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Rational Deterrence: Theory and Evidence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 June 2011
Extract
The causes and effects of the use of force raise crucial questions of substance and method. Issues are multiple and often are confused with each other. Thus, while many case-study findings contradict “second-wave” deterrence theory, they are consistent with some rational deterrence theories. Many findings, however, cannot be squared with the assumptions of rationality. Policies are suboptimal and behavior is often inconsistent. Furthermore, the actor's values, beliefs, and calculations are exogenous to rational theories and can only be supplied by empirical analysis.
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- The Rational Deterrence Debate: A Symposium
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- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1989
References
1 For an assessment of the relevant evidence from outside international politics considered within the frameworks developed by studies of international deterrence, see Stern, Paul et al., eds., Perspectives on Deterrence (New York: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar, forthcoming).
2 For an extended discussion, see Jervis, Robert, Perception and Misperception in Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976)Google Scholar, chap. 3. Also see Wildavsky, Aaron, “Practical Consequences of the Theoretical Study of Defense Policy,” Public Administration Review 25 (March 1965), 90–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a recent summary of the evidence, see Patchen, Martin, Resolving Disputes Between Nations: Coercion or Conciliation? (Durham, NC: Duke Press, 1988)Google Scholar. A complicating factor is that many abstract and seemingly historical or scientific arguments are driven by political preferences because debates about deterrence are central to American foreign policy. Thus many disagreements about the origins of World Wars I and II or Khrushchev's rationality in putting missiles in Cuba are not purely academic.
3 These cases are more complicated than the stereotypes commonly used by political scientists. See Robert Jervis, “War and Misperception,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Spring 1988), 685–88; Glynn, Patrick, “The Sarajevo Fallacy,” National Interest, No. 9 (Fall 1987), 3–32Google Scholar; Lebow, Richard Ned and Stein, Janice Gross, “Beyond Deterrence,” Journal of Social Issues 43, No. 4 (1988), 33–35Google Scholar.
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5 Good reviews of these kinds of theories are Paul Schoemaker, “The Expected Utility Model: Its Variants, Purposes, Evidence and Limitations,” Journal of Economic Literature (June 1982), 529–63; and Machina, Mark, “Choice Under Uncertainty: Problems Solved and Unsolved,” Economic Perspectives 1 (Summer 1987), 121–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Debates about this approach not unique to political science. In anthropology the argument is joined, for example, by Sahlins, Marshall, Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine, 1972)Google Scholar and Harris, Marvin, Cultural Materialism: The Strugglefor a Science of Culture (New York: Random House, 1979)Google Scholar. A summary of the arguments between psychologists and economists in the latter's own field can be found in the special issue of The Journal of Business 59 (October 1986). For the arguments in sociology, see Hirsch, Paul, Michaels, Stuart, and Friedman, Ray, “ ‘Dirty Hands’ Versus ‘Clean Models’: Is Sociology in Danger of Being Seduced by Economics?” Theory and Society 16 (May 1987), 317–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also, see Gravovetter, Mark, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Indebtedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91 (November 1985), 481–510CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Barry, Brian, Sociologists, Economists, and Democracy (Chicago: University of cago Press, 1978)Google Scholar. For the purposes of this article, I will equate rationality with probability-utility calculus, as most authors do, but this glosses over the question of whether it is always rational to choose by this criterion. Doing so, for example, could mean following a policy that entailed some chance of enormous loss, and we might not want to say that a person who chose a safer policy with a lower expected utility was violating the tenets of all rational models.
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11 George, Alexander L. and Smoke, Richard, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 519–33Google Scholar. As Achen and Snidal (fn. 6) note, however, these propositions were reached inductively.
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13 Jervis (fn. 3), 677–79.
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17 Whether prescriptive, descriptive, or both, it is often unclear whether the claim is that the policy is an appropriate way to reach the person's goals or the best way to do so. The latter and stronger claim is obviously extremely difficult to verify since doing so requires comparing the results of the policy with those imputed to alternatives—in one version those policies the person thought of and in another version all those that could have been adopted. A strict interpretation of SEU would imply that the policy is the best one; most tests in social science more modestly seek to demonstrate that the policy is adequate for the goals.
18 A good summary of relevant literature is Robert Wilson, “Deterrence in Oligopolistic Competition,” in Stern et al., eds. (fn. 1).
19 Achen and Snidal (fn. 6), 153.
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21 For convenience, I will treat these empirical studies as though the methods and results were entirely compatible with each other, which is not the case.
22 For a discussion of the second wave, see Jervis (fn. 10, 1979), 291–301. It should also be noted that, while these writings are generally called a theory, they do not meet strict criteria for this designation.
23 See Lebow, Richard Ned, Between Peace and War (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Jervis, Robert, Lebow, Richard Ned, and Stein, Janice Gross, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Lebow and Stein (fn. 3). I am using the Nehru case, drawn from Lebow, Richard Ned and Maxwell, Neville, India's China War (New York: Pantheon, 1970)Google Scholar, as a stylized illustration and am ignoring the complexities and ambiguities.
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29 This also was the main point of earlier critics of the second wave: see, for example, Osgood, Charles, An Alternative to War or Surrender (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962)Google Scholar.
30 Thus George has stressed the need to develop differentiated theories because cases are of different types: George and Smoke (fn. 11); George, Alexander L., Farley, Philip, and Dallin, Alexander, eds., U.S.-Soviet Security Cooperation (New York: Oxford University 1988)Google Scholar, chaps. 1 and 29; George and Smoke (fn. 14), 170–73. (A parallel argument from another field is that “no single theory is capable of explaining international trade in all commodities and at all times”: El-Agraa, Ali, The Theory ofInternational Trade [London: Helm, 1983], 85Google Scholar; also see Gilpin, Robert, The Political Economy of International [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987], 174–80Google Scholar.) For further discussion of why the theory would no longer be one of deterrence, see Lebow and Stein (fn. 25).
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33 Huth, Paul and Russett, Bruce, “Deterrence Failure and Crisis Escalation,” International Studies Quarterly 32 (March 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 30, acknowledge this, but some of their analysis then proceeds as though this were not the case, as the students in my graduate seminar pointed out to me.
34 Lebow and Stein (fn. 3), 33–36.
35 See George and Smoke (fn. 14), 179.
36 See George and Smoke (fn. 14), 173–74 and George, Farley, and Dallm (fn. 30), 5, 11–12.
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47 The familiar analogy to athletes, put forward by Friedman, Milton and Savage, Leonard, “The Utility Analysis of Choices Involving Risk.” Journal of Political Economy 56 (August 1948)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Achen and Snidal (fn. 6), 164, does not really help. Statesmen act in a realm of much greater complexity, deal with many fewer instances, and only rarely receive unambiguous feedback. For a discussion of the more interesting issue of whether information-processing biases and fallacies really can be considered deviations from rationality, see Cohen, L. Jonathan, “Can Human Irrationality be Experimentally Demonstrated?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (September 1981), 317–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the comments, ibid., 331–70. For an SEU model that takes information-processing costs into account, see Anderson, Paul and McKeown, Timothy, “Changing Aspirations, Limited Attention, and War,” World Politics 40 (October 1987), 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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