The Concept of Deterrence and Deterrence Theory

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick M. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
World War ◽  
Empirical Theory ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Considerable Complexity

Deterrence is an old practice, readily defined and described, widely employed but unevenly effective and of questionable reliability. Elevated to prominence after World War II and the arrival of nuclear weapons, deterrence became the central recourse for sustaining international and internal security and stability among and within states in an era of serious conflict. With regard to the presence of nuclear weapons in particular but also to deal with non-nuclear violent conflict, deterrence has been employed to prevent (or at least limit) the destruction of states, societies, and ultimately humanity. The greatest success has been that no nuclear weapons have been used for destructive purposes since the end of World War II in 1945. Deterrence has been widely used below the nuclear level but with very uneven results. Deterrence has been intensively studied and tested as to its use in terms of strategy in international relations, the maintenance of stability in international relations, the conduct of violence and warfare in both international and domestic contexts, and in political affairs. Since deterrence is the use of threats to block or reduce the inflicting of serious harm, the existence of capacities for inflicting harm are readily maintained and periodically applied, so available deterrence capabilities provide a degree of continuing concern and a regular desire to at least do away with nuclear weapons and threats. A brief period in the ending of the Cold War saw a serious effort to reduce the reliance on deterrence, particularly nuclear deterrence, in international politics but it was soon replaced by serious movement in the opposite direction. Yet efforts to reduce the need for and use of deterrence continue. Extensive efforts have been applied in the development of theories of deterrence, particularly to generate empirical theory in order to better understand and apply deterrence but without arriving at widely accepted results. This is the result of the considerable complexity of the subject, the activity involved, and the behavior of the practitioners. The conduct of deterrence is now broader and deeper than before. It is under greater pressure due to technological, political, and cultural developments, and operates in a much more elaborate overall environment including space, cyberspace, and oceanic environs. Thus the goal of developing effective empirical theory on deterrence remains, at various levels, still incompletely attained. The same is true of mastering deterrence in practice. Nevertheless, deterrence remains important and fascinating.

The United States and Asia

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Ellings ◽  
Joshua Ziemkowski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
World War ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
The Cold War

The United States’ experience with Asia goes back to 1784. Over the subsequent two-and-a-third centuries scholarly research grew in fits and starts, reflecting historical developments: the growth of US interests and interdependencies in the region; the wars in Asia in which the United States fought; the ascendance of the United States to international leadership; and the post–World War II resurgence of Asia led by Japan, then the four tigers, and most dramatically China. The definition of Asia evolved correspondingly. Today, due to strategic and economic interdependencies, scholars tend to view it as incorporating Northeast, Southeast, South, and Central Asia and Russian Asia as well as relevant portions of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The most recent US National Security Strategy (White House 2017, cited under Contemporary US-Asia Relations: General) reconceives the Asia-Pacific as the Indo-Pacific, stretching “from the west coast of India to the western shores of the United States” and constituting “the most populous and economically dynamic part of the world” (pp. 45–46) The first Asia scholars came to prominence in the United States during World War II, and the Cold War strengthened the impetus for interdisciplinary area and regional studies. Through the middle and late Cold War years, social scientists and historians concentrated further, but they increasingly looked inward at the development of their separate disciplines, away from interdisciplinary area studies as conceived in the 1940s and 1950s. While area studies declined, barriers between academia and the policy world emerged. Many scholars disapproved of the Vietnam War. “Revisionists” in the international relations, foreign policy, and area studies fields held that US policy and the extension of global capitalism were conjoined, suppressing both economic development and indigenous political movements in Asia and elsewhere. Simultaneously, behavioral science and postmodernist movements in policy-relevant fields developed. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Theory and methodology overtook the old approach of area-specific research that tried to integrate knowledge of the history, culture, language, politics, and economics of particular nations or subregions. Theory and methodology prevailed in research, tenure, and promotion. Policy-relevant studies became viewed as “applied” science. Another factor was money. Already under pressure, area studies was dealt a major blow at the end of the Cold War with cutbacks. Research on policy issues related to the United States and Asia increasingly came from think tanks that housed scholars themselves and/or contracted with university-based specialists. In recent years due to the rapid development of China and the urgent challenges it presents, interest in policy-relevant topics has revived on campuses and in scholarly research, especially in the international relations and modern history of the Indo-Pacific and the politics, economics, environment, and foreign and military affairs of China. Interest has revived too in the subregions of Asia, much of it driven by Chinese activities abroad.

The Symbolism of Subversion: Notes on Some Cold War Icons

1972 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Cold War

‘Ours is an era of “cases”,’ Diana Trilling wrote several years ago, ‘starting with the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the 1920s, proceeding through the Hiss and Oppenheimer cases to the Rosenberg case, the Chessman case, the Eichmann case, and [the subject of Mrs Trilling's essay]…culminating…in the Profumo case.’ We could add several since then, of course, and her chronology is misleading – the Rosenbergs having followed Hiss but preceded Oppenheimer – but Mrs Trilling's point, that such cases and others provoked within their society basic ‘confrontation(s) between opposing social principles’, remains valid. The Hiss, Rosenberg and Oppenheimer episodes were American society's most controversial post-World War II security cases. Each in turn dramatized the political and cultural impact of the Cold War for large numbers of Americans. They serve as useful paradigms, when examined together, for studying the process by which complex problems of evidence are reduced to compelling images of an event. Almost from the moment the ‘facts’ emerged in each case they congealed, first into partisan accounts and then into minor mythologies, in which each case became the subject-matter for a simple morality tale. Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Robert Oppenheimer, and the supporting caste in each drama achieved, in their own time, the status of icons in the demonologies and hagiographies of the opposing camps. Looking recently through the dreary record of trials and hearings connected with security problems during the Truman-Eisenhower era, I found certain continuities in the appraisal by intellectuals and politicians of these three otherwise singular episodes.

The United States, Italy, and the Opening to the Left, 1953–1963

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 36-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leopoldo Nuti
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Test Case ◽  
World War ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cold War

Drawing on newly declassified U.S. and Italian documentation, this article as-sesses U.S. policy toward Italy under the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations and uses this test case to draw some general conclusions about the nature of U.S. -Italian relations during the Cold War. The first part of the article focuses on issues that have been neglected or misinterpreted in the existing literature on the subject, and the second part presents some of the lessons that can be learned from the study of U.S. -Italian relations in the 1950s and 1960s. The aim is to cast broader light on the current debate about the role and influence of the United States in Western Europe after World War II.

Truman and the shift to a Cold War Paradigm mindset

2019 ◽  
pp. 32-53
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Baron
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Government Information ◽  
World War ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
Truman Doctrine ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter details how the Cold War Paradigm mindset became institutionalized within the executive branch following the end of World War II. The threat from communism, both external and internal, provided the foundation from which Truman would alter American foreign policy through the Truman Doctrine, but also would focus internally in seeking to stop communist and subversive activities domestically. Once institutionalized, the Cold War Paradigm demonstrates how Truman's actions became a learned response to threats, which altered information policies within the executive branch. Congress heavily supported Truman's actions during this period, as members of Congress also learned and responded to threats. However, the Internal Security Act of 1950 created a rift between the president and Congress over control of government information, setting up an ongoing power struggle that would lead to Eisenhower's creation of executive privilege and Congress's response with the creation of the Moss Subcommittee on government information.

Foreign Policy and Social Change: Japan and the United States

1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-97
Author(s):  
Tadashi Aruga
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Peace And War

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan moved from isolation and pacifism towards a militarized foreign policy. It relumed to pacifism after its defeat in World War II. The United States discarded its pacifist stance as it entered World War II and reaffirmed its commitment to a militarized foreign policy at the onset of the Cold War. Because both Japan and the United States had been outside or at the periphery of international relations for such a long time, these shifts tended to be far more dramatic than those experienced by European nations, accustomed as they were to an international milieu where peace and war coexisted.

Congress and the Cold War

2001 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert David Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Future Research ◽  
World War ◽  
Insufficient Attention ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cold War

Congress has received insufficient attention from scholars of Cold War foreign policy for a number of reasons, including historiographical patterns and the scattered nature of congressional sources. This gap in the literature has skewed our understanding of the Cold War because it has failed to take into account the numerous ways in which the legislature affected U.S. foreign policy after World War II. This article looks at Cold War congressional policy within a broad historical perspective, and it analyzes how the flurry of congressional activity in the years following the Vietnam War was part of a larger trend of congressional activism in foreign policy. After reviewing the existing literature on the subject of Congress and the Cold War, the article points out various directions for future research.

The Unassailable Self: Freud's Image Among Post-war American Intellectuals

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
External Force ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Human Being ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Way

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.

National Internationalists: British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, the Politics of Transnational Communications and the Social History of the Cold War, 1957–1964

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
HOLGER NEHRING
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social History ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This article examines the politics of communication between British and West German protesters against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The interpretation suggested here historicises the assumptions of ‘transnational history’ and shows the nationalist and internationalist dimensions of the protest movements' histories to be inextricably connected. Both movements related their own aims to global and international problems. Yet they continued to observe the world from their individual perspectives: national, regional and local forms thus remained important. By illuminating the interaction between political traditions, social developments and international relations in shaping important political movements within two European societies, this article can provide one element of a new connective social history of the cold war.

The Anti-Aryan Moment: Decolonization, Diplomacy, and Race in Late Pahlavi Iran

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-702
Author(s):  
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Cold War

In 1946, the entertainer and activist Paul Robeson pondered America's intentions in Iran. In what was to become one of the first major crises of the Cold War, Iran was fighting a Soviet aggressor that did not want to leave. Robeson posed the question, “Is our State Department concerned with protecting the rights of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian people, or is it concerned with protecting Anglo-American oil in that country and the Middle East in general?” This was a loaded question. The US was pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops after its occupation of the country during World War II. Robeson wondered why America cared so much about Soviet forces in Iranian territory, when it made no mention of Anglo-American troops “in countries far removed from the United States or Great Britain.” An editorial writer for a Black journal in St. Louis posed a different variant of the question: Why did the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, concern himself with elections in Iran, Arabia or Azerbaijan and yet not “interfere in his home state, South Carolina, which has not had a free election since Reconstruction?”

Global Governance in a World of Change

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
World War ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Governance Institutions ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Modes Of Governance

Global governance has come under increasing pressure since the end of the Cold War. In some issue areas, these pressures have led to significant changes in the architecture of governance institutions. In others, institutions have resisted pressures for change. This volume explores what accounts for this divergence in architecture by identifying three modes of governance: hierarchies, networks, and markets. The authors apply these ideal types to different issue areas in order to assess how global governance has changed and why. In most issue areas, hierarchical modes of governance, established after World War II, have given way to alternative forms of organization focused on market or network-based architectures. Each chapter explores whether these changes are likely to lead to more or less effective global governance across a wide range of issue areas. This provides a novel and coherent theoretical framework for analysing change in global governance.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document