Aug 10, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min · 12 segments
Nuclear deterrence depends on convincing adversaries that escalation could become dangerously costly. But as the United States extends that protection across Europe and East Asia, can its allies…
Jasen CastilloGuest
Sasha SternHost
Reed SmithHost
Let's start by asking, what is deterrence? Help us build this model from first principles.
So I'm gonna be borrowing from my intellectual grandfather, uh, here, Thomas Schelling, who wrote the classic work, Arms and Influence.
And that was written in the mid-1960s, uh, but the ideas really percolated earlier when Schelling was at RAND, and what he was trying to figure out, like many RAND analysts and policymakers at the time, which was what's the role of nuclear weapons in international politics? And Schelling argued that you need to make a distinction between brute force, that is doing what you want with military power, and coercion, which is making threats.
Because of the great destructive power of nuclear weapons, he emphasized the coercive nature of these instruments.
If you invade West Germany, I will destroy your cities." That's a deterrent threat.
You can make a compellent threat, uh, "Dear Saddam, leave Kuwait or I will bomb your cities." And then there's intrawar deterrence, uh, "Dear Saddam, while I, while I'm liberating your country and bringing you Jeffersonian democracy, please don't use chemical or biological weapons on my forces." Deterrence is about getting into the mind of a target, whether it's the Russians or the Ukrainians or the Iranians, and promising some kind of costly, uh, action if an action that you don't want them to take is taken.
So key to deterrence working is that the adversary needs to believe that it will work.
How do you make an adversary believe it will work without going to war with some regularity?
Well, I think, uh, the way to think about it is that if we, if we didn't live in a world with coercion, and we're talking about international politics as sticks and carrots, and so we're not talking about carrots.
What's the best way to use sticks? Brute force is I just use the stick and I don't care about your cost-benefit analysis, and that probably works if you are surrounded by a world of countries like Belize and Luxembourg.
But if you have to deal with other great powers, then coercion is more, uh, efficient, uh, more effective, more likely to work.
The challenge then is to figure out what the cost-benefit calculation of a target is, and often what you will hear is, uh, "I don't know, uh, what's going on in Iran because they're irrational, and so therefore deterrence won't work." Uh, I think that's lazy.
So in general, what you want to understand about coercion is it, it requires three things, what I call the three Cs, capability, credibility, and communication.
And the communication part is al- als- also very difficult because, uh, you could do it verbally, but often people think talk is cheap, so then you try to do it through your actions, but sometimes those actions are misperceived.
So again, you have the capability, the communication part, you know, what is the threat, and what is the implicit promise, right? When I make a deterrent threat, I'm also promising not to do it unless you trigger me.
And then there's the credibility problem, which is what plagued us during the Cold War.
Let's start by asking, what is deterrence? Help us build this model from first principles.
So I'm gonna be borrowing from my intellectual grandfather, uh, here, Thomas Schelling, who wrote the classic work, Arms and Influence.
And that was written in the mid-1960s, uh, but the ideas really percolated earlier when Schelling was at RAND, and what he was trying to figure out, like many RAND analysts and policymakers at the time, which was what's the role of nuclear weapons in international politics? And Schelling argued that you need to make a distinction between brute force, that is doing what you want with military power, and coercion, which is making threats.
Because of the great destructive power of nuclear weapons, he emphasized the coercive nature of these instruments.
If you invade West Germany, I will destroy your cities." That's a deterrent threat.
You can make a compellent threat, uh, "Dear Saddam, leave Kuwait or I will bomb your cities." And then there's intrawar deterrence, uh, "Dear Saddam, while I, while I'm liberating your country and bringing you Jeffersonian democracy, please don't use chemical or biological weapons on my forces." Deterrence is about getting into the mind of a target, whether it's the Russians or the Ukrainians or the Iranians, and promising some kind of costly, uh, action if an action that you don't want them to take is taken.
So key to deterrence working is that the adversary needs to believe that it will work.
How do you make an adversary believe it will work without going to war with some regularity?
Well, I think, uh, the way to think about it is that if we, if we didn't live in a world with coercion, and we're talking about international politics as sticks and carrots, and so we're not talking about carrots.
What's the best way to use sticks? Brute force is I just use the stick and I don't care about your cost-benefit analysis, and that probably works if you are surrounded by a world of countries like Belize and Luxembourg.
But if you have to deal with other great powers, then coercion is more, uh, efficient, uh, more effective, more likely to work.
The challenge then is to figure out what the cost-benefit calculation of a target is, and often what you will hear is, uh, "I don't know, uh, what's going on in Iran because they're irrational, and so therefore deterrence won't work." Uh, I think that's lazy.
So in general, what you want to understand about coercion is it, it requires three things, what I call the three Cs, capability, credibility, and communication.
And the communication part is al- als- also very difficult because, uh, you could do it verbally, but often people think talk is cheap, so then you try to do it through your actions, but sometimes those actions are misperceived.
So again, you have the capability, the communication part, you know, what is the threat, and what is the implicit promise, right? When I make a deterrent threat, I'm also promising not to do it unless you trigger me.
And then there's the credibility problem, which is what plagued us during the Cold War.
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