Deterrence Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Deterrence usually refer s to “deterrence by punishment” (where an attacker might be able to take over a territory but is dissuaded by the prospect of suffering retaliatory damage at home), rather than “deterrence by denial” (where the aggressor is dissuaded from attacking simply by the knowledge that his attack would fail—would be repulsed by the local opposing defenses). This kind of deterrence is often assumed to be tied to the invention of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them over the top of any battlefield, as the winner on the land or sea would still suffer horrendous damage to its cities, inflicted by the losing side’s airplanes or missiles. But there were some similar discussions of such deterrence as early as the after math of World War I (1914–1918), when it was assumed that conventional air raids would soon be catastrophic enough to be a deterrent. And the emergence of global oceanic commerce had even earlier suggested that naval forces could impose significantly deter rent punishment on any adversary that had become dependent on commerce.

Components Of And Problems With Deterrence

One crucial ingredient of deterrence is that such punishment has to be sufficient on “second strike,” that is, that the missiles or bombers or other means of inflicting this “counter value” retaliatory destruction have to be able to survive all the “counterforce” attacks an adversary has inflicted in a first strike. If an attacker were able to blunt all the means of retaliation in the first strike, there would not be a deterrent.

The process of deterrence is based on a rational choice model and is sometimes thus attacked as presupposing a rationality that may be difficult to find in human decision makers. But such criticisms may overstate the problem. For deterrence to work, one must simply have national leaders who are normal enough in their motives to be averse to having their own cities destroyed and who are normal enough in their cognition processes to understand that an attack on an enemy’s home cities or home territory can bring about such retaliatory destruction.

Most national leaders, but not all, would be “rational” enough to satisfy these conditions. It is sometimes conjectured that a national leader driven by a great confidence in the afterlife might be difficult to deter, because such a leader would not enough mind the retaliation that could be brought to bear in this life. Much more concern might apply to nonstate actors, the leaders of various terrorist groups, or other players who do not already govern cities and hence have nothing that can be threatened with retaliation and therefore cannot be so easily deterred.

One major concern about the deterrence mechanism has always pertained to the immorality of such approaches, since they depend substantially on the punishment of civilian targets. If the innocent are being threatened as a means of deterring the leaders who might be guilty of contemplating aggression, this conflicts with a Western or global morality that has tried to limit military attacks to military targets. The irony of deterrence is that potential attacks on civilians tend to reinforce deterrence and peace, while options for attacking military targets might undermine such deterrence and make war more likely. If a missile is aimed at the missile forces of the other side, it poses the threat that a first-strike attack could preclude retaliation. When the same missile is aimed at the cities of the other side, it reinforces the deterring prospect of retaliation. What is moral by traditional standards is thus a threat to the reliability of mutual deterrence, and what reinforces mutual deterrence is a challenge to morality.

A different problem with deterrence pertains to whether it can be extended, that is, whether the threat of massive retaliation can be utilized to deter attacks not only on one’s own cities but on the cities or territories of one’s allies. By a certain logic, this would not be possible, because the massive retaliatory threat would have to be held in reserve as long as one’s own homeland had not yet been attacked. But the cold war showed many instances of the United States seeking to shield Western Europe and South Korea by such “extended nuclear deterrence,” utilizing a variety of ploys to couple such exposed locations to the prospect of American retaliation. The effectiveness of such extended deterrence was much debated. In the net, a great deal of conventional war may have been deterred and avoided, but many risks of nuclear war may have been accepted in the process.

Does Deterrence Work?

Assessing the efficacy of deterrence has always produced a fair amount of dispute. It is difficult to prove the cause of something that did not happen. How do we know that any adversary was actually contemplating an aggression and hence was deterred? And it is difficult to establish counting rules for success or failure. If West Germany was protected by American deterrence from 1945 to 1990, does this count as one success, or as many?

Thomas Schelling presented an important distinction in 1966 between deterrence and “compellence.” In the former case, an adversary is dissuaded from an aggression that has not yet been undertaken. In the latter case, an adversary is induced, by the threat of punishment, to stop some hostile activity that is already under way. Cases in the latter category of compellence are easier to count and to sort for success or failure. A foreign regime is threatened with punishment unless it eliminates apartheid, terminates ethnic massacres, or meets some other criterion, and one watches to see whether or not the regime gives in.

This distinction between deterrence and compellence is particularly important when one considers the possibilities of economic deterrence. Rather than deterring war by threats of nuclear retaliation, perhaps the same deterrent impact can be achieved by the threat of economic sanctions and a cutoff of trade. Optimists about such economic deterrence might point to the cold war cases of West Berlin and Hong Kong. Pessimists about such economic threats sometimes cite a low success rate for sanctions, as low as 30 percent. But such low scores are derived only from the attempts at compellence, which are, as noted, easier to count but inherently more difficult to achieve, as compared to deterrence.

Bibliography:

Gray, Colin. The Second Nuclear Age. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999.
Jervis, Robert. The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Morgan, Patrick. Deterrence: A Conceptual Analysis. Beverly Hills, Ca: Sage, 1977.
Schelling,Thomas. Arms and Influence. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1966.
The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960.
Snyder, Glenn. Deterrence and Defense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960.