The other day Talleyrand discussed a Cold War relic, ‘containment’. Today we turn to another abstraction familiar to giddy nostalgic minds: ‘deterrence’.
Like containment, deterrence lives on as both tragedy and farce.
Unlike containment, deterrence has undergone something of a transformation in recent years.
Cold War deterrence featured the perpetual enhancement of weapons (mainly nuclear weapons) and the capacity to use those weapons in order to ‘deter’ anyone else from using them or, ideally, from acquiring them in the first place. Once arms races gave way to ‘arms control’, there were great efforts made to maintain ‘the deterrent’ in Talmudic-style codifications of arms control agreements.
Of course, when combined with a belief in containment, as in the Vietnam War, the doctrine of deterrence tended to ricochet, as the intervening power mostly acted to contain its own intervention (and its capacity to defeat its enemy) because to cross a self-imposed line would presumably invite, rather than deter, the intervention of other powers.
Otherwise it’s anyone’s guess whether deterrence worked as well as intended. It could just as well be that the world survived the Cold War because Providence filled the hearts of the world’s rulers with love. Or just plain common sense.
Deterrence persists today in a different form. Several countries (more, in fact, than during the Cold War) are busy enhancing their nuclear arsenals; but it’s also anyone’s guess whether they are doing so in order to deter an attack or for some other reason.
In a few instances (eg Barack Obama’s infamous red line in Syria), the logic of deterrence has proved comically tragic, or irrelevant, because its own advocates either failed to follow its playbook or failed to know that there was any playbook to follow.
Meanwhile, deterrence has become more pre-emptive and public. Hardly a week goes by when the media don’t report that some country’s senior intelligence officials possess the knowledge that something terrible is being planned by their enemies. That was the line pushed for weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine when Western leaders, citing the doctrine of deterrence, stated that any invasion would be met by a response beginning ‘at the top of the escalation ladder’. Such huffing and puffing continues, as with the line that China is about to provide significant military assistance to Russia to enhance the latter’s war effort in Ukraine.
Is the aim of such propaganda to deter or to provoke? Shouting ‘hey, we got the goods on you’ from the rooftops sounds more like a dare than a meaningful threat. It’s presumably not a bluff, which was how deterrence sometimes worked during the Cold War.
Or maybe it’s none of those things. Maybe it’s only the logical extension of the yearning, apparently now universal, to reprimand.
This is the statecraft of the schoolmarm. Whether, out of shame, annoyance, fear, or some other geopolitical emotion, it works in deterring miscreant nations from doing what they think is in their interest, remains to be seen. Bet on it ricochetting as well.