The idea that
something is a ‘deterrent’ is a regular refrain in politics and international
affairs, from sentencing in the courts, through small boat arrivals to the
threat of using nuclear weapons. Those in control of, or in a position to
apply, the deterrent in question often have a blind faith that it will work,
yet the evidence for deterrence as a principle is, at best limited. For any
deterrent to work (i.e. to deter someone from taking some action or other) at
least four things have to be true:
·
The would-be
perpetrator has to believe that he or she will be identified and placed in a
situation where the deterrent could be applied
·
Said perpetrator has
to believe that the deterrent actually would then be applied in practice
·
He or she must also
be convinced that the application of the deterrent would leave him or her in a
worse position than they would have otherwise been in
·
He or she has to be
in a sufficiently rational frame of mind to weigh up all of these factors
before deciding whether or not to commit the act which is supposed to be
deterred.
That final point is
something of a deterrent-killer when it comes to crime. An awful lot of
acquisitive crime is opportunistic rather than pre-planned, and a great deal of
violent crime arises from an emotional response at the time of the crime. Even
if those things weren’t true, the police forces charged with responding to
those crimes are understaffed and under-resourced: for a large number of
crimes, the chances of being caught are low. Preventing crime is something most
of us want, but it isn’t the same thing as deterring crime, which is where
Labour and Tory alike seem to concentrate their attention, instead of
considering the causes. I’m sure that there was a political leader once who
said something about being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime,
even if he forgot the second part of that once elected.
If the government
does manage to get its Rwanda Bill through parliament this week, it’s a policy
which fails on at least two of the key criteria for deterrence. It doesn’t take
a genius to calculate that if 40,000 people are arriving every year and the
capacity for deporting them to Rwanda is somewhere between a few hundred and a
thousand or so (even if they can find an airline prepared to carry them,
accommodation in which to place them which hasn’t already been sold off,
identify people who don’t fit into a category which will still allow some sort
of legal challenge, and find enough people to accompany them – each deportee is
likely to require at least two escorts to forcibly get them onto a plane and
restrain them during the flight) then the probability of them actually being
sent to Rwanda is somewhere between negligible and zero. And given the
desperation which leads most of them to flee their home country, few are likely
to see that remote possibility as being worse than the situation they are
fleeing. A government which really wanted to reduce the levels of migration
would be looking at the causes of that migration rather than simply punishing
migrants. That isn’t the government we’ve got, nor is it the one we’re likely
to have by the end of the year.
And then we come to
nuclear deterrence, aka the expenditure of vast sums on weaponry that no
rational person would ever use, but whose possession depends on an assumption
that ‘the enemy’ is both irrational enough to want to use them and rational
enough to be deterred from so doing, and that said enemy will, in turn, believe
that ‘we’ are irrational enough to want to use them and rational enough to be deterred
from so doing. Rational irrationality or irrational rationality: both sound
like they’ve emerged from the troubled mind of Donald Rumsfeld. We are
regularly told that the ‘evidence’ for the efficacy of the nuclear deterrent is
that the Soviet Union/ Russia hasn’t attacked the NATO alliance. Whilst it’s
true to say that they have not attacked NATO (and, come to that – and in the
interests of balance – neither has NATO attacked them), the ‘proof’ that the
possession of large armouries of nuclear weapons is the thing that has
prevented it is distinctly lacking. And inevitably so – we only live history
once, and the only way of categorically proving it would be to live history
over again, changing just that one factor. I suspect that the reasons for a
lack of war would be shown to be rather more complex than simple fear of one
particular type of weapon. The one case where we can be fairly unequivocally
certain that nuclear deterrence has ‘worked’ is Ukraine, where Russia’s vast
arsenal, accompanied by a threat to use it, has effectively deterred the rest
of the world from going to the aid of a country unlawfully invaded by a larger
neighbour. That, however, makes nuclear weapons look more like a facilitator of
aggression than a deterrent to war. To say nothing of an encouragement to
proliferation. And even more recently, Israel’s nuclear weapons have demonstrably
not ‘deterred’ Iran.
The thread running
through all of this is an assumption that the best or only way of preventing
that which is undesirable is to deter potential perpetrators from doing it. In
all three cases, however, what is really needed is to address the underlying
causes of those actions or potential actions. It’s harder to address the causes
rather than the symptoms, but our ‘leaders’ prefer to talk tough and make macho
threats than to be effective. In all three scenarios.
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