The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
A large literature on U.S. foreign policy takes for granted that America's alliances entangle the United States into military conflicts that it might otherwise avoid. Yet proponents of this argument have presented very little evidence that this entanglement mechanism has actually played a significant role in U.S. foreign policy. The speaker looks for such evidence in all post-1945 U.S. military conflicts and finds hardly any. U.S. entanglement is rare, he argues, because (1) the United States, as a superpower, is capable of flouting its commitments with relative impunity, (2) U.S. alliance agreements are vague and contingent commitments, and (3) these alliances help the United States deter potential aggressors and restrain allies from initiating or escalating conflicts that might threaten U.S. interests.
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