This book revisits and expands on my critique of threat-based strategies of conflict management and discusses the use of reassurance and diplomacy as alternatives. I also explore the sources of political accommodation and the relationship between conflict management and accommodation . My project is particularly timely because many of the less successful strategies of the past are considered relevant to contemporary security problems by American and British policymakers, the media, and scholars. Deterrence and compellence have made a comeback in the light of widespread fears of an aggressive Russia and more assertive China . Intervention is once again an active American strategy; Washington and its allies have been engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2003, and with American backing Europeans intervened in Libya to remove Gadaffi. The American right is pushing for military action against North Korea and mainstream media are debating it. 1
There are notable differences between the present and the past. Terrorism is the most immediate security threat to the West, foreign adversaries are increasingly non-state groups and movements, and chaos in North Africa and the Middle East has brought a flood of refugees to Europe. Globalization has significantly increased the mobility of pathogens, and with it the possibility that a newly evolved virus in East Asia or Africa could devastate populations worldwide. Most threatening of all in the longer term is global warming and the economic dislocation, water shortages, and domestic and international conflicts it is likely to provoke. Threat-based strategies are not relevant to these problems. But they are pertinent to more traditional kinds of conflictsâor thought to beâby those who make or seek to influence policyâand to combatting terrorism as well. Arguments in favor of them frequently invoke the so-called lessons of the Cold War or other past conflicts. It is worth revisiting these lessons, and all the more so because I think they are wrong. I oppose them with a critique of deterrence and compellence , based on the same cases but better historical evidence.
In the 1980s and 1990s, I published a number of articles and chapters on conflict management and prevention. Several of them were coauthored with Janice Gross Stein. 2 They collectively develop a powerful critique of coercive strategies of bargaining and conflict management. Other publications address alternative strategies, like reassurance and diplomacy and the problem of conflict resolution. This volume provides the opportunity to bring some of this work together and to go beyond individual strategies of conflict management to explore the links among them. How do they affect one another and how might they more effectively be combined or staged? My goal is to offer a more holistic view of conflict management and resolution, and the resolution between them.
Strategies of conflict management need to be assessed from the perspective of all the protagonists but during the Cold War there was a paucity of documentation available from the Soviet side about key EastâWest crises. Much of my research accordingly focused on earlier deterrence encounters, including the run-up to World War I. The end of the Cold War provided access to new information and another case of accommodation , as did the prior EgyptianâIsraeli peace and SinoâAmerican accommodation. In recent years, more information about World War I has become available. There is much more to learn from these conflicts about strategies of conflict management that is relevant to their present-day counterparts.
I reprint some of my key articles on chapters on conflict management and accommodation. They were published between 1989 and 2014. At the core is my critique of immediate and general deterrence, conventional and nuclear. I include work on accommodation and the conditions associated with it. In a lengthy, original conclusion, I explore the ways in which the strategies of conflict management can work together or at cross-purposes, the mechanisms responsible for these effects. I also offer some thoughts about the relationship between them and conflict resolution.
I open this chapter with a brief account of the theory and practice of deterrence. I describe how deterrence and compellence have been adapted to the post-Cold War world and how the lessons of the Cold War can be used to critique these applications. This is a teaser for readers, but also intended to demonstrate the relevance and importance of my enterprise.
The critiques of the theory and practice of threat-based strategies that I developed with Janice Gross Stein were well received by international relations scholars troubled by American national security policy and the seeming foundation provided for it by academic literature. Many realists and rationalists resisted the critique for political, psychological, and institutional reasons. I describe some of their response to illustrate how this kind of research can easily touch raw nerves.
As this book is about learning from the past, I consider the problem of learning. The history of threat-based strategies has generated competing lessons about deterrence and compellence , and discriminating among them is no simple matter. There is a very real danger of learning the wrong lessons, confirming them with circular reasoning and selective use of evidence, and applying them to inappropriate situations or in the counterproductive ways. I offer some thoughts about addressing this problem. I conclude with an overview of the chapters that follow.
Deterrence Theory and Practice
Threat-based strategies have always been central to international relations. Deterrence and compellence represent efforts to conceptualize these strategies to make them more understandable in theory and more effective in practice. These efforts, which have been underway since the end of World War II , remain highly controversial.
Deterrence can be defined as an attempt to influence other actorsâ assessment of their interests. It seeks to prevent an undesired behavior by convincing the party who may be contemplating such an action that its cost will exceed any possible gain. 3 Deterrence presupposes decisions made in response to a rational cost-benefit calculus, and that this calculus can be successfully manipulated from the outside by increasing the cost of non-compliance. Compellence , a related strategy, employs the same tactics to attempt to convince another party to carry out some action it otherwise would not. Deterrence has always been practiced, but the advent of nuclear weapons made it imperative for policymakers to find ways of preventing catastrophically destructive wars while exploiting any strategic nuclear advantage for political gain.
Theories of deterrence must be distinguished from the strategy of deterrence. The former address the logical postulates of deterrence and the political and psychological assumptions on which they are based, the latter the application of the theory in practice. The theory of deterrence developed as an intended guide for the strategy of deterrence.
Scholars and policymakers became interested in deterrence following the development of the atom bomb. The first wave of theorists wrote from the late 1940s until the mid-1960s. Early publications on the subject recognize that a war between states armed with atomic weapons could be so destructive as to negate Carl von Clausewitzâs classic description of war as a continuation of politics by other means. 4 In 1949, the problem of deterrence gained a new urgency as the Cold War was well underway and the Soviet Union , in defiance of all US expectations , detonated its first nuclear device in October of that year. In the 1950s, often referred to as the Golden Age of deterrence, William Kaufmann , Henry Kissinger, and Bernard Brodie , among others, developed a general approach to nuclear deterrence that stressed the necessity but difficulty of imparting credibility to threats likely to constitute national suicide. 5 The 1960s witnessed an impressive theoretical treatment by Thomas Schelling that analyzed deterrence in terms of bargaining theory, based on tacit signals. 6
The early literature began with the assumption of fully rational actors and was deductive in nature. It stipulated four conditions of successful deterrence: defining commitments, communicating them to adversaries, developing the capability to defend them, and imparting credibility to these commitments. It explored various tactics that leaders could exploit toward this end, concentrating on the problem of credibility. This was recognized as the core problem when deterrence was practiced against another nuclear adversaryâand the implementation of the threats in question could entail national suicide. 7 Thomas Schelling argued that it was rational for a leader to develop a reputation for being irrational so his threats might be believed. 8 Richard Nixon took this advice to heart in his dealings with both the Soviet Union and North Vietnam. 9
The so-called Golden Age literature focuses almost entirely on the tactics of deterrence, as do Kaufmann and Brodie, or, like Kissinger , on the force structures most likely to make deterrence credible. Thomas Schelling fits in the former category, but unlike other students of deterrence in the 1950s and 1960s, he attempts to situate his understanding of tactics in a broader theory of bargaining that draws on economics and psychology. His Strategy of Deterrence (1960) and Arms and Influence (1966) are the only works on deterrence from this era that continue to be cited regularly.
In Arms and Influence, Schelling makes a ritual genuflection to material capabilities on the opening page when he observes that with enough military force, a country may not need to bargain. His narrative soon makes clear that military capability is decisive in only the most asymmetrical relationships, and even then only w...