The Future of Extended Deterrence

The United States, NATO, and Beyond

Stéfanie Hlatky, Andreas Wenger, Stéfanie von Hlatky, Andreas Wenger

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626162662
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Seguridad nacional

Are NATO's mutual security commitments strong enough today to deter all adversaries? Is the nuclear umbrella as credible as it was during the Cold War? Backed by the full range of US and allied military capabilities, NATO's mutual defense treaty has been enormously successful, but today's commitments are strained by military budget cuts and antinuclear sentiment. The United States has also shifted its focus away from European security during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and more recently with the Asia rebalance. Will a resurgent Russia change this?

The Future of Extended Deterrence brings together experts and scholars from the policy and academic worlds to provide a theoretically rich and detailed analysis of post–Cold War nuclear weapons policy, nuclear deterrence, alliance commitments, nonproliferation, and missile defense in NATO but with implications far beyond. The contributors analyze not only American policy and ideas but also the ways NATO members interpret their own continued political and strategic role in the alliance.

In-depth and multifaceted, The Future of Extended Deterrence is an essential resource for policy practitioners and scholars of nuclear deterrence, arms control, missile defense, and the NATO alliance.

PART I
NEW THINKING ON DETERRENCE

CHAPTER 1

Threat Scenarios, Risk Assessments, and the Future of Nuclear Deterrence

Joachim Krause

NATO APPEARS TO BE in a perpetual state of crisis, a crisis that has two origins. First, there are deep-seated (one might call them fundamental) differences as to the role of military means in comparison to diplomatic instruments and multilateralism—not only between the United States and Europe but also within Europe and within the United States.¹ The clearest indicator for this inability to agree on the Alliance’s necessary military capabilities was the outcome of NATO’s 2012 Deterrence and Defence Posture Review (DDPR). This document was full of generic language that did not pay tribute to real security challenges and basically papered over fundamental differences between allies. The muted responses by NATO to the Russian aggression against Ukraine and to the unveiled threats against the Baltic States in 2014 also serve to demonstrate just how far the Alliance is from having a unified position in this area. Second, defense spending in most NATO states is declining due to the post-2008 economic crises facing all Western democracies. These developments are sure to undermine NATO’s ability to respond collectively to a broad range of contingencies. The Alliance is already losing critical capabilities, and the United States and Europe armed forces will be less and less able to work together (a problem that also exists within the European Union).²

This crisis is definitely not the first for NATO, and the Alliance has proven historically to be outstandingly resilient. NATO was able to overcome these crises and was subsequently hailed by many as the most successful military alliance in history.³ What made it easier to overcome those crises in the past was either the presence of a clear military threat (the former Soviet Union) or the necessity to respond to a specific international crisis (such as the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina). In dealing with threats and crises, political leaders and international officials, time and again, have tapped into the knowledge of the international strategic community to resolve key issues plaguing the Alliance. The international strategic community consists of academics, active and retired politicians, diplomats, generals, journalists, and entrepreneurs who attend conferences, write books and papers, and try to combine the wisdom and insights of many without having to represent governments or political parties.

This chapter focuses on the potential of the international strategic community as a source of solutions to the current NATO crisis over the Alliance’s core military capabilities and its deterrence posture. The starting point of this chapter is a critical review of NATO’s DDPR. It then proceeds to analyze the academic debates on deterrence from the 1990s to today. In doing so, it also draws on the academic debate about escalation control as a central element of deterrence strategy. The chapter concludes with some policy recommendations for NATO about deterrence issues. Deterrence will most likely become a salient subject for NATO because Russia is not the only one seeking a strategic competition with the West: Iran is following suit. The Alliance will also have to address the role that nuclear weapons should play in the twenty-first-century security environment if the vision of Global Zero is not realized. This analysis draws on different threat scenarios, which are helpful as heuristic models to better understand future deterrence challenges.

Deterrence Theory Since the End of the Cold War

One can draw several lessons from the academic and policy debates on deterrence since the end of the Cold War. The first lesson is that the very notion of deterrence has become much broader than before. Dissuading the Soviet leadership from initiating a major war is no longer the overarching goal for NATO. As Lawrence Freedman put it, “deterrence can be a technique, a doctrine and a state of mind. In all cases, it is about setting boundaries for actions and establishing the risks associated with the crossing of these boundaries.”⁴ Despite what is commonly assumed, the applicability of deterrence has grown during the past two decades in response to new and complex security problems.

Three dimensions of deterrence need to be addressed in this regard, and all three entail a careful evaluation of the role of nuclear weapons.⁵ The first dimension comprises efforts to deter state and nonstate actors from challenging the existing international order. There is, for instance, a liberal international order that is built on the nonuse of violence in interstate interactions and the promotion of free trade and cooperation. Yet some actors challenge this order more or less openly, and some of them are resorting to violence as a means to achieve their policy goals, all the while seeking nuclear weapons, with the aim of protecting themselves from international interventions.

The second dimension involves the role of nuclear weapons in the relationship among the major established nuclear powers, that is, the United States, Russia, China, and to a certain degree France and the United Kingdom. Here the issue is the possibility of arriving at a common understanding among them over the abolition of nuclear weapons or, alternatively, how to promote strategic stability to prevent nuclear wars and to ensure that nuclear states will not engage in any new strategic armament competitions.

The third dimension relates to the reemergence of traditional Article 5 threats to NATO that might, under certain circumstances, involve nuclear weapons. Such threats could come from Russia or from new nuclear states, that is, states that have challenged the international nuclear order and whose challenges have not been dissuaded by the diplomatic efforts of the international community. Devising deterrence concepts against such threats seems to be imperative because a coordinated response by NATO is required for deterrence threats to be credible. The recent crisis between Russia and NATO over Ukraine, for example, has amply demonstrated that this security challenge is no longer merely a hypothetical one.

The second lesson is that the relevance of nuclear weapons has been downgraded. During the past twenty-five years, most scholarly writings on deterrence were focused on the necessity to rely less (if at all) on nuclear means, including nonmilitary instruments such as sanctions and political isolation.⁶ Deterrence today means deterrence by denial rather than deterrence through punishment. As a consequence, nuclear weapons might become weapons of last resort, to be used only in cases where there is a clear existential threat, with non-nuclear weapons instead becoming more relevant for deterrence purposes.

This trend reflects the evolving nature of security challenges in the post–Cold War world but also the availability of new, non-nuclear military capabilities. Especially relevant is the modernization of the US armed forces since the 1990s, the so-called revolution in military affairs (RMA), or transformation, which made more and more non-nuclear military options feasible.⁷ In looking at the results of the various nuclear posture reviews that were undertaken under the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations, there is a clear tendency toward a reduced role of nuclear weapons.⁸ President Obama even made it clear in his Prague Speech in April 2009 that the United States was ready to address in a serious way the abolition of nuclear weapons because the US armed forces could make do without nuclear weapons if others reciprocated. What further contributed to the reduced salience of nuclear deterrence was the fact that, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Salafist jihadism (resorting to terrorism and insurgency) became the new strategic challenge. As is now painfully clear, Salafist jihadism is a threat that does not conform to many of the assumptions underlying nuclear deterrence.⁹

The third lesson one can draw from the literature on deterrence is that the United States and its allies have to be prepared for asymmetric nuclear threats. According to the US military, asymmetric approaches are attempts by adversaries to circumvent or undermine US strengths while exploiting their weaknesses.¹⁰ Asymmetric nuclear threats have been discussed in the literature since the 1990s. Most writings dealt with regional crisis situations in which US adversaries might consider threatening the use of nuclear weapons or even using them from a weak position.¹¹ As one author put it in 2000, “it is difficult to conceive of a rational actor electing to employ nuclear weapons against the United States in a direct strategic attack. To do so would invite annihilation.”¹² After September 11, however, more authors began to consider the use of nuclear weapons by terrorists or by state adversaries and referred to a different, non-Western understanding of rationality.¹³ The intention of these adversaries, some authors argue, is to protect themselves from US intervention in their region.¹⁴ This might involve strategies of asymmetric nuclear brinkmanship.

President Obama’s Global Zero agenda has not assuaged these concerns. More than five years after the Prague Speech, the nuclear missile programs of North Korea and Iran have continued to grow, with North Korea in March 2013 openly announcing that it was considering a preemptive nuclear precision strike against the United States.¹⁵ Pakistan is producing more and more plutonium for weapons purposes and is thought to be sharing sensitive technologies—and possibly sensitive materials, too—with others. For its part, Russia continues to cling to its special status as a global strategic nuclear power, and it has made nuclear weapons threats against European states since late 2014, in particular in the Baltic area. The emerging competition between the United States and China has a nuclear strategic component, too. With the exception of the US-Russian strategic balance, these are all asymmetric nuclear relationships. It is certain that NATO will become involved the very moment one of these regional adversaries feels tempted to threaten international forces with nuclear weapons.

The fourth lesson that can be drawn from the academic literature is that any deterrence strategy has to be fine-tuned to the respective threat scenario. Most authors have used the concept of tailored deterrence to describe this new understanding of deterrence, with the Quadrennial Defence Review of the US Department of Defence making specific mention of it in 2006.¹⁶ This concept simply expresses the wish to understand deterrence not in the sense of massive nuclear retaliation but to give it a new and more differentiated meaning in a world with threats that are hardly comparable to those of the Cold War era. The idea of tailored deterrence in a certain sense rejects the notion of a one-size-fits-all model of deterrence.¹⁷ Basic ideas were devised in 2001 by Keith Payne, who stressed the need to look at the decision-making processes of challengers, go after their strengths and weaknesses, and look for the various factors “that may be critical to the functioning of deterrence and coercive threats in a specific case.” He argued in favor of US deterrence policies that were specific to challengers and the respective context.¹⁸ Similarly, Elaine Bunne stressed that deterrence had to be tailored to specific actors in particular situations and that it was necessary to devise adequate means of communicating with a challenger.¹⁹

As with the debate on deterrence in the 1990s, the increased relevance of conventional weapons as well as nonmilitary means was emphasized, in particular because new technologies of the RMA would allow force to be used with much greater precision.²⁰ However, very few excluded the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons were given a central role in strategic deterrence, that is, in deterring the use of or the threat of using nuclear weapons by adversaries that either already possess them or are on the verge of acquiring them.

The debate on tailored deterrence was focused in part on rogue states and other states that might challenge the international order. But it was also referring to the reemergence of traditional strategic challenges. Another central element of this debate was that the concept of nuclear deterrence might also be relevant in analyzing the behavior of states or actors challenging the international status quo by engaging in strategies of counterdeterrence or deterrence evasion or of asymmetric forms of warfare to exploit the perceived weaknesses of Western democracies.²¹

The fifth lesson, which is closely related to the preceding one, is that escalation dominance is an indispensable requisite for any successful deterrence strategy under conditions of regional or strategic conflict. A RAND study from 1994 already concluded that escalation dominance must credibly deter nuclear threats against the US homeland or US forces overseas when the adversary’s objective was to prevent US intervention. A US strategy of extended deterrence based on escalation dominance, backed by theater defenses, should prevent US regional allies from being intimidated by an adversary’s nuclear threats. It concluded by arguing that US strategy should shift away from retaliatory deterrence to highly effective damage limitation, such as counterforce capabilities backed by effective defenses.²²

The next section offers some general lessons about deterrence and extended deterrence based on the preceding discussion regarding the state of the literature on strategic issues.

Deterrence in Support of International Order

The international system of the past decades has been characterized by a remarkable absence of major war. The absence of major war has been paired with paradigmatic efforts by the international community to prevent wars and to intervene when n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: American Alliances and Extended Deterrence
• PART I New Thinking on Deterrence
• PART II NATO’s Nuclear Weapons Policy
• PART III The Politics of Missile Defense
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index