^† further article on this subject, by Huth and Russett, will appear in a forthcoming issue.—ED.

¹ Deterrence seeks to prevent undesired behavior by convincing those who might contemplate such action that its costs would exceed its gains. In the area of security, deterrence usually attempts to prevent a military challenge; but it also can and has been used to try to prevent unacceptable military deployments (such as the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba) or nonmilitary actions that defenders perceive as threatening to their national security. Deterrence requires that the “defender” define the behavior that is unacceptable, publicize the commitment to punish or restrain transgressors, demonstrate the resolve to do so, and possess the capabilities to implement the threat.

General deterrence is based on the existing power relationship between adversaries; it attempts to prevent an adversary from seriously considering a military challenge of any kind because of the obviously adverse consequences. Immediate deterrence is specific: it is designed to forestall a challenge to a well-defined and publicized commitment. This distinction is analyzed by Morgan, Patrick M., Deterrence: A Conceptual Analysis (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Library of Social Science, 1977)Google Scholar. Extended deterrence refers to the attempt to prevent an attack against a third party; direct deterrence is the attempt to prevent an attack against home territory.

² The pioneering study is George, Alexander L. and Smoke, Richard, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974)Google Scholar. For a recent review of the controversies associated with the testing of theories of deterrence, see the following articles in World Politics 41 (January 1989)Google Scholar: Christopher H. Achen and Duncan Snidal, “Rational Deterrence Theory and Comparative Case Studies,” pp. 143–69; Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, “Deterrence and Foreign Policy,” pp. 170–82; Robert Jervis, “Rational Deterrence: Theory and Evidence,” pp. 183–207; Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, “Rational Deterrence Theory: I Think, Therefore I Deter,” pp. 208–24; and George W. Downs, “The Rational Deterrence Debate,” pp. 225–37.

³ Huth, Paul and Russett, Bruce, “What Makes Deterrence Work? Cases from 1900 to 1980,” World Politics 36 (July 1984), 496–526CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Huth and Russett presented a revised data set in “Deterrence Failure and Crisis Escalation,” International Studies Quarterly 32 (March 1988), 29–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Huth, Paul, Extended Deterrence and the Prevention of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Huth's article-length version, “Extended Deterrence and the Outbreak of War,” American Political Science Review 82 (June 1988), 423-44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ We researched and coded all the cases ourselves, but also asked our students to do so independently. We met periodically with them to compare analyses and resolve any discrepancies. We would like to thank John Garafano, Karsten Geier, Robert Herman, Aaron Karnell, Havina Dashwood-Smith, Christopher Cushing, Nabil Mekhael, and Mark Busch for their assistance.

⁵ We coded three compound cases twice, thus generating a total offifty-sevencases in this collection; they are cases 25, 32, and 49, described in Table 1.

⁶ These are cases 24, 44, and 48. Cases 25 and 44 are discussed in the appendix.

⁷ A third kind of ambiguity arises from the attempt to establish what would have happened if deterrence had not been practiced vigorously. This is a counterfactual argument that lies beyond the scope of this analysis.

⁸ Even as Soekarno threatened the use of military force, the chief of the general staff of the Indonesian armed forces, General Nasution, warned that an invasion of West Irian could not take place earlier than the middle of 1962 because of logistical preparations, the need for thorough military preparations, and the necessity to absorb new military equipment. A political settlement of the status of West Irian was reached before Indonesian military leaders estimated that Djakarta had the military capability to mount a successful invasion. See Ide Anak Agung Gde Agung, Twenty Years Indonesian Foreign Policy, 1945–1965 (The Hague: Mouton, 1973)Google Scholar; Bone, Robert C. Jr., The Dynamics of the Western New Guinea (Irian Barat) Problem (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Grant, Bruce, ed., Indonesia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Henderson, William, West New Guinea: The Dispute and Its Settlement (New York: Seton Hall University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Leifer, Michael, Indonesia's Foreign Policy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983)Google Scholar; and Pauker, Guy J., “General Nasution's Mission to Moscow,” Asian Survey 1 (March 1961), 15–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Huth and Russett (fn. 3,1984), 505. Russett, Bruce, “The Calculus ofDeterrence,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 7 (June 1963), 97–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 98, defined success as the repulse of a challenge to a client without a violent military confrontation.

¹⁰ Huth, Extended Deterrence (fn. 3), 27.

¹¹ This is case 49 in the 1984 data set and involves an attempt by Israel in 1970 to deter Syria from attacking Jordan.

¹² From the Soviet perspective, Cuba was a case of extended immediate deterrence, as one Soviet objective of putting missiles into Cuba was to deter an expected American invasion.

¹³ George and Smoke (fn. 2), 517n., cite the Berlin blockade, Suez, and the second Taiwan Straits crisis as cases in point. They score the Berlin blockade in 1948, for example, as a failure of American deterrence; Huth and Russett code it as a success.

¹⁴ Fink, Clinton, “More Calculations About Deterrence,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 9 (March 1965), 54–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, makes a similar argument about tautological reasoning.

¹⁵ This case is discussed in greater detail as a representative example in the appendix.

¹⁶ An early and influential example of this kind of thinking was Osgood, Robert E., Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957)Google Scholar. For a critique of current thinking of this kind and its application to Soviet policy in Afghanistan, see Richard Herrmann, “The Soviet Decision to Withdraw from Afghanistan: Changing Strategic and Regional Images,” paper presented at the Twelfth Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Tel Aviv, June 18–23, 1989.

¹⁷ Huth and Russett (fn. 3, 1984), 504, n. 15.

¹⁸ Huth, Extended Deterrence (fn. 3), 26, note 20, cites one data collection, seven secondary sources, three encyclopedias and general reference works, and five studies of crises by international relations scholars. Huth has assured us, however, that many other works were consulted, and that citations represent only those he found to be most helpful.

¹⁹ Kenneth A. Oye, ed., Specifying and Testing Theories of Deterrence (forthcoming).

²⁰ Kenneth A. Oye, ed., Specifying and Testing Theories of Deterrence (forthcoming).

²¹ For the most recent debate on this subject, see the articles by Achen and Snidal, George and Smoke, Jervis, Lebow and Stein, and Downs (fn. 2).

²² Lebow and Stein (fn. 2), and Lebow, and Stein, , When Does Deterrence Succeed and How Do We Know? (Ottawa: Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, forthcoming, 1990)Google Scholar.

²³ These include the U.S. success in deterring a successful Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1954 and Egypt's success in deterring an Israeli attack on Syria in May 1967.

²⁴ See, for example, Schelling, Thomas, The Strategy of Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar. By contrast, George, Alexander L., Hall, David K., and Simons, William E., in The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy: Laos, Cuba, Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971)Google Scholar, assert that whether compellence succeeds depends on how strongly motivated the challenger is, on the nature of the demand, and on the mixture of inducements and threats.

²⁵ We have restricted the designation of cases of compellence to those encounters where compellence is attempted by the “defender.” Extended compellence succeeded in 1913, when Austria-Hungary compelled Serbia to end its occupation of northern Albania (case 16: 1984); in 1970, when the United States and Israel compelled Syria to halt its attack against Jordan (case 49: 1984); and in 1961, when the United States compelled the Soviet Union to restrain its local allies in Laos (case 8: 1988). Direct rather than extended compellence succeeded in 1906, when Britain compelled a Turkish withdrawal from Taba (case 2: 1988), and in 1921, when the United States compelled Panama to surrender territory to Costa Rica (case 3: 1988). Extended compellence failed in 1964–1965, when the United States failed to compel North Vietnam to cease its support of the Viet Cong (case 45: 1984); in 1979, when Libya failed to compel Tanzania to withdraw its forces from Uganda (case 54: 1984); and in 1922, when Britain failed to compel Turkey to withdraw its forces from Chanak (case 4: 1988).

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²⁷ To protect Chinese scholars in difficult political conditions, we are currently withholding the identity of the sources.

²⁸ Comparative analyses of cases of immediate deterrence have examined the impact of the previous encounter on the outcome of deterrence. This is an inappropriately time-bound treatment of relationships that stretch into the past as well as the future. There is no theoretical reason to assume that leaders define their roles in a relationship largely in response to their last encounter.

²⁹ Paul Stern, Robert Axelrod, Robert Jervis, and Roy Radnor examine the impact of perceptions of legitimacy on the outcome of deterrence in their “Conclusions,” in Perspectives on Deterrence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 294–321Google Scholar.

³⁰ George and Smoke (fn. 2), 512–15.

³¹ Case numbers refer to the 1984 collection as listed in Table 1.

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