Deterring International Terrorism and Rogue States

US National Security Policy after 9/11

James H. Lebovic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135983581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This new study challenges the widely held view that many current US adversaries cannot be deterred, maintaining that deterrence is not a relic of the Cold War period and that it should shape US policies toward so-called 'rogue states' and terror groups.

James Lebovic argues that deterrence principles continue to apply, and focuses upon the 'three pillars' of the Bush administration's national security policy:

• 
  
  

• missile defence, which preoccupied the administration until September 11, 2001

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• pre-emption, which became the US focus with the September 11 attacks and US success in overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan

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• homeland security, which the administration has portrayed as more a natural response to threat than an aspect of policy that must be reconciled with the other pillars.

Deterring International Terrorism and Rogue States asserts that bad offences and defences have been endemic to the current US policy approach, leading US policy makers to pursue policies that require them to do everything without adequate concern for resource trade-offs, overreach, and unintended consequences.

This book will be of great interest to students of US foreign policy, national and international security, terrorism and international relations in general.

1
INTRODUCTION

Deterrence in a changing world

Most Americans vividly recall where they were and what they were doing on September 11, 2001 when they watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapse in flame in the deadliest foreign attack ever on US soil. This personalized tragedy thrust Americans reluctantly into the unfamiliar world of international politics. It is understandable, then, that they are prone to overstate how much the events of that fateful day imposed new demands upon US foreign policy. Now, for instance, US adversaries are commonly presumed to pursue the same nefarious goal—inflicting maximum damage upon the US and to its interests, at any and all cost. Ungrounded assumptions are not confined to the public. The George W. Bush administration added to the confusion by repeatedly labeling Iraq (under Saddam Hussein), Iran, and North Korea “rogue states,” treating them as co-plotters in a global conspiracy (e.g. the “axis of evil”), and claiming proof of cooperation between Iraq’s former leadership and the al-Qaeda terrorist network to suggest that Saddam Hussein was behind the World Trade Center attack.¹ The events of September only strengthened the administration’s view that the US is now facing adversaries that cannot be deterred—that is, dissuaded by potential costs—from pursuing their goals.

It is tempting to assume that deterrence principles are obsolete given their origins in the nuclear realities of the Cold War era. The superpowers were famously compared then to “scorpions in a bottle”—neither was secure as long as the other lived, nor could kill the other without first being stung fatally in retaliation. This oppressive reality meant that the Cold War was a “golden age” for abstract thinking about deterrence and exploring its policy implications: the belief that the Soviet Union could be “deterred”— in some sense of the term—with the right US strategies was held almost universally within the US policy community. But a consequence of this perceived association between deterrence and the US-Soviet nuclear standoff was that deterrence principles seemed increasingly antiquated with the waning of Cold War tension.

That challenges of the present and dissimilarities with the past have caused policymakers to doubt the utility of deterrence principles is unfortunate. Whereas these principles permitted some restraint in dealings with adversaries, restraint is no virtue in the current view. Relying upon the logic that “all that changed with September 11,” US policymakers have pursued policies that require the US to do everything without concern for resource trade-offs, overreach, and the unintended consequences of policy. The “war on terrorism” has become the rallying cry for the US as it races off in multiple directions in the pursuit of open-ended policies.

What is needed, I argue, is the sense of balance and proportion that derives from attending to first principles and drawing from policy assumptions that governed US thinking in the Cold War period. I maintain that deterrence theory is not a Cold War relic, and that it should shape policies toward even those US adversaries—the “hard cases” of rogue states and terrorists—that supposedly cannot be deterred. I assert that deterrence is far more robust than policymakers concede, and that policy guided by the false premise that deterrence does not work will justify extreme and imprudent measures in a “one-size-fits-all” foreign policy that will only increase the chances that US efforts will fail.

The contemporary policy debate

Critics are on the defensive in the US national security debate and have generally deferred to administration judgments. The “debate” over US policies toward so-called rogue states has focused, in the main, upon the execution of policy rather than upon its assumptions. The post-war debate over the 2003 US invasion of Iraq reduced first to whether US intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was good or bad, and then who was responsible for the flawed data that were used to justify US intervention. The issue of whether such weapons in the hands of Iraq necessitated US military action had been settled; and the option of preemptive action against Iran and, perhaps, North Korea remains on the table. Missing from the contemporary policy debate is due appreciation that reckless US preemptive policies are a greater threat to the US than the mere possession of nonconventional weapons by rogue states. These policies might not work and can actually undermine deterrence, inviting the consequences that preemption advocates appear to fear. Unexamined assumptions also pervade US defensive plans to counter rogue states. Policymakers fail to acknowledge that ambitious US efforts to defend against rogue-state missile attacks can exacerbate deterrence problems if pushing US adversaries to adopt destabilizing countermeasures or to exploit the vulnerabilities of the defense and that, regardless, the effectiveness of US defenses will depend upon a US threat to punish offenders through a deterrence strategy.

The assumptions underlying US counter-terror strategies similarly escape scrutiny. The current administration has opted for the offensive strategy of “taking the war to terrorists” by attacking their leadership, financial centers, networks, and support base. The guiding assumption for US policymakers is that “playing not to lose” guarantees defeat. The value of offensive tactics appears self-evident: why permit the adversary to retain the initiative, that is, to decide when, where, and what to attack? Why would the US forego opportunities to build cooperation with intelligence and police units abroad, to capture and kill individuals who provoke or plan terror operations before an attack occurs, to fight enemies abroad rather than within US borders, and to train and work with foreign militaries so US forces are not required to be everywhere and do everything? For no good reasons—at least, so it seems. But US policies could benefit enormously from a shift from offensive to defensive priorities. Despite US policy preferences, offensive tactics have their limits, can be self-defeating, and can create hardships for a fragile US defense. Homeland security need not be subordinate to an offensive strategy: offenses can be replaced by defenses that are designed, in part, to deter.

In exploring the contemporary application of deterrence, I focus upon the “three pillars” of the Bush administration’s national security policy: missile defense, which preoccupied the administration until September 11, 2001; preemption, which became the US focus with the September 11 attacks; and homeland security, which the administration portrayed as more a natural response to threat than an aspect of policy that must be reconciled with the other pillars. I argue that, given the neglect of deterrence, policymakers: (a) promote a defensive strategy when they should be emphasizing an offensive one; (b) promote an offensive strategy when they should be emphasizing a defensive one; and (c) promote an offensive-denial strategy (aimed at physically disarming an adversary) when they should be promoting an offensive-punishment one (based on coercing an adversary). Viewed in terms of the pillars of policy, then, I argue that policymakers: (a) exaggerate the value of offenses relative to defenses when making the case for a preemptive strategy against terrorists; (b) exaggerate the value of offensive-denial relative to offensive-punishment when supporting a preemptive strategy against rogue states; (c) exaggerate the value of defenses relative to offenses (i.e. the threat of retaliation) when arguing for a national missile defense (NMD) system; and (d) depreciate the value of homeland defenses by lavishing attention on offensive alternatives.

At least in theory, offenses and defenses are complementary. It is a truism in competition that a good offense makes for a good defense, and the reverse. But offenses and defenses are not always compatible, and each can undermine the other. Bad offenses—those that are poorly suited for the intended task—can compound problems for the defense by increasing its challenges and absorbing scarce resources. In turn, bad defenses can provoke adversary reactions that create and aggravate problems for the offense. Simply put, bad offenses and defenses are endemic to the current US policy approach. US offenses subvert a deterrence strategy by sapping resources that could be used in homeland security, by increasing the fears of rogue-state leaders, which could cause them to take destabilizing countermeasures, and by motivating and (perhaps even) enabling terrorists to attack. US defenses are inadequate for the problem at hand and, in the case of missile defenses, can weaken deterrence if viewed by adversaries as a threat.

Deterrence: Cold War-era limitations

Deterrence results when a party forgoes action because its costs outweigh the benefits. This conception, which associates deterrence with an ability to punish another for its transgressions, guided US national strategy in the Cold War years. As a result, the US sought to develop the capabilities to impose costs upon the Soviet Union, should it choose to act against the US and its interests in various parts of the world. As importantly, the US sought to convince the Soviet Union that the US meant what it said and would stand by its commitment to defend those interests should the need arise. This task seems straightforward when expressed in these terms. But US policymakers appreciated that the Soviets might doubt US resolve given the horrendous consequences of nuclear war, which the US did want to avoid, and US commitments to many countries that were conceivably of marginal importance to US security. US strategists rose to the challenge. Academics and policy intellectuals tweaked, augmented—and even transformed— deterrence principles to address critical theoretical challenges within a Cold War context.

This does not mean that Cold War-era deterrence principles were unproblematic: to the contrary, they were highly problematic. They were sometimes based on heroic assumptions about the adversary—its ability to think dispassionately, process information, and make the “right” decision under the most challenging of conditions—literally, seconds in which a national leader would decide the future of the planet. We should not forget the near-misses of the Cold War period at critical junctures, misunderstandings and organizational behaviors that could have led to war, the debt we owe to the wisdom and caution of particular US and Soviet leaders in moments of crisis, and the extent to which nuclear deterrence was itself a learning process. The Soviets did not take to principles of deterrence that contradicted long-standing Soviet bureaucratic traditions and historical lessons any more easily than many US policymakers did. For that matter, US and Soviet relations through much of the Cold War did not conform entirely, and even primarily, to deterrence principles—a fact that was sometimes lost on the participants.

An understanding of the current security challenge must reflect an awareness, then, that deterrence is and has always been a problematic strategy. The many problems of applying deterrence principles to Cold War-era behavior remain relevant today.

First, these principles can overstate the malevolence and ambitiousness of contesting parties. The superpowers were depicted, by all sides in the deterrence debate, as opportunistic—constantly probing for weaknesses and conditions that could be exploited to foster the other’s demise. But it was never clear what the parties could gain from neutralizing the other, much less whether this was indeed the US or Soviet goal. The historical record actually shows that both superpowers fell well short of the level of mutual aggression that is implied by the deterrence model. The US chose not to attack the Soviet Union even in the early 1950s, a period of overwhelming US nuclear supremacy; and the Soviet Union chose not to jump through the “window of vulnerability” that hawkish policymakers of the 1980s believed had been opened by the Soviet deployment of a large number of land-based missiles with multiple warheads aimed at fewer US land-based missiles. For that matter, neither party tested the other directly by initiating conventional military confrontations. As Lebow and Stein (1994: 357) conclude in their impressive study of US–Soviet crisis decision-making:

it was not only the absence of opportunity that kept the peace, but also the absence of a strong motive for war. Without a compelling motive, leaders were unwilling to assume the burden and responsibility for war, even if they thought its outcome would be favorable.

Put plainly, “the reality of deterrence helped to restrain leaders on both sides, but their relative satisfaction with the status quo was an important cause of the long peace.”

Second, policymakers can mistakenly assume that coercion is an effective source of influence. The escalations of conflict that some deterrence theorists presume can usefully signal an actor’s stakes and capabilities in a crisis can reinforce the nonlogical tendencies of the target, and provoke it. Whereas deterrence theorists suppose that threats are a stabilizing influence, threats can have the opposite effect. The psychological aspects of this process have been subject to considerable research. It has established, most notably, that deterrence threats can create a self-fulfilling prophesy when these “defensive” actions are mistaken for aggressive gestures. A party that fears another, is unlikely to view it more charitably after being threatened by it even if meant to convey that compromise is preferable to conflict. The pressure toward conflict is that much greater when policymakers yield to a variety of other (mutually reinforcing) psychological tendencies. These include foreclosing options prematurely when considering policy alternatives, ignoring policy trade-offs and assuming mistakenly that preferred policies have only beneficial effects, misreading and misapplying information when evaluating alternatives, overconfidence and wishful thinking, bolstering of preferred policies by gathering supportive evidence and ignoring disconfirming evidence, and underestimating constraints that limit an adversary’s latitude for choice (see, e.g. Jervis 1976, 1982/3). The likelihood that deterrent threats will backfire only increases when their targets reject the status quo and view it as politically, economically, or militarily untenable: “if leaders are driven less by the prospect of gain than they are by the fear of loss, deterrent policies can provoke the very behavior they are designed to forestall by intensifying the pressures on the challenger to act” (Lebow 1989: 27). The desire to fight “fire with fire” is that much greater when leaders see the world, and act toward it, through clumsy government bureaucracies and face domestic challengers who will capitalize on signs that those leaders are soft on issues of national honor or security. The propulsion toward conflict can worsen in crisis (see Jervis et al. 1985).

Third, deterrence theory focuses attention on short-term actions and responses when short-term successes can produce “failures” with time. Just as US backing of Islamic militancy to counter the Soviet presence in Afghanistan seems ridiculously short-sighted in light of contemporary events, the short-term US success at forcing Soviet missiles out of Cuba in 1962 can be viewed as a long-term failure for US policy insofar as the missile crisis helped propel the intense Soviet nuclear buildup in the years that followed. The issue of Soviet missiles in Cuba was moot once the Soviets could deliver missiles over intercontinental distances and fire missiles from submarines located off US shores.²

Fourth, policymakers assume, often wrongly, that they share their counterparts’ understanding of the “situation.” If the sides hold incommensurate views of the conditions and stakes in a conflict, coercive actions might serve only to reinforce dangerous misconceptions. Ultimately, leaders will not be deterred if all possible futures look bleak—if they believe there is little left to lose by testing the will of an adversary and by responding to threats with force. In attacking Kuwait in 1990, it appears that Saddam Hussein actually saw himself as the injured party—that he believed he was the “defender,” not the “challenger.” This is important because the “defender” might feel that it has little choice but to act, even a moral obligation to do so.

Fifth, policymakers assume that “deterrence problems” are actually deterrence problems. Foremost among the pretenders are “compellence” problems, where compellence is understood to involve attempts by a party to change the status quo through coercion. The danger is that policymakers will exaggerate the usefulness of threats against adversaries that are loath to convey weakness and renounce policy options. (This issue receives additional attention in Chapter 2.)

Sixth, policymakers can misread deterrence principles to require a linkage between issues and problems in diverse parts of the world. Concerns that the Soviet Union or US allies might doubt the resolve of the US government—especially, its willingness to do the unthinkable and stand by its suicidal threat to retaliate for a Soviet attack—provoked an obsessive US desire not to appear weak or irresolute in crises around the globe. Cold War-era policymakers disagreed over exactly how issues were linked but they agreed that issues were linked—that all US behavior would be read by adversaries and allies alike for underlying messages about US intentions and capabilities. Case study analysis suggests that the messages of US victories and defeats throughout the Third World were not read by the Soviet Union as the US had predicted (see Hopf 1994). Still, linkage effects continue to preoccupy the US as it pursues an ambitious strategy with the assumption that the US confronts a monolithic, global nemesis in the “axis of evil” and terror threat.

Finally, deterrence principles were too easily manipulated by US policymakers to serve their preferences and, specifically, a pre-occupation with weapons capabilities and deployment modes. With the assumption that quality and versatility were paramount, the US pushed ardently to increase the accuracy of US offensive forces and to diversify the means for delivering US nuclear weapons against their targets. Consequently, the assumptions behind US policies were far more inconsistent and undeveloped than would be guessed from the sophisticated tactics and technologies that were linked to abstract deterrence strategies (Lebovic 1990). Policymakers adopted policies to promote deterrence that could have undermined it.

In the end, deterrence principles were perhaps too compelling, for they could justify unrestrained actions with the false assumption that conflicts will be resolved to the benefit of the party that talks loudest and waves the bigger stick. A deterrence strategy is not a safety net for incautious and injudicious behavior; it does not reduce to determining what an adversary values and threatening it forcefully. A lesson of the Cold War is, instead, that deterrence can work when threats are implicit, what is unacceptable conduct comes to be understood, adversaries appreciate the limits to each other’s objectives, and opportunities for compromise are maintained and created (Lebow and Stein 1994). In other words, deterrence can work when policymakers allow situations to speak for themselves and leave the door open for negotiated resolutions of disputes.³

These Cold War lessons remain instructive because much about the world did not change with the end of the Soviet threat. Indeed, the principles that governed US–Soviet relations perhaps better fit today than the Cold War period. The US is far better positioned now than in the Cold War years to inflict prohibitive costs upon an offending state, through a variety of conventional and nonconventional means, and to limit the resulting costs and risks to the US and its allies. The reduced costs to the US of intervening worldwide have only strengthened deterrence by increasing the credibility of US threats to act when provoked—whether against states that target the US or its allies with WMD or support terrorist actions against those same targets. True, US adversaries might doubt that the US will act on its threats. But deterrence does not require that adversary leaders believe assuredly that the US will respond—only that it might respond—to an attack (Jervis 2003: 321–3). The irony, then, is that US interest in deterrence (and deterrence theory) declined as many strategic challenges that troubled the critics of mainstream US policy lessened considerably into the post-Cold War period.

Similar lessons apply in crafting a deterrence strategy against terror attacks. A defensive (denial-based) deterrence strategy, which plays to the adversary’s existing perceptions of benefits and costs, could be more productive than a strategy that seeks to destroy the terror infrastructure abroad or signal that terrorists will be punished for their transgressions. It is easier to convince terror adversaries that their plans are too ambitious or risky, given US defensive capabilities, than to destroy these groups or convince them to renounce their goals because the costs of being a terrorist outweigh the benefits.

The potential applications of deterrence are not lost entirely on US policymakers. The authoritative, four-year US defense planning document (the Quadrennial Defense Review), released in early 2006, uses the word “deter” (or its variants) over fifty times in calling broadly for “tailored deterrence for rogue powers, terrorist networks and near-term competitors” (US DOD 2006a: vi). Yet deterrence remains an ancillary theme throughout the document, which conveys US options against rogue states and terror groups with terms such as “prevent,” “defeat,” “de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Viewing the Present Through the Past
• 3 On the Offensive Against Rogue States
• 4 A Defensive-Denial Strategy Against Rogue States
• 5 On the Offensive Against Terrorists
• 6 A Defensive-Denial Strategy Against Terrorists
• 7 Final Thoughts
• Appendix
• Notes
• References