Strategy, more precisely “grand strategy,” is the way in which all instruments available to a state are integrated together to achieve the political goals set by the state’s political leadership. This is the “enduring nature” of strategy, while its “changing character” is given by the emerging methods and technologies available to successive generations of political leaders. In Cyber Strategy, Brandon Valeriano, Benjamin Jensen, and Ryan C. Maness examine one specific use of these “new” instruments of grand strategy, namely, digital means. More precisely, they investigate how effective such digital means, and the pertinent cyberoperations they are part of, actually are in coercing rivals.

As the authors clarify (pp. 8–11), as an “art,” strategy has various, multifaceted means to manifest itself (and war is but one of them). Indeed, creativity and lateral thinking are at a premium in strategy. In the book, the authors focus on the cyber dimension of strategy, identifying it as a “modern variant of coercive diplomacy” (p. 9). More explicitly, the research question leading their undertaking is “How do states use cyber strategies to influence their rivals?”—which is a bit peculiar as a “research question.” Indeed, Valeriano, Jensen, and Maness do investigate how states employ cyberstrategies (because it is relatively easy and it does achieve some results, especially when coupled with other tools), but they also try to explain why states do so, which is the more traditional format of a research question.

Truth be told, some readers who may expect from the book’s title an in-depth discussion of cyberwarfare (or cybersecurity in general) may be disoriented, which is what happened at first to this reviewer as these issues only remain in the background. Fortunately, this was just a passing moment, and the fact that the book is not on cyberwarfare was indeed a positive discovery. Sharing Martin Libicki’s skepticism (“Why Cyber War Will Not and Should Not Have Its Grand Strategist,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, 8(1), 2014) about the value of writing a “cyber war classic,” I was then encouragingly relieved that this work does not try to live up to such impossible expectations, but that its real value lies in many points elsewhere.

The first such valuable point is a concise but remarkable literature review (pp. 4–7) of cyberspace, which the authors divide into two broad camps, namely, “evolutionary” versus “revolutionary” theorists, and declare themselves as belonging to the former group. To be accurate, one should recognize that the evolutionary faction of cyberspace students (particularly among those with an international relations background) is larger than the revolutionary one. Most scholars (including this reviewer) were convinced in the beginning that cyberspace was indeed revolutionary, but slowly shifted toward a more evolutionary perspective. This change is probably the outcome of more and more governments slowly learning how to exercise more effective control on cyberspace than 20 years ago. Furthermore, cyberspace is so much a part of everybody’s life today that the study of politics can no longer fail to take note of it.

The authors then proceed to identify coercion as a strategy that can be articulated in cyberspace through disruption, espionage, and degradation. They present three hypotheses: Cyberdegradation is more likely to produce concessions; cyberoperations are used as means of limited escalation; and unique combinations of cyberops and other tools are used to achieve concessions from rivals. These hypotheses are subsequently tested in the quite extensive quantitative portion of the book and the case studies.

The three case studies (pp. 110–201)—the United States, Russia, and China—are predictable, not only because they are the world’s great powers but also because they are actively engaged in continuous cyberskirmishes. The picture presented is that of the United States desperately trying to protect itself from China’s espionage and copyright theft (to close its technology gap) and from Russia’s meddling in American and world affairs in a fashion consistent with its old Soviet past. Indeed, the close connections between the Russian government and organized crime are taken right from old KGB’s manuals, so that anything that damages the West is acceptable, no matter who contributes to it. Besides, as Russia has a much weaker economy than its chief rivals, other retaliation options and thus deterrence capabilities are rather limited.

The case studies are well researched and contribute to the book’s overall conclusions (pp. 201–214), which are also neatly summarized in a helpful policy appendix (p. 225): Cyberstrategies are functional to the political warfare of today, though unless accompanied by other means of coercion, they are unlikely to change the positions of rivals (a bit paradoxically, digital means are having a greater “tactical” impact on the battlefield).

These case studies do have a shortcoming, one weighty enough to be noted here: Europe, or more specifically the European Union, is nowhere to be seen in these pages. While this may be understandable in some ways, as the EU is not a sovereign state like the United States, Russia or China, and the complex functioning of the EU baffles most non-Europeans (and many Europeans as well), the EU nevertheless constitutes (along with the United States and Japan) the most advanced group of digital economies. And many EU member states are even more information technology (IT) dependent than the United States itself. This is to say nothing of the fact that the collapse of European infrastructures (transportation, commerce, undersea cables), let alone financial markets, would send more than a few ripples to the United States.

As a nonsovereign state, the EU cannot use digital means to coerce adversaries, but it is at the receiving end of those cyberoperations that are intended to intimidate the EU as a whole, as well as many of its member states. Consequently, as an integrated political entity, the EU is the world’s biggest spender in cyberdefense. At least some of these elements should have been recognized and included by the authors. While the peculiarities of the EU illustrated here may explain the lack of interest and consideration of the EU, ignoring the work done by European scholars in the early phase of the study of cyberspace is much less understandable (e.g., Giampiero Giacomello, National Governments and Control of the Internet: A Digital Challenge, 2005).

To conclude, the contribution of this book is undoubtedly original, well researched, and presented, but, in a sense, it confirms what international relations and strategy students already know and expect: Add another domain, and states will find ways to exploit it to their ends. When ruling the waves offered even more options for states to achieve their objectives, sea power was born; subsequently it was the sky and then space, and today it is cyberspace. And tomorrow, who knows?

Nevertheless, what is really needed today, at least for cyberspace, is a greater number of original studies not on “states” but, rather, on the other relevant actors in cyberspace, namely, companies, organized criminal gangs, and certain technically savvy groups of individuals, as well as how these actors support, foster, or hamper states’ cyberstrategies. This is the distinctiveness and (still) revolutionary field that sets cyberspace apart from other domains.