", whereby passing the bouc is equivalent to passing the blame or onus. The terms bouc émissaire and scapegoat both originate from an Old Testament (Lev. 16:6–10) reference to an animal that was ritually made to carry the burden of sins, after which the "buck" was sent or "passed" into the wilderness to expiate them.
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 the United Kingdom, United States, France, or the Soviet Union to effectively confront Nazi Germany during the 1930s. With the Munich Agreement, France and the United Kingdom successfully avoided armed confrontation with Germany, passing the buck to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union then passed the buck back to the western powers by signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
Similarly, John Mearsheimer argues that the delay of the Normandy invasion shows that a buck passing state can shift the balance of power in its favor: "There is no question that the United States benefited greatly from delaying the Normandy invasion until late in the war, when both the German and the Soviet armies were battered and worn down. Not surprisingly, Joseph Stalin believed that the United Kingdom and the United States were purposely allowing Germany and the Soviet Union to bleed each other white, so that those offshore balancers [the United States and the United Kingdom] could dominate postwar Europe."
A filibuster is a political procedure where one or more members of parliament or congress debate over a proposed piece of legislation so as to delay or entirely prevent a decision being made on the proposal. It is sometimes referred to as "talking a bill to death" or "talking out a bill" and is characterized as a form of obstruction in a legislature or other decision-making body. This form of political obstruction reaches as far back as Ancient Roman times and could also be referred to synonymously with political stonewalling. Due to the often extreme length of time required for a successful filibuster, many speakers stray off topic after exhausting the original subject matter. Past speakers have read through laws from different states, recited speeches, and even read from cookbooks and phone books.
The term "filibuster" ultimately derives from the Dutch vrijbuiter ("freebooter", a pillaging and plundering adventurer), though the precise history of its borrowing into English is obscure. The Oxford English Dictionary finds its only known use in early modern English in a 1587 book describing "flibutors" who robbed supply convoys. In the late 18th century, the term was re-borrowed into English from its French form flibustier, a form that was used until the mid-19th century.
The modern form "filibuster" was borrowed in the early 1850s from the Spanish form filibustero, and was applied to private military adventurers like William Walker who were then attacking and pillaging Spanish colonies in Central America. Over the course of the mid to late 19th century, the term "filibustering" became common in American English in the sense of "obstructing progress in a legislative assembly".