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- [00:01]
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- [01:01]
Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. When leaders choose war, what guides their decisions? At a time of rising tensions between the US And Iran and continued fighting in Ukraine and in the Middle east, should we understand today's conflicts as the result of clear strategic thinking or the absence of it? On today's episode, academic and author Lawrence Friedman joins us to shed light on the long history of thinking about strategy and what he reveals about how leaders weigh risk, power and uncertainty in an increasingly unstable world. Let's join our host, Adam McCauley, now with more.
- [01:42]
Adam McCauley
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm your host, Adam McCauley. Our guest today needs little introduction. His book on the evolution of nuclear Strategy, published in 1981, has been called a Bible by scholars in the field. His later work on strategy, both its history and its modern implications, continues to shape the field. He served as an official historian for the United Kingdom, penned memos for prime ministers, was selected as a committee member on the UK's Iraq war inquiry, and remains an esteemed Emeritus professor of War Studies at King's College London. It is my great pleasure to welcome Sir Lawrence Friedman to Intelligence Squared today to discuss his most recent book on strategists and strategies.
- [02:24]
Sir Lawrence Friedman
Good to be with you.
- [02:25]
Adam McCauley
So your collection of essays and articles in this book offers a kaleidoscopic survey of your life and work in some sense, and all aspects seem to be driven by the restless curiosity of a historian. In a telling line from early in the book you write, a lawyer knows to answer the question that has been asked. The historian is always Looking for more interesting questions. And so taking guidance from your autobiographical introduction to this book, I wonder if you could identify some of the formative experiences that led you into this discipline and field of study.
- [02:56]
Sir Lawrence Friedman
Yeah, well, I started getting interested in strategy in a way. I think a number of people of my generation did sort of baby boomers in the late 60s as part of the sort of student radical movement belief that we had some great ideas that would improve everybody's lives. But was struck very much about how everybody didn't seem to be as interested in these great ideas as I thought they should be. So I got interested in the sort of gap between the sort of radical aspirations that were not unique to me or my generation and the practicalities of getting change. So that's what animated me to start with. I got frustrated by people just saying this will be achieved when it was clear they had very little idea about how it would be achieved. So that got me going then. I think two things added to this in later years. First, my chosen field of work, which ended up being being largely about war, but started off, as you've noted, about being about nuclear strategy and nuclear arms control, led me to look hard at policy making, decision makers. And I found that kept on, interestingly, how were these big decisions on war and peace made in the US Government, British government elsewhere, and then all my career, for some reason I got involved in administration and management as well as scholarship and their strategy comes up all the time. So I was sort of a doer as well as a theorist, if you like. And I think that practical experience, both in my early political career, which didn't last very long, but in my lengthier administrative career, I think reinforced some ideas that I had developing out of, out of the reading and the study and research of high level policymaking.
- [05:10]
Adam McCauley
Given the fact that this has been sort of a formative theme throughout your career in life, I'm going to start with the first principles question. You know, we think a lot about, you know, what it is, what it does, who does it, what it might look like. And I wonder if you might talk a little bit about how you, your view on the subject of strategy has changed over the years and maybe how or what strategy means to you in the most useful way at the present moment, or at least as for our audience, perhaps to wrap their head around this concept.
- [05:41]
Sir Lawrence Friedman
Yeah, I think my view has evolved inevitably. I didn't, I mean, to start with, it was more. I talked about it without thinking very hard about what it actually was. As I started to work up the Big book. I started to move beyond the idea. It was just about the relationship between ends and means, which is still the simplest way and quite a perfectly useful way of thinking about what strategy is about. How do you achieve your objectives? What do you do if you can't get your objectives? To realizing that a lot of the time when people were talking about strategy, they talked about it as a sort of magic ingredient that if only you had a good one, then you would know exactly how to act. And also the people tended to start by saying what's your objective? And then working backwards as to how you achieve that objective. Whereas in my experience and just looking at the people I'd studied, they started with a problem, the here and now. What is it that I'm trying? What does I need to do? And what are my available resources? And they may have an ultimate objective in mind, they should have one in mind, but they may never get there. So I think my view on strategy shifted from being working backwards from where you wanted to be to working forward from where you are and moving to the next stage and then appreciating. The strategy never ends because when you've reached one stage, there's another stage to follow and the stage after that. So it is in that sense more like a soap opera than a three act play. So that I think has been the big shift. And I find it works for me, may not work for other people, but it works for me. One of the essays in the collection that I'm pleased with and allowed to be is the one on tactics, because that articulates something I'd been thinking for a while, but it says represented a shift in my thinking, but a recognition. Like everybody else, I tended to play down tactics as being a lower order secondary activity. Strategy was the big deal. And it struck me more and more that actually if you get the tactics wrong, however great your strategy, you're going to flounder. And, and actually if you go back into the 19th century, most of the literature was about tactics. I mean, strategy was something that you learned by studying the great battles of the past that had timeless principles. But the real innovation was in tactics. And there's something in that. So I think because we've elevated strategy so high, say back to this sort of magic ingredient quality. And as I note, you have plenty of vice president for strategy. I was one myself for a while. But you don't have a vice president for tactics that actually this actually getting it right. Implementation is critical. That's how you move forward. And if you don't get your tactics right, then you're in trouble. So I think that. And I found actually talking with people that resonates, especially those in government or in the military, that they can see how sometimes too much big thinking, thinking out of the box, always considered to be a good thing to do. But if you don't know how to work the box itself, then being outside of it's not going to be much help. I think in terms of the development of my thinking of strategy, it's coming to appreciate more recently the importance of implementation. And a lot of strategy fails because those formulating it don't talk to those who have to do it. Yeah.
- [09:50]
Adam McCauley
I mean, in the classic Clausewitzian sense, too, if we talk about this perennial friction in conflict or war, one presumes that that friction is probably highest at the level of tactics too. Right. And so the changes in the alchemy at that level are determinative as to whether or not a strategy is something you can hold, or it's just something that's sort of nice to have, even if it doesn't help us so much. But I think that is fascinating. And that question of implementation, I think surfaces another amazing piece in this collection, which is really the discussion between strategy and policy, which, if I could summarize, is more or less a frank accounting of how policy often defaults to satisficing given the political environment and the inability, maybe as Orwell would have put it, of facing unpleasant facts. But this also makes me think about that famous and perhaps two pat distinction between military leaders who want objectives and politicians who ultimately want options. And I wonder if you could just speak a little bit about. In some ways, this is the question of where you start your strategy. Do you start at your objectives and work backwards, or do you start where you are and move forwards? But I wonder if you could explore just how you see, given your role inside some of these policy spaces as well, that relationship between strategy and policy and what are some of the natural or institutional limits that get in the way?
- [11:07]
Sir Lawrence Friedman
I think so. One of the other points that is obvious when you talk about it, but it's often forgotten because it somehow often seems to be inappropriate, is if you're developing a strategy for dealing with an adversary, you're also all the time having to deal with your own bureaucracy. If you're a military officer, those in other services, your subordinates, your superordinates, whatever. So strategy's always got an inner sense that you've got to look inwards at how you get people on side, anticipating problems, what's going to motivate people as well as your outward look. What is it that will game the objectives for the organization or the country that you're seeking to gain? And there's often a real tension between those. And of course, anybody, once they move certainly from academia into government, is soon really struck by how much time is spent wallowing in the bureaucracy, how writing papers, persuading people whose own particular professional interests, bureaucratic interests, aren't really served by some radical new shift. Even if you think the the country demands it, the best policy demands it, which is what comes back to tactics again, that if you haven't thought these things through, however great your ideas, you're likely to get frustrated. Now in some cases, people have got a strong enough will to push them through, but you can then find that again later on. The lack of buy in from others holds you back. Just to give an example, because I use it in one of the essays on Iraq. Tony Blair was able to push through a policy on supporting the US Invasion of Iraq, despite many misgivings in government departments as well as in the country. But he was committed to the policy and he pushed it through. When things got difficult after the invasion, and in particular when it got around to trying to run Iraq, there was very little support from the bureaucracy. People didn't rush forward with bright ideas about how to help run wayward provinces or deal with insurgencies or move forward with nation building. They weren't committed to the policy in the first place. So I think if you're going to build up commitment, it is necessary to work on people. And if they're not going to be on side, either you've got to find a workaround or accept that as a limitation on what you can do. And maybe it's because it's not a very good policy. Again, one of the things that came out of Iraq was when you have somebody who's been pretty successful, whose judgment has been shown to be pretty good, who's who tends to be trusted, they can believe it a bit themselves and become less good at taking advice. That's a problem with authoritarian systems. So again, when I'm talking about Putin, that's a problem with Putin. He comes utterly convinced of the rightness of the cause and that his own judgment is correct. And all those voices that might have said, are you sure this is a good idea? What about this? Is that how the Ukrainians really think just weren't put to him? And to the extent anybody did raise concerns, he dismissed them out of hand. So I think it's not only sometimes frustrating to have to deal with your own organization and objections within it, sometimes they're right. And it's important to be. There's nothing worse in management than the person who says he's consulting when they've clearly made up their mind.
- [15:20]
Adam McCauley
No, I think you capture in so many ways in this book the particularities of individuals, how leaders in particular positions and in particular times or shaped by different factors are led to be bolder than perhaps they should be, with uncertainty still present, or perhaps not bold enough when the strategy is more or less clear, or might be more or less clear in front of them. But obviously the mention of Putin brings us up to, or brings us into a topic that you probably spend most of your time thinking about and most of your time writing about. And we sit here four years after the illegal invasion of Ukraine. In this collection, I think you do an amazing job of exploring the evolution of Ukrainian Russian relations. And certainly you do more or less a TikTok sort of analysis from 201314 to present to see kind of what the strategic back and forth looks like and where opportunities were either found, seized or otherwise, by the actors at play. And you also couch this within the larger collection. And as evidenced by our conversation already in academic work, Jervis is in particular around perception, misperception, and the influence of leaders sort of opinions in the decision spaces that they inhabit. So that's a very long winded way of opening a question which is I wonder if you could just reflect over the last four years on some of the lessons that this conflict has taught you about strategy and maybe some of the ideas that have been challenged along the way or that have made you think twice about some of the concepts and beliefs or assumptions we carry into the strategic space. I know this is, you know, we could probably speak for days on end on this topic alone, but I'm just curious to know, kind of front of mind for you, what has this changed as something we've lived through for the last four years?
- [17:14]
Sir Lawrence Friedman
That's a good question. It's something that's dominated my thinking as so many other people, since before the full scale invasion. But when these debates were going on about whether it would happen or not, which I got wrong, I mean, you know, I thought it was a stupid thing to do, which it was a stupid thing to do. But I should have been more aware that that didn't mean to say it wouldn't happen. And by the time it happened, I think I was. I'd be more persuaded that it was as Likely as not. But I stuck to the view that it was stupid, and I felt sort of reasonably vindicated on that quite quickly. So what's it changed since, in my thinking? First, the dangers of extrapolation. I suppose, just because one thing's happened in one way doesn't mean they say the next thing will happen in the same way. I think, like many people, I got optimistic on Ukraine's behalf during the course of 2022, correctly so they performed amazingly well, but didn't allow for quite how much Putin was prepared to double down on the war. I still think a lot of the key decisions were those taken in September 22 as much as those taken in February 22, when he partial mobilization, putting the economy more on a war footing, annexing for oblasts in addition to Crimea and so on. After that, I became much more cautious, and I've been cautious since, and remain cautious. I realized, especially when you're writing from a distance, it's very hard to be absolutely sure, however much you read, however many videos you watch, to be absolutely sure about what's going on. And therefore you've got to be a bit cautious if you're trying to forecast where it's going. On the other hand, there's no point doing the commentary game, as it were, unless, again, you're prepared to take some risks. I think the other thing that struck me is it's quite useful to have a background in military history. There's certain situations you recognize, and this gives you a starting point to thinking about them, that people who were just coming to it fresh as the conflict of the day might miss. So I think that's helpful. The military history, it's not that you get simple analogies, but it just gives you questions to ask. These are the sort of things that can go wrong. These are why this may not work. I mean, at the moment I'm trying to write a piece of. On whether the Russian offensive has culminated, which is a good old Clausewitzian concept. And so I've been reading back in Clausewitz what he actually said about culmination, which is not quite the same as how it's always understood. Now, I mainly say, well, so the idea of culmination is that every offensive reaches a point at which it's sort of exhausted or the enemy is able to resist. And if you push your luck beyond that, then that can produce disaster. If you recognize the point, then you can recover and so on. And then you have to remember that Clausewitz was writing at a time when he assumed that wars would be fought between pretty equivalent armies, which meant that if one did culminate, then the other could take over. Whereas, of course, in this case, Russia has got much more resource than Ukraine. So maybe it doesn't mean the same thing. So what I'm trying to point out is there's an interesting concept here which can give you questions to ask, but you shouldn't be bound by it because this isn't a term of pure science. Like all of this. It requires judgment, but it's helpful. So I think that's been important. I think, like most people who view the war, the amount of innovation that has taken place, oddly without it having that much effect on the movement on the front lines over the last two years is extraordinary. We forget how recent the drone warfare that the Ukrainians sort of mastered first and the Russians have certainly more than caught up with became a feature of this battlefield. When the current Russian offensive, which I would say started in late 2023 began, the assumption was that you move forward with armored columns, still maybe not quite as grand as the ones with which they started, but still tanks were the way of moving forward. Now you move forward with the infiltration of companies, maybe just two or three people on bikes or on foot because of the kill zone, you're likely to be spotted in movement, and if you're spotted, you're likely to be killed. So this is an extraordinary change that has taken place. And the speed of innovation has been quite staggering. I mean, you can see this obviously in previous wars. Any war that lasts a long time sees innovation in tactics and technology. Short wars don't. But given where Ukraine started, it explains why they're in a far better position than anybody would have dared assume they would be, certainly at the start of 2024, never mind in February 22nd. Yeah.
- [23:29]
Adam McCauley
I think what your answer also captures as well is that it's very easy, I think, from the armchair perspectives of many who sort of pontificate about Ukraine, Russia, to summarize this conflict with sort of simple top line statements. This is an adaptation war. This is a technology forward war. I think an individual with your background and what your answer sort of testifies to is that the nature of war probably doesn't change the character of war absolutely does change over time in different ways. And maybe our historical understanding of how wars are fought or won, that decisive battle in the classic military sense is no longer sort of the concept that holds here. In fact, maybe we have far too many smaller battles in far too many places to know and to be able to calculate sort of the definitiveness of any one of those, but it still gives you both a lexicon and, I think, a deep store of concepts and insights to draw on to try and kind of make the third thing out of both what we know to be true of the past and what we see to be true of the present. And I think that that's really where thinkers like yourself have added to this conversation in meaningful ways. I do want to pause on this question around Putin a little bit. You have a couple of lectures or lectures turned into essays in the book where you talk at great depth about an autocratic or an authoritarian system and what that means for a leader. One of the questions that always sits front and center in my mind is how we understand rationality and irrationality in decision making spaces and environments, largely because that is very much a key component of how we thought about everything from nuclear strategy to strategy in the present. And I wonder if you could just tease out for me how you've come to understand rationality and irrationality in this context. It seems like a tricky one, but one worth spending maybe a moment on,
- [25:27]
Sir Lawrence Friedman
especially at the moment. It doesn't mean reasonable, it doesn't mean you reason. I mean, sort of the classic social science view of rationality is there is a consistency to it, that it's coherent, that it fits. But if your starting assumptions are completely wrong, you can be perfectly rational, but end up with a pretty poor answer. So getting into somebody else's view of rationality, the way their thought processes work, doesn't mean to say that by saying that they're rational, saying that what they are doing necessarily makes sense, it makes sense to them. That's essentially what it's about. And so with Putin, it certainly makes sense to him what he's doing. He believes, on the basis of pretty tendentious historical research, that Ukraine should never have been separated from Russia, certainly not the eastern and southern part, that it's a wholly artificial state as a result that his government is illegitimate, and therefore that led him to believe it would fall quite quickly, which of course it didn't. So you can understand where he's coming from. But in the process, the more you try to look at it, the better you should be able to see the flaws. Now, when you get to your own president, I think these questions become harder because you're not quite sure exactly what's driving his interests and concerns of the moment, other than his own egotistical needs. So it's actually much harder with Trump. But nonetheless, nonetheless, you can still see themes in his thinking which go back a long way. For example, his dislike of free trade. It's not a new thing. It's always been there. His distrust of alliances. So there's something real to America First. It has a long tradition in American history. What's quirky about it, eccentric is back to implementation is the erratic way it's implemented in the lack of curiosity about the claims he's making on behalf of his policy. So, you know the question I was always taught to ask, what would it take for this proposition to be wrong as a pretty good check on whether you were right? You don't get the sense he ever asked this question or is curious about evidence to be just for his own comfort about whether he's doing the right thing. So this makes his rationality, I think, much more conditional. But Putin, who speaks more coherently maybe, nonetheless is clearly not curious enough at times to question what his generals are telling him. And so he repeats their falsehood. So that tells you something about how he stays informed. He's not a man who browses the Internet. And why he continues, I still think is a policy that's doomed to failure.
- [29:20]
Adam McCauley
It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump sort of entered the arena in our conversation today. And as a Canadian sitting just to his north, staring south and wondering what it is that Washington is thinking about more or less, day in and day out, I think feel we should probably spend just a little bit of time, perhaps in this present moment, speaking about the American administration. I'm going to take you essentially back into your own words. I found something you wrote in April of last year. This is just after Trump's famous tariff onslaught. And you write, we rarely have had such a clear example of bad strategy. This is not about objectives for someone with terrible intent, can still be strategically adept, but about deciding on a course of action that will not only fail to achieve its stated intent, but will have negative, negative consequences that far exceed the positive. And you add, I think later in that same article that Trump fits the model of a flawed military commander. He follows a worldview that reflects his prejudices, and he is surrounded by staff prized with their loyalty more than their independent judgment. And he lacks this intellectual curiosity, as you've just said, and rejects complicating information. You write later in the year, that same year, I think, after Keir Starmer's visit to, to the White House, you essentially say, the difficulty with Trump is that there's very little that's fixed, and so his policies and attitudes can change from day to day. I just wonder given how much time you've spent, especially in the realm of even nuclear strategy or deterrence, where really what we're talking about is this great game played between flawed individuals at the top of very large institutions with incredible coercive power. How do you think we understand and manage an administration like what we're seeing in the United States right now? God help you if you're ever asked hand to Bible here as to what the answer is. But just to say, what would you sort of provide as guidance as we navigate the high uncertainty of the present moment?
- [31:27]
Sir Lawrence Friedman
I think it's, it's extremely difficult. And I think you've seen over the past month, policymakers who thought that they had him under control, or they put it slightly differently, alliance policymakers who thought they knew how to handle them, suddenly realizing that their methods weren't adequate. And I think the Greenland issue, possibly more than the Canada issue, crystallized that. And so up to that point, you could get quite a long way with flattery and sort of going along with what he was saying, not interrupting, not contradicting, and then zooming in on the things that really mattered and then turning them around and saying, look, great achievement, Mr. President. So that worked up to a point. It got us through last year largely, but then all of a sudden, it just didn't seem adequate. So individuals like Starmer who state a lot on trying to make this work along with Macron and so on, they had to speak out that said, no, you really can't have Greenland. He goes, it's not yours to take. If there is a problem there, let's work it out. But acquiring it for the US Isn't it. And I think you find with Trump is that he actually picks his fight, some fight he clearly doesn't want to have, mainly because he's got an innate sense of what he'll lose, which, going back to the tariff point. And I don't think what I wrote in April 2025 I would rewrite. I mean, I think it remains okay, is the ease with which China pushed back, and China just did it better than he did. So he doesn't press on. Regardless, Trump, and he does change his mind and forgets what he said, and he makes points to annoy people because they've annoyed him. And this makes him extraordinarily difficult to deal with. And in the first administration, you had people around him who sort of knew he was annoying and unguided, but managed to soften the blows a bit. But you just don't have that with this administration at the moment, it's a very thin administration. There's not that many people doing the daily jobs. The two top negotiators are neither paid employees. They're both Trump's personal envoys, Witkoff and Kushner. Kushner, actually, people who talk to him normally find him quite able, but Witkoff is a complete amateur, and they plow into things, and then a lot of the bureaucracy has been been taken out. So, again, as they're fighting with deportees, the Justice Department isn't there. The Homeland Security is working without pay at the moment. So it's an extraordinarily inept operation as well. And it's scary, I think, for people who have to deal with it, because you never know where it's going to lead. Are we going to have a war with Iran? And if so, about what? Is it about regime change which might give a cheer? Is it about proliferation? But you told us you'd sorted the proliferation situation last June. What was that all about? So it's just very difficult to cope with now. Would it be better if he was more competent? I don't know. It makes it more dangerous then. But I've never, you know, I've been following professionally these things since the mid-70s. That's how long I've been doing it. And when I was doing my research in Washington, Watergate was on. So, you know, I've seen things before. I've never experienced an administration like this, and it just makes it very difficult to follow.
- [35:54]
Adam McCauley
Yeah, it's the blessing and curse of living in interesting times, certainly. So, to close for today, and again, we could spend most of the day together talking. I'm sure I'm going to take us back to the start or the earlier part of your career, in some ways, the evolution of nuclear strategy. And I'm going to try and bring some of these questions into the presentation. So we have risk and foresight analysts that put the likelihood of nuclear use as being quite a lot higher over the next 15 years than in the generations past, or at least in the decades past. And I wonder if this is a risk that you think about or worry about. You make good mention in your book about Putin's saber rattling around nuclear escalation during the invasion of Ukraine and throughout this conflict. And so I wonder if I could just get your sense on. On what this captures for you and what role these weapons are likely to play strategically in our current moment. And as we see perhaps the. The war come to a close, or just hotspots around the world as we sort of wrestle with the idea or the questions around nuclear proliferation.
- [37:00]
Sir Lawrence Friedman
Yeah. So, I mean, nuclear weapons have been a theme of my career, as it were. That's where I started. Most of my work in the 70s and into the 80s was about Nucleus. And when I began work on evolutionary nuclear strategy, which was in 1975, actually, it was only 30 years in to the nuclear age, so it was easier to do the book then. I later came to revise it with a colleague a few years ago. There was much more to it and it was also, you know, it was a book of discovery for me because I didn't know anything about the topic when I started to research it. It was just, you know, I started in 1945 and plowed on and you saw all these debates emerge. I think that's quite a good way sometimes to research things. If you know it all beforehand, it gets a bit boring. But when it's still a bit of discovery, then you can maintain your interest. Anyway, you see a lot of debates developing and you have this. And the first edition covered this period of absolute intellectual ferment in the 1950s, as people first really began to grapple with weapons of mass destruction and what they can do and the nature of deterrence and how did it work. And it still strikes me how much of current thinking is influenced by the 1950s and 1960s. What Colin Gray, I think later called the golden age of strategic thinking. First strike, second strike, damage limitation, escalation. All of these concepts come from that period and they shape our thinking still as you move forward to the present day. Yes, there are more nuclear powers. Not as many as people thought they were going to be, but more certainly more than they were. During the period in which I started writing, there have been conflicts between nuclear powers with India and Pakistan. And you have you mentioned a lot of saber rattling of Russia in connection with Ukraine. I think what I found with that is two things. First, actually, it's worked out almost as the theory would have predicted. Russia has not attacked NATO countries despite it could claim provocation. Equally, the United States and other NATO countries have not got involved directly fighting side by side with Ukraine, which almost certainly they would have done, I think, if there'd been that sort of aggression against a neighboring country and nuclear weapons weren't anywhere around. So in that sense, the theory has worked and deterrence has worked as you would expect. Yet we've also seen an attempt by Russia to extract a lot of political benefit from its nuclear arsenal, which hasn't really worked. They keep. Every time something is mooted, which they don't like. How Sweden and Finland joining NATO, long range systems being provided to Ukraine, attacks on Russian territory being allowed, whatever. All sorts of deep threats have come and not much has happened. And that's led from the Russian point of view to a degradation of deterrence. I think Putin has always been pretty consistent that deterrence in this context is about persuading NATO not to get directly involved on Ukraine's behalf. He's never actually directly threatened Ukraine with nuclear use. There was talk that it could happen, but I don't think that was ever a serious consideration that he's had could change, but I don't think that's where he. He's always been. So in that sense, I think you've had a pretty interesting case study about how to manage a nuclear relationship when the wider relationship is pretty poor and there are all sorts of stresses and strains and so far we've managed, which is not a prediction about the future, but it tells you how far and it gives you some sort of guidance for the future in terms, I think of the importance of keeping lines of communication open, but also just keeping in mind what a big step this would be. The longer that we haven't used nuclear weapons, nobody's used nuclear weapons. I think it's going to be harder for the first mover. If a war in the mid-50s, it would have been taken for granted that nuclear weapons would have been used early on. We've gone for so long development what people call the nuclear taboo that I think it's a real thing. It would be genuinely hard to break it, which doesn't mean to say again it won't be, but it's just going to be that much harder. So it's paradoxical, it's more dangerous than before and it's in some ways it's astonishing that we've gone as long as we have without one of these weapons being used in anger again over 80 years now. But. While they're around, it doesn't take very much to change that. They're not hard to use if you've got them. And so it's just one of the features of the modern age that will stay with us because despite all the campaigns, there's no obvious way of getting out of the nuclear age.
- [43:07]
Adam McCauley
You write in that last chapter on deterrence in your book about the paradoxical nature and I think as to your last point points out the normative importance of this understanding of non use being sort of a feature of our internationalist system and, and why that's so central for stability. And you draw, I think, some interesting distinctions, you know, general deterrence versus immediate deterrence, ways in which the concept has sort of evolved over time, or we've tried to think about it in new ways or different slices of it. But you do make a comment just towards the end of that chapter, which I'd love just to get your greater insight on. And, and part of this is that, you know, when deterrent work or when deterrence works, it's all about the dogs that don't bark, all the conflicts that haven't happened, essentially that we can may or may or may not be able to lump into the deterrence we win sort of column. And yet at the same time, there is this emphasis, I think, in your own writing, that the passive understanding or acceptance that deterrence as it is is enough, I think is also a dangerous game. And so you're right that NATO countries are finding that they need to move away from the passivity implied by a deterrence posture and to this idea of constant action in response to this developing security crisis with the Russian Federation. And so I wonder if you have any sort of examples of, or ways in which this game of deterrence or this dance of deterrence is being played more recently, or ways in which you might imagine this space to sort of evolve in months or years to come.
- [44:43]
Sir Lawrence Friedman
Yeah, the point I think I was trying to make there was that as sort of a basic posture, deterrence always sounds great. I mean, it's robust, you're defending your interests, but you're not going to be provocative, you're not going to go on the attack. And so it is a bit passive and it's working when nothing happens. But things are happening now. They're not things you would expect to deter very easily. I mean, we never tried to determine, except by vague threats of economic sanctions, the full scale invasion. We haven't tried to deter the attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, but we haven't also really tried to deter drones hovering around European airports, or cyber attacks or acts of sabotage or assassination attempts on people within our countries and so on. And that's really what I was referring to, is we need to think a little harder about this level of activity below war. It hasn't quite reached the threshold of war, but can be violent and certainly can be disruptive. And the danger of a sort of deterrence mindset is you're not thinking about that in sort of a rather dynamic sense, which is not to say you abandon high level deterrence, where I think, as I've suggested it works. The thing that's been problematic about deterrence is the tendency after the Cold War because it had been so successful, we got to 1990 without World War Three believing the deterrence was the way out of deal with all future conflicts. And it doesn't work that way. You've got to be very clear, there's a vital interest at State. You've got to be clear there's a vital interest at stake, that you've got things to do about it, that they're credible and so on. So I think we try to generalize deterrence too much and then you get into the situation that the Israelis get into where they talk about restoring deterrence. Well, if deterrence needs restoring, then it's clearly not worked very well. I think it's one of those terms, a bit like strategy I suppose as well, where familiarity and comfort mean that it gets a bit overused and applied in ways for which it's not really suitable. And that was really what I was trying to get away with. There are areas, the top end, where deterrence is important and should be taken seriously elsewhere a bit less so.
- [47:36]
Adam McCauley
So I want to thank my esteemed guest, Sir Lawrence Friedman for joining us today. This discussion, like the intellectual bounty of his recent book Strategists and Strategies, is testament to the value of a sharp and sharp mind loosed in the world, as it were. His new book is available now online or in your local bookshop. I'm Adam McCauley and from all of us here at Intelligence Squared, we'll see you next time.
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Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future events you can see our full live events program over on intelligencesquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared.
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Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for joining us.