Deterrence and Triangular Coercion: The Limits of Third-Party Constraint

Deterrence is a strategy designed to prevent a challenger from continuing to attack in order to alter an existing status quo. In its classical formulation, actor A—the defender—seeks to deter actor B by issuing credible threats of the form “if you do X, I will do Y,” thereby raising the expected costs of action to the point where the prize is no longer worth pursuing. This basic logic generated an extensive literature examining the assumptions underlying deterrence theory, particularly the conditions under which threats are believed, how credibility is established, and why weaker challengers nevertheless continue to test stronger defenders.

One of the most persistent puzzles in this literature is the observation that weaker challengers often continue to initiate or sustain challenges against stronger defenders, and in some cases “win” by surviving long enough to fight another day. From the challenger’s perspective, survival itself may constitute a form of success, allowing continued resistance and repeated attempts to alter the status quo. This dynamic complicates traditional deterrence theory, which assumes that sufficient punishment or denial should eventually induce compliance.

The concept of cumulative deterrence—based on repeated acts of punishment and denial intended to degrade the challenger’s capabilities—has attempted to address this problem. The expectation is that over time, sustained pressure will exhaust the challenger’s capacity or willingness to continue contesting the status quo. However, this approach has left the causal mechanism under-specified: it is not clear precisely when or why a challenger should abandon its objectives, nor how repeated punishment translates into a decisive cognitive or strategic shift.

A more recent approach, articulated by Lieberman, emphasizes deterrence as a process of strategic learning. In this view, the decisive mechanism is not cumulative exhaustion per se, but the imposition of “strategic teaching” through military interaction that progressively eliminates or narrows the challenger’s........

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