Why Deterrence Fail?

Deterrence issues accompanied the entire history of human civilization, from the Caveman Era to the Information Age. We can briefly conclude that deterrence is inevitable as long as mankind has to choose between war and peace. Endless game between the major powers provides rich empirical foundations for deterrence study. This paper is trying to study the key factors which lead to deterrence failures by selecting typical deterrence strategies that end up with failures in the situation of bilateral alliance deterrence and unilateral deterrence.This paper consists of five major parts. In the first part, three questions, namely what is deterrence, how to determine the formation of deterrence and how to judge the success of deterrence is successful, are primarily answered by defining deterrence and its related concepts as well as sorting out the general logic of deterrence. The second part introduces the application and development of Signaling Game Theory in deterrence with its general theories and basic hypotheses. In the third part, a model is established for the deterrence between China and the United States before the Korean War based on the Classical Signaling Game Theory. Equilibrium is calculated by simulating the interaction of game strategies with incomplete information. Another model is established in the next part for the interaction of strategies between Ming Dynasty and Mongols before the collapse of alliance against Jurchen Dynasty. Equilibrium is worked out by simulating the situation of game where neither party within the alliance had complete information. With the results of the above analysis, the fifth part restores the whole process of the cases and reinterprets them with Signaling Game Theory based on historical data and previous research from both home and abroad. Reasons for deterrence fail are summarized in this part as well.With the detailed historical data, this study standardizes the key historical facts and integrates them into Game Theory System. Reasons for deterrence failure are analyzed by Signaling Game Theory.This study shows that three factors are crucial to the failure of deterrence, namely types of deterrence (i.e. strength and resolution), the level of deterrence credits, and the transmission and interpretation of the deterrence signals.The former study of deterrence failure was mainly focused on the field of nuclear deterrence, lacking necessary research on conventional deterrence, especially research in China. This paper select two cases:Korean War and Ming Dynasty-Mongols alliance, which have highly similar geo-strategic environment with the current situation in China, enabled us to do analysis which is more suitable for Chinese situation compared with the established study, which were based on the strategic environment of Western world selected by former scholars. This paper also takes signaling game theory as the main method in deterrence study, which is not common in the current domestic deterrent research. Different from the most previous research, this paper uses signaling game model to find the conditions of cooperation in a deterrence alliance and draws a novel conclusion that "action is more important than natural type". Last but not least, this paper attempts to define the concept of deterrence credit, and points out that the level of credit deterrence is the key factor to the success of deterrence.