The “D“ Word X: What is the Failure at the Heart of Deterrence II
A kind of cooperation is made much easier when we see ourselves as threatened by a “them,” a group we see as different from ourselves in a significant way. (Having a different team mascot or colors can suffice to establish a significant difference.) In this kind of cooperation, we cooperate with “our own kind.” We are competing, or fighting, it may be, with “them.” And usually out to “win.”
It should be noticed, however, that we would not be able to compete or even to fight with “them” if they hadn’t agreed to cooperate in a competition or a fight with us. It does take two.
After a sporting event is over, if it has been fairly played, the players often ritually but sincerely embrace. After a war, soldiers can find more solidarity with the soldiers of the other side than they do with their own people. Does this not show, at a deep and possibly unconscious level, an understanding that the competition or the fight was made possible by cooperation at a higher level?
What does this have to do with deterrence? Deterrence, as we’ve said, is about preventing, by means of fear and threat, an action we ourselves fear.
We may develop a kind of cooperation with “our people” in producing the conditions of deterrence, but if we have committed ourselves only to deterrence, we have cut ourselves off entirely from the possibility of cooperating with those we want to deter to create conditions or relationships better than those that now obtain. Relationships that may obviate the need for deterrence.
Deterrence may sometimes be all we have.
It can never be all we might have.
Cooperation has an evil twin in the “mob.” The members of a mob are cooperating, strategically perhaps, but otherwise mindlessly. Mobs, unlike truly cooperating groups, do not need mindfulness. They are cooperating with others whom they see only as our kind of people, not attempting to do so with others whom they recognize to be uniquely themselves.
Mobs and mob-like groups view as threats those who do not sign on to whatever the mob is about. “Difference” is seen as “deviation,” not as something that might provide the pretext for a new and better relation.
In a truly cooperative relationship, the work, the mindfulness, the attention that needs to be given to achieving cooperation, never quite goes away. The mob may achieve what it has taken as its “objective,” elimination of the other perhaps, but it will remain in character exactly as it was and has been. In true cooperation, a new relationship and new identities may emerge. In true cooperation, a kind of certainty, or righteousness, is likely to be elusive but the potential for something new and better never disappears.
Before the Cold War took hold, before the first atomic bomb was tested even, the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed to President Franklin Roosevelt that an approach be made to the Soviets to see if they would agree to cooperate in an effort to, at the very least, forestall a nuclear arms race and beyond that possibly to develop new and more open and more productive international relations. Bohr’s idea was that the weapon was obviously going to be so horrible in its potential effects that the Soviets might agree to cooperate with the United States in developing a different relationship that would not just forestall conflict but which might even produce benefits that couldn’t yet be imagined.
Roosevelt had seemed to Bohr receptive to the idea of making such an approach to the Soviets, that is, to Josef Stalin. When Bohr later met with Winston Churchill at FDR’s suggestion, Churchill vehemently rejected the idea of seeking a cooperative relationship with the Soviets. He later argued to Roosevelt that Bohr should be locked up for having proposed such a thing.
Churchill was a warrior, not a statesman. The Soviets were “them,” and that was all they could ever be to him. Now that they were no longer needed in the fight with the Nazis.
In 1946, not long after we had used the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a plan for avoiding an arms race and the perils it would present was developed and proposed by a group that had been assembled under the aegis of the U.S. State Department. The plan became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, after the new Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the chair of the committee, David Lilienthal.
The hope of the group was to find a way to control atomic energy, which, they knew, could be achieved only with new international relationships. The members realized that atomic bombs would not be a danger to the world if the fissile fuel for them could be placed under international control. They proposed creating an international “authority” that would handle all uranium mining and manufacture of fissile fuel. Worldwide. They realized that creating such an authority would require a new way of thinking about what national “sovereignty” amounted to.
They realized also that the new arrangements would be fatally compromised if they relied primarily on “policing” (what we might want to call “deterrence”). What they proposed was a set of arrangements that would foreground the benefits of cooperation.
Unfortunately, when the plan was passed along to Bernard Baruch, the man chosen by President Truman to present it to the new United Nations, Baruch added provisions for policing and enforcement. This doomed the plan. It was rejected by the Soviets in 1948, one year before they tested their own atomic bomb. And the arms race began in earnest.
In 1985, as President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were finding their way to the end of the Cold War, a Soviet diplomat in the United States named Georgi Arbatov made a dire threat. “We are going to do a terrible thing to you,” he said.
The interaction between Reagan and Gorbachev had begun to seem so promising and now were the Soviets going to kill it with some new threat?
“We are,” Arbatov said, “going to deprive you of an enemy.”
Some of President Reagan’s advisors, it seemed, wouldn’t allow this to happen. Maybe President Reagan himself couldn’t allow it. Perhaps they weren’t sure they knew how to function in a world where they didn’t have an enemy. So in their suspicions and in their insistence on testing the technology of President Reagan’s proposed space-based Strategic Defense Initiative outside the laboratory, they made sure we continued to have one.
This happens a lot. It’s easier, isn’t it, in some ways, when we have an enemy. Our enemy completes us. Don DeLillo wrote in Underworld, set during the Cold War: “It’s not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.”
Our military (and other militaries) are professionally committed to seeing the world as a “threat environment.” Their duty is to prepare to meet with force the threats that are identified. Over the years, they have missed important ones. The threats that are imagined may or may not turn out to have been actual threats. Benign situations can become threat environments because one or both parties has found menacing something the other party has done that was not intended as a threat.
Usually, as in the Cold War, we don’t have access the minds of our enemy. After World War II, some of our diplomats—George Kennan was one—thought the Soviets had no interest in invading Western Europe. Others, those who were sure the Soviets were seeking “world domination,” believed they would invade at the first opportunity.
Unless deterred.
In a debate on such a question, as in many political campaigns, the advantage seems usually to be with the one who imagines and portrays the greatest threat and argues we should be firm, tough. Better to be safe than sorry, no?
No. Consider: where at such a time is the opportunity for truly courageous action?
Courageous action is not of course foolhardy action. An action is courageous only if it is taken with an appreciation of the actual danger.
Relinquishing a disposition for mere deterrence is not a matter of ignoring actual threats, of going soft, of succumbing to a silly naivete. It should be seen, I think, as a matter cultivating a more important kind of receptiveness, the powerful kind of naivete that, without hiding from actuality, dares to imagine and seek a different and better set of relations, a different and better world.
Deterrence may help protect a space were cooperation can be sought. But it must be remembered that deterrence itself is sterile. If cooperation is the goal, deterrence can’t get us there.
Deterrence may sometimes be all we have.
But it can never give us all we might have.
Why is cooperation so hard? It isn’t always. Sometimes—in our play, for example—it seems “natural.” Even when we are no longer children.
What makes it hard at other times can be a lack of trust. Cooperation requires trust. Trust necessarily creates vulnerability, uncertainty, risk. In relationships of trust, you give up the delusive certainties offered by deterrence.
But a trusting relationship is not necessarily a blind or naive one. In such a relationship, one may be more perceptive about one’s circumstances than when one is distrustful, fearful—protecting oneself by expecting the worst.
But a leap may be required, a leap beyond the safe space that deterrence purports to preserve. When we trust, we enter and embrace a world where there is risk, where we can turn out to have been wrong, where our trust can be betrayed.
There seems to be no route to this world that does not make this leap.
The diplomat McGeorge Bundy, In Danger and Survival (1988), said that his long career had taught him that the only way to become trusted was to trust. As long as trust is absent, so is possibility. The possibility of cooperation. The promise of a better self, a better world.
What takes more courage? Fighting an enemy? Or taking a clear-eyed leap into trust?
Fighting an enemy, if we are not simply driven by blind rage, does take courage. To the extent that the fight is a cooperative undertaking with one’s cohort, it also takes trust. But an attempt to find a way to cooperate with those who are clearly not part of our cohort, who may be and who may see us as the enemy, also takes courage.
Does it take more courage? How could such a thing be measured? It does seems possible to say that it takes a rarer kind.
Can we do it? Achieve cooperation, without an enemy we are rallying against? Maybe. If we are able to see that the most dangerous enemy might be ourselves.
Deterrence may sometimes be all we have.
But it can never be all we need.
To forget this is to court catastrophe.
Next: Meet General George Lee Butler