STRATEGIC

122 Strategic Choices for a Turbulent World: In Pursuit of Security and Opportunity
approximately 52,500 in early 2016, 43 and successive rounds of negotiations
cut the two countries’ nuclear arsenals by more than two-thirds. 44
On the Korean Peninsula, U.S. forces continued to maintain a largely
deterrent posture in the face of the unrelenting and now nuclear threat
posed by the hostile regime in Pyongyang. When the Cold War came
to an end, the United States did not abandon either the concept or the
capabilities of deterrence, but many of the people who had spent much
of their professional lives thinking about how to deter Soviet aggression
moved on to other pursuits.
Interest in deterrence faded further after the 9/11 attacks, when
the Bush administration argued that traditional deterrence would not
work against terrorists and “rogue states.” 45
A deterrence strategy is both about actors and actions. One actor
does not deter another in a general sense. Rather, one actor seeks
to deter another actor from taking a particular action. This concept
needs to be at the forefront of policy thinking as the country contemplates
how to preserve the peace in a repolarizing world. Recent
43 During the height of the Cold War, there were more than half a million U.S. personnel
assigned in the European theater. As of February 2016, around 52,500 personnel were in
direct support of U.S. European Command missions, while another 9,500 personnel supported
the missions of other organizations, such as U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Transportation
Command. See Gen. Philip Breedlove, U.S. European Command Posture Statement
2016, U.S. European Command, Stuttgart, Germany, February 25, 2016.
44 Together, the Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START, entry into force 1994), the Strategic
Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT, entry into force 2003), and the New START agreement
(entry into force 2011) resulted in deep reductions in the numbers of deployed strategic
warheads and deployed delivery vehicles by each country. In addition, while considerable
uncertainty exists about the current state of Russia’s tactical nuclear forces, the Presidential
Nuclear Initiatives announced by President George H. W. Bush on September 27, 1991, and
by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on October 5, 1991, just seven weeks prior to the official
dissolution of the Soviet Union, resulted in the elimination of all U.S. nuclear artillery shells
and short-range nuclear ballistic missile warheads and the removal of all nonstrategic nuclear
warheads from U.S. surface ships, attack submarines, and land-based naval aircraft.
45 The Bush administration’s National Security Strategy, released in September 2002, one
year after 9/11, stated, “Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist
enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents; whose
so-called soldiers seek martyrdom in death and whose most potent protection is statelessness.”
White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Washington,
D.C., September 2002, p. 15.