" In 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain hoped that a
policy of appeasement would satisfy Adolf Hitler's territorial
appetite and structured British policy accordingly. This plan was a
failure, chiefly because Hitler was not a statesman who would
ultimately conform to familiar norms. Chamberlain's policy was
doomed because he had greatly misjudged Hitler's basic beliefs and
thus his behavior. U.S. Cold War nuclear deterrence policy was
similarly based on the confident but questionable assumption that
Soviet leaders would be rational by Washington's standards; they
would behave reasonably when presented with nuclear threats. The
United States assumed that any sane challenger would be deterred
from severe provocations because not to do so would be foolish.
Keith B. Payne addresses the question of whether this line of
reasoning is adequate for the post-Cold War period. By analyzing
past situations and a plausible future scenario, a U.S.-Chinese
crisis over Taiwan, he proposes that American policymakers move
away from the assumption that all our opponents are comfortably
predictable by the standards of our own culture. In order to avoid
unexpected and possibly disastrous failures of deterrence, he
argues, we should closely examine particular opponents' culture and
beliefs in order to better anticipate their likely responses to
U.S. deterrence threats.
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