Defender's Dilemma

Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute(AEI), where she focuses on defense against emerging national security challenges, such as hybrid and gray-zone threats. She is also a columnist with Foreign Policy, where she writes on national security and the globalized economy, and a member of the UK’s National Preparedness Commission. Before joining AEI, Braw was a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London, where she founded its modern deterrence project. She has also been an associate fellow at the European Leadership Network, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a senior consultant at Control Risks, a global risk consultancy. Braw started her career as a journalist working for Swedish newspapers and has reported on Europe for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. She is often published in the Economist, Foreign Affairs, the Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She is also the author of God’s Spies: The Stasi’s Cold War Espionage Campaign Inside the Church (William B. Eerdmans, 2019). A frequent speaker at national security and business conferences, Braw often appears on various international media.

In a world with worrying new challenges to our safety and security, Elisabeth Braw is a clear voice of reason. In this authoritative and fascinating book she issues stark warnings about how our lives are increasingly affected by unsupervised and unregulated new threats. These urgent warnings must be listened to.

• IntroductionI. Defining and Identifying Gray-Zone AggressionII. 2014: A Decisive YearIII. Gray-Zone Aggression, a National Security ThreatIV. Is Sponsorship an Act of Aggression? Use of Licit Means in the Gray ZoneV. Subversive Economics: When Business as Usual Enters the Gray ZoneVI. Coercion, Bullying, and Subversion of Civil SocietyVII. Gradual Border Alterations and Surreptitious Fishing: Use of Illicit MeansVIII. Producing Fear in the Enemy’s Mind: Adapting Cold War Deterrence for Gray-Zone AggressionIX. Cold War Swedish and Finnish Total Defense as DeterrenceX. Building a Wall of Denial Against Gray-Zone AggressionXI. Deterrence by PunishmentConcluding ReflectionsNotes About the AuthorIndex