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.
James Andrew Lewis
Senior Vice President and Director, Technology Policy Program
CONTACT INFORMATION
Email: jalewis@csis.org
EXPERTISE: Cybersecurity and Technology, Defense and Security, Economics, Geopolitics and International Security
ASSOCIATED PROGRAMS: Technology Policy Program
James Andrew Lewis is a senior vice president and director of the Technology Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He has authored numerous publications on the relationship between technology, innovation, and national power. His current research examines international security and governance in cyberspace, the geopolitics of innovation, the future of warfare, and the effect of the internet on politics. Lewis is an internationally recognized expert on cybersecurity and technology and was one of the first to approach cybersecurity as a policy and strategic problem. His writings include the best-selling Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency, the national cybersecurity strategy cited by President Obama in the first speech by a U.S. president on cybersecurity and that became a template for cyber strategy in other countries. Lewis was the rapporteur for the United Nations' successful 2010, 2013, and 2015 Group of Government Experts on Information Security, whose reports set out the global agenda for cybersecurity by emphasizing norms for responsible state behavior, confidence building, and capacity-building measures.
Before joining CSIS, Lewis worked at the Departments of State and Commerce as a foreign service officer and as a member of the Senior Executive Service. His government experience included a range of politico-military and negotiating assignments, including the development of groundbreaking policies on commercial remote sensing, encryption, and advanced conventional weapons. He was assigned as a political advisor to the U.S. Southern Command for Operation Just Cause, the U.S. Central Command for Operation Desert Shield, and the Central American Task Force. Lewis served on the U.S. delegations to the Cambodian peace process and the Permanent Five talks on arms transfers and nonproliferation, and he negotiated bilateral agreements on transfers of military technology to Asia and the Middle East. He led the U.S. delegation to the Wassenaar Arrangement Experts Group on advanced civilian and military technologies. Lewis led a long-running Track 2 dialogue on cybersecurity with the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. He has served as a member of the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee, the Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy, and the Advisory Committee on Commercial Remote Sensing and as an advisor to government agencies on the security and intelligence implications of foreign investment in the United States. Lewis is frequently quoted in the media and has testified numerous times before Congress. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
A full list of publications by James A. Lewis is available here.
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