Review: Pivotal Deterrence
| Published date | 01 June 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200506000237 |
| Date | 01 June 2005 |
| Author | M. D. J. Morgan |
| Subject Matter | Review |
I
Reviews
|
PIVOTAL
DETERRENCE
Third-Party
Statecrafl
and the
Pursuit
of
Peace
Timothy
W. Crawford
Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2003. xii, 279pp. $39-95
doth
(ISBN
o-
8014-4097-1)
During the Cold War, deterrence occupied
pride
of place in the
study
of
international relations. Given the era's nuclear stalemate, this attention
was necessary and unsurprising. The development of game theory offered
political
scientists new tools for studying the balance of terror and
added
quantitative heft to their work on such abstract ideas as throw weight.
Since
1991,
however, the
study
of
deterrence seems to have lost its relevance. Given
the current state of the world, one might question the value of continuing to
study
a concept that seems to have lost its contemporary relevance.
Interestingly, Timothy Crawford, an assistant professor at Boston College,
is
determined to show that deterrence retains its old interest and vitality. Litde
more needs to be said about deterrence (nuclear or otherwise) in a bipolar sys-
tem, so he explores instead a rather more esoteric corner of the subject. He
focuses
on "pivotal deterrence," his name for a third state's attempt to deter two
other states from going to war with one another, and asks why it works in some
cases
but not others. For pivotal deterrence to work, Crawford argues, it is only
necessary
that the adversaries "have bad alignment options" (1). So long as
these states have no friends to
turn
to other
than
the state doing the deterring,
the policy will succeed. All other considerations are irrelevant.
Four
case studies provide the meat of the book. Crawford examines
Bismarck's
successful use of pivotal deterrence in the "eastern crisis" of the
mid-i87os; Edward Grey's failed use of the tactic
towards
Germany and
France
during
the July crisis of
1914;
and finally the American use of the pol-
icy
during
the Greco-Turkish confrontation over Cyprus in the 1960s (suc-
cessful)
and again
during
the Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir in the
same decade (failed). For each crisis, Crawford describes in detail the partic-
ipants' goals and the outcome. In the first two cases, he cites the appropriate
authorities, including
A.J.P.
Taylor, Fritz Fischer, and Hew Strachan. In the
second
two, he deploys a wide array of American archival sources. His
research is careful and strong, but his social scientific drive to isolate variables
lends a mechanical flavour to his analysis. Why bother investigating the sub-
tieties
of
the July crisis, for instance, if they made absolutely no difference to
an outcome that was predetermined by the structure of the system?
I International
Journal
|
Spring
2005
| 607 |
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