From Deterrence to Coercion?

As a lapsed Cold Warrior, I find the current muddle over coercion, deterrence, and compellence an intellectual quagmire.[1] So it is worth going back to the basics.

By Gregory F. Treverton

Note: The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of SMA, Inc.

While Russia and China tend to get equated in Washington’s enemy list, Vladimir Putin poses a challenge to international order that is very different from China’s. While China wants to alter that order to its own liking, it needs it, and will remain deeply intertwined, economically, with its geopolitical rival, the United States.

By contrast, Putin seems entirely prepared to upset the apple cart: even if chaos does not directly advance Russian interests, it still may damage those of the United States and NATO. He also seems, culturally, very much in the lineage of the Catherine the Great’s famous quote: “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.” Vladimir Putin is all too reminiscent of Thomas Schelling’s line that “taxi drivers are given a wide berth because they are known to be indifferent to dents and scratches.” (p. 119). Or in Putin’s case, indifferent to more than a half million dead Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

The change in Russian nuclear doctrine is very worrisome. Ironically, Russia has adopted a “first use” doctrine similar to that of NATO during the Cold War, indicating it might use tactical nuclear weapons, even on its own territory, in a losing conventional war. The watchword for the doctrine is “escalate to de-escalate,” but it amounts to “escalate to prevail.”

In thinking about what kind of a leader might succeed Putin and how, I am reminded of when I looked, years ago, for predictions of the fall of the Soviet Union. The best I found was a 1977 piece by the conservative British columnist, Bernard Levin.[2] He got close to the right answer through culturally stereotyping: the Russia people were much too passive to revolt from below, so change would come from the top. He imagined—hoped?—that it would come from leaders who loved liberty. In fact, Mikhail Gorbachev was no lover of liberty but was wise enough to understand what desperate shape the Soviet Union was in and set it motion change that—contrary to his intentions—ended the Soviet Union. Levin mused about when the change would come, suggesting that perhaps two centuries after the fall of the Bastille, 1989, was appropriate.

My digging leaves me cautious in the extreme about predicting change in Russia. The one thing that does seem tolerably certain is that Russia will be dramatically changed by Putin’s war—and not for the better.

The Tyranny of Terms

It is worth being careful about terms. To quote Schelling again: “There is typically a difference between a threat intended to make an adversary do something (or cease doing something), and a threat intended to keep him from starting something.” (p. 195). The latter we usually call deterrence and the former coercion or compellence. The distinction is timing: which side has to act first. To compel usually requires taking some action. To deter requires making a credible threat. Indeed, often coercion requires inflicting the punishment until the target changes its action. One contrary example was the Suez crisis of 1956 when President Dwight Eisenhower threatened to sell U.S. sterling bond holdings, which could have devalued the pound and undermined Britain’s foreign exchange reserves. In that case, when the capability was very concrete and not necessarily very expensive to the coercer, the threat was enough to compel. Or perhaps the lesson is that it is easier to compel allies than enemies!

Sanctions, the principal U.S. instrument of coercion in the last decades, is a classic example of requiring punishment until the target responds. Alas, one recent study reinforced my experience that sanctions are easy to apply but hard to make work, and too often boomerang.[3] Einstein is usually credited with observing: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” He might have been talking about sanctions-happy American foreign policy. Over and over again we repeat the same pattern: we impose sanctions on a country we judge profligate, and so impoverish its people, for, in the line attributed to George Kennan: “you can’t hurt a government without hurting the people, and you can’t help the people without helping the government.” Yet we expect that the result will be that those impoverished people will overthrow their offending regime and thank us for our actions. Then we are surprised when it doesn’t happen. As Chair of the National Intelligence Council, I had a ringside seat.

Iran is the latest in this long dreary line. What we do know is that the “maximum pressure” sanctions of the Trump administration, largely continued by Biden, produced neither regime change nor much of any visible restraint in other Iranian offenses, like its missile program or actions in the region. What it did do was contribute to consigning more than 20 percent of the middle class to poverty. Young Iranians were perhaps the most pro-American people in the greater Middle East. No longer: now even those who are no friends of the theocratic regime understand that the United States is responsible for at least part of their plight.

Cuba is another and decades-long example. Our sanctions were the best thing the Castro regime had going for it, for, as in Iran, they could be—and were—blamed for anything bad that happened in the country. More than once in my career, I’ve had a Miami Cuban take me aside and tell me: “Our Cuba policy has failed. Instead, we should have done what we did to Eastern Europe during the Cold War, seduce them with contact and commerce.” At the end of the conversation, though, my interlocutors have always added: “But please don’t tell anyone in Miami I said this to you.” By the same token, sanctions on Russia surely will damage what is already a failing petro-economy. But they won’t induce the country to stop making war on Ukraine. More generally, the record of coercion is unimpressive. A generation ago, a study looked at what it called “coercive diplomacy”—that is, diplomacy backed by the threat of limit use of military force—and found that it had succeeded only 20 percent of the time.[4]

Deterrence and Coercion

One of the current questions is whether the distinction between deterrence and coercion still holds. I think it does. Putin’s rattling of nuclear sabers over Ukraine is sometimes called “nuclear coercion,” but it seems deterrence in the sense of making a threat to prevent the United States and NATO from doing something they might want to do—provide Ukraine longer-range missiles—rather than change what they were doing, for instance reducing military support to Ukraine.

Classic Cold War nuclear deterrence looks easy in hindsight, especially because nuclear war never happened; in the world of MAD, mutual assured destruction, both sides became tolerably certain that no matter what nuclear first strike one side made, the other would have enough weapons left for a devastating counterattack. To paraphrase Schelling, perhaps in the end neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was deterred. Rather, like someone faced with crossing a busy street, they simply knew better. The challenge the United States and NATO then faced was extended deterrence: how to use nuclear threats to deter a Soviet conventional attack on Western Europe, not the United States. That is very much still with us.

It raises the issue of how to deter asymmetric threats to countries to which the United States would extend deterrence. Many of those threats, like information or cyber operations, seem less coercion than fighting a quiet war on a battlefield not of armies but of societies. But what of threats to destroy the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and perhaps unleash a Fukushima-like event? That may be a singular example, and it is worth noticing not just that the plant is no longer operating but also that Russia never used it make a threat intended to coerce.

The still larger question is systemic. “Deterrence” runs back a thousand years, mostly with regard to crime, yet it seems a product of the Cold War and nuclear strategizing. It was in many ways the core of American foreign policy. Will it remain so? As the pre-eminent status quo power, trying to deter bad things made eminent sense for the United States. Will it in a world where the status quo is being upset, if not upended, in ways often uncongenial to the United States? The motto of the Strategic Air Command is “peace is our profession.” To which the wags often add: “war is our hobby.” Will that next generation prove the wags right?

Gregory F. Treverton stepped down as Chair of the US National Intelligence Council in 2017. He is now Professor of the Practice at Dornsife College, University of Southern California, Chair of the Global TechnoPolitics Forum, and an SMA Executive Advisor.

[1] This piece is a version of a talk I gave at Sandia National Laboratories in October 2024. In preparing it, I had the pleasure of soaking again in the work of my teacher and mentor, later colleague, friend and fellow gym rat, Thomas Schelling. His The Strategy of Conflict, Harvard University Press, 1960, is the best book on strategy I know.

[2] Reprinted as Bernard Levin, “One Who Got It Right,” National Interest 31 (Spring 1993): 64-65.

[3] Narges Bajoghli and others, How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, Stanford University Press, 2024.

[4] Patrick M. Cronin, and Robert J. Art, eds., The United States and Coercive Diplomacy. U.S. Institute of Peace, May 2003.