Abstract
Postwar American security policy was built on a foundation of deterrence. In the early Cold War period, American leaders relied on nuclear deterrence to discourage Soviet or Chinese attacks against American allies in Western Europe and the Far East. When these countries developed the means to launch intercontinental nuclear attacks of their own, the United States counted on deterrence to prevent an attack against itself. Over the years, successive American administrations have also attempted to use deterrence to moderate the policies of Third World states with which the United States or its allies have come into conflict. Partisans of deterrence assert that it has kept the peace between the superpowers and has been useful in managing lesser conflicts. This chapter disputes both claims.
When discussing deterrence it is important to distinguish between the theory of deterrence and the strategy of deterrence. The former pertains to the logical postulates of deterrence and the assumptions on which they are based. Put succinctly, deterrence is an attempt to influence another actor’s assessment of its interests. It seeks to prevent an undesired behavior by convincing the party who may be contemplating it that the cost will exceed any possible gain. Deterrence presupposes that decisions are made in response to some kind of rational cost-benefit calculus, that this calculus can be successfully manipulated from the outside, and that the best way to do this is to increase the cost side of the ledger. Different scholars have developed their own variants of deterrence theory. All of them, however, are based on these assumptions.
Deterrence strategy is concerned with applying the theory of deterrence to real world conflicts. It has given rise to its own body of theory about how this is best accomplished. The first wave of this theory, almost entirely deductive in nature, was developed in the 1950s and 1960s by such scholars as Brodie (1959), Kaufman (1954), and Schelling (1966). Most of these works stressed the importance of imparting credibility to commitments and explored various mechanisms leaders could exploit toward this end. The literature of this period is often referred to as classical deterrence theory (Jervis 1979).
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter is based on Part I of “Beyond Deterrence,” co-authored with Janice Gross Stein, Journal of Social Issues (Winter 1987) 43, no. 4, 5–71. Research and writing of the paper were supported by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to Richard Ned Lebow and the Canadian Institute of Peace and Security to Janice Gross Stein. This chapter was first published as “Deterrence: A Political and Psychological Critique,” in Robert Axelrod, Robert Jervis, Roy Radner, and Paul Stern (Eds.): Perspectives in Deterrence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). The permission to republish this chapter was granted on 3 July to the author who also retains the copyright for the original text.
- 2.
For a fuller treatment of the detrimental effects of nuclear deterrence between the superpowers, see Lebow (1987a).
- 3.
The definition of adequate communication and apparent resolve is difficult. Students of deterrence have traditionally assessed credibility with reference to how a would-be challenger’s leaders perceived the commitment in question. There is a serious problem with this approach; it risks making determinations of credibility tautological. If a commitment is challenged, it is assumed not to have been credible. Researchers do not consider the possibility that the commitment should have been seen as credible but was not for any one of a number of reasons independent of the defender’s military capability or resolve. For this reason, the appropriate test of credibility must be the judgment of disinterested third parties and not that of the would-be challenger. As I will show, a challenger’s receptivity to communications and its judgment about a commitment’s credibility can be impaired by motivated biases. Thus, deterrent threats that appear credible to third parties can fail to be perceived as such by leaders intent on a challenge.
- 4.
George/Smoke (1974: 519–20) argue that the outcome of a deterrence encounter can also be mixed. This occurs, in their opinion, when deterrence succeeds in dissuading a country’s leaders from choosing certain options as too risky but does not prevent them from embarking upon another, less-risky challenge of the status quo. Such cases undoubtedly occur but I am not persuaded by the examples George and Smoke cite.
- 5.
These cases are Fashoda (1898), Korea (1903–1904), Agadir (1911), July 1914, the Chinese entry into the Korean War (1950), Cuba (1962), the Sino-Indian crisis of 1962, and the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967, 1969, and 1973.
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Lebow, R.N. (2016). Deterrence: A Political and Psychological Critique. In: Lebow, R. (eds) Richard Ned Lebow: Key Texts in Political Psychology and International Relations Theory. Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39964-5_2
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