Lecture 2 Use of Force 1

And then we'll get the full screen. Make sure once again that that's right. There we go. And then you've got the Powerpoint. And let me shrink the Newman head a little bit, so it doesn't need to be that vague. It never needs to be that big. All right, there we go. And that's where I will be during all of this. And you'll see from the Powerpoints that there isn't a lot of text on the Powerpoints. And that's the way I work. It's not a ton of texts, not a ton of information on the Powerpoint presentations and what really you have. There are bullet points with concepts and ideas. Yeah, bullet points with concepts and ideas. And what you'll do is use what I talk about as the material, and that's what you need to know on the exams. If you take a look at the review sheets, which you have, you take a look at the review sheets, be able to see that what's on the Powerpoints is pretty similar to what's on the review sheet. It's a series of bullet points. Just using the Powerpoints and not listening to the lectures will not help you in the class. Because again, as I said before, it's like having a dictionary where you have the words but you don't have the definitions of the words. So you've got to focus on what I'm talking about. And one of the dilemmas of doing an online course is that you've got me blathering away alone in a room. And the dilemma with that, let's see, what time did I start? I want to make sure I don't go too long to write this down somewhere I'm blathering along and I don't have any way of knowing if I'm going too fast. Normally, if you're in a class room, if a bunch of people, you can watch them writing things down. And you can see everybody's still writing what I said, so I want to start saying other things. Occasionally, I might go too fast if I do nice things about the recorded lectures is that you can pause me, right? Don't you wish you could do that to people in real life? But here you can. You can pause me whenever you want. Do that during the lectures. Pause it and finish what I'm writing. You can also go back. You can also look at a transcript that will be produced along with the recording. So let's get to, whoops, sorry about that. Someone just texted me and my texts are Ibaka, let me turn that off. Sorry about that. What we're going to do today in terms of the actual lecture, and again, you'll get a sense of the way I do this is we're talking about the nuclear arms race. And we're talking about the first nuclear arms race. And that's the Cold War, US Soviet arms race. And we're talking about what people often refer to as the second nuclear age, which is after the Cold War. When things get a lot more complex, you've got the United States Russian nuclear rivalry. You also have Chinese nuclear weapons, which have been added into the equation. You also have the problem of the proliferation of nuclear capability. India and Pakistan have a regional nuclear rivalry. Both have nuclear weapons. North Korea has nuclear weapons. Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Iraq did have a nuclear program and it's complex. But it was eventually destroyed. Actually, before the United States invaded in 2003 to destroy the Iraqi nuclear capability, it had already been destroyed. One of the great intelligence failures in world history. And that the United States invaded a country to eliminate that country's nuclear weapons. Only to find out that that country didn't have nuclear weapons. Yeah, that's a very large, whoops, Israel had nuclear weapons because they don't want anyone to know. But we all know, everyone knows the second nuclear age is much more complex because you have a lot more countries with nuclear weapons and countries of different power levels, and countries that some people think are politically unstable as well. We'll get to all that complexity of a second nuclear age. We'll start with the relatively less complex first nuclear age. Just the United States and Soviet robbery, though that's complex enough. But in order to understand all of that, we've really got to start with some basic concepts. Some basic things like why do countries develop nuclear weapons? Why do countries develop weapons at all? What would they do with weapons? We want to get into that very basic stuff. Before we get into the more complex stuff, I think you really need to do that. And I know that's the way it was taught to me. And basic concept stuff really helps because you can just build on all of that. We're talking some concepts and some ideas. This slide, just as a slide that says, just let you know we're doing that. And it's got a picture of a strategic missile submarine, a cumby class, firing off a submarine launch ballistic missile. We'll talk about what that means and what submarine launch ballistic missiles are. A little bit later on, maybe a couple of weeks down the road, a couple lectures down the road, depending on how you're listening to this. But let's jump ahead what we're going to talk about and call this lecture the functions of weapons or force. This is what we want to understand. Why do we have weapons? What can you do with weapons? Because, of course, nuclear weapons U, that's some people argue, the ultimate weapon that you can have. It's a good question about whether that's true or not. We'll debate some of that a little bit. But with any weapons, when you're talking about handing an automatic weapon to a soldier somewhere. Or even going back to giving someone a bayonet, going back a few hundred years, go back a little farther and you're talking about using long bows and all the different weapons technology. Why do you develop that and what can you do with it? And underneath all of it. And this is an important point we'll see over and over again, underneath all of it, what we're talking here is you develop weapons to achieve political goals. And now pause, therefore effect you develop weapons to achieve political goals. And that's really crucial because that's often forgotten. Some people think war is the absence of politics, but people who study war, and people who studied international relations will say, no, no. War is just another element of politics, that's what it is. Kronk, if you've heard that name, Kz wrote a book called On War during the Napoleonic Era. During that time, he was watching war and observing it and trying to understand it. And his book is still read at military academies all across the world. It's called War And the basic concept, there's wars. Politics, and that's important. That allows there to be a logic of it. Now some people would say, well, there's no logic. Illogical war is brutal. That all may be true. But when political leaders make decisions about war, when political leaders make decisions to use weapons, they believe they're doing it for political gains. That's why they're doing it. Now that's, that's immoral. Maybe that's wrong. Maybe they shouldn't think of it that way. But that's what they do, that's the reality of it. Maybe that's a sad reality. We wish we could change that. But that's still true. That when leaders, good leaders or bad leaders, leaders who are doing things that we think would be good. The United States and the Allies during World War Two, defending the world from Imperial Japan and from Nazi Germany. They're doing that for political reasons because they don't want to be ruled by Fascists. They don't want to be ruled by genocidal regimes. Those regimes, Japan and Germany, also went to war for political reasons. They had their own reasons. Whether it was related to ideology, whether it's related to economics, whether it was related to seeking power and increasing their power in Europe or in East Asia are controlling resources. We're destroying enemies who they feel have wronged them in the past. A lot of different reasons, but it's all political reasons. That's the way people think of war. Now, there are rejoinders to that, as I mentioned, but that's the way people think of it when they study it. That's where we're going to start from that basis. And you'll see how once, once you think of this as being politics, it allows you to come up with concepts. It allows you to come up with lots of different theories about why we use weapons, and in this case, why we use nuclear weapons. Okay, over long introduction. All right, let me just check. Keep checking time. Let's see. There we go. All right, so let's do basics. All right. What we're going to talk about is the functions of weapons or force in the context of four different things. Now here's a good place for me to stop real quick and say, to use these Powerpoints. See something like this. Don't start writing it all down. A lot of words on this, but don't start writing it all down because this is just a slide that's an outline of what we're going to talk about next. There's going to be at least one slide on defense deterrence, compellants, swaggering, and prestige. That's going to take a long time to get through. That's the rest of this lecture. This is just telling you where we're going. No need to write it down. The other thing about these slides as well is that since you have the review sheet, you can use the review sheet. If you look on the review sheet, you'll see that this is written down, the review sheet. You can go ahead and use it that way, and it just means that you can listen to what I'm talking about. What are these things? There are four things there. What are they? The answer is when people think about the use of weapons and in this case the use of force, think about either way. They see four different functions of weapons or force. That everything that's done with weapons or done with the use of force can be put in one of these categories. And that forms the basic of a whole lot of concepts that you can go in a zillion different directions. Once you start with this, this is basic, it's true for a nation state. Actually I teach course on terrorism and counterterrorism and you could actually look at terrorist strategy and also put terrorist strategy in this as well. Nation states, those are countries you see in a map or terrorist organizations, and I'll bring in some examples of that a little bit later. Also their actions seem to fit into these four categories. All right, what we're doing here is we're talking about some classic strategy. And that's what the next slide does. So we punch over to the next slide. You'll see that the lecture I'm going to give right now is based in part on a lot of these books. These are classic books I remember reading in grad school. If you go to grad school and study international security, you will probably wind up reading these. In particular this Robert article. He's the one who wrote an article to what ends military power. And he put things into these four different categories. In part, this is a good way of thinking about that. If this is a graduate program, I'd have you read all this stuff and start with arts article. All right. So let's talk about the basic stuff. Defense, All right? Defense is an easy concept and we get to deterrence and compellants, those get more complex. But defense is the easiest one to think about. You've got a country, you've got your territory, and on this map we've got the Territory of the United States, right? There's the continental United States, and you've got Alaska, and you've got Hawaii in the little orange box. You've got some territories over in the Pacific as well. They're in different categories. Don't worry about the differentiation between that. This is just a map for the purpose of showing you a map. This is US territory defenses. Can, can you defend it from foreign enemies? You assume enemies, right? Nation states assume enemies. If you've taken science one oh five international relations class, you probably started with basic aspects about there is no world government, there is no world police force that protects nation states. Nation states are out there on their own, all alone. Maybe they can get some help. They can maybe get some allies. Right? Russia invaded Ukraine and Ukraine's friends came to help it out. But they didn't intervene directly, right? There aren't Foreign US. Troops or Polish troops. Or Or other North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Nato troops in Ukraine helping. So they helped a little bit, but they're saying Ukraine mostly you're on your own. Fight this out. We'll supply you, we'll fund you. But you're on your own, You're out there and you're self reliant. It's all about your self help. You've got to defend yourself from opponents who may say, hey, we really like Alaska. Who are going to take it in. World history is the history of exactly that. Powerful countries in the world, looking at a smaller country and saying, hey, that's really nice. That thing that you have over there, we're going to take it. Going to keep it. If you look at the history of the United States, right? You might look at the southwestern part of the United States and say, well, how did the southwestern part of the United States get there? And the answer is, some of it was independent, some of it was Mexico. And the United States says we want it. The United States was more powerful, so we took it. And that's that right. And of course, even before that, right, That's the 1840s before that, North America, Central America has South America. Well, that all belonged to somebody else. And Europeans came in and said, we like that and took it. All right, so that's the history of the world. Countries, of course say this is mine, we want it, leave it alone. But in order to do that, you have to be strong enough to defend yourself. So that's the most basic thing. Can you defend your territory from somebody else? If you can't, the assumption is they will probably take it from you. Pretty ugly view of the world. But most international relations starts from that basic point is that it's a world of robbery. It's a world of competition. If you can't defend it, somebody else will steal it. So you build defenses. So that's the first thing that you're going to do with weapons. The first thing you're going to think about, well, if I need to defend myself, I need some capability to defend myself. And that means I need weapons. I need to be able to use force in some way. It can be really basic, right? And talk about basic defense about as basic as you can get. I just came back from a research trip, so I was on a plane and Transportation Security Administration, Right. That's defense. The possibility that someone might try to blow up plane or hijack a plane, right? This is your basic defense against that. You're going to face these people who are going to find out who you are. They now use facial recognition to do a lot of this. They're going to check your baggage. They may search your baggage. They may swab your baggage to make sure there aren't any chemical agents in your bags. They're looking for anything that you might use to harm an aircraft or harm people on an aircraft to defend the nation from enemies who might try to hurt it in some way. In this case is what people often think of as the lowest level of violence, which is terrorist violence. But defense also includes that higher level of violence as well, and all the levels of violence in between. The Coast Guard is a form of defense as well. And of course, any country's military itself is a form of defense. But here's a more complex form of defense, ballistic missile defense. Don't worry about all the details of this. We'll get to this a little bit later. We're going to talk about ballistic missile defense in some detail. You'll know what terminal, midcourse and boost mean a little bit later. Right now it doesn't matter, but the idea is if another country in the world wants to fire a ballistic missile at the United States. A missile that will take minutes from launch to hitting a target in the United States, perhaps with a nuclear weapon. And during the Cold War, as we'll talk about a little bit later, the United States and the Soviet Union were about 30 min away from annihilation all the time. From the moment the Soviets launched an intercontinental ballistic missile. To the moment that a bomb might hit Washington DC, or Chicago, or Richmond, or New York. That might be 30 min, You fire off this missile, it hits a target and kills 50,000 people. That's the capability nuclear weapons gave each country. Now, during the Cold War, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had the capability to defend themselves against ballistic missile attack. That becomes really relevant a few lectures down the line. But just think about that concept. Both sides had nuclear weapons and neither side could defend against those nuclear weapons. But they were hoping they could in that concept. That's what you have here is the architecture of ballistic missile defense. United States has deployed ballistic missile defense. United States can defend itself against a small attack by. Say North Korea. It can't defend itself from a large Russian attack. Don't have that kind of capability. But that's defense, that it's most complex is someone is trying to shoot a missile at us, which will destroy a city 30 min later. What if we can blow that missile out of the sky before it hits its target? Incredibly complex, cost billions of dollars to do it, because you've got to detect a launch of a missile, then you've got to be able to track that missile. And then at some point that missile is going to release the bombs. Because the missile itself is not the explosive, the missile is actually carrying bombs. And when a bomb is on a missile, it's called a warhead. And I'll get into all this terminology later. This is just for illustration of defense. And a missile may have ten warheads on it, ten bombs on it, which you're going to go to ten different targets. And you've got to be able to track all those targets. And then somehow you've got to be able to shoot them out of the sky and then move about 12,000 mi an hour. Okay, That's hard, but that's defense. Can you defend your territory? And the answer sometimes, in particular with nuclear weapons, was no, you can't, you cannot defend your territory. And that changes the way you think about nuclear weapons. So we'll talk about that in particular. Because if your answer is I cannot defend myself, what do you do? And the answer actually is you deter, hold that thought defense, really basic. You've got something you want to protect it, you need to build ways of protecting it, right? And it's actually just physical protection, real life, physical protection of that. So pretty basic concept. Easy to understand. Not super interesting. Well, bless Mr. Defense, I guess gets really interesting, but concepts pretty basic. Let's get to something that's more more difficult to achieve then defense would be deterrence. And more interesting is a concept deterrence. All right, so let me pause for a second because we're moving on to the second idea. And if you note, I'm going to slide back up for just a second. To a different power point present in a different slide here just to show you. Right, We did defense and the four functions of weapons or force, right? We did one was defense and now we're on two determined. So you'll see how this all fits together. So a lot of stuff on this slide. So again, don't write it all down. I'll talk about all of it and write it down. I'll talk about it. I'm going to take a thank you. Are either here. All right. All that talk of mixture thirsty, Right? Deterrence. Deterrence is one of the most basic concepts in national security, international security, parenting, Which is interesting, you might go how does it fit into parenting? You'll see what I mean in just a second. But you all know more about deterrence than you think you do. Here's the complex part about it. Deterrence is based on a goal that you have. You're trying to prevent your opponent, and really we're talking about an enemy here for a minute. You're trying to prevent your enemy from taking action. You think your enemy might do something to harm you. That enemy or opponent has not taken any actions yet. But maybe they're preparing to do it. It looks like they're preparing to do it. You think they might do it. They might be saying things that sound like they're going to do it. They haven't done it yet, nothing's happened and you want to keep it that way, Okay? So what you do is you issue a threat and your threat is don't do the thing or else that's deterrence. And it could be general, leave us alone or we'll do bad things back to you. Or could be very specific. During the Cold War, the United States, United States said to the Soviet Union, do not invade West Germany. And I'll use this as a great example several times. Do not invade West Germany or we will vaporize Moscow. That's a threat. If tanks cross, Soviet tanks cross the border between East Germany, which was a Soviet ally, and West Germany which was AUS ally. If tanks cross that border, the United States will launch a nuclear strike on Moscow. That's a threat, so don't do it, All right? The point is, the point of a threat, I should say, is to influence the opponent's decision making process, right? So the opponent is thinking about doing the thing. All right, let's use that Soviet example again. Soviet Union is saying to itself, United States is our rival. We're communist dictatorship. It's a liberal democracy. We want to control US territory. We don't like liberal democracy. We want the whole world to be communist. The big obstacle to that is the United States. Well, what if we could get rid of the United States? And the Soviets sit there and say, we've got thousands of nuclear weapons. Thousands of them. Let's do it. Let's destroy the United States. Let's launch a massive nuclear strike against the United States, will destroy 50% of the population. This is reality. They had this capability, We had the capability to do the same to them. They'd say we can destroy 50% of the population. We can wipe out 75% of the economy. Can destroy the United States. United States will no longer exist as a political entity in the world. It will have no capability to defend Western Europe from a Soviet invasion. Western European countries, we're all liberal democratic US allies. So you launch a nuclear strike of the United States. You destroy the United States. Then turn to Europe and say surrender. Or we'll launch a nuclear strike against you. And Europe says surrender. The Soviet saying, let's do it right. Let's assume they're making a decision to do that. But then United States says, we think you might be thinking about doing that. And we're going to influence your decision making process by letting you know that if you launch weapons at us, we will return a volley of weapons of our own. And you can't stop them. You can destroy the United States because you've launched your weapons first. But 15 min later, all our weapons will arrive on Soviet soil and you'll all die. You can't prevent this. So the Soviet leader says, okay, is there any way for us to launch a nuclear strike at the United States and then survive? The answer is no. Then the Soviet leader says, don't do it. And that's successful deterrence. You've influenced the opponent's decision making because they say to themselves that threat is big. That threat is real, so we can't take the action, so we don't do it successful deterrence. Now, having said all that, all right, we'll get back to some examples again. But underneath all that is the assumption that everybody's rational, right? Because the rationality of that Soviet leader is, I don't want to die. The rationality of that Soviet leader is, what do we accomplish if we destroy the United States and then 15 min later we're destroyed? We've won the war technically because we live 15 min longer. It's not worth it. It's not worth it because I'm rational. Because I want to achieve a political goal. My political goal would be to conquer Europe. Get rid of the United States. And I can't do that, because being able to conquer Europe is useless. If the Soviet Union is destroyed, we are all killed here in Moscow. I'm rational. So I think that nuclear war doesn't make any sense because we don't get any part of our political goals achieved. We don't achieve anything, we just die 15 min later. Assumes rationality. Hold that thought about rationality because a lot of this assumes rationality. Almost everything we're talking about assumes rationality and there's rationality that I have no idea what that equation means. But that's an assumption in this is an assumption in compellants which comes next. That decision making. Decision makers are all rational when they think about it. I want to achieve a political goal, how do I achieve it? And weapons are just one of the things in my tool bag, right? I can use negotiation, but I can also use weapons, right? I can use international organizations. I can use lies, I can use misinformation, I should say disinformation. I'd use deliberate lies and do all kinds of things. But the assumption is rationality. Hold that thought, emphasize that g. What do I mean by rationality? And here's another way of thinking about it. Rationality is about cost benefit analysis. And you've probably heard the term rational choice theory. Rational choice theory is a theory that says that when you're making decisions, you make them rationally through calculation, right? For every option to achieve a goal, right? When you sit down and say, how do I achieve this? Here, all my options. For each option, you assess the costs and the benefits of each option. What you want to do is find an option that has the least amount of costs, an option that has the most benefits. You can even do the math if you want to. A lot of areas, particular engineering, you're actually going to do the math. You're going to sit there and say, here's the costs minus, here are the benefits or profits. You could think of it that way, which are plus, and then for option A, you've got number for minus and you've got a number plus. You add the plus and the minus together and you get maybe a positive number or that's a good option or maybe a negative number, and that's a bad option. I'm losing money here. I'm not going to do that. That would be foolish. You cost out all the options you might take. So the assumption is here in deterrence that everybody's rational for every option. They're going to come up with a cost and benefit. And what you're doing with your threat back to deterrent. What you're doing with your deterrent threat is to increase the perception of costs. Raise the costs to your opponent. Raise them as high as you possibly can to convince your opponent not to do it. So all right, Soviets are thinking we want to get rid of the United States. We want to conquer Western Europe. Option a, launch a nuclear strike. The costs are well, we've destroyed the United States. We've probably destroyed Europe. United States has told us, there's the threat that it's going to launch a nuclear strike against us and wipe us out. The costs we all die in the Soviet Union cease to exist. The benefits are we live 15 min longer than the United States, and we throw a really, really big party for 15 min, but that's not that much of a benefit. Option B, maybe we subvert Western Europe. We use communist propaganda. We tried to convince the Europeans that the United States is a bad country, and that communism is a better system than liberal democracy. And that's our option there. And hopefully what we'll get is Europe to abandon its alliance with the United States. And maybe we'll do that. The cost of that, or it's going to cost a lot of money. But it's not likely to lead to war, that's a benefit on it. It's not going to necessarily be that successful unless the United States does some really stupid things to make Europeans think that as bad as the Soviet Union treated its own people, that the United States is worse than that. And that cell never worked. During the Cold War, it was obvious that the United States system was much more open and much more free. Not perfectly free and not perfectly open. Obviously, during the Cold War, the United States still had segregation. Still had discrimination. Still trying to form a more perfect union, right? Still progressing. The benefits are well, it probably doesn't lead to war at all. You don't get a whole lot of benefits. You don't get a whole lot of costs either. So maybe you got other options where you challenge United States around the world and make the United States look like unreliable ally. Maybe that get the Europeans to back away. But for all these options, you're assessing costs and benefits. And what a deterrence does is a deterrent tries to increase the costs or somewhere. So let me give you some other examples and then we'll get back to the Cold War parenting, all right? Let's see, do I want to back up parenting? Right. Your parents probably said this to you at some point in your life and said you got to be home by midnight. Be home by midnight or else or else maybe you can't use a car. All right. That's a deterrent threat. Don't do the thing. Don't stay out too late or else here's what happens to you so they raise the costs to you, all right? Very different from saying, you know, if you come back after midnight, you don't get no tater tots on Sunday night. Love tater tots. All right? I can do without tat tots. I can go. Okay. No tat tots. You can't use the car that's bigger. Don't come home past midnight or we won't pay for college, that's even bigger. You might look at your parents to go. That sounds really, really big. But you're probably going to be back home by 11 59, just in case you're worried about them pulling the trigger on something like that. So you raise the cost of doing the thing and that's your deterrent. It's that kind of threat. You want that threat to be explicit, right? United States said the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Right? If you invade West Germany, and that was the heart of the issue there is who controlled Germany? Germany was actually split in two, East Germany, West Germany, to make sure that both countries, both alliances had a Germany, so they wouldn't fight over Germany. But the idea was if you invade West Germany, the United States will in fact use nuclear weapons. All right, so there you go. That's a threat that raises the costs. So I've spent more time on this than I should have. So let me jump to the next concept here. Because your threat needs to be credible. It has to be believable, your opponent. Or if you're a parent trying to deter a child. Or if you're professor saying, hey, the papers at the beginning of class don't be late, or else you got to have a credible threat. Threat has to be believable, right? So I use these pictures, beware of dog as a deterrent. All right? So if you're aware of dog sign and you're basically saying, don't break into my house or else you face my dog. If you had to put a picture of your dog below that sign, which one of these pictures are you going to choose? The dog on the right. The dog with the big teeth and the chain around its neck. Right? That's the dog that you want to use as your threat because it looks like you can do some damage. That's a real deterrent, that's a real threat dog on the left? Not so much. That's actually my dog, Frannie, who is in the room right behind me. Fan? Yeah, Fannies asleep. So that's Frannie. She weighs nine pounds. She's 16 years old now, but little Frannie is not much of deterrent, not at all because she looks soft and cuddly and sweet. Now actually she isn't. Don't listen to this, Fran. She's a mean little dog. She's when she's on that pillow, if you went near that pillow up and looked like you were going to tilt that pillow a little bit so it wasn't going to be as level or you were going to maybe take that pillow away. Pam, that dog is she is fierce, but I have a scar on my nose which you can't see but in person you can see this nice scar on my nose. It's Frannie, she split my nose right open. That was exciting. So I was I was clipping her and she started to fall off the table. And I caught her, but she freaked out and she ate my nose. So she may be fierce, but she doesn't look fierce. A good threat, it's got to be believable. And you believe that dog with big teeth in order to make that threat credible believable. Well, during the Cold War, the United States built a lot of weapons, thousands of nuclear weapons to say the Soviet Union, you can launch a nuclear strike against us no matter what you do. We'll talk about the schematics of this and the details of this. Little bit later, no matter what you do, we'll be able to fire some back at you, probably thousands. And you're wondering whether they work here. We just tested an atomic bomb. Can we do it again? Yes, we can do it again. Boom. We tested and tested during the first 15 years of the nuclear era. We tested and tested and tested and tested. To let the Soviets know this is what we can do, Soviets did the same thing and said, well, we can do it. Also. Our threat of using nuclear weapons, it's credible not only that, but we had bombers and we put them in the air. We tested them, We had them drop bombs and say, here's the target we want to hit. We fired off Icbms, intercontinental ballistic missiles. And we say, we're going to send off a missile. We want that missile to hit a target 6,000 mi away. We're going to do it, we're going to do it on Tuesday. We're going to do it again on Wednesday. We're going to do it again on Thursday just to let you know we can, and we're not going to do it in secret. We're going to call you up, We're going to announce. We're testing a weapon today. The weapon is supposed to be launched from here and it'll hit this target. And then we would do it and then say to the Soviets, remember we can do this and we can do it again and again and again. Soviets did the same thing to increase that threat, to show that we have the capability. Then the only question is, would really be willing to do it. Would really be willing to destroy the Soviet Union if the Soviet Union tried to destroy the United States. Or would we really be willing to respond to a Soviet invasion of West Germany with tanks, not with nuclear weapons. Would we really be willing to start a nuclear war? Our response all the time was yes, we would be. In fact, in 1982, Soviet Union said we will never be the first to use nuclear weapons. The US response to that was damn right. We will. That was a way of making our threat more credible. We said we will go first if we can. We will. The Soviets, of course, had to believe that. But that was our threat. And always the threat was to increase the credibility and the power of our deterrent to be a credible threat. And you have to communicate that threat clearly. All right? So people often have questions about that. If you have questions about all the things I just talked about now, semiemia, let's talk about communication. You've got to communicate the threat. You've got to make it clear, that's why you put a beware dog sign up, right? That's why you say if you invade West Germany, we'll use nuclear weapons. That's why you may put a picture of your very large dog and say, look, here's my determine, it's credible, you've got to communicate your threat, make it clear. So United States pretty consistently said, we will respond with nuclear weapons if the Soviet Union invades West Germany. And here you can see the Cold War set up the map on the left, you've got the Soviet Union, USSR, and the countries in that reddish pink. There are all Soviet Allies. The countries that are green striped are countries that are green. Don't worry about stripes. The countries that are green are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Nato, the United States, and its alliance. And we said you cross that red line with troops, we will use nuclear weapons. That was our deterrent. You make it explicit. Now, having said that, we're going to talk about US Chinese relations. So let's talk about China for just a little bit. We're going to get more on this a little bit later. But the very short version of this, because it's almost impossible to do a short version of this. But I'll give it a shot again. I try every semester and I fail. So you've got a map up there and you'll see China, and you also see Taiwan is the orange island down in the bottom right of that picture. Right. Now, if you go back to World War Two, you've got China. And it's called the Republic of China and its ally of the United States. During World War Two, United States and the Republic of China are fighting against Japan. Japan had invaded China. The Republic of China was run by a political group called the Nationalists. Their rivals were the Communists. And the Communists had been trying to overthrow the nationalist government since the early part of the 20th century. We'll get some Chinese history a little bit later because the Republic of China isn't born until 19, 1911 or 12, depending on what, what signifies in whatever history you read as the birth of the Republic of China, say 1912, just for the sake of it. But you have the Republic of China run by the Nationalists. The Nationalists political party. The Communist political party then fighting each other. But when Japan invaded China during World War Two, starting World War Two, the nationalist and Communist had a truce of sorts and didn't fight each other. Instead, fought the Japanese Japanese lost World War Two, the dropping of the atomic bomb. One Hiroshima, Japan surrendered. We'll talk about that a little bit later. Japan surrendered. And then the nationalists and the communists tried to come up with a coalition government. And the United States worked really hard to try to get a coalition government. And it failed. And then Nationalists and the Communists went to war and they fought a war. 1946-1949 1949, the Communists one when they entered Beijing and declared the People's Republic of China a communist China, October 1, 1949. Don't worry about all the details of this because you'll get this a little bit later and you'll get it in some readings. Well, the Nationalists lost the war and they fled across the Taiwan Strait, which is on your map. And they landed on Taiwan. And they said, well, Taiwan had been a part of China. It's part of China. And what the nationals did is they went on to this island and they said, okay, from here we'll eventually come back and reconquer the country and capture Beijing. And why the Communists didn't attack Taiwan at that time is because the United States protected Taiwan. What you had is you had the People's Republic of China run by the Communists. That's the whole yellow that you see on the map there. And then you had the Republic of China on Taiwan, the nationalist government which claimed all of that yellow as well, and said, we're a government in exile right now, we'll be back. And then they formed a rivalry. It was the Cold War. So the Soviets backed the Communists and the United States backed the Nationalists. And they started to arm each other to defend their territory. The Nationalists actually launched attacks on China up until the mid 1960s. It was a pretty significant series of attacks. Never succeeded, significant in terms of its quantity. Not really the quality, but they kept trying to do it and failed each time. The Communists occasionally would launch attacks on Taiwan, but pretty clearly the United States was going to defend Taiwan. That solidifies in the 1950s. A lot of things change about that, which you'll get plenty of detail on a little bit later. But even today, you still have Taiwan, which is a liberal democratic country. It is not recognized as a country by most other countries in the world. It's this weird thing which, it's an independent political entity which has a relationship with a lot of countries and trades with most countries in the world. It's a pretty wealthy country. It's industrialized, middle class country, capitalist, liberal democracy. It's got an election come up in 2024. Then you've got Communist China still there. People's Republic of China, though it's capitalist now, but it's still a dictatorship. China says we're going to conquer Taiwan someday. And keep it and take it back. We don't want it to be independent. It's part of China. Taiwan actually says eventually we may reunify. Some political parties say we may reunify with China, but only we'll reunify with a democratic China. Until then we're separate and we're arming ourselves to the teeth to defend ourselves from a possible China, Chinese invasion. So there's a lot of complexities that I'm leaving out, but think of it this way. You've got this island there, which China claims as theirs, but you've got this independent political entity there on Taiwan which says we don't want to belong to a communist country. And China says we're going to get you back. We may use force to get you back. And that's where the United States comes in. United States has had an interesting deterrent, referred to it as strategic ambiguity. Strategic ambiguity, you'll know more about that term a little bit later on, where the United States has not said specifically if China invades Taiwan, we'll defend Taiwan with force. United States generally refrains from saying that. But what we say is, if an invades Taiwan, it will have the gravest consequences. So that's strategic ambiguity. We don't explicitly say, yes, we will defend Taiwan, but we arm Taiwan. We sell them weapons. We sell them the bulk of what they use to defend themselves. And there's this strategic ambiguity in all of that because we don't explicitly say we will defend Taiwan. We also don't explicitly say that if Chan invades Taiwan, we'll attack China. But we did say if the Soviet Union attacks Germany, West Germany will attack the Soviet Union. So you can see the difference. One is very explicit. One, we don't say, for instance, if China invades Taiwan will vaporize Beijing. We do not say that. We don't even say that we'll touch any Chinese territory. So that's the ambiguity that comes in. Actually, it's interesting because President Biden, since he's been in office, has said several times, yes, we'll defend Taiwan. Absolutely no question about it. And he's moved from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity. But each time he said that, a lot of his aides have come back and said, our policy has not changed at all. But if the United States explicitly says, we will defend Taiwan, that's a change in policy. Biden's doing strategic clarity, but other people in this administration are doing strategic ambiguity. Well, that creates ambiguity. There's a fuzziness there, and we'll get to a lot of that a little bit later. From the perspective of deterrence, which deterrent is stronger? And the answer is the explicit deterrent. Where we say if you invade West Germany, we will vaporize Moscow. That's a much stronger deterrent than if you invade Taiwan. Will be really serious about what we do, some fuzziness there. So you've got to think about your deterrent and how strong you want your deterrent to be. Now, having said all that, all right, boom. Talk about two types of deterrents. I've already been hinting in this a little bit. First, type of deterrence by punishment. That's really what nuclear weapons are. Deterrence by punishment. If you take the action that we want to prevent, we've said don't do this. But if you do it, here's my threat. We will punish you. We will hurt you. We can't stop you from doing it. We can only threaten you with incredibly high costs, incredibly massive punishment. That's if you invade West Germany, will destroy Moscow, you launch a nuclear strike at the United States, we will destroy the Soviet Union. We will punish you after the fact. Nuclear deterrence is exactly that kind of deterrence. By punishment, right? If you come home after midnight, No, I can't force you to be there, can't force you to come back by midnight. But if you come back after midnight, I will punish you. I'll take the car away. Right? So you've got that punishment after the fact. And you influence the enemies opponents or your child's. It's weird in this case the child is the opponent but you influence the targets. Do it that way, It's neutral. Influence the targets decision making process by saying, here's the punishment you get. So when you're thinking about whether you should do it or not, I just raise your costs and the costs are the punishment that you receive. That's pretty basic concept. The other one, may be more complex is deterrence by denial. What that says, if you take the action, you're going to fail. So don't try, you will fail. In that case, it's not a punishment that you receive though. There could be some punishment effects there. It's the idea that we've said to the Soviet Union, if you invade West Germany, we're actually going to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops in West Germany. And actually you can see the deployment of troops in West Germany. This is during the Cold War. You can see West German troops from north to south. West German troops, Dutch troops, West German troops, British troops, Belgian troops, West German troops, US troops, US troops, West German troops. That border was the most heavily defended border on the planet. Probably world history, United States alone had over 300,000 troops in there. In the 1980s, the idea was, if you invade West Germany, we've got this threat that says we're going to vaporize Moscow. But maybe you don't believe that threat. So we're going to add some deterrence by denial. By putting so many troops there that you know what, you might not win the war you're going to lose. Even if we don't use nuclear weapons, you will lose. And that's a deterrent in itself because the decision maker says, can we do this? The answer is military assistance. Military advisers will say, I don't know, not sure. Maybe the answer is no, we can't do it. Deterrence by denial is a different way of deterring with the aircraft carrier battle group in the picture on the left. That's another aspect of it in which the United States, you could argue, tries to, tries to deter China from invading Taiwan by having that capability in the South China Sea. Sitting right there saying to China, hey, look at our aircraft carriers. Look at the capability, do you have anything like this? And China's answer is, we're working on it. The United States says you're working on it. That's nice. United States has had aircraft carriers for over 100 years. China has had capable aircraft carriers for two. And never use them in combat. And you can't underestimate the value of actually using them in a war. The United States has 100 years of experience and that China has none. Zero. And the United States has, I guess, 12 carriers right now, depends on how many are being, you know, modernized and how many are being replaced. There's new aircraft carrier capability coming on line. The newest carriers, Jeb Ford, which is replacing some of the old U limits carriers are named after the first carrier of a certain class. And the new class is coming on right now, and the United States is building more and more. We usually have about 12 of them or so. And China right now has operationally one, maybe the second one is ready to do some sea trials. And there's a third one that they're working on, but they have much less capability. The United States can look at China and say, you've got to cross the Taiwan Strait in order to attack Taiwan, and you'll fail. Actually refer to it as the Porcupine strategy in which Taiwan defends itself. And the United States gives Taiwan enough capability to defend itself well enough so that if China attacks, it will be incredibly difficult for them to do it. They may fail and that may deter them from trying to attack Taiwan. Deterrence by denial is don't do the thing because you'll fail when you try to do the thing. All right, let's talk about one last thing related to deterrence, and that's extended deterrence. Whoops, extended deterrence. Extended deterrence. And yeah, we're going to stop this lecture in a little bit. We're not going to get all the way through the use of force. We'll put this use of force in two lectures just to give you a breather extended deterrence. And let's see, am I going to I want to put this bar, I know there's ways to get rid of this bar, but I always freak out because I think of it. Get rid of the bar, the recording will stop. I'm superstitious about that. Put the extended deterrence is something that's a key concept during the Cold War. A key concept. Now it's being more and more important. Again, the idea there is that the United States during the Cold War said to the Soviet Union, not only will do we defend ourselves from a Soviet attack, with a nuclear strike, but we might defend all these countries with nuclear weapons. And then there's a might in there. For some of them it was explicit, yes, we will. For some of them we might use nuclear weapons. But the idea was we're going to extend our deterrent to all these countries by saying to the Soviets, if you attack Europe, we will use nuclear weapons. If you attack Japan, we use nuclear weapons. If you attack South Korea, we will defend South Korea. If you attack Israel, we will defend Israel, attack Taiwan might. If you attack Australia, New Zealand, we might. But the idea was we're not just defending ourselves, but we're extending our defense to other countries. The missile you see there, the pushing two, which was an intermediate range ballistic missile, were deployed in Europe 1983-1991 That was a very explicit deterrent because it was a missile that we deployed in Europe, which created this interesting situation. If the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe with conventional weapons, it would quickly have the capability to destroy these missiles where they were deployed in Europe. And deployment just means putting them someplace. So the Soviets would be able to hit those missiles very early on in their attack. The United States was in the situation of having a choice. Very early on the war, maybe within the first few minutes of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, to either launch these missiles which were targeted at Moscow or lose them. Watch them be destroyed, use them, or lose them. That was the phrase for it. And the United States put the missiles in there explicitly to say, this means we use them or lose them. Why would we put them there if we didn't intend to use them? We increased our threat, our extended deterrent in Europe. We increased the cost of a Soviet invasion because we said, if you invade Western Europe, we almost have to use nuclear weapons immediately. And that was seen as a very explicit extended deterrent. If you have questions about deterrence, let me know and let's see. Because we are in theory, let me see it. I think that's the last slide for deterrence. Let's see. Oh, actually 12 more slides, 3 more slides. All right, let's do three more slides and then we will stop and we'll have this lecture be a part one and part two. Part two will be able to shorter. So all of this, as I mentioned a long time before, I'm going backwards in the slides, is all based on rationality. So let's complicate this thing per minute. All right? It's not complicated enough. Let's complicate it a little bit. Rationality, Is rationality a good assumption? All right, that's a debate. It's a really good debate amongst scholars I can't give you an answer for that. Is rationality a good, good assumption? I can tell you what I think, but who cares what I think? I think rationality is a good assumption, but rationality with an asterisk. All right, let's talk about that asterisk for a little bit because it helps the debate complications in all this is let's say we're rational. We'll assume we're rational. But how rational can we be, Right? We're human beings, right? How many people do you know make decisions based on cost benefit analysis, right? And even if they do try to make decisions based on cost benefit analysis, you've got complexity. And there's a concept bounded rationality, great concept, right? Because it says even if we do try to be rational, there are limits to our rationality, right? Think of it this way. There are things we don't know when we use CB as cost benefit analysis. Here, there are things we don't know, right? Right, The Soviets, and trying to make a rational decision about whether they use nuclear war or not. We're modeling what they're thinking about, but we don't really know what they're thinking about. They're thinking, will the United States use nuclear weapons or not? And they're going to make their assumptions and their decisions based on their assumptions about us. But they don't know. There's things that they don't know. They are things that we don't know. We've incomplete information. We don't really have a great picture of the costs of any action or the benefits of any action. We just don't know incomplete information. One of my favorite things about that is that when people think about what we know and what we don't know, Donald Rumsfeld, who was a Secretary of Defense for the George W Bush administration to talk about this, said there are things that we know, There are things that we don't know, there are things that we know we don't know, right? Give me an example, right? Iran up. Is Iran trying to develop nuclear weapons? We think they are. They say they aren't. There are a whole lot of things we don't know about that, things we know we don't know. And Rumsfeld is my favorite favor. There are lots of these things. People actually took some of Rumsfeld's statements about what people know and put them into poetry because there are things we know, there are things that we don't know, there are things that we know we don't know, there are things that we don't, we don't know. Hold that thought for a second, right? Think about that. We don't know, we don't know them, right? There's all that involved. So we're making rational choices, but we don't have all the evidence to make that decision, right? So we're kind of, there's some guesswork involved in that also. Different people make different calculations of cost benefit analysis, right? And think about the way you and your friends make decisions about things, all right? Will you always come up with the same answer, right? No. All right, and give you an example, right? You have friends and I'll bet you you can name your friends silently. You have a friend, it's a good friend. You've known them for years, you trust them. But, uh, you know that if you say, here's what's going on in my life, should I do this, You know that their answer isn't going to be very useful. I got a gang of friends I've known since, since 1968. And if I have a decision, a serious decision to make, there are three guys who, my closest friends I'll ask two of them. The third guy I might ask him and what he tells me, I'll do the opposite. Because his way of making decisions and what he values and the way he does a cost benefit analysis completely different from mine. All right. So people have different calculations of cost benefit analysis. So you might think Donald Trump's calculation of cost benefit analysis is probably different from Joe Biden's calculation of cost benefit analysis, right? Yeah. Different things also making decisions, right? There are emotions involved, right? This is about war. About it could be about war. It could be about the possibility of destruction of your country. It could be about, you might think it's a vital interest. So it could be emotions. There are bias involved. If you look at nation's histories and the way may made decisions, you often see this horrible racism involved in decisions. Horrible bias involved in decisions that a lot of countries make about things. All of that goes into your rationality. So it doesn't look as rational as you might think. It's not like building a bridge where somebody would say actually building a bridge is more bounded rationality. So that's what that chart there is. There are cognitive limitations of our ability to make decisions. There's information imperfection, which is a nice way of saying the things we don't know. And there are time constraints, right? Right. You've got to make a decision, you've got 15 min to make a decision that might be a different decision, a different outcome in that decision. Than if you had three or four days to make a decision or a month to make a decision. So all of those things that the stress level that would evolve in making a decision are called bounded rationality. Which means instead of making the best decision that you can, particularly because of your time constraints, you do something that's called satisficing. Is that a great word? Herb Simon is one of the guys who developed a lot of the cognitive theories of decision making. And he came up with, I think he came up with the term satisficing or I don't know if it was someone who co authored with satisfying, which means you come up with the best decision you can come up given the information you have and given the time constraints you have, it's a sub optimal decision, which means it's not the best decision you could make if you had perfect information and all the time in the world, but you don't have perfect information, you don't have all the time in the world. So you make the best decision you can, given the situation. And that's as rational as you can get. Okay? So there you go. So bounded rationality means that things can go wrong. Things can go wrong. You can try to deter someone and fail to deter someone as things can go wrong. Yeah, that's even more complex when we talk about compels, get to compels in next election, bounded rationality. That's a complication in all this. Let's talk about another complication. What about irrationality? Is leaders are irrational, are they? United States spent a lot of time, United States government and scholars as well, Spent a lot of time thinking about whether Saddam Hussein was rational or not. Whether Kim Jong on, the current leader of North Korea, whether he's rational or not, what if we tried to deter them? We say don't do the thing, or else we'll destroy your country. And they say, don't care. Can you deter someone who's irrational? Or people argue that, well, you couldn't. That's one of the reasons why the George W Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003. Is because a lot of the decision makers in the administration felt that Saddam Hussein was irrational. We won't be able to deter him because he's crazy, actually. As it turns out, he was very rational. He just was extremely bounded in his rationality and he made some very bad calculations. He actually believed when we've captured documents after he was overthrown, he actually believed that he, if he made the United States think that his nuclear capability was much greater than it was, and that his nuclear program wasn't panning out. It wasn't working out well. But he was going to convince us that it was that he was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. He was trying to deter the United States from invading. He thought that if he had nuclear weapons, all right, I should say. He thought if we believed he had nuclear weapons that we would leave him alone. Actually, it turned out that our belief that he had nuclear weapons led us to invade. So he was just wrong. It was rationally calculated. It was just turned out to be wrong because he made bad assumptions about the United States. Right? Some people think Kim Jong Un is irrational as well. If you look at behavior, he does actually seem pretty rational as well. He threatens the United States with his nuclear capability in the United States, then promises some things, offer some things, We try to make deals with them, Otherwise we would ignore him. It's like a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum and getting the parents to pay attention, that's a pretty rational thing to do. We'll talk about both these cases in some detail a little bit later on. But there's the irrationality. Aspect of it that some people argue about. The last thing that we'll talk about actually no. Before one other thing I wanted to mention, irrationality. What about a suicide bomber? Someone who says, I'm going to destroy a target. But as a part of that destruction, I will kill myself. All right. In the suicide bombers, pioneers in that were the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elm in Sri Lanka, who pioneered the suicide vest. And people who are willing to kill themselves in order to destroy a target, how do you deter them? And that's a question people keep asking, all right? Because it's not like after they blow themselves up, you can say, we'll kill you again. Israel actually tries to deter suicide bombers from Hamas, which is a Palestinian independence group that uses terrorism as part of their strategy. It's also the government of the Gaza Strip right now. So Israel tries to deter Hamas by saying, well, we can't punish a suicide bomber, but we can punish the suicide bombers family. We can punish the suicide bombers neighborhood. So on occasions what they have done is if they get the identity of a suicide bomber, there's some gruesome ways to get the identity of a suicide bomber by forensic analysis of things that the bomber leaves behind. Dna often head which is intact, but you go ahead and say, now we have the identity of a suicide bomber and we will blow up the apartment building where they lived. We'll give everybody a warning and say, evacuate the building, but we'll blow up your building. And it's a way to deter future suicide bombers. Can't deter the one that already did it. But to deter future suicide bombers by raising the cost to people that they leave behind. Very controversial, very controversial. Some people actually feel it's a war crime, but very controversial way of trying to deter a suicide bomber. Last thing about deterrence is maybe the most complex. What happens if deterrence fails? You have said don't do the thing, or else, and the target does the thing anyway. So what do you do? You can carry out the action. So I told you what I was going to do. All right. And that that seems kind of obvious, right? If the deterrent is don't come home after midnight or else you can't use the car, you come home after midnight, your parents saying you can't use a car, there you go. And then you've actually carried out the threat. And the point of that is we've said you can't use the car for a month. After that month goes by, you can use the car again. And we say, remember what happened last time? When we say come home before midnight, we mean come home before midnight. And then what you've done is you've carried out the threat which has made the future threats, the next threat, much more credible, much more believable. And you say, wow, they actually did it. I didn't think they were going to do it, didn't think they were going to take the car away from me for a month. But they did, so I better actually come home before midnight. You carry out the threat to enhance the deterrence for the future when it comes to nuclear war. No, You say to the Soviet Union, if you invade West Germany, we will vaporize Moscow. They invade West Germany. And then you sit there and go, well, we really start World War Three. Happily we never found out whether the United States would carry out its deterrence or not. We don't know. Yeah, but there are lots of vocations where the United States has made threats and didn't carry them out. The 1950s for instance, the United States kind of didn't explicitly say it, but kind of obliquely implied that if the Soviet Union ever moved troops into any other, other, excuse me, any of the other Soviet allies at any point that we might take military action. So in 1956, there was a more reform movement in Hungary, which actually was trying to get rid of the Communist regime. There you have the communist regime ally with the Soviet Union and you had people who were saying, we don't want communism here. And the Soviet Union actually moved troops in. And this reform movement did the same thing in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, crushed a reform movement that was trying to get rid of the communist leadership in the 1956 case. The United States in 1950s implied that if the Soviets do anything that we don't like in Europe, we might use nuclear weapons. When the Soviets moved into Hungary, we did nothing. Our deterrent failed and we did nothing. You could argue, the Soviets learn from that and it's like United States, blah, blah, blah. You talk a good game, but we're not going to believe any of your threats. Then again, the Soviets didn't three weeks later invade West Germany, because they must have believed that threat. That was a much more explicit threat. That's the difference between saying we will do something yes, absolutely positively versus we might. That goes back to the difference in how the United States deterred an invasion of Western Europe versus how the United States uses ambiguity to deter China and Taiwan. Taiwan China may not believe that we actually defend Taiwan. Taiwan may not believe we would actually defend Taiwan. Everybody looks at that ambiguity and says we're not sure what the United States is going to do. Let me stop there because I've gone on for about what would be a one class period if we were sitting in a classroom. So I'm going to try to do lectures that fit that aspect of it. And then we'll pick up from Compean and do compellants then swaggering in the next lecture. And that'll be the third lecture in this, after you watch this ask questions, use the review sheet. It's got a good outline of all this. Other than that, I will see you next lecture. Take care everybody.