Leaders that fail to understand that their actions and words can give rise to insecurity in others risk becoming embroiled in a security paradox. An example is the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) program intended to counter Soviet ballistic missiles in the event of a preemptive nuclear strike.
While Washington stressed that SDI was intended to be a “shield of peace” and that the Soviets “knew” that the U.S. would never carry out a preemptive nuclear strike, leaders failed to understand that their words and actions caused the soviets to be suspicious of the true motives of SDI and to plan for the worse.
Had their roles been reversed, American strategists would have been painfully cognizant that the successful deployment of ABM systems to defend against a Soviet preemptive nuclear strike would also leave the USSR more vulnerable to American strategic nuclear forces, undermining the stabilizing doctrine of mutually assured destruction. A strategy that was intended to bolster American security actually led to greater insecurity for both superpowers precisely because it did not account for Soviet fears. This underlines the argument that strategy which emphasizes the maximization of relative gains at the expense of a balanced consideration of the psychological dynamics of the security dilemma is overly simplistic, and provides limited value in the formulation of foreign policy.