Deterrence pp 163-182 | Cite as

How Can the United States Deter Nonstate Actors?

  • Adam B. Lowther
Chapter

Abstract

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States took center stage in an international system dramatically different from the one that existed a decade earlier. As the Cold War took shape in the late 1940s, the United States played the protagonist to a Soviet Union seeking to export communism around the world. One school of thought regarding US foreign policy holds that Americans traditionally prefer to remain aloof from international politics.1 In the twentieth century, US policy makers repeatedly departed from this perspective—by participating in both world wars and the Korean War and by taking the lead to form the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—to pursue and protect the country’s interests. As the expansionist ideology of the Soviet Union, armed with the atom bomb, threatened to overwhelm the free world during the Cold War, American policy makers developed a grand strategy for containing the Soviet Union that ultimately succeeded.2

Keywords

Terrorist Group Criminal Organization North Atlantic Treaty Organization Grand Strategy Congressional Research 
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Notes

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© Adam B. Lowther 2012

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  • Adam B. Lowther

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