Understanding Deterrence

For decades, the rational actor model served as the preferred guide for U.S. deterrence policy because it requires little detailed knowledge of an opponent's unique decision-making process and yet provides confident generalizations about how deterrence works. Yet history has shown that a broad spectrum of unique factors that influence an opponent's perceptions and his calculations, and this absence of uniformity means there can be no single universal strategy of deterrence applicable to the entire range of opponents. Understanding Deterrenceconsiders how factors such as psychology, history, religion, ideology, geography, political structure, culture, proliferation and geopolitics can shape the decision-making process in ways that are specific and unique to each opponent. Understanding Deterrencedemonstrates how using a multidisciplinary deterrence analysis can better identify and assess factors that influence an opponent's decision-making process. This identification and assessment process can facilitate the tailoring of effective deterrence strategies and specific purposes and result in a higher likelihood of success than strategies guided by generalizations about an opponent's unique decision-making process. This book was published as a special issue of Comparative Strategy.