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Deterrence is a national security strategy aimed at persuading an adversary that the costs of attacking exceed the benefits. During the Cold War, U.S. leaders sought to deter an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States or its allies in Europe by threatening to respond with nuclear weapons. The United States worked hard to maintain a powerful nuclear deterrent and to convince the Soviet Union that it would actually initiate nuclear war if push came to shove, but most analysts came to believe that these efforts were unnecessary: The mere possibility of a catastrophic nuclear exchange produced robust deterrence.
Complex Deterrence seeks to assess the relevance of deterrence in contemporary international politics. The basic premise is that the world today is much more complicated than it was during the Cold War; scholars and policymakers should thus deviate from that era's "straitjacket conceptions" (p. 20) of deterrence and, instead, understand the nature of complex deterrence relationships that will dominate the globalized world of the twenty-first century. Deterrence is more complex today because of the increased importance of nonstate actors, international organizations, and domestic and transnational audiences; the emergence of significant power asymmetries, particularly between the United States and all other countries; and ambiguity about the motives of many potential adversaries. Perhaps no problem better captures the greater complexity of deterrence today than the challenge of deterring seemingly nonrational, suicidal terrorists committed to pursuing highly intangible goals.
The book outlines five types of deterrence relationships in the contemporary era that warrant new scholarly thinking and policy approaches: deterrence among great powers; deterrence among new nuclear states; deterrence and extended deterrence involving nuclear great powers and regional powers armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; deterrence between nuclear states and nonstate actors; and deterrence by collective actors. Each of these topics is covered in one or more chapters by more than a dozen prominent scholars in security studies or related fields.
The first two sections of...