Limited Strikes for Limiting War

The idea has its apocryphal roots in iterations of Russia’s military doctrine, which formally lays out the country’s military policy. This is a discourse at more than one remove from the reality of armed conflict: it deals with nuclear weapons, which have not been used in war in nearly eight decades, and publicly available statements of military doctrine, an imperfect guide to how a country might actually behave in a war.

There is no statement of such a doctrine in publicly available versions of Russia’s military doctrine from the Cold War period. Its first use as a phrase occurred in a 2015 Senate hearing. As developed by American foreign policy thinkers, “escalate to de-escalate” has come to mean intensifying a conflict through “coercive threats, including limited nuclear use,” in such a way that it will force the other side to end the conflict, on terms favorable to the one doing the escalation.

From there, the idea developed and took shape in the ferment of Washington-based foreign policy discussion. In 2017, the strategy was cited as the root cause of Russia’s nuclear modernization, which would allow it to “‘de-escalate a conflict’ using a small number of strikes.” Modernization, which in practice means replacement or renovation of nuclear weapons and supporting infrastructure, is a project that Russia, China, and the United States have all poured huge sums into as nuclear forces created in the mid-twentieth century aged and arms control negotiations foundered (fell out of fashion), investing hundreds of billions in making sure that nuclear weapons will be part of global politics for decades to come.

By 2018, the concept was in the US nuclear posture review, another formal statement of doctrine released by every incoming administration. The Trump administration’s review stated that Russia “mistakenly assesses that the threat of nuclear escalation or actual first use of nuclear weapons would serve to “de-escalate” a conflict on terms favorable to Russia. These mistaken perceptions increase the prospect for dangerous miscalculation and escalation.”

The idea of perpetrating increasingly intense acts of violence until your opponent gives up is pretty close to the basic proposition of armed conflict, and the idea that nuclear weapons have some role in that process has been part of US-based strategic discussions since the Cold War. But the fact that US analysts who gave the concept life and legs were ostensibly merely explicating a theory whose true home was in the mind of Russian nuclear war planners is important. The concept was used to explicate a whole range of decisions Russia made about its nuclear arsenal at the time, but most of all, its purported willingness to conduct a “limited” nuclear strike.

What would be limited about using a nuke? In theory, it might involve a nuclear weapon smaller than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. It could take place in a less populated area than those strikes had, perhaps lessening the immediate human cost. But above all, it would be limited because a country in full possession of the nuclear weapons it would need to respond to a nuclear attack in kind would, instead, decide not to, choosing to step back from the edge of a full-scale nuclear war.

“Escalate to de-escalate” eventually attracted a critical mass of criticism and fell out of favor as a concept, though within foreign policy circles whether Russia would be willing to make good on the nuclear threats it has made in the context of the war in Ukraine with a “limited” (or less limited) nuclear strike is still debated. But its shortcomings as a concept remain, as does the fundamental irrationality it rests on. It shifts responsibility for the “real” escalation to the opponent, raising the floor for business as usual — Israeli military leaders can describe their attacks as “leading to war,” and not for all intents and purposes war itself, as long as their opponents have not taken whatever steps might persuade them to stop their bombing campaign.

Like many other theories of warmaking that retain some credibility in mainstream foreign policy discussions, escalate to de-escalate assumes that the side doing the escalating can maintain a level of control over all aspects of a conflict situation that has proven unrealistic in practice. More than that, though, it assumes that escalating a conflict is a step taken with a realistic plan for what comes after — which would likely be very different from the insistence on total achievement of extravagantly destructive aims that seems to underlie many contemporary conflicts, and certainly Israel’s attack on Gaza and expanded regional war aims. Here, de-escalation is not a serious approach to managing a conflict but instead a demand for total capitulation from one’s adversaries, at the cost of ever greater escalation.

To take 9/11 and October 7 as two examples, given how the United States and Israel have responded to conventional attacks that were, when measured against the scale of destruction that nuclear weapons could cause, pretty small, it’s difficult to imagine either responding to a nuclear attack with world-saving restraint. Countries like the United States and Israel seem to always find it easier to imagine their adversaries making the decision to limit the destruction of war — nuclear or otherwise — in the interests of broader peace.