Why Deterrence Is Dead
“Why Deterrence Is Dead“
Speaker: Lewis, J. (Center for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS])
Date: 3 March 2020
Speaker Session Preview
SMA hosted a speaker session presented by Dr. James Lewis (Center for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS]) as a part of its SMA General Speaker Series. Dr. Lewis first stated that what the US signals and what China and Russia interpret those signals to mean are often entirely different. This constant misinterpretation is not new, however. Next, he explained that China and Russia also have found ways to circumvent US deterrence strategies and test the US’s limits (e.g., the Russian occupation of Crimea, Chinese activities in the South China Sea) for the past two decades. Dr. Lewis argued that this has created a perception that the US is strategically inept and that it is possible to take action against the US without retaliation. Moreover, this Chinese and Russian shift from being defensive to using techniques to advance their own interests—particularly in cyberspace, which is unconstrained and indefensible even for a well-resourced opponent—only occurred around five years ago. Russia and China have also discovered a threshold under which they can take actions in cyberspace that will have a damaging effect but will not provoke US deflection or retaliation. Next, Dr. Lewis stated that US deterrence is inherently flawed and weak in the cyber domain. He elaborated that the US draws upon Cold War precedents and tries to apply them to the cyber domain; however, the Cold War was a very different political environment. The Soviet Union, for instance, had knowledge of the US’s nuclear past and the risks that accompany the use of nuclear weapons, which impacted its calculations. Dr. Lewis then stated that the US can change the current situation in the cyber realm by convincing other nations that the US will respond to an attack. The US must also define its offensive goals more clearly, according to Dr. Lewis, and use some combination of 19th century great power competition and the rise of authoritarianism in the 1930s to inform strategic influence, as opposed to the Cold War. To conclude, Dr. Lewis stated that empires fall not because they fail to recognize the problem, but because they continue to apply old solutions to those problems. The US has the tools; it just needs to assess how it should use them to engage with its opponents.
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