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Deterrence: Then and now

a
Professor Richard Ned Lebow
a
Department of Government , Dartmouth College ,
New Hampshire, USA
Published online: 08 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Professor Richard Ned Lebow (2005) Deterrence: Then and now,
Journal of Strategic Studies, 28:5, 765-773, DOI: 10.1080/01402390500393852

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 The Journal of Strategic Studies
Vol. 28, No. 5, 765 – 773, October 2005

Deterrence: Then and Now

RICHARD NED LEBOW

Department of Government, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA

In the course of the past half-century, deterrence has developed as a

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strategy and a theory. Judging from the degree of resistance and hostility
that critiques of it encountered, deterrence also assumed the status of a
religious relic, which, if frequently paraded in public and blessed in the
right language by the high priests of national security, might protect the
community against the ultimate evil of nuclear war. Now that the Cold
War has ended and the Soviet Union has become history, we can
reflect more dispassionately on the consequences of deterrence and its
sister strategy, compellence. Toward this end, we can benefit from the
spate of information that has since become available from superpower
and third-party archives and memoirs, and other accounts of key
participants. Such reflection is also timely, as the post-Cold War world is
rife with violent and war-threatening conflicts in which deterrence
features prominently. And once again, claims are being made for the
efficacy of threat-based strategies of conflict management (e.g. continu-
ing peace in South Asia, the Libyan about-face) in the absence of any
evidence.
In response, Lawrence Freedman has produced a short and useful
book on the strategy of deterrence. It describes the history and
evolution of deterrence and assesses its utility in today’s world. His
analysis is rooted in the sensible assumption that deterrence is no
substitute for a broader strategy of conflict management, and needs to
be employed and evaluated in that context. He recognizes that even
when deterrence works, the most it does is dissuade an adversary from
challenging a state’s vital commitments or those of its allies. Unless
used in tandem with other strategies like rewards and reassurance, it
cannot reconcile a would-be aggressor to the status quo or socialize it

Correspondence Address: Professor Richard Ned Lebow, Department of Government,

Dartmouth College, 211 Silsby Hall HB 6108, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755, USA.
E-mail: Richard.ned.lebow@dartmouth.edu

ISSN 0140-2390 Print/ISSN 1743-937X Online/05/050765-09 Ó 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/01402390500393852
 766 Richard Ned Lebow

into acting in conformity with generally accepted norms of interna-

tional practice. Toward the end of the volume, he offers some thoughts
about the current applicability of deterrence, and includes a thoughtful
critique of the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemption. He rightly
characterizes the latter as really a policy of prevention that reflects the
Bush administration’s exaggerated belief in the efficacy of its military
instruments to solve political problems.1
Freedman describes the historical origins of deterrence theory, which
derive from the writings of Jeremy Bentham and efforts by British and
continental governments to reduce domestic crime. Elsewhere in the
volume he returns to the question of violent crime, and describes the
principal findings of the ongoing debate about deterrence and the death
penalty. Evidence from the United States (US) – and Britain too, he
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might have noted – offers no support for the deterrent value of the
death penalty. In several American states, homicide rates actually went
up after the death penalty was reinstated. There is some evidence that
the certainty of punishment has some deterrent effect; ceteris paribus,
crime is likely to decrease when would-be perpetrators know that they
will be punished regardless of the nature of that punishment.2
Deterrence in international relations came to the fore with the advent
of nuclear weapons and widespread fears that their use in warfare
would be catastrophic. Ab initio, Freedman argues, deterrence was
conceived of as a strategy intended to prevent such an outcome by
promising certain destruction to any state that used these weapons. He
goes on to offer a succinct portrayal of the so-called ‘three waves’ that
characterized the development of deterrence theory in the US. He uses
some of its principal findings to reflect on the practice of deterrence.3
The theory and practice of deterrence cannot be separated from the
Cold War, and the ways in which deterrence was conceived and
practiced by the superpowers. Freedman engages this dimension of
deterrence only in part. He attributes largely defensive motives to
American leaders. He notes efforts by Washington to extend nuclear
deterrence to protect allies and a range of American commitments that
could not be considered vital. He recognizes that development by the
Soviet Union of its own nuclear arsenal and means of attacking the
American homeland undercut the credibility of extended deterrence,
and led to the bizarre specter of American leaders attempting to
buttress it by building a reputation for being irrational.
There is no discussion of how either superpower sought to intimidate
the other, or how deterrence sometimes backfired when practiced for
avowedly defensive goals. Khrushchev made grossly exaggerated claims
about Soviet strategic capability in the aftermath of the launching of
Sputnik in 1957, and exploded gigantic nuclear devices in the early
1960s, to intimidate and restrain the US. The Eisenhower and Kennedy
 Deterrence: A Roundtable Review 767

administrations played the same game; in 1961, Kennedy advertised

publicly and privately the superiority of American strategic forces and
his willingness to conduct a first strike under certain circumstances, left
largely undefined. He hoped to deter Khrushchev from making another
move against Berlin. Evidence from Soviet sources indicates that
Kennedy’s threats were a principal incentive for Khrushchev to send
missiles to Cuba.4
Threat-based strategies are risky. They can provoke the very kind of
behavior they are implemented to prevent if they are perceived as
offensive in intent. When this happens, the target may conclude, as
Khrushchev appears to have in 1961, that restraint will be interpreted
as weakness and invite more provocations, whereas toughness holds
out some chance of inducing restraint.5 The roles of defender and
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challenger are considered unproblematic by deterrence theorists and

practitioners. Would-be deterrers consider their defensive motives for
threatening force self-evident, but this is not often the case – as
Freedman acknowledges. When perceptions are symmetrical, as they
were in Soviet-American and Sino-American relations in the 1950s and
1960s, force buildups, forward deployments and bellicose rhetoric are
likely to elicit similar behavior from adversaries. There is considerable
evidence that the strategy of deterrence, as practiced by both super-
powers, was responsible for a pattern of aggressive behavior and a cycle
of crises that brought them to the brink of war in October 1962. The
Taiwan Straits crises between China and the US provide another
example of this dangerous escalatory phenomenon.6
To the extent that I have any disagreement with Freedman it
concerns his general failure to consider the downside of deterrence and
overvaluation of its benefits during the Cold War. Janice Stein and I
distinguish between the ‘reality’ of deterrence and the ‘strategy’ of
deterrence. The former acted to restrain both superpowers whenever
their practice of the strategy of deterrence raised the risk of war.
Freedman agrees that ‘the prospect of nuclear war encouraged a
welcome caution all around’.7 Such a statement is insufficiently
attentive to the ways in which deterrence made both superpowers
more risk prone. I describe one such dynamic above: provocations
based on insecurity and high threat perceptions. The superpower crisis
arising out of the 1973 war in the Middle East illustrates another, even
opposite dynamic: provocation based on confidence and low threat
perception. Both Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev and Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger were so convinced of their adversary’s fear of nuclear
war that they felt free to seek unilateral advantages at the other’s
expense, confident that it would not provoke serious escalation.8
A strong argument can be made that deterrence, as practiced by both
superpowers, prolonged the Cold War. That conflict began as a struggle
 768 Richard Ned Lebow

for influence in the power vacuum created in central Europe by the

collapse of German power. By the late 1960s, the political and
territorial status quo in Europe was accepted by both superpowers. The
Helsinki Accords of 1978 gave de jure status to this de facto
accommodation. The Cold War continued, and even intensified, by
reason of threatening arms buildups and superpower support for
opposing clients in the Third World. By the 1980s, nuclear weapons
and their delivery systems, once a consequence of the Cold War, had
become its principal sustaining cause. President Ronald Reagan’s
commitment to strategic defenses – ‘Star Wars’ – did not bring the
Soviet Union to its knees, as his apologists insist, but gave new life to
the Cold War, and made it more difficult for Gorbachev to achieve the
accommodation he so desperately desired.9
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Freedman gives deterrence some credit for the ‘long peace’ between
the superpowers. He quotes Michael Howard who insists that it is
‘beyond doubt that we effectively deterred the Soviet Union from using
military force to achieve its political objectives’.10 However, Freedman
offers no substantive evidence at all in support of his claim, and since
the end of the Cold War many propositions about the consequences of
deterrence in superpower relations are open to empirical investigation.
A case in point is Thomas Schelling’s assertion that credibility is a
seamless web; that failure to defend any commitment will damage the
credibility of all of them. Ted Hopf has scoured the Kremlin’s archives
to ascertain Soviet estimates of American credibility in the Third World
during the Cold War. He found those estimates to be consistently high,
and quite independent of American responses to any putative
challenges.11
Like Schelling, Kennedy and his advisors worried that Khrushchev
doubted the young president’s resolve. This was the principal reason
they increased their pressure on Castro, advertised their strategic
advantage and pressed on with the Jupiter missile deployment in Italy –
the very actions that provoked Khrushchev’s ill-considered decision to
send missiles to Cuba. One of the great ironies of superpower relations
is that Cuban President Fidel Castro pleaded with Khrushchev to
deploy the missiles publicly, as the US was doing in Italy and Turkey.
Khrushchev, who never doubted Kennedy’s resolve, adamantly rejected
Castro’s twice-renewed plea on the grounds that the American
President would deploy the US Navy to stop or sink the ships
transporting the missiles. Kennedy and his advisors considered the
possibility of an open Soviet missile deployment in Cuba and had
reluctantly concluded that there was nothing much they could do to
prevent it as it would be such an exact parallel to their forward missile
deployments.12 In retrospect, it is apparent that American concern for
resolve, in theory and practice, bordered on the neurotic, and stands in
 Deterrence: A Roundtable Review 769

sharp contrast to another Michael Howard statement, quoted by

Freedman: that ‘we have become rather expert at deterrence’.13
In assessing the possible beneficial consequences of deterrence, we
must be very clear about what we mean by constraint. Howard
certainly, and Freedman in part, seem to mean preventing the Soviet
Union from military aggression that it would have carried out in the
absence of nuclear deterrence. No one has found any evidence in
support of this proposition in the Soviet archives, notes of Politburo
meetings, memoirs of former high-ranking Soviet officials or in
interviews with their former top political and military officials. These
officials, and records of their discussions, speak of the searing memories
of the horrors of World War II; they appear to have been at least as
committed as their Western counterparts to avoid initiating any kind of
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conflict that risked repeating this destruction. There is also evidence

that Soviet leaders, like their American counterparts, never felt so
unhappy or threatened by the status quo that they were willing to
consider war to change it. To the extent that deterrence worked, most
of the credit should go to self-deterrence, reinforced by mutual
recognition that a nuclear war could – indeed, almost certainly would –
result in mutual destruction. The Cuban missile crisis was a watershed
in this connection because its resolution brought Kennedy and
Khrushchev to the recognition that the other was just as terrified as
they were of the prospects of nuclear Armageddon. Unfortunately, this
recognition did not penetrate their respective national security
establishments as deeply as it should have.
The big question for historians may not be why deterrence worked,
but why so many leaders and lesser officials on both sides thought it
was so necessary, and how, until the advent of Gorbachev, they
repeatedly confirmed this belief tautologically.14 Such behavior has not
stopped with the end of Cold War. Claims are now made that nuclear
weapons have kept the peace between India and China and that
American intervention in Iraq brought about an about-face in Libyan
foreign policy. Freedman gives them credence without offering any
supporting evidence.15
With the possible exceptions of Israel and conservative British
defense analysts, the US appears to stand alone in the faith it places in
deterrence and the credit it gives it for preventing war. Freedman
suggests that what theorists say about deterrence often tells us more
about their ideological assumptions and their country’s strategic culture
than it does about the nature of threat-based strategies. The same is
certainly true for those who practice these strategies.
So what are the implications of deterrence for the post-Cold War
world? Freedman’s thoughts in this regard are on the whole sensible.
He emphasizes the need to embed general and immediate deterrence in
 770 Richard Ned Lebow

efforts to reduce the incentives for aggression and reward states for
conforming to acceptable standards of international behavior. He is
unfortunately vague about how this might be done, beyond some casual
references to domestic efforts to reduce violent crime. He does,
however, recognize that for any such effort to work, the norms in
question must be adhered to by those who dominate the system and
claim to be defending its norms. Citing Kegley and Raymond, he writes
that ‘the United States cannot follow one code of conduct and expect
others to follow another. It if wants to encourage a restrictive
normative framework when it comes to the use of force, then it cannot
claim a permissive one for itself’.16 The Bush administration has
repeatedly scoffed at international law and the need to gain Security
Council support for the use of force, and now threatens to encourage
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proliferation by pushing ahead with its own warhead modernization

program.17 When the hegemon has the power and desire to satiate its
appetites at the expense of lesser powers, it is like putting the fox in
charge of the chicken coop. In such circumstances, the prospects for
world order are not good.
Freedman notes, but does not elaborate on, one of the more
interesting characteristics of deterrence and compellence since the Cold
War. It has been more effective against those who would stop violence
than against its perpetrators. In Somalia, the US withdrew its forces
after losing 18 Rangers. In Rwanda, genocidal Hutus deterred Western
intervention by killing ten Belgian soldiers. In Bosnia, compellence
clearly failed against Milosovic, who continued his policy of ethnic
cleansing of Albanians in Bosnia despite Western threats. Pushed by
Western public opinion, NATO finally screwed up its courage to
intervene, but then failed to go after known war criminals because of
the vulnerability of its lightly armed forces, whose primary mission was
the distribution of aid.18 There is an important lesson here, and one
that has been consistently ignored by theorists of threat-based
strategies.
Threat-based strategies involve an equation. On one side is the ability
to inflict punishment; on the other is the ability to absorb costs.
Theorists have emphasized the former and all but ignored the latter.
Thomas Schelling pushed for American military intervention in
Vietnam. The US, in his judgment, not only had the need to intervene,
but ample power to impose its will on North Vietnam.19 Along with
key officials in the Johnson administration, he measured power and
assessed compellence in terms of the ability to inflict pain. Schelling and
American leaders ignored the other side of the deterrence – compellence
equation: the ability to absorb punishment.20
The US dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than it did during
World War II. North Vietnam rode out the bombing because its
 Deterrence: A Roundtable Review 771

government and people were committed to the cause of national

unification. On the ground, the US won every battle but lost the war
because its citizens would not pay the moral, economic and human cost
of victory. The same phenomenon is evident in the several post-Cold
War conflicts noted above. The target groups are generally immune to
deterrence, and difficult to coerce through the direct application of
force, because they are able to sustain proportionately greater losses
than those seeking to compel or coerce them without unacceptable loss
of morale or domestic support. This asymmetry is only likely to grow in
the future. If so, the applicability of deterrence and compellence to
these kinds of conflicts is likely to be severely limited.
Failure in Indochina did not lead to any serious revision in American
thinking about power. In the academy, Schelling’s Arms and Influence
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remains a required text. In the Pentagon, the dominant lesson that

emerged – the so-called ‘Powell Doctrine’ – stipulates that if force is
used it should be used massively and without the kinds of constraints
imposed in Vietnam by the Johnson administration. The Powell
Doctrine is based on the same conception of power that led to
intervention in Vietnam, and implicit in it is the counterfactual that the
proper exercise of military power in that conflict would have resulted in
victory.21
The Powell Doctrine underlay the Anglo-American application of
force in Iraq. It succeeded insofar as the desired objective was defeat of
Iraqi military forces and removal of Saddam Hussein from power.
American military planners did not go much beyond this objective –
although they did consider the need to protect the Oil Ministry once
Baghdad was occupied. The driving goal was victory with minimal loss
of American life, and rapid withdrawal of American forces in its
aftermath. Dismissing the concerns of some of his generals, Secretary of
State Donald Rumsfeld ordered them to be ready to bring home
sizeable forces within 60 days of the capture of Baghdad. American
forces quickly shrunk from 140,000 to 115,000 before the insurgency
necessitated a second buildup. The Secretary and his advisors were
blindsided by the violence directed against their occupation forces, yet
their policies helped to bring it about. They had no plans for a rapid
transfer of power to an independent Iraqi or international authority.
They assumed tight control over the reins of civilian authority, headed
by an American puppet exile with little or no local support. American
forces were widely regarded as an army of occupation. Pot shots at
them triggered equally violent reprisals, and set in motion an escalatory
spiral that led to the kind of casualties Rumsfeld had expected to avoid.
As I write, there is no end in sight to the American occupation, and no
guarantee that a pro-American regime would remain in power if
American forces were withdrawn.22
 772 Richard Ned Lebow

Deterrence and compellence as applied to the Soviet Union and

Vietnam, the American preference for air power over ground forces, the
plans for a quick and cheap invasion of Iraq and Secretary Rumsfeld’s
current efforts to develop armed forces that could utilize still visionary
technology to fight wars from afar, are all pieces of the same puzzle.
They reflect the longstanding American search for technical fixes to
warfare, and conflict management more generally. There are, however,
no technical fixes to political problems. Such an approach to war is not
only based on a naive understanding of international relations, it
represents at its core an unrealistic attempt to square a political circle.
American leaders want to shape the world and remove all threats to
their security and dominance, but at the same time recognize that the
American people will not put up with open-ended commitments and
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casualties of the magnitude of Vietnam. They are unwilling to make the

hard choices that this predicament dictates. The sooner Washington
recognizes the illusionary nature of its goals, the better off we will all
be. It is thus incumbent upon students of strategy to speak truth to
power, and try to disabuse the American national security establish-
ment that its conceptions of security are ultimately as dangerous to
them as they are to everyone else.

Notes
1 Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity 2004) pp. 106–8.
2 Ibid. pp.60–4.
3 Freedman (note 1) pp.1–25.
4 Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP 1994) Ch. 2.
5 Ibid.
6 Gordon H. Chang, Friends and Enemies: The United States, China and the Soviet Union,
1948–1972 (Pala Alto, CA: Stanford UP 1990); Jian Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press 2001).
7 Freedman (note 1) p.13.
8 Lebow and Stein (note 4) Chs.10 and 13.
9 Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition: American Soviet Relations and the End of the
Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings 1994); Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford:
Oxford UP 1996); Jacques Lévesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of
Eastern Europe, trans. Keith Martin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1997);
Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of
the Cold War (NY: Columbia UP 2000); Lebow and Stein (note 4) Ch. 12; Richard K.
Herrmann and Richard Ned Lebow, Ending the Cold War (NY: Palgrave 2004), conclusions.
10 Freedman (note 1) p.13.
11 Ted Hopf, Peripheral Visions: Deterrence Theory and American Foreign Policy in the Third
World, 1965–1990 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press 1994).
12 Lebow and Stein (note 4) Chs. 3–4.
13 Freedman (note 1) p.13.
 Deterrence: A Roundtable Review 773

14 See note 9.
15 Freedman (note 1) pp.120–1.
16 Freedman (note 1) p.108; Charles Kegley and Gregory A. Raymond, ‘Preventive War and
Permissive Normative Order’, International Studies Perspectives 4 (Nov. 2003) p.391.
17 William J. Broad, ‘Aging Warheads Ignite a Debate Among Scientists’, New York Times, 3
April 2005, p.A1.
18 Freedman (note 1) pp.124–5.
19 Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1960) pp.18–20,
and Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1966) pp.3–4 and passim.
20 Richard Ned Lebow, ‘Reason Divorced from Reality: Thomas Schelling and Strategic
Bargaining’, International Politics (forthcoming) for a critical view of Schelling’s conceptions
of power and influence.
21 Colin Powell, ‘US Forces: The Challenges Ahead’, Foreign Affairs 71/5 (Winter 1992)
pp.32–45.
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22 Michael Gordon, ‘The Conflict in Iraq: Road to War’, New York Times, 19 Oct. 2004, p.A1;
Michael Cox, ‘Empire, Imperialism and the Bush Doctrine’, Review of International Studies 30
(Oct. 2004) pp.585–608; Michael Mann, ‘The First Failed Empire of the 21st Century’,
Review of International Studies 30 (Oct. 2004) pp.631–53.