305 Carlos Javier Frías Sánchez Conventional deterrence serious and immediate implications for a country’s national security54. In conflicts of choice, states are motivated by opportunity. In conflicts of necessity, states are driven by necessity. In stabilisation/counterinsurgency operations abroad, western intervention is motivated by opportunity; therefore the prospect of a lengthy and costly conflict may be a very effective deterrent. On the other hand, rebellious factions are driven by necessity, and their willingness to make sacrifices is therefore very high. The less importance the state being deterred attaches to the action the opponent is trying to prevent, the more effective deterrence by punishment is likely to be, i.e., this type of deterrence works best when used against states that are motivated by opportu-nity. It is important to point out that most of the U.S.’s interventions in its capacity as’global policeman’(given that it is the sole remaining superpower) are operations that the U.S. Government chooses, but which it is not actually forced to undertake. In these operations, the U.S. (and its western allies) are states motivated by opportunity. Therefore, in these cases, deterrence by punishment is likely to work against the Uni-ted States if the adversary has the capacity required to sufficiently raise the cost of the action being deterred. Furthermore, in these types of conflicts, the potential adversa-ries of the U.S. (and the West in general) may assume that their actual willingness to take deterrence measures (such as the use of nuclear weapons or mass reprisals against the population) is reduced or non-existent (because they are rejected by western pu-blic opinion) and deterrence will therefore be ineffective. On the other hand, in the case of states motivated by necessity, it is quite possible that no level of damage that can be inflicted by conventional means will suffice to deter them from taking a particular course of action (a good example would be the debilitation of North Vietnam in the war with the United States). Consequently, the-se states will be very difficult to deter using punishment. In reality, the arguments of Mack and of Snyder and Diesing suggest that in the event of a conflict where one of the states is motivated by opportunity and the other by necessity, the latter will be able to assume a much greater level of sacrifice than the former, to the extent that the latter will have a much greater chance of winning. This is because, as mentioned previously, the level of damage that can be inflicted by conventional means is limited (and, for this very reason, it is acceptable if the ex-pected benefit is worthwhile) in the case of deterrence by punishment, and the success or failure of the deterrence strategy will ultimately be determined by the will of the enemy. It once seemed that this dependency on the willingness of the anniversary, which is inevitable in terms of conventional strategy, could be overcome thanks to the power of nuclear weapons. Thus, the concept of unacceptable damage emerged. This concept is based on the idea that the level of destruction that can be inflicted by nuclear weapons is such that it would break the will of even the strongest adversary. Therefore, the general limitations of deterrence by punishment would not apply to a http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee 54 Ibid.
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