Deterrence Failure Revisited
1987; The MIT Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2538926
ISSN1531-4804
Autores Tópico(s)Global Peace and Security Dynamics
ResumoJohn Orme's article, Deterrence Failures: A Second Look, is a spirited attack on my book Between Peace and War.' A principal finding of this study is that deterrence is most often defeated by the flawed calculations of the challenger. Orme insists that deterrence only fails when it is executed poorly. In the rebuttal that follows I will show that Orme's historical analysis fails to address, let alone refute, the substance of my criticisms of deterrence. Our dispute is significant because of its implications for conflict management. Chapter four of Between Peace and War analyzed a class of acute international crisis, brinkmanship, whose defining characteristic is the challenger's expectation that its adversary would back away from its commitment. In eight of my sample of thirteen cases, challenges were made in the absence of any good evidence indicating that the adversaries in question lacked either the capability or resolve to defend their commitments. The evidence available at the time pointed to the opposite conclusion. The commitments that were challenged appeared to meet the four essential conditions for successful deterrence. They were clearly defined and repeatedly publicized. The wouldbe deterrers also possessed the military capability to defend them or subsequently punish a challenger, and gave every indication of their resolve to do so. Not surprisingly, most of these challenges resulted in setbacks for the initiators; in all but three cases, the initiators were forced to go to war or back away from their challenge. I found that brinkmanship could generally be traced to the existence of grave foreign and domestic problems which leaders believed could only be surmounted by a successful challenge of an adversary's commitment. By far the most important incentive for brinkmanship was the belief that a dramatic negative shift was imminent in the international balance of political or military power. Leaders conceived of brinkmanship as a forceful response to acute and impending danger, as a means of safeguarding vital national and
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