By Van Jackson
Thinking about deterrence shouldn’t be a substitute for critical thinking.
Deterrence is no substitute for strategy, and there’s danger in confusing the two. A resurgence of debates about deterrence and coercion are necessary given their neglect in post-Cold War foreign policy discussions. But even “successful” deterrence has little hope of solving national security challenges and a high likelihood of generating second-order problems.
Mainstream academic research all but abandoned deterrence at the end of the Cold War. Some of the biggest journals—International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, and Journal of Conflict Resolution—became obsessed with research on things like institutions, treaties, and the mediating effects of economic ties. As a tenured political scientist friend of mine (at an R1 institution) recently remarked, “The incentives of the academy since the 1990s are geared toward IPE [international political economy], institutionalism, human rights. Just look at the specialties that universities are hiring for every year. If you want a job as a tenure-track professor, don’t specialize in security studies.”
For U.S. policymakers though, the importance of deterrence (and security studies in general) never waned, nor did the deterrence literature simply stop evolving with the Cold War’s end; it just stopped receiving attention from the public and from most top tier political scientists. When I worked as a Pentagon strategist, deterrence concepts were part of daily discussion among some of us, and I was part of the original crew to establish extended deterrence consultation mechanisms with our South Korean and Japanese allies. I was even lucky enough to be part of the Minerva Research Initiative, a low-cost, high-impact program that funds social science research of relevance to the national security enterprise.
But even in the Pentagon there were many policy civilians who found talk of deterrence “a little too Cold War,” “passé,” and a euphemism for aggression. The military services and Joint Staff were sometimes more embracing of deterrence, but most viewed it as a “left of boom” (boom=conflict) concept that had no place in military operations, which were all about achieving “kinetic effects.” Their philosophy was to identify the destructive effect that needed to be achieved, and then work backwards to identify what capabilities should be brought to bear to best achieve that effect. Thomas Schelling’s notion of “the threat that leaves something to chance” was elusive.
Read the full story at The Diplomat