Cold War-Era Deterrence and International Relations in the Middle East

Commentaries by George H. Quester, Patrick M. Morgan, and Jeffrey S. Lantis, with a reply by Elli Lieberman

Editor’s Preface: Elli Lieberman’s Reconceptualizing Deterrence is a wide-ranging study of deterrence in the Middle East over the past seven decades. For the JCWS, Lieberman’s analysis of how deterrence worked (and did not work) in the Middle East during the Cold War is of particular relevance. We asked three leading experts on conventional and nuclear deterrence—George H. Quester, Patrick M. Morgan, and Jeffrey S. Lantis—to provide short commentaries on this and other aspects of the book. Their commentaries are published here seriatim along with a reply by Lieberman.

Commentary by George H. Quester

Elli Lieberman’s very interesting book continues a debate that raged throughout the Cold War among political scientists and strategic planners about whether deterrence can really work, and about how it actually does work. The debate remains as timely as ever in the post–Cold War world.

Pessimists about the efficacy of deterrence in preventing wars have fallen into two main categories. The first group have stressed the psychological problems of decision-makers that may substantially compromise their rationality. The second group have warned that one or more sides might be ideologically committed to a confrontation (suggesting, for example, that massive civilian casualties might have been shrugged off by Soviet leaders during the Cold War so long as the territories governed by Communist parties could be expanded).

Prominent in the first category of pessimism are Janice Gross Stein and Richard Ned Lebow, who expressed concerns during the Cold War about whether mutual deterrence would indeed persist between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Soviet Union, and who regarded the termination of the Cold War without any use of nuclear weapons after Nagasaki as only a matter of good luck, with enormous risks having been run.¹ Their projection of this pessimism into the future, with nuclear weapons playing less of a role in international confrontations, is that continued deterrence of conventional warfare will be problematic. Much of the thrust of Elli Lieberman’s book is to challenge the Lebow-Stein pessimism about whether conventional deterrence can work.

Prominent in the second category of pessimism is Keith B. Payne, who during the Cold War repeatedly warned that Soviet leaders might not be reliably deterred by “assured destruction” and would be held back from threatening or launching wars only by the prospect that they would actually lose such wars in military terms (i.e., lose control over territory rather than gaining it).² Having emphasized the purportedly stronger ideological zeal and motivation of the Communist side before 1989, Payne has since been prominent in arguing that Islamic terrorist groups and other non-state actors, driven this time perhaps by religious zeal, may also be difficult to deter by the mere threat of retaliatory punishment.

Lieberman cites Payne approvingly as a mentor and research supporter, and he does not really challenge Payne’s reasoning on the nuclear standoff during the Cold War. Lieberman’s book sees the problems of nuclear deterrence credibility as having been relatively easy to solve, given the immense destructive capacity of the weapons. Hence, he mainly addresses the problems of conventional deterrence.

The book’s thorough coverage of the relevant political science literature and strategic literature is followed by two detailed case studies, both involving Israel: the confrontation with Egypt from 1948 to 1973 and the long-standing confrontation with Hezbollah. Lieberman convincingly argues that mutual deterrence, even when nuclear weapons are not emphasized, can indeed work effectively. Rather than being the result of a single all-important crisis in which one side or the other demonstrates its resolve, this sort of deterrence can become entrenched as the result of a gradual learning process that leads to what Lieberman calls “internalized deterrence.”

The findings from these two case studies should...