The concept of deterrence—the effort to make an adversary's costs and risks of going to war greater than the political incentives pushing in that direction—was the centerpiece of academic national security studies and the core policy concern of Western governments throughout much of the Cold War. Today, in the post-9/11 world, deterrence has taken a back seat to a different set of strategic concepts: preemption and prevention. Both involve destroying an enemy's capabilities before he can harm you, the former when the threat is imminent, the latter when it is potential (pp. 85–89). In his timely and useful book, Lawrence Freedman offers a compelling account of the decline of deterrence and creatively seeks to revitalize it as a subject of scholarly inquiry and as a viable policy in the post-9/11 world.

The precipitous decline of deterrence is something of a puzzle inasmuch as its track record from 1945 through 1991 was pretty good. The aim of the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization during the long struggle with the Warsaw Pact was simply to pose enough of a threat—using a combination of conventional and nuclear forces—to dissuade the Soviet Union and its allies from launching World War III. Despite fears on the Left that this posture might provoke accidental war and complaints from the Right that conventional deterrence by denial or nuclear deterrence by punishment was not sufficient to keep the Red hoards at bay, NATO's deterrent posture seems in retrospect to have been fully adequate.

Given this, it is surprising that deterrence would have emerged from the Cold War in such ill repute. Freedman's book helps us understand this puzzle. In addition to the persistent reservations about deterrence among many Cold War scholars and policymakers, Freedman highlights important post–Cold War developments that have further undermined deterrence. Essentially, the Bush administration and many analysts outside of government have concluded that new threats from nonstate actors or “rogue states” cannot be dealt with in the old deterrence framework, the former because they have “no return address” against which we can retaliate and the latter because they do not engage in a rational calculation of the costs and benefits of their actions.

These twin concerns came together in a “perfect storm” between August 2002 and March 2003 during the debate over the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The war party argued, despite compelling counterarguments from deterrence proponents like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (“An Unnecessary War,” Foreign Policy 134 [January/February 2003]: 51–60), that Saddam Hussein was not a leader who engaged in rational calculation (Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, 2002), and that the danger of his transferring weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda made deterrence infeasible and preemption the only option.

It is now clear that these concerns were overblown. Morover, Freedman lays out the real diplomatic and military costs of this transition from deterrence to preemption and prevention, and makes it clear that he would like to find some way to make deterrence relevant again. But it is not clear that his efforts to reformulate deterrence will have the desired effect. He argues that it is necessary to supplement our traditional interest-based notion of deterrence (the more we can threaten things of value to an adversary, the greater our ability to deter him) with a norms-based conception (the more our adversary shares our same sense of the limits of appropriate behavior, the less likely he is to transgress them) (pp. 4–5). But there are conceptual and practical difficulties with this approach to revamping deterrence for the post–Cold War international environment.

The theoretical problem with this approach is that it shifts attention away from the traditional focus of deterrence—affecting an adversary's military calculations—and moves us into the completely different realm of changing the political processes within other states. It is not clear how thinking about this as “deterrence” advances our understanding of the more general process of influencing other states' behavior.

As a practical matter, Freedman's approach would produce similar results to the Bush administration's policies. If a high level of shared understandings among states about the acceptable bounds of their behavior is essential to make deterrence work, then it is not too much of a stretch to conclude that the great powers ought to take steps to impose such common understandings. The most reliable way of doing so is for all states to have the same domestic political systems. Many scholars and policymakers have come to believe that one particular type of domestic regime—democracy—is uniquely suited to externalizing domestic norms of cooperation into the international system. Hence, the outcome of this approach may not be a return to a world of stable deterrence.

Indeed, the Bush administration clearly shares many of these reservations about a strictly interest-based conception of deterrence, and this surely explains why the administration felt it could not continue to rely upon deterrence to contain Saddam Hussein. Beyond that, the administration's commitment to the expansion of democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world is also justified in terms of making the United States secure precisely through the creation of a world based not on mutual deterrence, but rather on shared norms of behavior from unilateral efforts to spread democracy. Ironically, in order to achieve this world of shared norms, the United States is willing to unilaterally wage preemptive and preventive wars to establish it.

In sum, Freedman has given us a helpful diagnosis of the demise of deterrence since the end of the Cold War and its replacement by preemption. Unfortunately, his efforts to resuscitate it by combining interests and norms in a post–Cold War formulation of deterrence may not lead us away from the world of preemption and prevention that he quite rightly deplores.