Deterrence

Deterrence. By Lawrence Freedman. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2004. 160p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The concept of deterrence—the effort to make an adversary's costs and risks of going to war greater than the political incentives pushing in that direction—was the centerpiece of academic national security studies and the core policy concern of Western governments throughout much of the Cold War. Today, in the post-9/11 world, deterrence has taken a back seat to a different set of strategic concepts: preemption and prevention. Both involve destroying an enemy's capabilities before he can harm you, the former when the threat is imminent, the latter when it is potential (pp. 85–89). In his timely and useful book, Lawrence Freedman offers a compelling account of the decline of deterrence and creatively seeks to revitalize it as a subject of scholarly inquiry and as a viable policy in the post-9/11 world.