Research on Strategic Stability and Instability
My forthcoming book project (Bloomsbury Academic), Open to Interpretation: Strategic Stability in the Modern Era, reconceptualizes strategic stability as an interpretive process rather than an objective condition produced by a particular balance of forces. Existing scholarship generally treats stability as a property of material relationships, institutional arrangements, or technological systems. This project instead argues that these factors become stabilizing only when rivals develop sufficiently compatible understandings of what capabilities, signals, and actions mean. It introduces the concept of strategic legibility to describe the degree to which states can interpret one another’s conduct within shared expectations about restraint, resolve, and escalation. Stability therefore does not require complete agreement, trust, or perfect information. It requires rivals to know enough about how the other side interprets the strategic environment to anticipate its reactions and regulate their own behavior accordingly.
The project traces how strategic legibility emerges through repeated interaction, strategic memory, signaling practices, institutionalized scripts, and the gradual formation of shared expectations. Drawing on episodes from the early Cold War through contemporary nuclear, cyber, and space competition, it explains why some rivalries become manageable despite profound hostility while others remain vulnerable to misinterpretation and unintended escalation. It also shows how legibility can deteriorate when new technologies, actors, or operational practices disrupt established meanings faster than states can reconstruct them. By shifting attention from achieving an ideal strategic equilibrium to cultivating resilient interpretive relationships, the project offers a more historically grounded account of stability and a practical framework for managing competition in an increasingly complex strat
Chapter 1: Strategic Stability as an Interpretive Process
Chapter 1 introduces the book’s central puzzle: why do some intensely competitive relationships become relatively stable while others remain vulnerable to miscalculation, despite apparently similar distributions of power and destructive capability? Conventional theories generally treat strategic stability as a condition produced by material balances, secure second-strike forces, rational incentives, or formal institutions. This chapter argues instead that stability is an ongoing interpretive accomplishment. Material conditions matter, but their effects depend on whether rivals can make one another’s capabilities, signals, and behavior intelligible. The chapter introduces strategic legibility as the book’s central concept and previews how repeated interaction can produce shared, though never perfectly identical, expectations about restraint, resolve, and escalation.
Chapter 2: Rivalry, Interpretation, and Strategic Memory
Chapter 2 situates the argument within the existing literature on deterrence, strategic stability, signaling, learning, and strategic culture. It shows that established theories often recognize the importance of perception while continuing to treat meaning as an intervening variable between more fundamental material causes and strategic outcomes. The chapter instead treats interpretation as constitutive of the strategic relationship itself. It also develops the concept of strategic memory: the accumulated body of experiences, analogies, expectations, and lessons through which states interpret present conduct. Strategic memory is neither an objective record nor a fixed national characteristic. It is a socially constructed and politically contested resource that shapes what rivals notice, how they categorize behavior, and which historical precedents they expect to recur.
Chapter 3: Signals, Scripts, and Strategic Legibility
Chapter 3 formally develops the theory of strategic legibility. It distinguishes signals, which are individual acts intended to communicate, from scripts, which are more durable expectations about how particular strategic interactions normally unfold. Signals become intelligible only when they can be interpreted through scripts that connect actions with recognizable meanings and anticipated responses. Strategic legibility emerges when rivals possess sufficiently compatible scripts to forecast how the other is likely to interpret and answer a given action. This does not require trust, agreement, or a common worldview. It requires only enough shared interpretive structure for each side to anticipate the other’s likely reactions and adjust its behavior before an interaction produces uncontrolled escalation.
Chapter 4: The Emergence of Strategic Legibility
Chapter 4 explains how strategic legibility develops over time. It identifies repeated interaction, observation, signaling, institutionalization, and the accumulation of strategic memory as the principal mechanisms through which rivals construct shared expectations. Legibility may emerge from formal negotiations, but it can also develop through crises, operational encounters, military exercises, tacit bargaining, and professional exchanges among diplomats, officers, scientists, and technical communities. These interactions gradually establish recognizable categories of behavior and create expectations about what counts as routine, provocative, restrained, or escalatory. Because these understandings are learned rather than inherent, their development is historically contingent and can proceed unevenly across different domains of competition.
Chapter 5: Learning the Nuclear Relationship, 1945–1950
Chapter 5 traces the uneven emergence of strategic legibility during the opening years of the Cold War. Between 1945 and 1949, the United States and Soviet Union possessed few shared expectations about the political meaning of nuclear weapons, the boundaries of acceptable competition, or the relationship between conventional conflict and nuclear escalation. Episodes such as the Berlin crisis helped the two sides begin learning how resolve could be demonstrated without directly attacking one another, but the Soviet atomic test and the transition to the Korean War transformed the strategic environment before stable scripts had fully developed. The chapter shows that early Cold War stability was not supplied automatically by nuclear weapons. It had to be constructed through dangerous encounters in which both sides gradually learned how the other interpreted threats, restraint, and escalation.
Chapter 6: When Strategic Legibility Occurs
Chapter 6 identifies the conditions under which strategic legibility is most likely to emerge and endure. Legibility becomes more probable when rivals interact repeatedly, retain institutional memory, possess channels through which interpretations can be tested, and encounter consequences that encourage them to revise mistaken assumptions. It is less likely when interactions are rare, organizations rotate rapidly, political leaders reject inherited lessons, or states lack opportunities to observe how their actions were understood. The chapter also explains why legibility varies within a single rivalry. Two states may understand one another relatively well in the nuclear domain while possessing incompatible expectations in space, cyberspace, or regional conventional conflicts. Strategic stability is therefore best understood as partial, layered, and continuously reproduced rather than as a single condition applying uniformly to the entire relationship.
Chapter 7: The Breakdown of Strategic Legibility
Chapter 7 examines how established interpretive relationships deteriorate. Strategic legibility can break down when new technologies, operational practices, political actors, or domains of competition make inherited scripts unreliable. The 2023 Chinese surveillance-balloon incident illustrates how an event can pass through several competing interpretive frames before either side determines what it means or what response it warrants. Cyber operations pose an even deeper challenge because persistent intrusion, ambiguous effects, uncertain attribution, and the participation of private actors complicate the construction of stable categories of behavior. The chapter argues that instability arises not simply from novelty or uncertainty, but from the inability of rivals to determine which script applies and whether the other side understands an interaction in comparable terms.
Chapter 8: Learning Under Uncertainty
Chapter 8 considers how states can cultivate strategic legibility in domains where shared experience remains limited and technological change is rapid. It argues that policymakers cannot eliminate uncertainty or manufacture common understanding through declaratory policy alone. They can, however, create repeated opportunities to test interpretations, clarify categories of behavior, and preserve lessons across institutions. Crisis communication, military-to-military contacts, operational agreements, technical standards, tabletop exercises, and regularized professional exchanges can all contribute to this process. The chapter also emphasizes the growing role of engineers, software developers, satellite operators, cybersecurity specialists, commercial firms, and standards organizations in constructing the language through which emerging strategic practices become intelligible.
Chapter 9: Stability Without Certainty
The concluding chapter draws together the book’s theoretical and practical implications. Strategic stability does not rest on complete transparency, perfect rationality, or a permanent balance of forces. It depends on whether rivals know enough about one another’s interpretive frameworks to anticipate reactions, communicate limits, and recognize departures from established patterns. This conception replaces the search for a final stable equilibrium with the more modest but realistic task of maintaining resilient processes of interpretation. The chapter concludes that the central challenge of contemporary strategic competition is not merely controlling capabilities. It is preserving and adapting the shared scripts that allow adversaries to understand what those capabilities and their employment mean.
