Author Description

Deterrence has long been a cornerstone of interaction among states. This was especially true when state interests clashed and when political leaders sought to avoid direct military conflict. In traditional deterrence relationships, calculations of military, economic, and diplomatic power determined the degrees of deterrence effectiveness. This seemed to change with the advent of the Cold War. The potential destructiveness of nuclear weapons combined with the relatively small numbers of states that possessed them suggested a need for new concepts of deterrence tailored to govern the nuclear competition among the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allies. Deterrence thinking came to mean nuclear deterrence-and as the Cold War wound down, there was a general perception that the absence of nuclear confrontation among the great powers required less emphasis on deterrence as a key feature of national strategy and a corresponding decrease in the instruments of deterrence that had prevailed during the Cold War. As the collapse of the superpower confrontation became more distant, however, states began to confront threats that were present during the Cold War but were perceived to be less important- what some have termed lesser included threats. These threats involved state failure, mass migration of populations, and drug, small arms, and human trafficking. Also included were environmental and humanitarian disasters, traditional state competition, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their components, and the emergence of nonstate actors empowered by new communication and information technologies that give them global reach. Taken individually, few of these threats have the potential to overthrow established and functioning states-especially in the developed world. However, these threats present challenges that policy makers struggle to meet using traditional diplomacy. Economic sanctions and incentives have exerted little apparent effect toward solving so