No. 19 | Seeking Deterrence in the High North
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While the United States and its NATO allies are carefully navigating their support of Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, the alliance has otherwise asserted itself in an ongoing campaign of deterrence aimed at Moscow. The 2022 U.S. National Defense Strategy (NDS) notes that the Department of Defense “will support robust deterrence of Russian aggression against vital U.S. national interests, including our treaty Allies.” The NDS uses a broad-brush concept of deterrence: “deterrence is strengthened by actions that reduce a competitor’s perception of the benefits of aggression…” including both conventional and nuclear deterrence.
But a broad definition can create its own challenges: as Michael Kofman has noted about “this ethereal substance known as conventional deterrence,” it can be hard to measure: “How do you know when you have it? Lost it?” And when it comes to the Arctic region, where a complex set of conventional and strategic deterrence considerations play out across multiple domains, questions about how successfully the U.S. and its allies are pursuing deterrence are especially acute.
In this nineteenth edition of the Polar Points blog series, Rebecca Pincus, Brittany Keates, and Robert Tolliver analyze the strategic and operational considerations of maritime deterrence in the High North, based on a February 9, 2023 event co-hosted by the Polar Institute and the Center for Maritime Strategy.
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