The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Deterrence on a Dog Day in Summer

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.   On this edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard take advantage of the so-called Dog Days of Summer and a break in hectic international news to provide a master class on the concept of deterrence in international affairs. What is it? How does it function? How has it changed over time? And, what do the latest theories of deterrence say about how the next phase of the Ukraine War? To access a copy of Janice’s recent paper on deterrence and the Ukraine War click here. Send us your feedback on this program to [e-mail]. To access full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website. in just a few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website.

Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Monk listeners. Roger Griffiths here, your hosted moderator of the Friday Focus podcast. Welcome to our program on Friday.

Friday the 4th of August. As always, we are joined by Janice Rostein, the founding director, the Monk School of Global Affairs, internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, great to be in conversation with you. Great to be with you, Roger, on the eve of a long weekend. You're here. Let's all enjoy it. And as we're enjoying it, Janice, what I thought we do is circle some contemporary events, but step back a little bit. I think a lot of the feedback that we get to the show and we appreciate it all every email, Janice and I read them. So if you ever have a comment, send it to podcast at monkdebateswithanS.com and we'll get back to you with our thoughts and suggestions to your ideas. But one idea, Janice, that has kept coming forward in

viewer and listener email is helping people understand some of the bigger kind of concepts that often get kind of batted around. So there's all kinds of terminology. We've discussed the liberal international order in the past. I think we did a great job. You did a great job in explaining that. And one of the things I wanted to speak with you today, take an advantage of a dog day in summer, is to talk about a concept that's really come up in a major way around this war in Ukraine that grinds on. And it's a concept called deterrence. And many of us may initially, I thought initially, hey, I might know what deterrence means, but you, to your credit, have written an important paper for the Texas Journal of,

is international security? Texas National Security Review. Exactly. And we'll put a link to this paper in our show notes. But at the heart of this paper, Janice, is a is a kind of detailed analysis and conversation of the idea of deterrence, how it's changed over time, how Americans and traditionally the American military and political state craft world has looked at deterrence and how the Russians look at deterrence, often different. And you put it together, I will say it, Janice, in a pretty masterful and interesting way, I really enjoyed reading the paper from cover to cover. So with your OK, let's dive in here and let's look at the state of the Ukraine war as we find it today through this excellent in-depth analysis that you've provided of the concept of deterrence.

Can I take us somewhere else for just one minute before you do that? Because I think you strike an important note when you say, well, we all intuitively know what we mean by deterrence. How do we know it? we know it because we've been kids and our parents have used it on us or we're parents and we struggle to use it on our kids and here's how this works you say to this four-year-old if you put a toe on the street off the sidewalk we're going in the house and you won't ride your bike today so you don't want some you don't want this kid to step on the street You are warning him.

You are threatening him with consequences that he will fear. And you hope that's enough to stop him. Because you really don't want to take him inside the house. Well, then he does it. And there's two responses. And I've seen parents do both. One response is, okay, I told you this. We're going inside the house.

And the kicking and screaming kid is hauled inside the house, much to the discomfort of the parents. Or there's a second group that start in a long, detailed negotiation. Well, I told you not to do it and you did it, but I'm giving you a second chance. And if it happens again, you're nodding your head there, Rudyard. We've all been there because we're human beings. And what this little story tells us, first of all, how hard it is to make threats credible, how exhausting it is to make threats credible, and that deterrence,

which is threatening somebody with adverse consequences that they don't want, if they do what you don't want them to do, it's fate ultimately rests in the hands of the other, not in yours. Well, excellent. You answered my first question, which was to ask you to define deterrence for us.

So you've given us a real world practical example of that. Let's move from the kid on the street with the parents wagging fingers to the world as we see it today to great power relations. How have we come to think about deterrence? Like, is this a concept that goes back centuries that people discussed and had a view of? Is this a more of a recent thing that people? people think, okay, we have a problem. We have a war. We have this aggressor, Russia. We have a desire to assert state sovereignty and support Ukraine in this unprovoked attack on its sovereignty and security. And now we're going to use deterrence as a lens to interpret that.

Is this a modern thing or an ancient thing? It's an ancient thing. I probably the person who who wrote about it most clearly is lucidity. And that's taking us back a long, long time in this absolutely marvelous discussion of the Peloponnesian War. And he talked about, in fact, the fear that Sparta could invoke in Athens. And then he went to an interesting place with it because he says, look, there's a threat, which is supposed to work. But he pointed the first contradiction all the way back then,

and there are multiple contradictions. But he said, look, you react out of fear sometimes by going first, by preempting, because you're afraid the other side is going to implement that threat. And you want to move first. And so we actually end up in a world of wars that nobody wanted, not the threatner and not the country that is the leaders that are made afraid by the threat. And so I love that story because most military people think about the terms. Okay, let's just count the forces we have and count the forces they have.

And this is all going to work. It's just being counting. You still hear a lot of that from very experienced generals. But what Lucidity's told us, no, it's psychology. And beyond the military capabilities, which you sure need, it's psychology. And it works sometimes in very unpredictable ways. And you have to be careful. You have to be careful how you use it.

You have to be both clear about what you don't want. and fuzzy enough to leave yourself some room to retreat if the other side goes ahead and does it anyway. Let me give you a concrete example. I want to talk about the concrete example of the Ukraine war in its start over 18 months ago. So we had this idea that Ukraine had been armed, that there had been ongoing training there, that the cost of Putin were communicated to him. his regime and no uncertain terms, not only by the United States, but by the European community.

Maybe China weighed in. We don't know. And everyone, I remember those shows, Janice, when we were talking at around that time, we thought there was a possibility this could happen, but we certainly didn't think that it was odds on. And there, for some reason, deterrence really failed. So what's the lesson there about deterrence and maybe connecting back to your discussion of Athens and Sparta? Is it that sometimes, even though the threats are real, the costs of incurring the threats are worth the action because the participant feels that they're not going to be deterred because they have other interests that are superseding, whatever deterrence the opposing side is trying to constrain them with. That's exactly it. It's a fascinating story, really, Roger.

The efforts that the United States went to, as I read about it in the paper. And people are surprised by that part of the paper. They didn't see it was opaque the efforts the United States made November, December, January. to tell the Russians in the most unmistakable terms, don't do this. There will be terrible consequences for you. There will be terrible economic consequences. Don't do this. And they said it over and over.

And there's only two explanations for why deterrence failed. Clearly failed. It's a really interesting example of failed, which is a cautionary note. Only two reasons. One, Putin just cared so much more. more about occupying Ukraine and getting rid of any independent government in Kiev. It was so important to him that just trumped any other calculations. He didn't care enough about even the most devastating economic consequences.

That's one. The second, and the answer to this is only in his head and none of us know, right? The second one is he didn't believe it. He just didn't believe that the United States, the European Union would actually do what they said they were going to do and that they would implement all those sanctions, which after all are unprecedented. As you and I both said, never before has a central bank been sanctioned the way the Russian central bank was. Never before of the assets of a great power been seized. So you may well thought, okay, these guys are bluffing. I'm going to hit.

And that's what I mean by this is a deeply psychological process at the end, which makes it so much harder than simply a question of who's got more tanks or aircraft or drones. I think part of the reason I didn't anticipate the invasion was I thought that with the advent of the nuclear age, we're all going out to watch the Oppenheimer on our big screens with the Trinity test and the emergence of these existential weapons, that deterrence really becomes something much more powerful, much more real. And at least in the course of my life, I was born in the early 70s, I may be wrongly, I don't know, you tell me, jazz, had a sense that in the nuclear age, deterrence mattered.

in a way that previously it existed, but it didn't have the same effect. Forget about the consequences of deterrence. Either horrible contemplation of a nuclear holocaust or not. It's more about the fact that because there were these existential threats, suddenly deterrence could really function as a way of ordering the world. And ultimately, and maybe this is a contraband, Reversial view, Janus, making the world safer, ironically, because the costs of conventional wars were no longer just conventional, that they could escalate. And I guess that's what I always thought about this conflict in Ukraine, is that Russians would never do this because even though they were small risks, tail risks, there were these bigger risks of escalation with NATO.

Both are nuclear-powered entities, Russia, NATO, the United States. and what the heck happened? You put your finger registered on the biggest conundrum that everybody faced, and particularly the Biden administration as they struggle to craft a response. So this is the first time, I guess since the Korean War, really. This is the first time that a nuclear power, invaded its neighbor, and China wasn't a nuclear power when you did it, really, in the 1950s, and that neighbor got the all-out support of another nuclear power.

So you could argue this was potentially most dangerous situation we've ever faced in the world, frankly. Even when Russia set missiles to Cuba in 1962, you know, the aggression was not being done with a near neighbor. So why is this one so hard? one because it is Russia's next door neighbor and it says to everybody oh boy Putin really cares about this this is not some trivial adventure that he's embarked on this goes to the heart and soul of what he wrongly but nevertheless deeply cares about and so the Biden administration has to be able to do and let's not forget in that day before Putin launches his invasion

he alerts some of the staff in nuclear command and control centers. He's sending a very clear message to Washington and then layers it on by saying, if anybody intervenes here, they will face consequences that they've never before faced. So he was deliberately threatening the use of unconventional weapons. And the Biden administration clearly got that. They heard it. Now, what do you do? then. Pretty tough. You do nothing. You reward the use of nuclear threats. Sit up everybody and take notice. That works. If you do something,

you risk an escalation to a nuclear exchange of some kind. And that's precisely what they struggle with. And the paper tells the story of how they managed to thread that needle. And the Biden really did it in an unprecedented way. Never before has a president published an op-ed in New York Times, which is what Biden did, in which he explicitly said, here's what we're not going to do. We are not going to attack Russian forces. We are not going to engage with Russian forces, no matter what, off the table. Why? Because we won't take a chance on World War III. We are not about regime change. As much as I think all you did is disgusting, and he literally used a word revolution, we are not about regime change.

And he went on, in other words, to put limits at the outset on what the United States would do. So just think about this for a minute. How this might seem bizarre to people who don't see the larger picture. limiting. That's what the United States was doing in order to prevent escalation, which Biden feared, and I think rightly so, above all else. So what do you think, Chancellor, the last 18 months? I mean, you've heard these reoccurring voices, prominent people like Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, former monk debater, urging, you know, the Biden administration always to take the most maximal kind of response. And many people, and Applemom, another monk debater, I can go through

the list, Gary Kasparov, another monk debater saying, don't submit to this nuclear blackmail. Do not put this into your calculus. Act as if it is something to the side. It is an empty threat. and it should not be part of our strategic calculus when it comes to how we support Ukraine and how this war is conducted. So those voices, Anne's voice, Michael's voice, those, in fact, they have been very clear. Putin has no one. He would never use nuclear weapons. That's the kind of language.

And they, by the way, are moderate. in comparison to the emails, and you can imagine I've gotten once this thing was posted online. And my answer to all of them is, how do you know? How do you know? What evidence do you have that Putin would under no circumstances use a nuclear weapon? Frankly, there's no answer to that question.

It's an incalculable risk because we don't have any precedence. A lot of people, including me, thought he would not take the risk of invading Ukraine because it was so clearly stupid, which it has proven to be. But I was wrong. And so my first comment, every one of them, and it makes them even more, you know, it raises the frustration level on their part is we can't know that. We can't know what's in Putin's head here if he felt that he was going to lose, if he felt the security of his regime was truly at stake. In other words, if he became desperate. There's no, but there's no evidence because, and the part of the drove people craziest in the article I wrote was he probably doesn't even know himself yet.

And what we know from a lot of good economics research is people often don't know what they really want until they're in this situation. They do something and then they say, oh, I must have really wanted that because here's what I did. And as long as we're in this world of radical uncertainty, anybody who and my friend, you know, says with great confidence and I look at her and I say, I mean, how you know, we live in a radically uncertain world right now, and therefore, caution when the stakes are this high, some caution is really important. Now, look, the United States has done a great job, and the Zelensky's done a great job extracting from the United States, virtually every kind of weapon. Here's one left, and I suspect it will be on its way that they haven't provided. But what Biden made clear is he does not want Zelensky attacking Russian cities with American-made weapons. And that's been the last line that there's left.

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