security dilemma, in political science, a situation in which actions taken by a state to increase its own security cause reactions from other states, which in turn lead to a decrease rather than an increase in the original state’s security.
Some scholars of international relations have argued that the security dilemma is the most important source of conflict between states. They hold that in the international realm, there is no legitimate monopoly of violence—that is, there is no world government—and, as a consequence, each state must take care of its own security. For this reason, the primary goal of states is to maximize their own security. However, many of the actions taken in pursuit of that goal—such as weapons procurement and the development of new military technologies—will necessarily decrease the security of other states. Decreasing the security of other states does not automatically create a dilemma, but other states will tend to follow suit if one state arms. They cannot know whether the arming state will use its increased military capabilities for an attack in the future. For this reason, they will either choose to increase their own military capabilities in order to reestablish the balance of power or they will launch a preemptive attack to prevent the arming state from upsetting the balance in the first place. If they choose the first option, the result may be a security spiral, in which two (or more) states are tied in an arms race, with each state responding to increases in weapons procurement and defense expenditure by the other state, leading them both to arm themselves more and more heavily. That situation may lead to war in the long run.
The logic of the security dilemma was first described by the British historian Herbert Butterfield in 1949. The term itself was coined by the American political scientist John Herz in 1950. Although the concept seems to fit particularly well the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, its advocates do not see it as tied to a specific historical era. Rather, in their view, it reflects the fundamentally tragic nature of international life: state actors strive for peace and stability but end up in military conflict.
Other scholars have argued that the security dilemma is largely irrelevant, because international conflict is not the result of “status quo” powers seeking to maximize security but of “revisionist” powers seeking to maximize power. If all states were status quo powers, such critics have argued, then military conflict would be extremely rare, because the world would consist of status quo powers eager to signal their benign intentions.