Distributed Deterrence: Trusting Our Allies More and Ourselves Less
By Michael Hochberg
October 11, 2023
AP
To date, the formula for the United States’ strategic interaction with most allies has been fairly direct: It revolved around the idea that allies need to defend themselves from attack until US forces can sweep in to their rescue, bringing a professional military with long-range weapons, modern aircraft, deep lockers of munitions, and other advanced capabilities to bear. Where these capabilities were crucial, the U.S. established forward bases, rather than handing the relevant capabilities to allies. This defensive formula was marvelously successful during the Cold War in preventing US allies from perceiving one another as significant threats, while serving as a guarantee of American support should the USSR or its proxies threaten an ally.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, this defensive strategy was allowed to atrophy; the absence of a peer adversary enabled the United States and its allies to imagine that a rules-based international order would dominate without robust western enforcement.
Though reliance on this strategy has persisted, it is fundamentally inapplicable to today’s problems: Small states on the border of large, nuclear-armed autocracies face an ongoing, existential threat from conventional attack. Only the local balance of forces and the assessed probability and cost of victory stop their autocratic neighbors from exploiting local weakness and attacking them. The autocratic, nuclear armed neighbors have the option to limit the response of the United States by threatening to use their nuclear arsenals.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/10/11/distributed_deterrence_trusting_our_allies_more_and_ourselves_less_985267.html
