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Book Reviews: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS March 1993

The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response arguably constitutes the most important study of the alliance since the publication of Robert Osgood's NATO: The Entangling Alliance (1962). Given the paucity of declassified materials from the period, the book makes excellent use of the available primary and secondary sources. And it goes well beyond most works on NATO in terms of its analytical aspirations. The principal contributions of the book are two. First, it brings together in one place discussions of all the major nuclear issues that roiled the alliance during the two decades following the adoption of the strategy of flexible response in 1967. Here can be found detailed analyses of NATO's problematic efforts to develop political guidelines for the employment of nuclear weapons, the unsuccessful United States—sponsored attempts to restructure the alliance's nuclear forces that culminated in the neutron bomb fiasco, the events leading to the two-track Long Range Theater Nuclear Forces decision in 1979, the intraalliance dimension of the subsequent Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) negotiations, and further efforts to modernize NATO's nuclear posture in the 1980s. Although some of these topics have been addressed elsewhere, Daalder's comprehensive approach illuminates the important connections between them. Second, the book presents an innovative analytical framework that helps to impose order on a seemingly unending series of intraalliance squabbles. Daalder argues that disagreements both within and between member countries over the implementation of flexible response stemmed primarily from different assessments of the requirements of extended deterrence. He outlines four distinct extended deterrence strategies—pure, escalatory, conventional, and warfighting, all nevertheless consistent with the basic precepts of flexible response—and then systematically uses these categories to identify and contrast the positions of the participants in each of NATO's nuclear debates. At the same time, Daalder demonstrates how the imperative of maintaining alliance cohesion typically enabled the allies to achieve mutually acceptable political compromises, notwithstanding deep strategic differences. Less successful is the book's attempt to explain why various actors held divergent strategic preferences. Daalder attributes disagreements over the requirements of deterrence primarily to underlying differences in subjective beliefs about (1) the threat, or Soviet intentions, and (2) the possibility of controlling nuclear escalation. He goes on to locate each of the four extended deterrence strategies in a different corner of the two-bytwo matrix defined by assigning dichotomous values to each of the two perceptual dimensions (e.g., high and low probabilities of attack and of escalation). In his subsequent explication of the four strategies, however, Daalder makes little reference to differences in threat perception (pp. 43-63). Instead, the strategies are portrayed as differing almost exclusively in terms of the threshold beyond which escalation is assumed to become uncontrollable. Thus, by the end of the chapter, they are arrayed along a one-dimensional continuum. The limitations of this framework become clearer in the historical chapters. For example, Daalder argues that by the late 1980s, the NATO strategy debate was essentially reduced to a dispute between the proponents of conventional and warfighting deterrence. This characterization of the debate at a time when the threat to Western Europe had reached a postwar low seems puzzling, however, since these two strategies were initially defined as assuming a relatively high probability of attack. Surely, moreover, advocates of pure deterrence could have been expected to offer opinions on what to do about short-range nuclear forces following the INF treaty, since they are described elsewhere as favoring the deployment of such weapons, in particular (p. 48). One also wishes that the analysis of the determinants of strategic preferences had been taken one step further. The sources of perceptions about the nature of the threat and the probability of escalation are left unexplored, as is the possibility of motivated bias. At the same time, the book could have devoted much more attention to assessing the influence of more objective determinants, especially those that might be expected to differentiate national positions. After all, strategic preferences reflect not only assumptions about what deters but also one's estimate of the costs and benefits associated with different strategies. While also necessarily somewhat subjective, such estimates will be strongly shaped by such enduring factors as a country's location, its resources and technological endowments, its historical experience, and the existence of foreign policy interests other than deterrence. Indeed, the importance of such determinants is strongly suggested by the discussion of the four extended deterrence strategies. For example, the principal difference that emerges between pure and conventional deterrence concerns not Soviet intentions (as indicated by the matrix) nor even the probability of escalation but the perceived desirability of escalation and thus the need to take steps to make uncontrolled escalation more or less likely. This perception is strongly influenced in turn by a country's exposure to different forms of attack. Similarly, we might expect countries to prefer strategies that shift the costs to others or that maximize their prestige and influence. Of the various objective factors that could influence a country's choice of strategy, however, Daalder mentions only geography—and then only briefly, in the theoretical section of the book. Reference to these conceptual shortcomings should not obscure the overall conclusion that The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response makes a significant contribution, thanks to its thoughtful analysis, thorough research, and considerable breadth. And Daalder's attempt to put the study of NATO on a more theoretical footing, even if not fully successful, is to be applauded.