Matthew Sussex and Cathy Moloney
The belief that the U.S. retains the overwhelming capability to control crises with peer competitors is one of the most dangerous assumptions in American strategic thought.[1] Recent history shows that when America’s rivals challenge the status quo they frequently get what they want. Moreover, they have been able to do so without fighting, or even coming close to it.
This article argues for a more holistic U.S. approach to escalation control. It highlights the need to act earlier and adapt faster to challenges before they develop into crises. This approach has two advantages. First, it represents a more anticipatory and agile way for the U.S. to address strategic rivalry. Second, it better reflects the fact that activities short of war—including lawfare, assertive diplomacy, economic leverage, the adaptation of international norms, civil-military fusion, and information operations—are increasingly overshadowing pure military competition as ways for U.S. competitors to attain their objectives.[2]
TELEGRAPHING TIMIDITY
Escalation control—put simply, the ability to dictate the tempo crises take and lock adversaries into responding to moves—was once firmly part of the U.S. strategic lexicon.[3] The term fell into disuse because it was assumed U.S. unipolarity made it dominant in any post-Cold War political-military competition. But such assumptions are clearly incorrect today. Indeed, U.S. responses to rival nations’ efforts to dominate escalation narratives have tended to telegraph timidity rather than strength. This has been apparent in the lack of a coordinated U.S. response to Chinese militarization of the South China Sea, its half-hearted pivot to the Asia-Pacific, and a series of failed resets with Russia. In each instance the U.S. has chosen a de-escalatory approach rather than seizing the initiative. Rather than altering the behaviour of the target state, its actions have emboldened them.
U.S. RESPONSES TO RIVAL NATIONS’ EFFORTS TO DOMINATE ESCALATION NARRATIVES HAVE TENDED TO TELEGRAPH TIMIDITY RATHER THAN STRENGTH.
Here Russia’s approach to strategic interactions, from gray zone operations to nuclear doctrine, is instructive. It is chiefly concerned with triggering low-level contacts, controlling their tempo, and then offering an exit ramp that favours its own interests and agenda.[4] For instance, in 2017 Russia stationed S-400 surface-to-air missile systems to blunt the widespread use of American airpower in Syria, and it has repeatedly flown its interceptors dangerously close to U.S. warplanes.[5] It has built storage facilities for Poseidon 2M39 unmanned nuclear submarines on the Kola Peninsula.[6] And most famously for students of hybrid warfare it seized Crimea in 2014 with “friendly green men,” before then backing pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region to expand its de facto territorial footprint.[7] Most recently this has included the seizure of Ukrainian vessels, threats to close the Kerch Strait, and the movement of large numbers of troops close to the border with Ukraine.
China has also engaged in attempts at escalation control, especially in the gray zone.[8] It completed its island-building activities in the South China Sea with little resistance from either ASEAN states unable to compel Beijing to reverse course or successive U.S. administrations unwilling to jeopardise the trading relationship. It simply ignored The Hague Court of Arbitration’s 2016 ruling that its historical claim to the South China Sea was without legal basis, thus demonstrating that possession was worth more than nine-tenths of the law.[9] And China’s 2021 use of semi-civilian fleets around Whitsun Reef and recent exercises in the Sea of Japan have been similarly intended to test U.S. preparedness to respond to provocations, not to mention the resolve of Manila and Tokyo.[10]
China, the members of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and proposed corridors in the Belt and Road Initiative (Wikimedia)
China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative is a broader attempt to escalate Sino-U.S. competition. Multilateral in aspiration but bilateral in execution, the Belt and Road Initiative taps geo-economic leverage from investment to achieve strategic gains.[11] On the one hand it cements Chinese continental dominance as a Eurasian trading hub. But on the other it opens new opportunities for China to gain wider access to the maritime domain. Some examples here include the People’s Liberation Army Navy base in Djibouti, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, port infrastructure funding in Myanmar, assistance to upgrade the Ream naval base in Cambodia, and large-scale investment in Fiji.[12]
The overall response from the U.S. and its allies to such efforts to alter the status quo has been piecemeal and partial. During the Obama and Trump Administrations, the key message Washington sent Moscow and Beijing was that it was not prepared to risk war over Ukraine, Syria, or the South China Sea. It offered no real counter to the Belt and Road Initiative, withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and forcing Japan to take the lead on an investment alternative that was dwarfed in scope and scale by China’s initiative.[13] The Trump Administration offered an incoherent trade war in addition to the Blue Dot Network that contained little real funding and seemingly vanished as soon as it was announced.[14] And neither Presidents Obama or Trump took firm action that might have caused Vladimir Putin to pause, such as insisting Ukraine be admitted to NATO or stationing sizeable forces on the Ukrainian border. In each case, the U.S. and its allies de-escalated voluntarily, reinforcing the lesson to Moscow and Beijing that Washington would blink first.
FACING FORWARD, NOT BACKWARD
The willingness of China and Russia to challenge the U.S. using a suite of diplomatic, legal, economic, and political mechanisms demands a change in Washington’s thinking on escalation. A primary lesson about gray zone operations and political warfare is that they make existing strategic paradigms and attempts at analytical forecasting murkier. This includes our understanding of the sources of national power, which are often more complex than such simple cleavages such as diplomacy, information, military, economic permit.[15]
Moreover, in an era where the initiator has the advantage, the reactive state is often stymied by the speed of events—or lack of will—in attempts to respond effectively. Indeed, decision-making frameworks like John Boyd’s OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) arguably much better describe the tempo achieved by America’s rivals in achieving their politico-military objectives, rather than describing the conduct of the U.S. itself.[16]
…IN AN ERA WHERE THE INITIATOR HAS THE ADVANTAGE, THE REACTIVE STATE IS OFTEN STYMIED BY THE SPEED OF EVENTS—OR LACK OF WILL—IN ATTEMPTS TO RESPOND EFFECTIVELY.
That is why the U.S. needs its own more proactive approach to escalation management. Obviously this cannot go as far as Russian notions of total or hybrid war, or what Chinese scholars have called unrestricted warfare, since liberal states face stronger domestic, institutional, and legal constraints on their behaviour than authoritarian ones.[17] One could also make the argument that liberal states are status quo actors, and hence it is difficult—by definition—to take the initiative under such circumstances. But this ignores the fact that hybrid warfare is viewed by Russian and Chinese strategic planners as a depiction of Western approaches to war, and not the other way around.[18] It also means that without a swifter and more creative way to respond to its challengers, the U.S. will be left in the unenviable position of relying increasingly on kinetic power or defaulting to rivals’ interests.
Under those circumstances, crisis management and attempts at escalation control occur when the threat of war is already high. If contemporary competition is increasingly about winning without fighting, it is therefore in America’s interests to tailor its escalatory responses around that competition at an earlier stage.
TAKING BACK THE ESCALATION ADVANTAGE
The gray zone approaches used by Russia and the People’s Republic of China have three main points of vulnerability. The first is that they rely on the U.S. and its allies continuing to be reactive and risk-averse. Second, they assume the U.S. will either establish clear escalation thresholds, or ultimately fail to enforce the red lines it communicates.[19] Third, they assume U.S. attempts to influence escalation will largely come on the brink of conflict, and that it will try and defuse lower-level provocations from becoming larger conflicts it would rather avoid.
Taking back the advantage sooner, more swiftly, and more creatively is therefore the key to re-establishing U.S. control over escalation during competition with peers. Below we sketch out a strategic loop encompassing four key themes: learning, anticipating, initiating, and reinforcing. This acts as a cycle, providing stepwise confidence in proactive decision-making.
A Learn - Anticipate - Initiate - Reinforce Model (Authors’ Work)
Learn
The challenge of contemporary political-military competition is that the volume and complexity of information often outstrips analytical capacity.[20] Too much data therefore becomes almost as difficult to manage as not enough of it. U.S. rivals have also increased the tempo of their lower-level provocations, which disrupts policy settings that have often taken years to develop. Hence, a key aspect of any attempt to recapture escalation control is adaptive learning, recognising that today adversaries can pinpoint vulnerabilities within societies just as ably as between them. This increases the scope of warfare beyond the five domains to include political, economic, and societal arenas. But while this makes learning more complex, it also allows escalation control to become a more iterative process. This can facilitate more agile intervention or policy shifts long before kinetic flashpoints occur, and blunt escalatory moves by adversaries adopting gray zone tactics.
As an example of this, it has long been recognised that the Belt and Road Initiative is partly a geostrategic effort to loosen the current rules-based order, using tempting bilateral investment deals to construct a China-centered hegemonic order. Effective learning in this context requires better understanding the incentive structures for states being offered Chinese investment; their relative weight and importance to the Belt and Road (as transit corridors or providers of key resources or strategic position, for instance); and the potential vulnerabilities Beijing might exploit. This would then serve as a basis to predict future behaviour and devise swifter U.S. interventions.
Anticipate
The corollary of learning is that it enables the U.S. and its allies to shape and/or influence potential conflicts by drawing upon the possibility of what could happen.[21] Such an anticipatory framework presumes clear understandings—or at least well-reasoned assumptions—about an adversary’s escalation intentions. Shared wisdom at a whole-of-government level about an adversary’s strengths and vulnerabilities is therefore also vital. This makes escalation control not just a national defence concern; given the increasing prevalence of non-linear warfare, more comprehensive planning than typical dyadic conflict scenarios is necessary. This should involve a wide array of domestic and outward-facing agencies to wargame threats ranging from election meddling to cyber-enabled information war, economic coercion, and the political, legal, and military responses to hybrid operations. Such an approach will not only build caches of knowledge about where an adversary may go next, but also provide flexible options to seize control over both the processes and narratives around escalation.
Effectively anticipating a peer’s moves provides the capacity to intervene at an earlier stage than when a crisis has been triggered. If, for instance, it becomes evident that Russia has an incentive to probe the U.S. for weakness by escalating tensions with one of the Baltic States and opening a new round of cyber attacks against U.S. interests, an anticipatory approach would allow the U.S. to pre-empt such an outcome by hardening critical infrastructure, better coordinating its cyber defences and sharing information, and acting in concert with NATO and other allies to adopt a proactive rather than reactive stance.
Initiate
If the U.S. is able to reliably anticipate an adversary’s moves, it will have more confidence to initiate, by which we mean employing escalatory pre-emption. This recalls Thomas Schelling’s notion of “the power to hurt,” which essentially refers to bargaining power.[22] To be clear, we are not advocating strategic pre-emption simply in the form of military strikes, but in deliberately using diplomatic, economic, normative, and other levers to take the escalation advantage. In practice this could resemble announcing surprise investment initiatives near an opponent’s territory, deploying forces when there is a reasonable assessment of military coercion by rivals, upgrading alliances, or a combination of these. In other words, it would see the U.S. utilise its full range of diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military tools as the initiator, rather than the respondent. Indeed, the U.S. has long been capable of using such instruments.[23] But given the nature of the contemporary strategic landscape, it is clear the U.S. will need to rediscover the willingness to do so against peer competitors, and not just weaker actors.
A good example of this concerns the current stand-off with Russia over Ukraine, where U.S. and European Union hesitancy has been understood as weakness by Moscow. While there is little appetite amongst NATO members to admit Ukraine to the alliance, a concerted display of U.S. power in the form of greatly enhanced military assistance would test Russia’s escalation intentions. For instance, the establishment of a joint U.S.-Ukrainian air defence network, coupled to the provision of a limited offensive strike capability for stand-alone Ukrainian forces would up the ante for the Kremlin, and go some way towards wresting back escalation control in the conflict.
Russian airborne troops take part in exercises in Crimea in March 2021. (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)
Reinforce
It is axiomatic that great powers use strategic narratives to establish and maintain influence. In the case of recapturing escalation control, however, these narratives are a crucial tool alongside other national power resources. They offer states the capacity to reinforce their interests, values, and aspirations, and potentially avoid kinetic outcomes. Targeted messaging, strategic alliances, economic power, and utilising international norms to Washington’s advantage all allow for controlled escalation and de-escalation. They would assist the U.S. in acting with more agility, instead of reacting to adversary moves and having to simultaneously juggle nervous allies and domestic constituencies.
Reinforcing narratives in this context have particular salience in escalating Sino-U.S. tensions. One crucial criticism of the U.S. approach to strategic competition with Beijing is that it has yet to settle on a coherent explanation for why it should remain the primary guarantor of strategic stability in the Asia-Pacific, and why others should be wary of a rising China. Attempts to frame competition around ideology have been largely unsuccessful and potentially counterproductive because they have given Beijing the opportunity to point out U.S. hypocrisy (as with COVID-19 vaccine nationalism, for example) and potentially recreate a Cold War by proxy. Effective reinforcement, then, is by nature de-escalatory; it is aimed at reassuring allies about U.S. commitments as well as reassuring China the United States is prepared to engage constructively on points of disagreement.
CONCLUSION
A longer-term, broader approach to escalation management offers more opportunities for the U.S. to influence peer rivals before competition becomes a crisis. Certainly the Biden administration has sent promising signals that it offers a more coherent commitment to maintaining global order than its predecessor. Yet the U.S. has continued to cede escalation control to Russia over Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula. The United States still has no answer to either the Belt and Road Initiative or China’s attempts to pressure nations like the Philippines and Australia into acquiescence. As we have argued, adapting its approach based on what it knows or has learned, and what it believes may occur or anticipates will allow the U.S. to retake escalation control by initiating rather than simply responding. Backed by strategic narratives that reinforce U.S. interests and values, a more proactive U.S. strategy will therefore also be better equipped to constrain its rivals and to reassure its friends.
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