Confidence building measures are actions taken to reduce the fear of aggression or attack by parties in a conflict situation. The term dates back to the Cold War, where superpowers took actions to prevent nuclear war due to misperceptions or miscalculations.
Master Data Science from Johns Hopkins University
Confidence building measures typically involve exchanging information and making it possible to verify this information. For example, during the Cold War, superpowers would exchange information on troop movements and exercises or exchange information on equipment and arms.
This was done to allow one party to better understand the expectations and stances of the other as a way of
building confidence that each other would respond in a positively reciprocal manner.
In another lecture we will look at various confidence building measures that exist in cyber security in more detail. But for now some common confidence building measures would involve sharing information about monitoring of criminal activity, greater transparency in intelligence gathering, etcetera.
Confidence building comes down to establishing trust between nations. You can see the emphasis on shared monitoring, compliance and transparency as in terms to increase expectations that partners will act in terms on what is best for the partnership rather than what is best for one party. Remember, that is the second key cognition for trust.
In essence the heart of the confidence building measures approach is building trust through transparency and reciprocity. They're small, incremental steps that results in positive in some situations.
Confidence building measures are also useful tools to stop the escalation of conflict. Nations are by nature competitive with each other. It's unrealistic to expect that nations are going to be totally open and honest with each other, and stop competing, okay? They're bound to compete and they're bound to look after their own interests. So their initial response in a prisoner's dilemma game is not likely to be cooperation.
Tensions are always going to exist between nations, and events will cause tensions to escalate to conflict.
The purpose of the confidence building measure therefore, is to provide negative feedback to this tension escalating situation, thereby reducing tensions.
That is, you can think about international conflict situations as positive feedback systems. Fear and suspicions provide positive feedback, increasing conflict between nations. The initial fear, the initial suspicions amplify. They guide one nation's response to the other.
And it reveals suspicious behavior which gets interpreted as further threats. So, that's a positive feedback system.
Confidence building measures introduce trust, or attempt to introduce trust at least, which acts as negative feedback on this system. It reverses the conflict that would otherwise continue to escalate until war broke out.
So confidence building measures involve the exchange of information and allow other parties the opportunity to verify this information. The old adage trust to verify.
This reduces the perceptions of threat and increases the expectations for cooperation.
But can confidence building measures really work in cyber space?
Some experts have questioned whether the Cold War techniques are applicable to modern cyber warfare. Well, Joseph Nye is a noted political scientist, and former dean of Harvard School of Government, has suggested that lessons from the nuclear arms race are in fact very useful for building cooperation in the cyber arena as well. Professor Nye has outlined the similarities between nuclear and cyber war scenarios. First, there's a superiority of offense over defense.
Okay. Back in the Cold War as eschewed today in cyberspace, the strength of the offensive capabilities outweighs the strength of the defensive capabilities. Second, there is potential use of weapons for tactical and strategic purposes.
Third, there are possibilities of first and second use scenarios both in nuclear war and in cyber security or cyber war.
Fourth, there is a possibility of automated responses.
Nations can set up automated responses to actions or behaviors of the other nations.
The fact that nuclear war never broke out, full scale nuclear war between the US and USSR. Never broke out. Can be attributed, Professor Nye argues, to the fact that although the nations were locked in a zero sum game of political advantage, they were simultaneously engaged in a positive sum game of avoiding nuclear war.
They recognized the mutual benefits of avoiding a full scale nuclear war, and followed the process of positive reciprocity.
In the reading that accompanies this unit, Professor Nye identifies several important lessons form the Cold War for international cooperation.
Partners in initial experiences can lead, the first lesson is that partners initial experiences can lead to the concurrence of believes before cooperation emerges. Both the US and Soviet leaders learned that nuclear wars can not be won and should not be fought.
They realized this independently years before they jointly announced their shared belief.
Yet, their actions early on demonstrated to each other that they both held the same belief. So the leaders of each nation could tell that the leaders of the other nation knew that nuclear war could not be won, and that they were committed to preventing one.
The lesson here is that independent learning may pave the way for cooperation. This means that we should find ways to make sure that leaders of nations can reach the same conclusions about the consequences of cyber war. In essence, that it is futile. Perhaps they could even use the cyber equivalence of war games. Which were used during the Cold War with positive results. Once the US and USSR were made aware of the power of nuclear destruction, they developed implicit norms of reciprocal behavior that guided the competition between their nations. This positive reciprocity reduced the chances that competition turned lethal.
It would be great if we can construct iterated gauge of prisoner, iterated gauge of the equivalent of prisoner's dilemma situations in cyberspace that would allow parties to test limited cooperation and see the benefits of such cooperation.
Another lesson from Professor Nye's analysis is that deterrence involves more than just retaliation. Second strike capability and mutually assured destruction may have been at the heart of the nuclear deterrent strategy, but they weren't the only things supporting it. The US for example developed the declaratory policy governing when and under what conditions it would use nuclear arms. Similar policies could be developed regarding cyber weapons.
A third point made by Professor Nye is that, it's important for nations to begin arms control treaties with positive sum gains related to third parties. The first two successful nuclear treaties between the US and the USSR can be seen as positive sum scenarios. The first treaty established bans on tests which were good for the environment and hence for the people in both countries. The second treaty limited the spread of nuclear arms to third parties, which was good for both countries, they didn't have to worry about what other countries had nuclear weapons, and did not have to worry about containing those countries. Further containing the spread of the nuclear arms. The global nature of the internet requires international cooperation. The most promising area for cooperations relate to third parties, and those third parties are criminals and terrorists. States could agree to cooperate on forensics and on monitoring to limit damage caused by cyber criminals and cyber terrorists. So these are some of the ways to increase trust between nations regarding the use of cyber space. As I allured to a moment ago in the next module we'll look more closely at some other confidence building measures. However, there are still some other issues that we have not yet discussed that we will need to take in to account. In particular cultures and customs of nations need to be considered.
Cultural differences may be an impediment or barrier to trust building exercises. For example, values and norms related to cyber activity are different for people in the US than in China. To the US, websites like YouTube and Google are seen as tools of participation and democracy. They are seen as liberating. But in China, they are considered threats, clear threats, and are blocked.
Further, the US and China have vastly different political systems which may make it particularly difficult to establish trust between nations.
China's political system is closed, so Western governments can never be sure if the information and pronouncements from the Chinese government are genuine.
China can't trust the US because its leaders repeatedly call for democratic change in China, which is obviously upsetting to the leaders of that nation.
This means that the two nations may have to work particularly hard to open communication and establish relationships that build transparency and trust. We will explore such confidence building attempts in another lecture. The point of this lecture has been to highlight the key perceptions that underlie trust and confidence building between nations. Trust will only occur if nations perceive positive sum scenarios and have clear and confident expectations that each nation will act for mutual gain, rather than for purely self interest.
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