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Deterrence and Compellence

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Abstract

Deterrence and compellence were foundational strategies during the Cold War. They have made a comeback in the light of widespread fears of an aggressive Russia, more assertive China, and always troublesome North Korea. 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 conflicts—or thought to be—by those who make or seek to influence policy—and 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. Toward this end I offer a critique of deterrence and compellence, based on the same cases but better historical evidence.

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Notes

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  2. 2.

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  4. 4.

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  22. 22.

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  23. 23.

    Ibid., pp. 50–57.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., pp. 289–90 for his references. Mihail M. Narinskii, “The Soviet Union and the Berlin Crisis, 1948–9,” in Francesca Gori and Silvio Pons, The Soviet Union in the Cold War, 1943–53 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), pp. 57–75; Victor Gorbarev, “Soviet Military Plans and Actions During the First Berlin Crisis,” Slavic Military Studies 10, no. 3 (1997), pp. 1–23. Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 134–37, 194–97.

  25. 25.

    Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, chs. 2–4 for discussion and exposure of these kinds of argument with reference to the Cuban missile crisis.

  26. 26.

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  27. 27.

    Lebow, Between Peace and War, chs. 4–5.

  28. 28.

    Jervis, Lebow, and Stein, Psychology and Deterrence, ch. 4–5, 7; Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chs. 7–9.

  29. 29.

    Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988); Weinberg, A World at Arms, pp. 260, 323, and 329–330.

  30. 30.

    Alexander L. George, and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 5.

  31. 31.

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  32. 32.

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  33. 33.

    Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 55.

  34. 34.

    Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, ch. 2.

  35. 35.

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  36. 36.

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  47. 47.

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  48. 48.

    Robert Service, End of the Cold War (London: Pan, 2016), pp. 169–220.

  49. 49.

    Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, ch. 6.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College, London, UK

    Richard Ned Lebow

  2. Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Richard Ned Lebow

  3. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Richard Ned Lebow

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Lebow, R.N. (2020). Deterrence and Compellence. In: A Democratic Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21519-4_4

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