The Russian cyber attacks that were meant to skew the 2016 US election toward Donald Trump have raised new concerns about conflicts in cyberspace. How might normative taboos, such as those against chemical and biological weapons, be adapted to the cyber realm?

Joseph S. Nye explains how states can deter or dissuade adversaries in cyberspace.
 

After he won the Republican nomination, many expected Trump to follow the traditional path of moving to the center for the general election. Again, he defied expectations and focused a populist campaign on segments of the population that had lost jobs to global competition; and/or resented the cultural changes that had occurred over the past few decades. This populist appeal was effectively targeted, and he won the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote by nearly three million votes. But for 100,000 votes in three rust belt states, he would not be president.

Can states deter adversaries in cyberspace? Analogies drawn from nuclear deterrence mislead; nuclear deterrence aims for total prevention, whereas states do not expect to prevent every cyberattack. Additionally, cyber deterrence is possible even though it can be hard to identify the source of a cyberattack. Attribution problems do not hinder three of the major forms of cyber deterrence: denial, entanglement, and normative taboos.

Charles Kindleberger, one of the intellectual architects of the Marshall Plan, argued that the disastrous decade of the 1930s was a result of the United States' failure to provide global public goods after it had replaced Britain as the leading power. Today, as China’s power grows, will it make the same mistake?

"Increasingly, however, the openness that enables the United States to build networks, maintain institutions, and sustain alliances is itself under siege. This is why the most important challenge to the provision of world order in the twenty-first century comes not from without but from within."

"If there is no American power behind those values, they will become a façade, simple rhetoric. It's a matter of combining values with policy and implementation. Take Russia’s invasion of Crimea, for example. Russian President Vladimir Putin stole land from his neighbor using force ― something that is against any post-1945 agreement. Without U.S.-imposed sanctions, Putin surely would have gotten away with it much easier and perhaps would have continued seizing territory."

"But what about deterring operations that are not equivalent to an armed attack? There are grey areas in which important targets, say, a free political process, are not strategically vital in the same way as the electrical grid or the financial system. Destroying the latter two could damage lives and property; interference with the former threatens deeply held political values."

"Putin's strategy of intervention in neighboring countries and the Middle East, and his cyber meddling is designed to make Russia look great again, but is making their situation worse in the long run. Declining countries often take more risks and are thus more dangerous—witness the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914."

During his campaign, US President-elect Donald Trump challenged the alliances and institutions that underpin the liberal world order, but he spelled out few specific policies. Perhaps the most important question raised by his victory is whether the long phase of globalization that began at the end of World War II is essentially over.