How to arm Ukraine without starting World War 3
When it comes to fears of catastrophic escalation or stumbling into World War 3, I claim:
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The West can safely supply more powerful military equipment to Ukraine …
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… if and only if they are careful about how they publicly message the donations.
Primary targets for such messaging are Russians other than Vladimir Putin, for Putin can’t start a nuclear war unless other Russians are willing to help.
Almost nobody else argues exactly this position. Many “doves” want to stop more or less at current levels of aid. Most “hawks” don’t acknowledge that we need to be careful about messaging our escalations. And neither side seems to have worked out which potential Russian escalators we should most worry about.
The fears and why they’re exaggerated
There actually are multiple kinds of dangerous escalation to worry about, via combinations of two main categories:
- Bottom up. NATO and Russian soldiers could stumble into direct combat with each other, and things could escalate from there.
- Top down. Either genuinely or pretextually in retaliation for some lesser Western escalation:
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- Putin could order the use of strategic or tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
- Putin could order a strategic nuclear strike against the US (or Germany or whoever).
- Putin could order a conventional-weapons attack against a NATO country (e.g., a salvo of missiles, or even a full-out invasion).
Most discussion is around the top-down scenarios. But the thing is – Putin has much less power to cause those kinds of problems than it might initially seem. Unless the escalation orders made sense to those whose agreement was needed, they would likely be disobeyed. So the challenge isn’t to keep Putin from escalating; rather, it’s to keep the Russian military from wanting to.
Asserting limits on Putin’s power may sound like an extreme claim, but I’m mainly just synthesizing a variety of well-known and typically well-accepted ideas. Nuke-focused ones include:
- Putin literally doesn’t have the power to launch strategic nuclear weapons without the consent of a colleague.
- The colleagues with the authority to consent are ones he seems to be on the outs with right now.
- Most people, no matter how craven otherwise, won’t start a nuclear war they don’t believe in, even at gunpoint.
- Deploying tactical nuclear weapons would be a major effort, visible to US intelligence all the way through the process.
- Armies can “slow walk” politicians’ orders if they want to badly enough.
More generally, Putin and the military have massive mutual disdain and mistrust.
- The Ukraine invasion has been a disaster in the early going, the military is obviously being scapegoated, and only some of the scapegoating is fair.
- Putin didn’t even give his military a chance to plan properly.
- Corruption at the top of the military makes it very hard for them to succeed.
- So does the purging of competent senior officers.
- Putin signaled his lack of alignment with the military in 2016 by establishing Rosgvardiya, aka the National Guard, as a rival organization presumably more loyal to (and more favored by) him.
- Stories of low Russian military morale abound.
How to help Ukraine safely
So increased military aid to Ukraine should not trigger runaway escalation, provided it meets three criteria:
- It must be done carefully enough that it doesn’t start accidental escalatory conflict (e.g. Americans directly shooting Russians).
- It must be limited enough that nuclear escalation and the like would seem wildly disproportional to senior Russian military leaders.
- It must not cross any “red lines” of the kind that would trigger inevitable catastrophic escalation.
For both the “carefully” and “red lines” criteria, let’s go to a bit of game theory. To avoid catastrophic outcomes in a situation of military escalation, it helps to have agreements that certain formally possible “moves” are in fact taboo to play. These agreements are not necessarily explicitly negotiated, but are at least tacitly understood even so. For example, the two most obvious Russia/US “red line” taboos are:
- Don’t nuke each others’ cities.
- Don’t directly attack each others’ troops.
Prudence dictates that “red lines” that would be immediately catastrophic to break should be:
- Unambiguously clear.
- Widely understood among many people in each country.
- Quite stable over time.
And so they should be simple and obvious, like the two examples above. If an alleged “red line” is hard to assess, it probably isn’t a true red line at all.
That’s not to say that true red lines are the only taboos. Indeed, we can regard the sides as engaged in never-ending bargaining as to which actions are or aren’t allowed. And of course, sometimes in a bargaining situation you simply declare how one aspect of the disagreement will go.
To continue with that analogy: Dictating a new escalation non-taboo – such as “We’re giving MiGs to Ukraine and there’s nothing you can do to talk us out of it” – is roughly like introducing a firm, non-negotiable demand into a more conventional negotiation. The main tips for how to do that are:
- Negotiate from interests and/or principles rather than positions.
- Persuasively communicate commitment to the underlying interests or principles.
- (When this tactic is practical) Leave yourself no way to back down.
That’s where careful messaging comes in. I’d specifically suggest something like:
- As we’ve been shouting all along, we deplore the bombardment of Ukrainian cities. (Principle that we’re committed to.)
- Our citizens and allies demand we do more to stop it. (Hard to back down.)
- Thus, we’re supplying Ukraine with X, Y and Z systems. (Again, hard to back down; we’re asking for forgiveness, not permission.)
- We are forbidding Ukraine from using these systems outside Ukrainian borders. We’ll punish them with reduced support if they violate that non-trivially. (Respect Russia’s interests/principles and indicate great desire not to escalate.)
If communicating and living up to messaging like that isn’t enough to avert World War III, no other approach was going to stop it either.
Related links
- I reargued this case in a post on my new blog Implicit Games. Other posts there continue the discussion.
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This is a critical and complex topic. Arming Ukraine while avoiding escalation into a broader conflict requires careful diplomacy and strategic planning. Providing defensive support and humanitarian aid can bolster Ukraine’s resilience without provoking further aggression. Open dialogue among nations is essential to ensure that actions taken do not inadvertently lead to a larger confrontation. Thought-provoking article!