Routledge Handbook of Strategic Culture

30 Strategic Culture and Tailored Deterrence

Nicholas Taylor¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781003010302-34

Introduction

To most people, including a large proportion of both military and civilian defense professionals, deterrence was a strategy of the Cold War. The bipolar security architecture of that era endured for nearly half a century due to what appears to many, in retrospect, to have been a largely stable deterrence relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Since the Cold War ended, the understanding of deterrence in many parts of the world has atrophied. In the United Kingdom, for example, deterrence was rarely the primary objective of defense activities after 1990; indeed, the term was largely used to refer to nuclear deterrence. ...