ARGUMENT: VIRTUOUS ESCALATIONWestern Leaders Should Take Escalation over Ukraine Seriously

Published 6 June 2022

The United States and members states of the EU and NATO have taken significant action to assist Ukraine and pressure Russia, but there is increasing pressure to “do more.” Michael Lopate and Bear Braumoeller write that as we provide Ukraine with more sophisticated weapons, and as calls grow for allowing Ukraine to push Russian forces back over the border without requiring any concessions on the part of Ukraine, “we should be clear-eyed about the risks of escalation as we seek that victory.” They write that their research shows that “War escalation is extremely unpredictable, and most people don’t appreciate just how easily and quickly wars can escalate to shocking levels of lethality.”

The United States and members states of the EU and NATO have taken significant action to assist Ukraine and pressure Russia, but there is increasing pressure to “do more.” The brutality Russia has exhibited and its scorched-earth strategy have been met with a justified moral outrage, while the battlefield successes of the Ukrainian forces have led some observers to argue that more support, Ukraine can defeat Russia, pushing Russian forces back over the border without requiring any concessions on the part of Ukraine.

Eliot Cohen is not alone is arguing that a Ukrainian victory would lead to a new balance in Europe and that “the West must aim to break Russia’s societal will through the grinding up of its army and the devastation of its economy.”

Michael Lopate and Bear Braumoeller write in War on the Rocks that theysympathize with what animates these calls for action.

They want to protect Ukraine and defeat Russia because that is the right thing to do morally, politically, and geo-strategically. Letting Ukraine burn as Russia bleeds itself white through attrition and economic crisis is indeed monstrous, and a Ukrainian victory over Russia would garner significant long-term upsides. However, we should be clear-eyed about the risks of escalation as we seek that victory. While militaries on all sides consider escalation to be a tactical or strategic choice to coerce or defeat their opponents, it also represents an undesirable risk inherent in continued conflict, one that is not entirely under anyone’s control. It would behoove anyone advocating escalation to think seriously about the risks they would be running, and to do so we must first make them explicit. One of us has written a book on trends in the initiation and escalation of wars and a summary of the current state of knowledge, and we are currently collaborating on a new project on escalation. Two lessons stand out starkly from our research: War escalation is extremely unpredictable, and most people don’t appreciate just how easily and quickly wars can escalate to shocking levels of lethality.

The first point to understand is that wars are not like most ordinary phenomena, in that their size doesn’t cluster closely around an average value in the way that many measures do…. The distribution of the size of wars, by contrast, does not conform to a tidy, bell-shaped curve. Most wars remain relatively small, but some get unbelievably large, and the magnitude of the difference is