While Islamic State (IS) and its affiliates have carried out attacks from France to Afghanistan to the U.S., they have consistently refrained from attacking the Jewish state—even though their forces are, as one Israeli journalist put it, “several hundred meters away from reaching Israeli school buses.” Graham Allison explains how Israel’s strategy of patience and deterrence has succeeded, and urges America to take note:
Israel seeks to persuade IS not to attack it by credibly threatening to retaliate. If you attack us, the thinking goes, we will respond in ways that will impose pain that exceeds any gain you can hope to achieve. As cold-war strategists learned, making this work in practice is demanding. To be effective, deterrence requires three Cs: clarity, capability, and credibility. Specifically, this means clarity about the red line that cannot be crossed, communicated in language the adversary understands; capability to impose costs that greatly exceed the benefits; and credibility about the willingness to do so.
Failures occur when the deterrer falls short on any one of the three Cs. So, if I draw a red line, and you cross it, and I respond with words rather than the decisive punishment threatened, I fail the third C. Whatever excuse I give for not executing my threat, and however earnest my claim that next time will be different, the blunt fact is that adversaries will find my threats less credible. . . .
The flip side of the deterrence coin is an equivalent promise: if you refrain from the prohibited action, I will withhold the threatened punishment. If, for whatever reason, I decide to administer the specified punishment even though you have complied with my demands, I spend that coin—and can no longer use that threat to deter you. As the saying goes: if you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, then you might as well do.
Read more on National Interest: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-isis-fears-israel-17286