The terms “deterrence” and “coercive diplomacy” have figured prominently in debates over how the West should respond to the ongoing crisis over a potential Russian incursion into Ukraine. Much of the focus of those debates, however, has been narrow and episodic—how to prevent a Russian attack, for instance, or get Moscow to pull back its forces from the Russian-Ukraine border.
While both concepts are necessary to understand the tensions currently on display in Europe between Russia, Ukraine, the U.S. and NATO, those tensions must be seen through a broader and more holistic lens, because the current crisis is the result not of a discrete and static issue, but rather of interlocking, multisided and dynamic factors at play.
Nevertheless, the tools necessary to unravel those factors are relatively simple. The Rabbi Hillel, when asked to summarize the Torah while standing on one foot, replied, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary.” Similarly, as I tell my students at the Naval War College and at Harvard Extension, the fundamental principles of national security can be summed up as “deterrence and compellence.” Everything else is commentary.
Deterrence is passive in its orientation. It is intended to prevent an action not yet undertaken from being initiated, either by showing that the action itself is doomed to failure or that the costs resulting from it will be significantly greater than any benefit that might be obtained. Compellence is trickier. It involves getting the other party to do something—either to initiate an action that they might otherwise not choose to, or change course on an action they have already initiated. This can be done through threats, inducements or a combination of the two.
In short, every country in the world, regardless of its political system or its values, seeks to deter other countries from taking actions that it views as injurious to its national interests, while striving to obtain leverage that will compel other countries to be receptive to its requests. At the same time, to protect its own independence and freedom of action, it will seek to minimize the abilities of others to utilize deterrence and compellence against it. Some countries can generate sufficient deterrent and compellent power from their own resources, while others may need to band together in a coalition or seek a protective alliance with a stronger partner. Some countries have natural advantages that enhance their position, such as mountainous terrain or territorial depth, while others are more exposed.
Deterrence rests, in the classic formulation of Thomas Schelling, on the three C’s: a state must have the capabilities to deter another state, must communicate the existence of those capabilities, and must demonstrate the commitment to use those capabilities in the event that previously communicated “red lines” are crossed. Compellence, on the other hand, requires having sufficient resources necessary for “persuasion”—a military force capable of imposing costs, for instance, or the economic resources to buy acquiescence. In both cases, political leaders must calculate what they are willing to spend and risk in line with the objectives that they feel are most vital and important for their country’s interests or, at times, its survival. Successful applications of deterrence and compellence can occur when, as Walter Lippman famously pointed out, the strategic ends are balanced with the means that will be used to achieve them.
The Russia-Ukraine crisis is part of a larger bargaining process, the outcome of which will see one side’s deterrence and compellence power increase and the other’s decline.
Schelling viewed deterrence and compellence, including the threat of or actual use of force, in the context of bargaining, with the zone of negotiations located between what is desirable—a state’s maximalist objectives—and what is essential, or its minimal-level satisfactory outcome. In some cases, bargaining produces compromises that fall somewhere in this zone. In other cases, however, one party feels it can achieve its maximalist objectives without having to compromise, because it is confident it can impose its will on the other party at an acceptable level of risk and cost.
That brings us to the current standoff between Russia, Ukraine and the West. On its surface, the dispute seems almost absurd. On one hand, Russia does not want to see Ukraine admitted to NATO. On the other, despite acknowledging at various times over the past several months that NATO membership for Ukraine is not a realistic near-term possibility, NATO leaders have refused to formally close the door to Ukraine’s membership, to avoid conceding the principle that every European country is entitled to choose its own security arrangements.
On closer examination, however, the dispute fits my Hillel-inspired definition of national security objectives, but in a complex, multisided configuration.
The Russian view is that the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a comparable collapse of Moscow’s deterrent and compellent power, particularly in the military sphere. With Russia’s freedom of action at a nadir, neighboring post-Soviet and Eastern Bloc states increased their ability to push back against Russian power, in part by joining alliances and coalitions—the European Union and NATO—with more powerful actors. The EU and NATO, in turn, were willing to absorb these countries precisely because the collapse of Russian power made it harder for Moscow to deter expansion or to impose costs.
In 2008 and then again in 2014, however, Russia signaled that it would no longer passively accept this expansion, using limited military engagements against Georgia and Ukraine, respectively, to raise the costs of either country fully integrating into the Euro-Atlantic community beyond an acceptable level. Today, Russia is once again engaging in coercive diplomacy to compel Kyiv—and its Western partners—to accept a compromise in which Ukraine remains outside the Western community.
For its part, Ukraine, under the successive administrations of former President Petro Poroshenko and current President Volodymyr Zelensky, has sought closer alignment with the West to offset Russia’s military advantages. In parallel, as a further deterrent against potential Russian aggression, Kyiv has tried to preserve its importance as a key transit country for Russian natural gas to reach European markets. The sale of Russian energy to European customers remains an important source of income for the Russian state, and to the extent that Moscow would hope to preserve that revenue stream, it might shy away from damaging the pipeline infrastructure with a military invasion. Notably, its military interventions in Ukraine in 2014-2015, particularly in the southeastern Donbass region, took place at a significant distance from the energy transit infrastructure that connects Russia to Europe.
To reinforce this energy deterrent against Russia, Ukraine wants its European partners to shut down various energy transit projects that bypass Ukrainian territory, and Kyiv has solicited Washington’s support to that end. For their part, however, Germany, Hungary and Turkey, among others, have been seeking to delink their own energy security from the Ukrainian dispute. This was the logic behind both the Nord Stream pipeline in Germany and the Turk Stream pipeline in Turkey, which, by providing direct access to Russian energy, liberate both countries from accommodating Ukrainian concerns. The U.S., through legislation passed by Congress, has targeted both projects, without managing to prevent their construction and utilization. The current debate over the Nord Stream II pipeline, which has been completed but not yet brought online, is driven by the same dynamics.
So, the Russian approach combines military threats to Ukraine with an energy policy designed to delink European energy supplies from Ukrainian territorial security. In turn, Ukraine is seeking military protection from the West, while attempting to keep European energy supplies intimately connected to its territorial security.
A further complicating factor is that we often think of deterrence as being reasonably stable and enduring over decades—take the U.S.-Soviet Cold War standoff as an example. But in the current crisis in Europe, deterrence is anything but stable. It has shifted over time and can continue to do so. This, too, is shaping the strategic choices of all the parties involved.
Despite the impetuousness of some in the Ukrainian national security establishment, Ukrainians seem to understand the importance of the long game. Russia has advantages now, but those advantages are unlikely to last over time. Western and NATO assistance has dramatically transformed the Ukrainian military over the past seven years and will continue to do so. The Russian economy faces structural problems that Western sanctions might amplify. In other words, if Russia can be deterred from attacking today, and if the West does not accept a settlement imposed on Ukraine by Moscow, Kyiv might be in a position by the end of the decade to exercise a greater degree of compellence against Russia. That could mean, for instance, regaining lost territory in Donbass without accepting any federalization arrangement as envisioned in the Minsk-2 accords, as well as proceeding with its trajectory for NATO and EU membership. In other words, deterring Moscow in the short term could create conditions for the erosion of Russian compellent capabilities in the long term.
At the same time, Russia may decide that it must up the stakes now—by using its current military advantages to destroy or retard Ukraine’s military advances, while using the current energy crisis in Europe to convince European states that defending the principle of Ukraine’s right to membership in Euro-Atlantic institutions is not worth the cost of major short-term energy disruptions, with all the economic implications they would entail.
Moreover, with the U.S. focused on strategic competition with China and the world's center of economic and strategic gravity continuing to shift to the Indo-Pacific region, the Biden administration or its successor in Washington might over time become more amenable to a compromise over Ukraine—for instance, by accepting a belt of neutral states between the Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian worlds. Thus, a Russian strategy of compellence today, via coercive military and economic diplomacy, could create conditions where Russia feels less deterred by the West down the road.
Much of the current discussion of the crisis focuses on Russian troop movements, the status of Western sanctions and the state of the certification process for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. But these issues are all part of a larger bargaining process, the outcome of which will see one side’s deterrence and compellence power increase and the other’s decline.
In these conditions, strategic ambiguity—in which Schelling’s three C’s are blurred, rather than clearly apparent—loses its utility. Yet that is just what we see today in the mismatches on display—in Moscow, Kyiv, Washington, Berlin, Paris, London and elsewhere—between the capabilities each player has at its disposal, how each is communicating its red lines, and whether each truly believes in the other players’ commitment to act.
All of this creates a worrying situation in which the chances of miscalculation increase exponentially. Unfortunately, while everyone agrees on the relative simplicity of these fundamental concepts of national security in theory, finding a way to have them guide complex interactions on the ground is much more difficult.
Nikolas K. Gvosdev is a professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College. He is also the editor of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s journal Orbis.