Reflecting on One Year of War: Assessing the West’s “Failure” to Deter​

By Dr. Melanie Sisson

The failure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine has generated much commentary and analysis, some for purposes of making political hay and others, more usefully, to explore whether the details of the strategy were well- or poorly-conceived. Those interested in evaluating the strategy on its merits have argued that it had two important shortcomings: President Biden’s early elimination of the threat of a direct U.S. military response; and poor communication about just how costly defiance would be. The suggestion is that the outcome would have been different if the alliance had allowed Putin to worry about the possibility of a U.S. or NATO military response, and if leaders had conveyed to him in advance both the magnitude of the aid they have since provided to Ukraine and the severity of the economic measures – sanctions, bans on banks, a cap on Russian oil prices, and more – they have since imposed.

These criticisms are counterfactual and so cannot be confirmed or denied. More important than the claims themselves, however, is that they highlight two pathologies in how the national security community thinks and talks about deterrence. The first is the propensity to overweight the value of the strategy’s outcome relative to the risks it accepts in its design. The second is the tendency to conflate a strategy designed to deter with a strategy designed to punish. When these bad habits of thought are removed from assessment of NATO’s strategy, the approach has far more to recommend it than not.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst

Deterrence is a failure-prone enterprise. No matter how well-informed and well-designed, no matter how credible the threat or how resolved the threatener, strategies of deterrence never directly cause failure or success. This is because strategies of deterrence seek to convince the other actor not to behave in a particular way, but do not actually preclude or prevent them from doing so. This means that even the most tightly calibrated and cleanly implemented strategy can increase the likelihood of success, but not guarantee it.

This does not give policymakers permission to be fatalistic or relieve them of any responsibility for the quality of the strategy they construct. To the contrary, it means their work is double: first, to use all information available to design a strategy that there is reason to believe will increase the likelihood of deterrent success and; second, to design that strategy mindful of how it might fail, and of what that failure will mean for the United States.

If a strategy of deterrence is a military strategy – if it relies upon the threat of direct U.S. military involvement, which usually is communicated by placing U.S. forces at risk as a “tripwire” – then failure will engage the United States in conflict. The deterrent threat, in other words, is war with the United States. Policymakers implementing a military strategy of deterrence must therefore be convinced that the interests at stake are so vital that they are worth accepting all the costs that war imposes – in territory, property, economic productivity, and servicemember and civilian lives.

The logic is the same but the risks are different for a strategy of deterrence that doesn’t threaten war but that instead promises punishment through the integrated use of all tools of national power. Such punishment can include selective use of military force – including, as is the case in Ukraine, aid and assistance that affects the costs and potentially the result of aggression – along with reductions in the quantity and quality of bilateral diplomatic exchanges, public reprimand in international organizations, and the economic costs of sanctions and other restrictions on access to goods, services, and capital.

When seeking to deter Putin from aggression in Ukraine, the Biden team and its allied counterparts concluded that the interests at stake made it necessary to threaten punishment, but not necessary to fight a war if deterrence failed. It is impossible to know whether or how depriving Putin of that information would have shaped his decision – it could be that the possibility of a U.S. or allied military response would have deterred him, it also could be that it would have convinced him to begin his campaign with a massive incursion rather than with a “special military operation,” and it also could be that it wouldn’t have changed anything at all. Whatever one’s preferred counterfactual, the alliance is to be credited for being clear about the extent of its own cost tolerance and designing its strategy consistent with those limitations.

When deterrence is over, it’s over

When a strategy of deterrence fails, that strategy is complete and no longer operative. Failure marks the transition out of deterrence and into a different phase of interaction, one that requires its own strategy designed to achieve its own objectives.

When a military strategy of deterrence fails, the post-deterrence strategy is a wartime strategy and its objective is to impose the desired U.S. outcome through the coordinated use of military force. When a strategy of deterrence by punishment fails, by contrast, there is no default set of objectives or strategy through which to pursue them.

Whatever the objectives, however, the threatener is under no obligation to do only what was threatened in the deterrence strategy. The punishments selected for inclusion in the strategy of deterrence ostensibly were there because they were believed to engender restraint by holding at risk the interests, values, and motives of the targeted actor. If the threat of those costs failed to be convincing, then whether or not to proceed with imposing them is properly understood to be a matter of alignment not with the strategy to deter, but rather with the objectives of the strategy to punish.

Just as with the potential for a military response, the threat of more and different costs may or may not have succeeded in deterring Putin. What is of greater consequence now is to understand the relationship between the costs being levied on Russia and the objectives of NATO’s punishment strategy. Pressing the alliance to clarify what its objectives are – to convince Putin to abandon the war? to permanently excise Russia from Western economies? to collapse the Russian economy or weaken it to a certain degree or for a certain period of time? – and to explain how the punitive policies in place achieve them is a far more productive exercise than is retroactively criticizing their absence in the deterrence phase.

The reflex to assess a strategy of deterrence against its success or failure is understandable, but it is an inclination that should be resisted. The quality of a strategy of deterrence is reflected less in the choice ultimately made by the other actor, and more in the strategy’s success in being as persuasive as possible while also defending against the most severe consequences in the event persuasion fails. Much depends upon the alliance’s ability to strike that balance in the enormously consequential tasks that remain: deterring Putin from attacking a NATO member and from initiating a nuclear detonation of any kind.

Melanie W. Sisson is a fellow in the Foreign Policy program’s Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology where she researches the use of the armed forces in international politics, U.S. national security strategy, and military applications of emerging technologies.

The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.