Against Escalation Management

PETER JUUL

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If there’s one principle that’s come to guide the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Ukraine and indeed national security in general, it’s escalation management. That’s a bit of esoteric foreign policy jargon, but in ordinary words it means that the United States finely tunes its military aid to Ukraine so as not to provoke the Kremlin. Hence the tortured and tortuous internal debates inside the White House and U.S. government over whether or not the United States and its allies should provide Kyiv with this or that weapon system.

In other words, the Biden administration imagines they can control or manage the course of events in Ukraine—largely based on their own notions of what constitutes Vladimir Putin’s red lines in the war. Hence the State Department publicly declaring that it does not support Ukrainian drone strikes against Russian oil refineries, a continued (though weakening) refusal to provide Ukraine with longer-range ATACMS missiles, or the Pentagon saying that Ukraine should use its new F-16 fighters to “focus on Ukraine's defense of its sovereign territory within Ukraine's sovereign borders.” Sound military advice perhaps, but it’s counsel that nonetheless fits well within an overall Ukraine policy that’s overly concerned with the phantom menace of escalation with Moscow—a policy that’s more likely to bring about precisely the escalation it aims to avoid.

Much the same could be said of Yemen, where fear of a nuclear-armed rival cannot explain the tentative and indecisive series of U.S.-led strikes in response to Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in international waters. For all their very real differences, however, the cases of Ukraine and Yemen reveal much about the mentality of avoidance that’s seized a hold of America’s foreign policymakers. Reasonable concerns about conflict escalation merge with technocratic hubris to yield in a form of strategic paralysis that leaves America in the worst of both worlds: involved in conflicts without any goal save avoiding escalatory spirals and catastrophic scenarios that seem to exist largely in the heads of policymakers, foreign policy analysts, and think tank experts.

Worse, this conflict avoidance mindset hands the initiative over to the likes of Vladimir Putin and the Houthis and their Iranian backers. For all the talk of responding to adversaries at a time and place of our own choosing, the United States reacts on the terms these adversaries set rather than forcing them to react to our own. In part, that’s because America’s own goals remain unclear—do we want Ukraine to succeed on the battlefield, either winning outright or giving Kyiv a decisive advantage in any negotiations, or simply not lose?—but the end result remains the same.

Escalation management isn’t a strategy, it’s avoidance and absence of one. In that respect, it’s a preeminent species of the self-deterrence the United States has become adept at practicing in Ukraine and elsewhere in recent years. This equation needs to change in the minds of American policymakers and analysts if the United States wishes to achieve its own objectives and protect both its values and interests on the global stage.

Avoidance in Ukraine

Making escalation avoidance America’s top priority has proven especially damaging in Ukraine. To begin with, it’s resulted in a policy that almost always gives Kyiv the weapons it’s requested, whether Abrams tanks, F-16 fighters, or ATACMS missiles, too late to make the largest possible difference on the battlefield. Russian attack helicopters, for instance, played a large role in stymieing Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year—and could have been neutralized had Ukraine’s military possessed enough fighters to shoot them down or long-range missiles to strike their bases, as indeed occurred when the Biden administration finally transferred such missiles to Ukraine in October of last year.

There may have been other good reasons for these delays—a low inventory of missiles in U.S. military stockpiles, for instance—but they nonetheless occurred within the context of a policy intended to avoid escalation with Moscow above all else. In just about every high-profile case, high-ranking American officials have considered a particular weapons system escalatory in some sense. The Biden administration then typically approves the transfer of these weapons to Ukraine, but not without lengthy internal and sometimes public handwringing.

Each time the United States has crossed one of what American officials see as Putin’s redlines, moreover, the response from the Kremlin has been muted at worst. That strongly suggests that fears of escalation among American policymakers and analysts have been unfounded and unwarranted. The fact that the United States and its allies have crossed one of the Kremlin’s redlines after another with little to no consequence also heavily implies that Putin possesses just one true redline: the direct intervention of American and NATO combat forces in Ukraine.

Worse, the United States has actively discouraged Ukraine from carrying out strikes in Russia—all while Russian forces carry out strikes against Ukraine with near-impunity. The logic seems to be that Ukrainian attacks against legitimate military targets like air bases hosting strategic bombers or oil refineries fueling Russian tanks presents too great a risk of escalation. But that’s a recipe for a longer-than-necessary war, one that encourages the Kremlin to persist knowing that its rear areas are and will remain largely secure. By failing to provide Ukraine with the necessary weapons to repel Putin’s invasion and placing unreasonable restrictions, formal or informal, on their use, the United States effectively prolongs the war in Ukraine—and does so to Putin’s advantage.

Ironically enough, this inordinate fear of escalation likely only increases the real risk of escalation in Ukraine—that NATO member nations may feel compelled to send in troops to defend their interests and prevent the total Russian victory Putin still clearly seeks in Ukraine. French President Emmanuel Macron has publicly floated the possibility that troops from NATO nations may eventually need to be sent to Ukraine, a notion that’s found favor with frontline NATO members like Finland and the Baltic states. It’s not hard to imagine more talk like this should Ukraine’s battlefield position continue to erode, especially if the U.S. Congress continues to dither and delay on President Biden’s request to support Kyiv’s war effort.

The avoidance playbook in Yemen

The same “escalation management” playbook has been at work in America’s response to recent Houthi attacks on international shipping, with the Biden administration obviously reluctant to take military action out of fear of escalation. When President Biden did order strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, these strikes were limited in scope and have since largely focused on hitting “missiles on launch rails” and “UAV ground control stations” that pose imminent threats to commercial shipping or American military vessels. Suffice it to say that neither the Houthis themselves nor their Iranian patrons have not de-escalated and do not fear that further attacks against commercial ships—or even U.S. Navy warships—will lead to escalation with the United States.

In part, that’s because the current U.S.-led air campaign doesn’t really threaten anything the Houthis or their supporters in Tehran actually value—such as the Iranian intelligence ship MV Behshad that’s helping direct Houthi strikes or Houthi forces in the field maintaining the years-long siege of Taiz. Instead, the United States has chosen, essentially by default, to pursue a strategy of attrition apparently predicated on the hope that, one way or another, the Houthis will run out of missiles and drones faster than Iran can resupply them.

Now the United States finds itself in an unenviable and precarious position, indefinitely fighting a war of attrition due to an inordinate fear of escalation—and escalation may come anyway if the Houthis get lucky and hit a U.S. Navy ship with a missile or drone. In any event, the United States has ceded the initiative in the Red Sea and Bab El-Mandeb strait to the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors. The risk of escalation in Yemen hasn’t been “managed” in any real sense; it’s merely been deferred.

Making matters even more complex, the Houthi campaign against freedom of navigation is intimately connected with the challenge to wider regional and global security posed by the ruling regime in Tehran. The United States has been trapped in an escalation management mindset with Iran for years now, and strenuous American attempts to signal restraint and avoid escalation have not been met with reciprocity on Tehran’s part. Indeed, Tehran and its proxies have continued to foster insecurity in the Middle East and around the world, from Iranian material support for Russian aggression in Ukraine and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea to brazen attacks against exiled Iranian journalists and human rights activists living in the United States and Europe.

The rise of strategic avoidance under the guise of “escalation management” has several implications.

First and foremost, policymakers and political leaders in Washington need to shift away from a mentality grounded on an inordinate, paralyzing fear that anything the United States might do will escalate a conflict. In too many cases—Ukraine most prominent and damaging to American interests among them—policymakers appear to live in terror of crossing redlines that largely exist in their own minds. Witness the debates in Beltway foreign policy circles as to whether providing Ukraine with one weapon or another will somehow violate some limit that Putin himself has not clearly articulated. Even worse, this timid way of thinking only encourages Putin to continue making vague but ultimately empty nuclear threats. After all, these threats evidently work to instill fear and hesitation in American and allied political leaders and policymakers as to each and every step taken to support Ukraine.

Likewise, the idea that American policymakers can manage escalation in conflicts with their own logic thousands of miles away needs to go. It’s technocratic hubris to think that officials in Washington can so finely tune their policies and make such judicious decisions that whether wars escalate or not depends upon them. The notion that the Kremlin would see decisions to provide one major weapons system to Ukraine but not another as somehow less “escalatory” seems dubious, as does the view that Tehran sees the lengths the United States goes to avert potential escalation when retaliating for attacks against American troops as an act of forbearance rather than one of avoidance.

When it comes to the war in Ukraine, the United States should ditch the overwrought apprehension and provide Kyiv weapons without regard to their supposed escalatory potential—and do so with alacrity. Congress must pass the aid package requested by President Biden nearly six months ago now. That doesn’t mean Kyiv has carte blanche here; it doesn’t make sense to give Ukraine arms that it can’t reasonably be expected to support, for instance. If weapons can’t be provided for some other reason—like low American military stockpiles—then the U.S. government should say so, not use the specter of escalation as an excuse for not giving them.

At the same time, the United States should not impose draconian restrictions on Ukraine’s use of American-provided weapons—or publicly decry Ukraine’s attacks inside Russia as dangerously escalatory. Instead, the United States should establish more reasonable and informal rules for the use of American-supplied arms. Kyiv could agree to limit the use of these weapons to a certain, publicly undisclosed geographic zone in Russia, or to certain legitimate military targets like air bases used to attack Ukraine. Nor should the United States should not air disagreements with the Ukrainian government in public in the way it has in recent weeks. Above all, the Kremlin should feel it has to defend its rear areas rather than see them as secure.

On Yemen and the Houthis, the United States will need to threaten something of value to either the Houthis themselves or their Iranian sponsors. Strikes against Houthi positions in the field around Taiz or elsewhere might do the trick, as could seizing or even sinking the MV Behshad. That ship has already been the target of an American cyberattack, though it’s unclear how effective that attack was or how long its effects will last. Additional American actions should wait until the next major Houthi provocation, but they must demonstrate the dangers to both the Houthis and Iran of continuing on their current course of action in the Red Sea and Bab El-Mandeb strait.

Ultimately, American policymakers and political leaders need to recognize that “escalation management” isn’t an end in itself. It can and should be a consideration when the United States pursues other foreign policy goals, but fear of escalation only risks bringing about precisely the outcomes it’s intended to avoid. America must get over its dread of escalation, stop deterring itself, and start taking the necessary actions to achieve its foreign policy goals and defend freedom overseas.