Strategic Asymmetric Deception and Its Role in the Current Threat Environment

Abstract

[President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, once stated that the post-Cold War world of the 1990s was a “paradox [where] American military superiority actually increase[d] the threat of... attack against [the U.S.] by creating incentives for adversaries to challenge us asymmetrically.” He was alluding to the fact that the Cold War’s closure was supposed to bring about a situation that encouraged peace, nation-building, and unilateral comfort for the United States. The reality that America has come to know is quite different, and some might even argue that, given the option, many people would return to a security situation comparable to the bipolar world of the Cold War.]