Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

III. Psychological Challenges to Deterrence

A. Deterrence

The dominant paradigm. Whereas neorealism has been the most influential theory in the academic study of world politics, deterrence has been the most influential theory among the policy elites responsible for statecraft in the second half of the twentieth century (Achen & Snidal, 1989; Jervis, 1978). And, just as it is misleading to place neorealism in conceptual opposition to psychology, it is misleading to do so for deterrence as well. Like neorealism, deterrence theory is best viewed as a particular kind of psychological theory--one that places a premium on conceptual parsimony and that emphasizes the amoral rationality of foreign policy actors. Although deterrence theory comes in many forms (from thoughtful prose to game theoretic models), there are certain recurring themes that justify the common label:

1) the world is a dangerous place. One is confronted by a power-maximizing rational opponent who will capitalize on every opportunity to expand its influence at one's expense. Whenever the option to attack becomes sufficiently attractive (i.e., has greater expected utility than other available options), the likelihood of attack rises to an unacceptably high level;

2) to deter aggression, one should issue retaliatory threats that lead one's opponent to conclude that the expected utility of aggression is lower than the expected utility of the status quo and its projected value into the foreseeable future;

3) to succeed, deterrent threats must be sufficiently potent and credible to overcome an adversary's motivation to attack. Potential aggressors must believe that the defender possesses the resolve and capability to implement the threat. Deterrence will fail if either of these conditions is not met.

Although most deterrence theorists accepted these principles or variants of these principles in the abstract (Kaufman, 1956; Kissinger, 1957; Wohlstetter, 1958), they often disagreed vigorously over how to operationalize them in policy, especially in a nuclear-armed world in which, for the first time in history, the “loser” in war retained the capacity to destroy the “winner”. Consider a classic debate within the deterrence camp during the Cold War. Some theorists argued that, in a MAD world (of mutually assured destruction), nuclear weapons could only deter attacks on one's own territory (Type I or basic deterrence); others argued that nuclear threats could also deter attacks on allies (Type II or extended deterrence) (Kahn, 1965). For the former camp, nuclear threats were of limited utilitybecause , in McNamara’s words, “one cannot fashion a credible deterrent from an incredible action” (quoted in Freedman, 1981, p. 298). Why would a sane American leadership value the political independence of its allies over its own physical survival? This argument highlighted the need for a massive strengthening of conventional deterrence.

The NATO nations balked, however, at matching what they perceived to be massive Soviet spending on conventional forces (Thies, 1991). Deterrence theorists were then assigned the task of infusing credibility into the seemingly suicidal threat of nuclear retaliation. One strategy was the rationality of irrationality. Nuclear threats may gain credibility if one can convince one's opponent that one is crazy enough to follow through on them (Schelling, 1966; Mandel, 1987). Used judiciously, "irrational" threats are effective because "a bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat taken as a bluff" (Kissinger, quoted in Gaddis, 1982, p. 300). One danger is, of course, that if the threatener does not appear crazy enough, the bluff will be called. The strategy can also be dangerous by working too well. For example, during the border skirmishes of the late 1960s, Soviet leaders concluded that Mao was so irrational that he might use nuclear weapons. To preclude this possibility, the Soviets seriously considered a pre-emptive attack against Chinese nuclear facilities (Whiting, 1991).

A second strategy--the threat that leaves something to chance--emphasizes the uncertainties inherent in military confrontations (the fog of war). Even if both sides want to limit a conflict, once hostilities begin, the conflict can escalate far beyond the worst case expectations of the antagonists. Threats that appear incredible become plausible when the two sides find themselves on the slippery slope of military engagements in which neither side completely controls the escalation process (Schelling, 1966). From this perspective, American forces in Europe did not need to be sufficient to halt a Soviet invasion; they functioned as a tripwire that raised the likelihood of eventual American nuclear involvement to an unacceptable level. The essence of this strategy is that potential aggressors will be induced to behave cautiously by the non-zero probability that conflicts, once initiated, will lead to mutual assured destruction (MAD).

Other deterrence theorists denounced the MAD strategy as morally and intellectually bankrupt. They advocated a war-fighting or "countervailing" strategy. Even defensive states need to develop conventional and nuclear capabilities that will give them a wide array of options when confronted by a challenger. The stated goal was to "prevail" in war with any potential aggressor at any step in the ladder of escalation (Kahn, 1965). The reasoning was straightforward. If the aggressors know they have nothing to gain by initiating a conflict or moving up the ladder of escalation, they will refrain from doing so (see Jervis, 1984, for a critique of this strategy).

In brief, MAD theorists emphasized the existence of secure second-strike forces as the best guarantee of peace in a world with two or more nuclear powers. The goal was to prevent war by stressing the risk of mutual annihilation. By contrast, war-fighting theorists were more concerned with what happens should deterrence fail. When challenged, states need the capability to respond in a controlled manner to contain the damage and yet force opponents to back down (Gray and Payne, 1980).

Critics of deterrence theory and its diverse doctrinal offshoots have raised numerous objections. George and Smoke (1974) noted that deterrence theory lacks motivational diagnostics (cf. Herrmann, 1988; Jervis, 1979; Mercer, 1996). It assumes an expansionist adversary, takes conflict for granted, and underestimates the variety of interpretations that can be placed on supposedly unambiguous, reputation-building acts. It also says little about: (1) how risk-seeking oraverse one's opponent might be in sizing up options (joining deterrence theory to prospect theory can be helpful here--Huth and Russett, 1993); (2) how one might change an opponent's motives and transform a competitive into a cooperative relationship (cf. Lindskold 1978). Critics have also complained about the emphasis of deterrence theory on threats and its concomitant neglect of the role that rewards, concessions and integrative problem-solving can play in mitigating conflicts (Jervis, 1979). Threats are not only sometimes ineffective; they sometimes backfire (Lebow, 1981). Finally, critics have objected to the notion that decision-makers in highly stressful crises are as coolly rational as many deterrence theorists, especially the "war fighters", imply (Jervis, Lebow, & Stein, 1985; Holsti, 1989). From the critics’ perspective, it is necessary to replace a narrow focus on deterrence with a broader focus on international influence by building psychological and political moderators into our analysis of when, where, and how threats -- alone or in combination with other tactics -- work.

B. Testing, Clarifying and Qualifying Deterrence

Theory. Any serious evaluation of deterrence theory must grapple with the methodological problems of determining whether deterrence worked or failed from the historical record. To be sure, dramatic failures of deterrence as policy are easy to identify. Country x wanted to stop country y from attacking it or a third country, but failed to do so. The historical data are, however, sufficiently ambiguous to allow seemingly endless arguments on whether individual cases also represent failures of deterrence theory (see Orme, 1987; Lebow & Stein, 1987). An equally imposing obstacle is presented by cases of deterrence success; no one knows how to identify them (George and Smoke, 1974; Achen and Snidal, 1989). When crises do not occur, is it due to the credibility of threats (successes for deterrence theory) or to the fact that the other states never intended to attack? Causal inference requires assumptions about what would have happened in the missing counterfactual cells in the contingency table in which the defender issued no threats.

These issues are not just of academic interest. The events that transpired between 1945 and 1991 in American-Soviet relations underscore both the logical problems in determining who is right and the magnitude of the political stakes in such debates. Although very few predicted when, how, and why the Cold War would come to an end (Gaddis, 1993), neither conservative deterrence theorists nor their liberal conflict spiral opponents were at a loss for retrospective explanations. Conservative observers argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicated the policies of containment and deterrence that the United States pursued, in one form or another, since World War II. Partisans of the Reagan administration argued, more specifically, that the new Soviet thinking was a direct response to the hard-line initiatives of the 1980s and to the technological threat posed by the Strategic Defense Initiative. By contrast, liberal critics of deterrence argued that the policies of the 1980s (and, for many, earlier policies as well) were a massive exercise in overkill, with much blood spilled in unnecessary Third World wars and much treasure wasted in defense expenditures. The Cold War ended as a result of the internal failures of communist societies. If anything, Gorbachev and his policies emerged despite, not because of, the Reagan administration (Lebow and Stein, 1994).

Perhaps historians will someday adjudicate this dispute--although the lack of success on the abundantly documented origins of World War I should constrain optimism here. What is most remarkable for current purposes is how easily the disputants could have explained the opposite outcome. If the Soviet Union had moved in a neo-Stalinist direction in the mid-1980s (massive internal repression and confrontational policies abroad), conservative deterrence theorists could have argued and were indeed prepared to argue that the adversary had merely revealed its true nature (Pipes, 1986), and liberal spiral theorists could have argued and were indeed prepared to argue that "hard-liners beget hard-liners" in the escalatory dynamic (White, 1984). In short, we find ourselves in an epistemological quagmire--an example of what Einhorn and Hogarth (1981) aptly termed an "outcome-irrelevant learning situation."

Assessing the efficacy of deterrence is obviously deeply problematic (indeed, the game theorist Barry Weingast (1996) has shown that if deterrence does indeed work, then there will be many contexts in which the correlation between implementing deterrence and war or peace will be zero). Suffice it to say here that, contrary to White (1984), there is no evidentiary warrant for concluding that deterrence theory is wrong in general or even most of the time. The literature does, however, highlight important gaps in deterrence theory. From a social psychological standpoint, deterrence is but one of many instruments of social influence and the analytic task is to clarify the conditions under which these diverse strategies elicit desired responses from other states (George and Smoke, 1974, 1989; Jervis, Lebow, & Stein, 1985). Excellent reviews of work on bargaining and negotiation exist elsewhere (Druckman and Hopman, 1990; Pruitt, Handbook Chapter). This chapter offers a condensed summary of research that bears most directly on international influence, with special attention to hypotheses that have passed multi-method tests.

C. Influence Strategies

(1) Pure threat strategies. Threats sometimes work (McClintock et al., 1987; Patchen, 1987). Laboratory studies of bargaining have shown, for example, that: (a) threats of defection can lead to beneficial joint outcomes when interests do not conflict (Stech et al., 1984); (b) the mere possession of threat capabilities can reduce defection and increase mutual outcomes in games that prevent communication between the parties (Smith and Anderson, 1975). The evidence is, however, mixed. Other studies have found that threats impede cooperation and lower joint outcomes (Deutsch and Krauss, 1960; Kelley, 1965). Threats have also interfered with cooperation when interests were in conflict (Friedland, 1976) and when communication between bargainers was possible (Smith and Anderson, 1975). Brehm's (1972) reactance theory suggests that threats may backfire by provoking counter-efforts to assert one's freedom to do what was forbidden.

Evidence on international conflict is equally mixed. Although threats may be essential against some opponents, this strategy is counterproductive when directed at nations with limited goals (Kaplowitz, 1984). Several studies of interstate disputes have discovered that even though threats occasionally yield diplomatic victories, they can also lead to unwanted escalation of severe crises (Leng, 1988; Leng and Wheeler, 1979; Leng and Gochman, 1982). Case studies of American foreign policy have drawn a similar conclusion. A strategy of coercive diplomacy emphasizing military threats is appropriate only when restrictive preconditions are met; for example, when the coercing power is perceived to be more motivated than the target of coercion to achieve its objectives, when adequate domestic support can be generated for the policy, when there are usable military options, and when the opponent fears escalation more than the consequences of appearing to back down (George et al., 1971).

(2) Positive inducements. Since Munich gave appeasement a bad name, international relations scholars have largely neglected the role of positive inducements in foreign affairs (for exceptions, see Baldwin, 1971; Milburn and Christie, 1989). The primary advocates of positive inducements have been conflict-spiral theorists who emphasize the debilitating consequences of action-reaction cycles in international conflict (Deutsch, 1983; White, 1984). Although these theorists stress conciliatory gestures, few advocate total unilateral disarmament. And, for good reason: experimental evidence indicates in mixed-motive games, such as Prisoner's Dilemma, unconditional cooperators are ruthlessly exploited (e.g., Stech et al., 1984). In their study of international disputes, Leng and Wheeler (1979) found that nations adopting an appeasement strategy manage to avoid war but almost always suffered a diplomatic defeat. Positive inducements such as financial rewards for compliance can also be very expensive if the other side complies (particularly if it quickly becomes satiated and ups its demands for compensation), and they can foster unwanted dependency and sense of entitlement (Leng, 1993). Finally, just as deterrence theorists face difficulties in operationalizing threats, so reward theorists encounter problems in operationalizing positive inducements, which may be perceived as overbearing, presumptuous, manipulative, or insultingly small or large (Milburn and Christie, 1989).

The picture is not, however, uniformly bleak. Komorita (1973), for example, showed that unilateral conciliatory acts by one party in experimental bargaining games resulted in increased communication, perceptions of cooperative intent, and mutually beneficial outcomes. In reviewing studies of America-Soviet arms control negotiations, Druckman and Hopmann (1989) found that concessions by one side were generally met by counter-concessions by the opponent, whereas retractions provoked counter-retractions.

For the most part, conflict-spiral theorists have advocated combining conciliatory policy initiatives with adequate military strength and nonprovocative threats. The next section turns to these "mixed" strategies.

(3) Mixed-influence strategies. Spurred by Robert Axelrod's (1984) "the evolution of cooperation," a great deal of attention has been directed to firm-but-fair approaches to resolving conflict. This chapter focuses on Axelrod's (1984) tit-for-tat strategy (TFT), Osgood's (1961) strategy of "graduated and reciprocated initiatives in tension reduction" (GRIT) and the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of detente (George, 1983).

(I) Tit-for-tat. TFT is straightforward. One begins by cooperating and thereafter simply repeats one's opponent's previous move. Considerable research demonstrates that TFT is as effective as it is simple. In Axelrod's (1984) round robin PD computer tournaments in which expert-nominated strategies were pitted against one another, TFT--the simplest entrant--earned the highest average number of points. Axelrod (1984) argued that TFT works because it is nice (never defects first), perceptive (quickly discerns the other's intent), clear (easy to recognize), provocable (quickly retaliates), forgiving (willing to abandon defection immediately after the other side's first cooperative act), and patient (willing to persevere).

Although numerous experiments (Pilisuk & Skolnick, 1968), case studies (Snyder & Diesing, 1977) and event-analytic studies (Leng, 1993) have shown TFT-like strategies to be more effective than either pure threat or appeasement strategies in averting both war and diplomatic defeat, an equally sizable body of work has highlighted serious drawbacks to TFT in the international arena:

(1) Two parties can easily get caught up in a never-ending series of mutual defections. One solution is to be less provocable and more forgiving: to respond to defection with a smaller defection or to refrain altogether from retaliating to the first defection and respond in kind only to the second defection. These kinder, gentler variants of TFT outperform simple TFT in computer simulations that permit even low levels of “noise” in which players occasionally misclassify cooperation as defection and defection as cooperation (Bendor, Kramer, & Stout, 1991; Downs, 1991; Molander, 1985; Signorini, 1996). But the price of preventing conflict spirals from escalating out of control may be steep in environments in which predatory powers stand ready to exploit signs of weakness or generosity. A possible corrective here is to couple a slow-to-retaliate rule with a slow-to-forgive rule, thereby perhaps simultaneously averting spirals and deterring opportunists (Pruitt, Handbook Chapter).

(2) TFT applies primarily to Prisoner's Dilemma games in which both sides prefer mutual cooperation to mutual defection. Many conflicts, however, may best be described as games of "Deadlock" in which at least one party prefers unilateral defection or mutual defection to cooperation (Oye, 1985). In such games, TFT will not induce an opponent to cooperate. In arms races, for example, one or both nations might prefer a mutual build-up to an arms control treaty, especially if trust is low or if there is an opportunity to benefit from the race (a charge often leveled at the "military-industrial complexes" within major powers that are an important part of two-level games).

(3) TFT implies perfect perception and control--the ability to identify cooperation and defection correctly and to respond to an opponent in ways that will not be misconstrued. In PD games, moves are unambiguous and this condition can be satisfied; in international politics, policy makers must interpret actions that are ambiguous and, therefore, often controversial. Ambiguity may arise, in part, because there are both temptations and opportunities for nations to disguise defection as cooperation (e.g., by secretly developing chemical weapons or by surreptitiously deploying new missiles or by turning a blind eye to patent pirates). Ambiguity may also arise because nations are complex stimuli that lend themselves to multiple conflicting interpretations. It is often difficult to say whether a given foreign policy act merits a direct dispositional attribution or should be written off as domestic political posturing in a two-level game or perhaps even as a “normal accident” of complex institutional functioning. Arguments of this sort are common place in foreign policy. In the mid 1980's, American observers were deeply divided over the significance of the unilateral suspension of nuclear testing by the Soviet Union. Some treated it as sincere, others dismissed it as a propaganda ploy, and still others took it as a sign of weakness. In October, 1962, Soviet leaders confronted some puzzling mixed signals from the United States, including back-channel diplomatic assurances that the U. S. Navy would avoid provocative confrontations with Soviet vessels in the course of implementing the blockade of Cuba and reports from the Soviet Navy that Soviet submarines were being compelled to surface by aggressive interdiction tactics of which the White House was not fully aware but that were part of standard operating procedure for the U. S. Navy. Whatever the diverse causes of misperception, mistakes can be consequential. Even low levels of “noise” (random misperception) can affect the relative performance of influence strategies in simulations. And misperception with a consistent bias toward encoding cooperative and ambiguous acts as defections can prove devastating to TFT. The literature on cognitive biases warns us to expect exactly this latter form of misperception whenever mutual suspicion has hardened into hostile stereotypes.

(ii) GRIT. Like TFT, GRIT is designed both to resist exploitation and to shift the interaction onto a mutually beneficial, cooperative plane. Unlike TFT, however, GRIT does not assume that the game has yet to begin. Rather, GRIT assumes that the parties are already trapped in a costly conflict spiral. To unwind the spiral, Osgood proposed that one side should announce its intention to reduce tensions and then back up its talk with unilateral conciliatory gestures such as troop reductions and dismantling missiles. These actions are designed to convince the opponent of the initiator's peaceful intentions, but not to weaken the military position of the initiator. The opponent is then invited to respond with conciliatory gestures, but warned that attempts to exploit the situation will force the initiator to return to a hard-line posture. In contrast to TFT, GRIT is nicer (it cooperates in the face of defection) and less provocable (it continues to cooperate even when the opponent ignores what one has done).

Several experiments suggest that GRIT stimulates cooperation. The most impressively cumulative evidence comes from Lindskold’s (1978) research program. The paradigm involves a PD game in which subjects face an opponent (actually a preprogrammed strategy) who is initially competitive (to produce a climate of hostility) but then practices GRIT. In the final phase, the simulated other returns to a neutral strategy to test the persistence of GRIT's effects. Key findings include: a) GRIT leads to more integrative agreements than do competitive and no-message strategies; b) GRIT elicits more cooperation when initiated from a position of strength than weakness (a finding that could be invoked as support for major defense build-ups as a necessary prelude to GRIT); c) GRIT's general statement of cooperative intent is more effective than both promises of conditional cooperation and no statements at all, and GRIT statements are particularly effective when repeated and rephrased; d) GRIT elicits more cooperation than TFT and 50% cooperative strategies; e) GRIT produces more cooperation than a 50%-cooperative strategy, regardless of whether the subject responds before, after, or during the simulated other's response.

Some historical evidence can also be interpreted as consistent with GRIT. In the previous Handbook chapter on international relations, Etzioni argued that a quasi-GRIT strategy adopted by President Kennedy in 1963 promoted a short-lived period of cooperation between the United States and Soviet Union. Larson (1987) credited GRIT with producing the Austrian State Treaty of 1955. And some Sovietologists believe that Western thinking about conflict management influenced the policy strategies of Gorbachev in the late 1980s (Legvold, 1991). Gorbachevian initiatives such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the nuclear test moratorium, and unilateral troop reductions were all in the spirit of GRIT. Indeed, Gorbachev responded to American claims that the Soviet initiatives were merely "propaganda" by demonstrating an intuitive awareness of the logic of GRIT:

If all that we are doing is indeed viewed as mere propaganda, why not respond to it according to the principle of "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth"? We have stopped nuclear explosions. Then you Americans could take revenge by doing likewise. You could deal us another propaganda blow, say, by suspending the development of one of your strategic missiles. And we would respond with the same kind of "propaganda." And so forth and so on. Would anyone be harmed by competition in such propaganda? (Time, September 9, 1985, p. 23).

GRIT can be criticized for being too soft ("surrender on the installment plan") or as too tough (insufficiently sensitive to the psychological obstacles to resolving protracted and bitter conflicts). In the spirit of toughening GRIT, some researchers have argued that a combination of TFT and GRIT is the best strategy of conflict management in many contexts (Downs, 1991). Initial use of a TFT strategy would demonstrate one's willingness to endure a painful stalemate. Conciliatory offers could then be extended with a diminished fear that they will be interpreted as a sign of weakness (Snyder and Diesing, 1977). Others, however, argue that early competitiveness can too easily escalate into all-out war or poison the atmosphere so that later conciliatory initiatives will be ignored or discounted (Kelman & Bloom, 1973; Kriesberg & Thorson, 1991). Indeed, the now extensive literature on conflict resolution workshops suggests that, in emotionally and politically polarized disputes with long histories of violence (northern Ireland, Cypus, Israelis-Palestinians,... ) even GRIT is too insensitive to the difficulties of breaking down psychological barriers to peace (Azar, 1990; Burton, 1987; Fisher, 1990; Kelman, 1993; Rouhana & Kelman, 1994). It may be necessary to bring high-ranking disputants together in nonofficial workshops in which they are encouraged to understand each other’s needs and to engage in joint problem-solving exercises that gradually build up trust as each side acquires the ability to state the other’s position to the other’s satisfaction and acquires the willingness to consider and even generate integrative proposals that concede some legitimacy to the other’s concerns (Kelman & Cohen, 1976). Third-party mediation can also prove helpful in encouraging disputants: (a) to see the conflict as a disinterested but thoughtful and fair observer might; (b) to consider compromise packages that they would have categorically rejected if simply proposed by the adversary (Rubin, 1981). But the moderators of mediational success appear to be numerous and subtle, including the "ripeness" of the conflict (the parties perceive a mutually debilitating stalemate to exist), the types of issues (the conflict does not focus on territory or rights that the parties endow with sacred or transcendental significance) and the perceived impartiality of the mediator and of the mediation process (Kleiboer, 1996; Vasquez, 1993; Zartman & Touval, 1985).

Evaluating the efficacy of both workshop and third-party interventions raises unsolved methodological issues (from selection biases to the counterfactual vagaries of inferring what would have happened absent any intervention). And all of these approaches assume that there is hidden integrative potential and that both sides can be induced to prefer "jawing" to "warring" -- assumptions that do not hold when one side has so completely dehumanized the other that a dialogue of equals is impossible (e.g., Nazi attitudes toward Jews; Khymer Rouge attitudes toward class enemies).

(iii) The Nixon-Kissinger strategy of detente. Shifting from unofficial to official diplomacy, some scholars argue that the Nixon-Kissinger policies of detente in the early 1970s constituted a carefully crafted mixed-influence strategy, albeit with more emphasis on deterrence that in either GRIT or TFT (George, 1983). In this view, Nixon and Kissinger sought to shift the superpower relationship from “confrontational competition” to “collaborative competition” in which the United States and Soviet Union would both show restraint in the Third World and in weapons programs. The American strategy relied on both carrots (enhanced trade and credits, reduced military competition, and access to advanced technology) and sticks (a renewed arms race that would strain the Soviet economy and a suspension of trade that would deny access to American goods). For reasons still vigorously debated, the Nixon-Kissinger policy failed, competition in the Third World heated up, and arms control sputtered and eventually stalled with the SALT II treaty (Gaddis, 1982). Some suggest that the Nixon-Kissinger policy was ill-conceived, poorly implemented, or undermined by Congressional opponents who insisted on linking improved relations to human rights issues. Others blame the Soviet Union for exploiting détente by intervening in Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. As usual, we discover conflicting policy postmortems, each resting on distinctive counterfactual claims and each linked to different assessments of the adversary.

D. Reprise

Research on social influence points to a number of policy-relevant conclusions. At a minimum, the findings demonstrate that the simplistic remedies for complex conflicts are untenable. An exclusive emphasis on threats can provoke otherwise avoidable conflicts (Leng, 1993); so can calls for unilateral disarmament, albeit via a different mechanism -- by tempting aggressors. Encouraging, though, is the multi-method convergence suggesting that in many situations a firm-but-fair reciprocating bargaining strategy works reasonably well by both protecting vital interests and preventing conflicts from getting out of control. On a more pessimistic note, current findings are incomplete and poorly integrated. Although we know more than we once did about when alternative strategies are likely to be successful, our contingent generalizations are still crude (George, 1993). The more specific the policy question -- for example, will economic sanctions work against this adversary in this time frame? -- the more equivocal the answer we can justifiably derive from the literature. There remains a yawning gap between the idiographic and nomothetic -- the particular concerns of the policy community and the theoretical abstractions of academia.