Severing the ties that bind: Moving beyond deterrence

Abstract

Abstract The U.S. strategic policymaking community for 45 years has operated under a fundamentally flawed paradigm: Deterrence theory. The transformation of the East‐West bipolar construct into a more complex and challenging multipolar context, and the concomitant exchange of new threats for old, has provided an opportunity to rethink and, possibly, reformulate U.S. strategic doctrine with alternatives to deterrence. An examination of the concepts comprising deterrence theory reveals a basic disconnect between deterrence doctrine and strategic reality. Deterrence‐as‐theory was not effective in the U.S.‐Soviet context, and there is growing evidence that attempts to respond to today's strategic realities through the skewed prism of deterrence theory will also not suffice. Having established as inoperable those concepts, such as “mutual vulnerability” and “rationality,” which form the basis of strategic dogma, several schools of thought propose strategies to replace deterrence. After exploring possible alternatives to deterrence, the alternative recommended herein seeks to combine strategic defense and crisis prevention measures into a strategy upon which the United States can restructure its theoretical base, bringing in the process a viability to U.S. policy that deterrence theory has never provided.