What happens when a state attempts to squeeze a rival power into submission, choking off its access to financial flows, resources, technology, and trade? Washington is betting heavily that it produces concessions. American policy toward Russia since 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and initiated a separatist war in eastern Ukraine in response to the pro-Western Maidan uprising, has been premised on the belief that if the United States and Europe put Moscow under sufficient economic pressure, the Kremlin will recalculate the costs and benefits of its aggressive actions against its neighbors and the West and adopt a less threatening, more accommodating course. At worst, it is thought, Moscow might resort to economic retaliation in response to American sanctions, but given Russia’s relative economic weakness, such retaliation is not regarded as a significant danger.
History, however, provides us with a sobering example of an alternative reaction: Pearl Harbor. Most people are familiar with the events of December 7, 1941, the “day that will live in infamy,” when Japan attacked US naval assets in Hawaii. The Central Intelligence Agency was created largely as a result, with the primary goal of guarding against future surprise attacks by a determined foreign adversary. But fewer know the events that led up to that attack. There were really two intelligence failures that led to the surprise at Pearl Harbor. One was tactical, the failure to know where and when the Japanese would attack, despite numerous pieces of accurate intelligence that, in retrospect, showed clearly that the targeting of American naval assets in Hawaii was looming. The second was strategic. Dean Acheson, who was then US assistant secretary of state, described it:
Everyone in the Department—and in the government generally—misread Japanese intentions. This misreading was not of what the Japanese military government proposed to do in Asia, not of the hostility our embargo would excite, but of the incredibly high risks General Tojo would assume to accomplish his ends. No one in Washington realized that he and his regime regarded the conquest of Asia not as an accomplishment of an ambition but as the survival of the regime. It was a life-and-death matter to them. They were absolutely unwilling to continue in what they regarded as Japan’s precarious position surrounded by great and hostile powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, and a possibly revived and restored China.1
In the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States had put Japan under increasingly severe economic pressure in response to Japanese military conquests and expansionist policies in Asia. Washington terminated its commercial trade agreement with Tokyo in 1939, restricted the export of iron and steel in 1940, and then froze all Japanese assets in the United States in 1941 and placed a full embargo on oil exports. As an island nation whose industrial production and military capability were almost wholly dependent on the import of oil, steel, and other commodities, Japan viewed these measures as nothing less than an existential threat, but it had few economic cards it could play in response. A few days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan’s ambassador to the United States delivered a diplomatic note that plainly set out his government’s perspective: “The Japanese people believe that economic measures are a much more effective weapon of war than military measures; that … they are being placed under severe pressure by the United States to yield to the American position; and that it is preferable to fight rather than to yield to pressure.” Despite that warning, Americans were stunned by what they regarded as an unprovoked attack on American territory.
One of the lessons of Pearl Harbor is the importance of alertness to the danger of secretly planned “bolt from the blue” attacks by hostile foreign actors, such as the Japanese in 1941 and al-Qaeda in 2001. During the Cold War, this American intelligence mission most often took the form of ascertaining Soviet intentions, plans, and capabilities to attack the American homeland or to mount an assault against important objectives in the European theater, such as the Fulda Gap. In the early post–Cold War years, it refocused on preventing attacks by terrorist groups or hostile states such as Iran and North Korea. Now, in an era defined by “the return of great power competition,” as the US National Security Strategy put it in 2018, intelligence alertness to the prospect of Russian or Chinese surprise attack, either against the continental United States or our friends and allies abroad, is once again coming to the fore.
Another lesson from Pearl Harbor, though, is the importance of sensitivity to the ways that adversaries can misread each other’s perceptions and take steps that trigger unexpected escalations into unsought, full-fledged kinetic warfare. Intentions are simultaneously the most important and most difficult thing to understand about one’s adversaries. And history is littered with examples of wars that involved the misreading of intentions, sometimes escalating even when their leaders tried to avoid them. World War I is perhaps the most notorious and impactful example, but it is far from the only one. The Seven Years’ War between France and Britain in North America arose unexpectedly out of small skirmishes because each side incorrectly believed that the other knew its aims were limited. The Korean War began in large part because the Soviets and North Koreans mistakenly believed that Washington did not regard the Korean peninsula as important to its interests and thus would not oppose conquest of the South. China later entered that war, much to American surprise, because both Beijing and Washington misunderstood the other’s key concerns, and each sent signals that inadvertently misled the other.
Today, a secretly planned military attack on the American or Russian homeland is not the primary danger posed by the extreme hostility in US-Russian relations, even though both nations have been taught by traumatic national experience to expect one—America by Pearl Harbor, Russia by Hitler’s betrayal of the German-Soviet nonaggression treaty in launching his savage Operation Barbarossa. Neither state wants to initiate what it knows would be a mutually devastating, apocalyptic war. While Russia is under increasing economic pressure from the United States, American sanctions have not (yet) reached the crippling level that Japan suffered prior to Pearl Harbor, and Russia in any event has a range of less dangerous, alternative responses to Western economic warfare.
Nonetheless, we are each in grave danger of misreading the other’s intentions and inadvertently triggering an escalatory spiral that neither side can control. Each side has convinced itself that the other is intent on its destruction. Each accuses the other of destabilizing the international order, with the United States defending the post–Cold War, NATO- and EU-dominated order in Europe, and Russia arguing that America’s oft-touted “responsibility to protect” is undermining Westphalian conventions that have underpinned the international system since 1648. Within this context, each side is increasingly confronting the other in regional proxy wars, in probes of air and maritime boundaries, and in cyberspace. In Syria, US and Russian air forces are operating in the same airspace on opposing sides for the first time since the Korean War. Each country is directly backing opposing sides in the fighting in Ukraine, potentially bringing US and Russian forces into the other side’s line of fire, or tying their fate to the actions of local proxies they only loosely control. In tense, politically and emotionally charged situations in regional military arenas, accidents or limited local clashes can force statesmen to choose not between all-out war and peace but between incremental escalation and humiliation—a dynamic process that is difficult to control once it begins.2 An examination of near-miss US-Russian incidents, as well as hypothetical but realistic escalation scenarios, reveals just how easily local events could spin out of control, leading Washington and Moscow toward a nuclear confrontation that neither wants.
Many people remember the Cuban missile crisis and recall how close Washington and Moscow came to nuclear catastrophe at that time. Fewer are familiar with what is now known as the Able Archer incident, a much less public affair that took place in the secret confines of NATO and Soviet military commands in November 1983. The events played out as the culmination of a tension-filled year. In March, US president Ronald Reagan had made a high-profile speech describing the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” and called for a rollback strategy that would “write the final pages of the history of the Soviet Union,” followed only a few days later by his announcement of the “Star Wars” strategic defense initiative. In September, Soviet air defenses in the country’s far eastern region had shot down a civilian airliner, Korean Air Lines flight 007, believing it to be an American intelligence collection plane crossing into Soviet airspace, resulting in the deaths of 269 civilians, including a US congressman. Meanwhile, NATO was proceeding with plans to deploy American Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe to counter the Soviet SS-20s targeting the alliance, stoking fears on each side that the other might attack. Trust between the United States and the USSR was at rock-bottom levels.
Against this backdrop, the United States and NATO carried out a regular annual military exercise designed to test command and control procedures for nuclear weapons use. It was framed around a hypothetical Warsaw Pact reaction to unrest in Yugoslavia, which led to a conventional clash with NATO and escalated quickly into the use of chemical and nuclear weapons. But unlike past exercises, “Able Archer 83” involved high-level US government policymakers, used new and different encrypted message formats, included dummy nuclear warhead handling procedures, and placed forces participating in the exercise on a notional high alert. Soviet officials, already primed by KGB reports to suspect that the United States might use the cover of a military exercise to mask preparations for a nuclear attack, detected these changes and became alarmed, unable to distinguish actual from notional activity. They responded by placing Soviet forces on high alert, loading planes in Poland and East Germany with bombs, preparing seventy SS-20 missiles for launch, and sending submarines armed with ballistic missiles under the Arctic ice to await attack orders. Years later, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) wrote in a subsequently declassified report that the Soviet fear of attack was genuine and that the United States “may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger.”3 War may have been averted, the report said, largely due to the actions of one American official, Lieutenant General Leonard Perroots, who “acted correctly out of instinct, not informed guidance” in deciding not to elevate the alert of Western military assets in response to the Soviet actions. The fact that the affair played out largely in secret, outside the pressure of headlines and the glare of television cameras, probably facilitated its peaceful outcome.
Even in their current somewhat weakened state, confidence-building measures put in place in the context of the OSCE that allow for direct observation of large military exercises make such misinterpretations less likely today. But the renewed rivalry and heightened mistrust between Moscow and Washington in the past several years have made other escalation scenarios a realistic possibility once again. According to the American Security Project, which tracks military incidents between Russia and the United States, there have been over two hundred instances of Russian military aircraft flying across or close to Western airspace since 2012, apparently probing the West’s ability and willingness to intercept the Russian sorties.4 These aggressive offensive operations have been paired with equally aggressive defensive maneuvers, including several incidents in which Russian interceptors have flown at high speeds within a few feet of American military aircraft or naval ships approaching Russian airspace or territorial waters. The margin for error in these encounters is slim. American officials have accused Russian aircraft of reckless and irresponsible actions, flying without transponders that would facilitate detection by radar.
While these maneuvers unquestionably appear reckless, they are also rational in the context of Russia’s broader security interests, which means they are likely to continue. The American strategist and deterrence theorist Thomas Schelling famously compared deterrence in the nuclear age to teenagers engaged in a game of chicken, driving their hot rods directly toward each other on a narrow strip of road, daring the other to turn aside. Like that senseless game, he observed, nuclear deterrence is dependent on convincing the other side that one has the nerve not to yield to the other’s will, to defend one’s line in the face of looming self-annihilation. Such a posture requires the demonstration of a certain degree of recklessness to make one’s resolve clear to the other side. Forays into the other side’s airspace and “buzzing” its aircraft and “shouldering” its ships are meant in part to gain insight into the military procedures and capabilities that an adversary will employ in actual warfare. But they are also intended to take a measure of the opponent’s mettle and send signals about one’s own fortitude, not despite the dangers but because of them. When two nuclear powers face off across borders, these close encounters—and the risk of accident that goes with them—are an almost unavoidable part of the game.
The dangers of such “rational recklessness” were made clear in a direct clash between US and Russian forces in Syria in February 2018. Each side was backing opposing forces in Syria’s civil war; Moscow was supporting a coalition of pro-government forces, including the Syrian military, while the United States was assisting a mix of anti-regime opposition forces, including a large contingent of Kurdish fighters. Both sides were fighting a common foe, however, in ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and had recently made significant gains against the ISIS stronghold in eastern Syria near the city of Deir al-Zour, an area that housed valuable oil and natural gas reserves and a gas production facility known as the Conoco plant.
As ISIS was driven out of the area, the question of who would control the Conoco plant and surrounding fields rose to the fore. ISIS had used black-market gas sales to help fund its activities, and the plant could potentially help to sustain other opposition forces in the wake of ISIS’s defeat. Up to this point, the two militaries had done a good job of communicating regularly about deconfliction, careful to notify each other about flight plans and ground maneuvers, sensitive to the danger that the other’s forces could come accidently under fire. As part of that effort, they had agreed that neither would cross the Euphrates River near Deir al-Zour, which separated Russian and Russian-backed forces on the west bank from American and American-backed forces in the east. But US commanders grew increasingly concerned as they observed pro-regime forces massing to the river’s west, seemingly poised for a crossing. Through the deconfliction channel, they warned about the approaching forces and reminded the Russian commanders about the agreement to remain on opposite sides of the Euphrates.
Despite US warnings, the pro-regime forces launched a sustained tank, mortar, and artillery attack on the night of February 7 and began crossing the river. The Americans fired warning shots and inquired again through the deconfliction channel about whether the approaching forces included Russian personnel. The Russians, however, denied participating in the attack and claimed to have no control over the forces involved. As artillery shells and Russian-made T-72 tank rounds rained down on American special forces personnel, the US command faced a choice between fighting back and falling back. It chose to fight. “The Russian high command assured us it was not their people,” Defense Secretary James Mattis subsequently testified to US senators, so he directed “for the [attacking] force, then, to be annihilated. And it was.”5
US forces fired back at the attackers using anti-tank missiles and machine guns and then called in massive air strikes. The resulting four-hour battle killed more than two hundred of the attackers, according to documents released by the Pentagon, against no reported American casualties. But Russia’s denial about having any personnel in the attacking force turned out to be misleading. The casualties included fighters from Evro Polis, a private mercenary army of Russian and pro-Russian veterans of the war in Ukraine known informally as the Wagner group, after the nom de guerre of its commander. The Russian foreign ministry acknowledged after the fact that five Russian citizens—but no official Russian military personnel—had been killed and dozens more injured. Independent Russian media reports suggested that the death toll was actually eighty or more.
Whether the Wagner group was acting at the behest of the Russian government is unclear.6 Evro Polis certainly had reasons of its own to target the Conoco gas plant with or without any official blessing, as it had signed an agreement with the Syrian energy ministry in 2016 entitling it to 25 percent of the production from gas and oil facilities it helped to liberate, protect, and develop.7 However, a Washington Post report suggests that Wagner had at least some level of Russian government approval for the operation; it cites an alleged intelligence intercept in which the owner of Evro Polis told a Syrian official that he had secured the approval of an unnamed Russian government minister for a “fast and strong” initiative in early February.8 This suggests several possible explanations for the attack. A government official resentful of Wagner’s growing role may have okayed the attack in the hope that a rout by the Americans would undermine an influential rival to Russia’s uniformed military forces, or alternatively, the promise of a personal share in gas proceeds may have won the blessing of a corrupt minister. It is also possible that the Kremlin had full knowledge of the planned attack and used it to test America’s resolve while maintaining some level of plausible deniability about its involvement.
Regardless of the explanation for Russian actions or the absolute numbers of Russian citizens killed or wounded, the gravity of the event remains clear. Whether officially blessed or not, Russian forces in significant numbers had attacked US military personnel on the battlefield. And for the first time since the Cold War, that clash had produced appreciable casualties. The amazing lack of American losses in the attack was at least as important in avoiding a genuine crisis as was the Kremlin’s choice to disavow any official involvement.
It is one thing to risk localized military encounters between ships and planes or small expeditionary ground forces. It is quite another to move from limited conventional clashes to the use of nuclear weapons. No country has crossed that threshold since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, and all recognize the immense dangers of doing so. That recognition played a big part in keeping what Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis has called “the long peace” between the United States and Soviet Union, despite their mistrust, military rivalry, and ideological animosity.9
But technology has evolved since the post–Cold War period in ways that make escalation from conventional to nuclear conflict more likely once fighting starts, even if the combatants try to avoid crossing that threshold. James Acton, a physicist working on deterrence and nuclear policy issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has been sounding the alarms about what he calls “nuclear entanglement,” the intermixing of the command, control, communications, and intelligence warning systems that oversee nuclear and conventional weapons systems in the militaries of the world’s great powers, coupled with new nonnuclear capabilities that can threaten an opponent’s nuclear retaliatory force. The bright line separating nuclear and conventional conflict is in reality not bright at all, he argues, and national command authorities in Russia and the United States probably have less control than they think over whether any conventional military clash turns into a catastrophic nuclear conflict.10
During the Cold War, the only viable means of countering an opponent’s strategic nuclear forces was a nuclear strike against the weapons themselves or against their hardened command and control systems. Each country’s satellites—used both to communicate with nuclear weapons systems and for early warning of an adversary’s nuclear launches—were largely safe from ground-based attacks. Unless one of the superpowers detected the other preparing or launching any of its nuclear forces, it could rest assured that its strategic retaliatory force was safe, able to serve as a reliable nuclear deterrent.
Today, that is no longer the case. The world’s great powers have grown more and more dependent on satellite-based systems to detect launches of nuclear and nonnuclear missiles, to guide ever more accurate weaponry through global-positioning systems, and to communicate with both nuclear and nonnuclear weapons systems. But these satellites have also grown more vulnerable than ever to nonnuclear anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons.11 And highly accurate long-range conventional weapons, not to mention cyberweapons and ballistic missile defense systems, hold the potential to undermine an opponent’s nuclear capability without resort to nuclear strikes.
As a result of these new capabilities and vulnerabilities, both Washington and Moscow have officially announced that they might launch a nuclear attack in response to conventional threats. The United States has lapped the field of global competitors in developing and using long-range sea-launched and air-launched conventional cruise missiles, with an inventory of several thousand. Russia’s concerns about these conventional capabilities had years ago prompted it to announce that it might use nuclear weapons to counter a conventional threat. But Russia has recently deployed a smaller number of similar weapons, most notably the Kalibr cruise missile that it has employed in the Syrian war. As Russian and Chinese conventional weapons, anti-satellite technology, and cybercapabilities have evolved, the United States has grown more concerned about nonnuclear threats to its nuclear arsenal. Its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review declares that in the event of “significant nonnuclear strategic attacks … on US or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment capabilities,” the United States would consider the use of nuclear strikes.12
Even more alarming, according to Acton, is the fact that such nonnuclear threats to nuclear capabilities might be inadvertent, flowing from activities not meant to be escalatory.13 Today, a significant number of weapons systems are dual-use, capable of delivering either nuclear or conventional warheads. Thus, whereas the command, control, communications, and intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance systems (C3ISR) that govern the nuclear arsenal were once largely separate from those of conventional weaponry, those systems today are increasingly networked and overlap. As a result, if Moscow were to grow concerned in a crisis situation that the United States might target its forces with conventionally armed Tomahawk cruise missiles, it would have strong incentives to counter those weapons preemptively by crippling the American C3ISR satellites controlling them through anti-satellite weapons or cyberattacks or some combination thereof. Washington might interpret an attack on dual-purpose satellites, however, as a threat to American nuclear capabilities—causing US authorities to believe they must choose between launching nuclear weapons immediately or losing their ability to use them altogether. This would constitute a highly escalatory situation driven by misunderstanding and fear rather than by any desire to initiate a nuclear exchange. Some Russian experts share Acton’s concerns, cautioning that “entanglement erodes the traditional delineation between nuclear and nonnuclear arms, as well as between offensive and defensive systems, and creates the threat of a swift and unintended escalation of a local conventional armed collision between the great powers into a nuclear war.”14
Dry tinder does not produce a fire absent a spark of some kind, and sparks do not always result in a conflagration. Conditions that are ripe for an escalatory spiral—deep mistrust between adversaries, ongoing cybersparring, a mutual belief that the other side is intent on one’s own destruction, and deteriorating organizational and procedural frameworks that might normally contain conflicts and manage crises—do not necessarily lead to disaster, as the encounter in February 2018 between Russian mercenaries and American special forces in Syria demonstrated. Still, an examination of two hypothetical conflict scenarios, an exercise in imagination based on actual conditions that are ripe for escalation, illustrates how easy it would be for Washington and Moscow to find themselves in a nuclear confrontation neither wants.
The 2014 Russia-Ukraine crisis has precipitated one of the largest schisms in Orthodox Christian history. Millions of worshippers are caught in the middle of a struggle for political control between Moscow and Kiev. The present conflict has its roots in 1686, when the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople granted the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) conditional jurisdiction over the Kiev Metropolis. This arrangement has remained unchanged for over three centuries, but the Soviet collapse and Ukraine’s subsequent attainment of statehood have elicited a host of difficult political questions dividing Ukrainian public opinion: How does nationality intersect with religious identity in an overwhelmingly Orthodox state? Does fealty to the Moscow Patriarchate compromise Ukrainian national sovereignty?
The majority of Ukraine’s Orthodox parishes currently belong to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), subordinate to the ROC. In 1992, a faction led by the newly proclaimed “Patriarch of Kiev,” Filaret Denysenko, broke off from the UOC-MP to assert its autonomy from Moscow. This spiritual project has proved popular with Ukrainian nationalists, who have long expressed displeasure at the political messaging scattered throughout some Russian Orthodox liturgies; most strikingly, these include prayers for the health and safety of the Russian armed forces. The schism came to a head with the annexation of Crimea, when Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko took up the cause of the Kiev Patriarchate (UOC-KP) as an assertion of Ukrainian “spiritual independence” from Russia.
But over the span of its existence, the UOC-KP has not been recognized by any other Orthodox church; the Russian-aligned UOC-MP remained the sole Orthodox authority in Ukraine. In a bid to secure international legitimacy, Ukraine lobbied the Constantinople Patriarch for a certification of autocephaly, or full self-government. It was granted this document, a Tomos in Orthodox terminology, in January 2019. Shortly afterward, the UOC-KP and smaller Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) were merged into the new Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
The UOC-MP, with its twelve thousand parishes across Ukraine, is regarded by Ukrainian nationalists as a national security threat and stands on the verge of being branded as an illegitimate sect within Ukraine. Around seventy parishes have opted to join the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, but what will become of the less willing? Several UOC-MP priests have unequivocally stated their resolve to die in defense of their churches and monasteries. Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church is accusing Ukrainian authorities of seizing and vandalizing UOC-MP property with increasing frequency. The Ukrainian Rada has already passed an unprecedented law allowing church allegiance to be switched by majority vote, further increasing the likelihood of conflict within UOC-MP communities.
From this point, it is easy to imagine how events might begin to spiral out of control. Ukraine’s president is unlikely to seek outright physical confrontation with the UOC-MP, but Ukrainian nationalists to his right have proved themselves less restrained. Right Sector, a prominent nationalist coalition, sees the UOC-MP leadership structure as wartime traitors, hostile foreign agents who cynically undermine Ukrainian national sovereignty under the cover of religion. Over the past year, Right Sector has staged several large street confrontations outside of UOC-MP churches to disrupt ongoing religious services. These ongoing efforts are likely to intensify and become more frequent, as the granting of autocephaly has cast the dispute over UOC-MP church property in a new political light.
Imagine, then, that a large group of Ukrainian nationalists blockades yet another UOC-MP church, as they have recently done in the Volyn Oblast of northwestern Ukraine. The priest arrives shortly thereafter, accompanied by a small congregation. Against a cacophony of jeers and threats of violence, he insists on entering his church to hold regularly scheduled services. As he pushes his way through the crowd, someone throws a stone at the back of his head. He collapses at the footsteps of his church. An ambulance is called, and responders pronounce him dead on the spot from a fatal concussion.
The religious cold war in Ukraine begins to turn hot. Tens of thousands of Russian Orthodox believers march in protest against the violence in Ukraine. Hundreds of private Russian citizens cross the border armed with pistols, rifles, and other small arms, intent on preventing further Ukrainian attacks and defending what is seen as Russian Orthodox property. The US State Department attempts to defuse tensions with a statement condemning violence, affirming the importance of religious freedom, and supporting Ukraine’s right to handle its own internal affairs in accordance with democratic principles.
The Russian response does not prove nearly as restrained. Since the presidential election of 2012, Russian president Putin has had to contend with growing Communist and nationalist movements on his political right flank. They accuse Putin of not doing enough to defend Russian interests with military force and complain that he naïvely seeks compromise with the West when he should instead be taking aggressive measures to roll back NATO influence in Russia’s legitimate sphere of interest. According to one particularly popular Communist critique, Putin has failed to protect the predominantly Russian-speaking people of Donbass from what is portrayed as a Ukrainian ethnic-cleansing campaign.15
The Communists charge, with overwhelming popular support, that this killing of a priest demonstrates the need to act immediately and decisively to protect Russian compatriots in Ukraine. They use this opportunity to again demand formal Russian recognition of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), something that they have sought since 2015. Putin has to this point resisted calls for open and direct Russian military involvement in Donbass, a move that would invite serious international repercussions. But doing nothing in the face of the Ukrainian religious violence would play into the hands of his detractors, whose hawkish calls to action reflect the country’s mood better than Putin’s caution. Actively preventing Russian mercenaries from defending their co-religionists would be seen as an act of betrayal. The Kremlin settles for a response that stops just short of recognizing the Donbass: Russian emergency ministry units, supported by the Russian national guard, will cross into Donbass to establish a safe zone around the Luhansk area, replete with field hospitals to treat Ukrainians wounded over the course of the civil conflict.
Kiev calls this move not merely an invasion but an act of war, and it appeals to Washington for immediate military aid. Poland supports this call and offers to host additional American military forces to respond to Russia’s aggression. With Congress and influential segments of American public opinion demanding a forceful response, the White House has neither the political capital nor the diplomatic tools to de-escalate with Moscow. American tactical missile defense systems, air assets, artillery, and heavy armor pour into western Poland over the next several weeks. The US president announces that he has ordered US military personnel that had been rotating through Poland on temporary assignments to be increased in number and stationed along the border with Ukraine, ready for action should Russian military forces move toward the western portions of Ukraine. He explains that this show of force is not to help Kiev retake Donbass but to be ready to defend the rest of Ukraine against Russia. Moscow views the US announcement with alarm. Despite Washington’s denials, Russian military leaders conclude that Washington and Kiev are preparing for joint military action against Donbass.
From here, both sides become constrained by an increasingly narrow field of policy options. Moscow officially recognizes Donetsk and Luhansk as independent of Ukraine in a desperate last bid to deter what it sees as an imminent invasion. To protect what it has now acknowledged as two sovereign states, Russia establishes and enforces a no-fly zone across Donbass while stationing military forces across the border from Kiev-controlled territory. The United States, in turn, has no choice but to support a Ukrainian military buildup on the other side of the Donbass border, putting the two sides within a hair’s breadth of kinetic conflict.
A single shot across the unofficial border serves as the spark to war. It was not ordered in Moscow, Kiev, or Washington, however. Rather, it comes from the many “volunteer” forces active in and around the Donbass region, including the Kuban Cossack Host, which had long threatened to “come to the defense of our homeland and mother church” in response to acts of persecution against Russian Orthodox believers, and from ultranationalist paramilitary groups within Right Sector that had long been convinced that the Ukrainian government is unable or unwilling to take the steps necessary to retake Donetsk and Luhansk. As limited conventional skirmishing between Russian and Ukrainian forces begins, the United States does its best to avoid being drawn directly into the fighting, providing intelligence, arms, and advice to Ukrainian forces while keeping its own forces far from the line of contact, ready to defend against a Russian offensive. But a Ukrainian-operated antiaircraft unit shoots down a Russian fighter plane on combat air patrol over the Donbass, and Russian aircraft and artillery retaliate against several sites where US advisers were assisting Ukrainians, killing four American military personnel. A direct US-Russian military conflict starts climbing the ladder of escalation.
The highly sophisticated, Russia-generated NotPetya malware attacks in Ukraine in 2017 quickly spilled out of control beyond Ukrainian borders and into networks across the world, inflicting more than $10 billion worth of damage and constituting the most destructive malware attack in history. The American response—indicting some named Russian individuals and adding new economic sanctions to those already in force against Russia, struck many cyberprofessionals as incommensurate to the severity of the damage. “The lack of a proper response has been almost an invitation to escalate more,” commented one.16 The next time Russia launched an attack, many advised, the United States should actively disrupt Russian cybercapabilities and impose much higher costs for such reckless aggression.
Imagine, then, a scenario in which a new cyberweapon is unleashed on Ukraine that targets gas pipeline control systems. Its effect is nearly instantaneous, shutting down valve control systems and pumping stations and bringing the flow of gas through Ukrainian pipelines to a halt. Because the halt is brief, and because the attack occurs in summer, the impact on European gas supplies is not nearly as severe as it would be in cold weather, but the intended message seems clear.
Ukrainian, European, and American governments issue immediate condemnation of the attacks and all but officially accuse Russia of responsibility. Moscow denies any involvement. Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson suggests that Ukrainian hackers had launched the attack themselves in what she calls a “provocation.” Russian cybersecurity experts say Ukrainian criminal hackers who had been part of a transnational cybercrime group had initiated the crisis using Russian botnets and imitating Russian techniques. Their aim had been nothing more than extortion against Ukrainian government officials. US and European audiences find the Russian counteraccusation risible.
The perception of bald-faced Russian lying only reinforces American determination to act. Leaders at US Cyber Command urge the White House to draw a firm line. Issuing toothless legal indictments that have little chance of putting any Russian hackers behind bars would only underscore American powerlessness in the face of such attacks, they counsel. They ask for authorization to mount a reciprocal and proportionate attack on Russian infrastructure, reverse engineering the Russian malware and redirecting it against valve control systems and pumping stations in Russia. The White House agrees. Within weeks, Russia experiences a brief disruption of gas flows. The economic impact is minimal, but the psychological effect is significant. The United States, it seems, has removed the gloves on offensive cyberoperations.
Events soon begin to accelerate. As markets open on Wall Street several weeks later, traders experience a series of short “flash” outages of their online systems that result in the loss of several trillion dollars. Intermittent trading outages continue over the course of the few days, and trading is halted as stock and bond markets begin to plunge. FBI investigators strongly suspect that Russia is behind the attacks. The US Treasury secretary warns that sustained Wall Street losses could have a devastating domino effect on the American economy, producing a collapse of confidence from which it might be difficult to recover. If investors lose faith in the stability of the American economy, the foreign credits on which the financing of America’s massive national debt depends could grow dangerously more expensive.
In response, the American president draws a firm redline. He telephones the Russian president and states that cyberinterference with the US financial system constitutes an attack on critical American infrastructure that poses an existential threat to US national security. US policy allows for a kinetic response to such cyberattacks. He has no desire to attack Russia, he says, but unless Russia’s cyberattacks stop immediately, he will be forced to take military action, which he insists will be narrowly targeted and proportional. He counsels his counterpart to remove personnel from the Internet Research Agency building in Saint Petersburg as a precaution to minimize the chances of civilian deaths.
In Moscow, the Russian Security Council convenes a meeting on the growing crisis. One official recalls the critical role that an informal back channel between Bobby Kennedy and the Soviet ambassador had played resolving in the 1962 Caribbean crisis, but others point out that Russia’s current ambassador has long been frozen out of contact with anyone who matters in the US administration. Russian military officials, fearing the possibility of conventionally armed Tomahawk or drone attacks on key cyberunits, urge the Kremlin to authorize a “demonstration” event to discourage American aggression. Since many of America’s precision-targeted munitions depend on satellite-guidance systems, they argue, Russia should use ground-based weapons to temporarily disable a US global positioning system (GPS) satellite. By “escalating to de-escalate,” the action would show Washington that Russia can and will defend itself against attacks and bring US decision-makers to their senses. The Russian president approves the operation.
But the “temporary” disabling of a single GPS satellite proves to be more damaging and more enduring than the Russians had expected. The satellite remains out of service for three days, and its outage has a cascading effect on the twenty-three other satellites in the US GPS constellation. Synchronization failures disrupt the entire system. Though it is popularly regarded as a mapping system, GPS in fact is an enormous space-based timing device vital to a wide range of government and commercial functions. Telecommunication networks rely on GPS clocks to allow cell towers to transfer calls. Electrical power grids use GPS to balance current flows. ATMs and credit cards cannot function without GPS time-stamping. Even computer network synchronization depends on GPS clocks.17 And much to Moscow’s surprise, its disabling of a single satellite brings all of this activity and more to a grinding halt. Americans are shocked to learn that the US government has no effective backup system in place.
Outrage over the Russian satellite attack quickly mounts. Congress demands that the White House respond, and it passes an immediate authorization for the president to use any and all means he deems necessary to end the Russian aggression. Pentagon officials tell the president that under the circumstances, they cannot be confident that Russia will not target even more critical C3ISR satellites next, which might cripple the United States’ ability to receive early warning of a Russian missile attack or to communicate with its conventional or nuclear forces. Piggybacking on the Pentagon warning, the NSA and CIA report that they have detected what they believe is a Russian cyberpenetration of a C3ISR communications network, and they cannot determine whether the intrusion is meant to monitor or disable the system. All concur that unless the president strikes back against the Russians immediately, he might lose the ability to defend the United States altogether. They urge an immediate retaliatory attack on all Russian ground-based ASAT facilities, in addition to targeting Russia’s cyberunits and its GLONASS counterpart to the US GPS system.
The march up the ladder of military escalation begins skipping rungs.
These hypothetical scenarios are far from inevitable. At each rung in their particular notional escalatory ladder, American and Russian leaders had options they failed to exercise that could have reduced tensions, cooled off emotions, and mitigated the dangers of spiraling into a disastrous confrontation. Individuals matter in the affairs of state, in addition to national interests, perceptions, technologies, alliances, behavioral norms, and the balance of power. Wiser leaders could have taken more responsible decisions that might have produced a much less alarming outcome. The fog of war and the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” could have shaped developments in substantially different ways.
But neither are the scenarios far-fetched. To one degree or another, each of the elements in the scenarios are based on current trends, actual recent events, the tendencies of leaders now in power, and genuine military capabilities. Nor are they the only set of events that could trigger an escalatory spiral. Unrest in the Baltic states, a clash in Syria, and a US-China confrontation in the South China Sea that Russia seeks to exploit are among a wide range of realistic situations that could produce unsought catastrophe.
No matter its origins, any escalation scenario is likely to have some features in common with the events illustrated in this chapter. The adversaries show themselves willing to run risks in the interest of gaining a competitive advantage, but they prove unwilling to take risks in the interest of peace. Both sides in the scenario fall into the same cognitive trap, the unexamined assumption that incremental escalation at each stage of the dispute will cause the other to reconsider its actions and back down, that “escalating to de-escalate” will prove to be a winning strategy. Both eventually discover that they are not dealing with what international relations scholar Robert Jervis has labeled a “deterrence model,” where a tough response to an ambitious aggressor state ends its aggression, but rather with a “spiral model,” in which coercive steps against a state that already sees itself as threatened wind up magnifying perceptions of vulnerability and triggering a dangerous escalatory reaction.
But both reach that discovery too late to change course.