the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

72 strategic studies, deterrence and the cold warmore so Mao’s China, a hard and ruthless player, prepared to accept hugecasualties, while the US was relatively soft and easy to threaten?Waltzian Neorealism was built on the assumption that states, includingthe Soviet Union, were rational actors, and other scholars such asJervis held that Soviet military doctrine was not that dissimilar to that ofAmerican military officials, that their ‘ideas are not particularly Russianor particularly Marxist but simply those one would expect from peoplecharged with protecting society and winning wars’ (Jervis, 1979/80: 630).The Russians understood ‘very well the potency of the American threatto destroy their society’; the difference between the two countries residedrather in the different distributions of power between civilian and militaryleadership (Jervis, 1979/80: 630). Others agreed with Kennan that morefundamental differences between the East and West were to be found.According to Colin S. Gray (1980: 139), there were ‘no functional Sovietequivalents to the Western theories of deterrence, limited war, and armscontrol, just as the key Western concepts spawned by those theories – stability,escalation control, bargaining, sufficiency/adequacy, and the rest –appear to play no identifiable role in guiding Soviet military planning’.Those who emphasised Soviet difference fell into two broad camps: therewere those who, like Kennan, linked Soviet enmity to the communistideology of its leadership, while arguing that the Russian people wereinadequately represented by this ideology and would eventually topple‘their’ leaders. Others like Gray claimed that what explained the adoptionof this ideology was ‘a Russian national political character marked bycunning, brutality, and submissiveness’ and that Soviet strategic culturewas thus ‘at root, Russian rather than Marxist-Leninist’ (Gray, 1980: 142).Although couched in more concrete, empirical terms, these discussionsforeshadowed later ISS debates over the significance of cultural factorsversus material capabilities, and of the importance of societal cohesionand ‘national identity fit’ between governors and governed.There was no easy way of settling such questions: Western access tothe Soviet Union and China was severely restricted and estimates of theirintentions were thus deduced from a combination of these countries’observed behaviour, and assumptions about ideology, national identityand structure of government. The tricky thing was that behaviour oftenlent itself to multiple interpretations depending on which deeper assumptionsabout actor rationality and the specific views of the enemy Other ISSanalysts held. Underneath these debates was also a more fundamental analyticaldifference between Neorealist explanations located at the level ofthe international structure where actor rationality was a basic ontological