Over the last month or two, the western media has been full of talk about “war” with Russia, and potentially other countries as well. For some, “World War 3” is now inevitable, for others “nuclear war” is just around the corner, for still others, because NATO and the West have agreed to transfer weapons that can theoretically strike Russia) this will inevitably “lead to full-scale war,” for still still others, the agreement signed in Pyongyang between Russia and North Korea will inevitably “lead to war”, and for yet others still, the West, and especially the US, is planning some kind of “war with China.” Here in France, serious articles have been written asking whether France will be “at war” with Russia, if the much discussed but so far not implemented proposals to send French specialists to Ukraine actually come about.
The two common threads that run through this discourse are that, as far as one can judge, the participants all seem to mean different things by “war”, and that in any case few if any of them have any coherent idea of what they are talking about anyway. This is not surprising, perhaps, given that the Ukraine crisis has already cruelly exposed the ignorance of western political and media elites about the most elementary questions of security and defence, and a lot of western military “experts” have been left looking rather stupid by successive turns of events. Whilst up until the end of the Cold War, the political class had at least a general sense of what “war”might consist of, even that has now been completely lost.
As a result, I thought it might be useful to try to clarify a number of points. The purpose is not primarily to criticise, but rather to explain a few conceptual issues, touch on the legal dimension, look at escalation and how “wars” “start” and try to explain in practical terms what that would mean. That’s a very large agenda, so I’m going to go quickly over a number of points.
First, a few terms. Historically, nations issued “declarations of war”against others. This was a more formal procedure than perhaps we now appreciate: there was normally a list of grievances, an ultimatum of some kind, and a statement that unless certain conditions were fulfilled, there would be a state of war. So war was, at least in theory, a legally formalised activity. Hitler’s Reichstag speech on 1 September 1939 largely followed this model, although there was no formal declaration of war on Poland. A few days later though, the British and French declared war on Germany in the classic manner. These days, and partly in response to the provisions of the UN Charter, states no longer “declare war” (that power being effectively delegated to the Security Council) although this has not noticeably brought the world closer to peace. We now talk about “armed conflict” rather than war, and the difference is not just semantic, as we shall see. “War’ as a popular term remains in very common usage, however, and has attracted a large forensic legal literature. In spite of this, an ICRC paper notes mournfully that “(o)ne may argue almost endlessly about the legal definition of ‘war’.” Some would be tempted to remove the “almost.”
Among the dozens of definitions of “war” that the merest Google search will turn up, the common theme is of large-scale violence between the military forces of nations. (The issue of non-international armed conflict is a massive subject that we won’t get into here.) So it’s reasonable to begin by asking whether some of these bloviating pundits are actually thinking of “war” in the traditional sense. Some of them certainly aren’t. Those who look forward to “war” with China are presumably not thinking of Chinese nuclear weapons reducing Washington to cinders, much of the US Navy at the bottom of the ocean, and US military bases all over Asia vaporised. If they are thinking of anything at all, it is”making war” against China, launching military attacks like those launched against Somalia, with the Chinese unable or unwilling to retaliate. Similarly, those who talk of France potentially being “at war” with Russia seem to be thinking of an existential political and legal situation, not the despatch of French troops to march once more on Moscow. (I hope, anyway.) And finally, those who want NATO to “get involved” against Russia in some unspecified way seem to be thinking of limited operations in Ukraine which will end in a Russian defeat by superior NATO, um, weapons and superior NATO, um, leadership, after which the Russians will sportingly admit defeat and leave.
On the other hand, some others do actually seem to fear the worst: the use of F16s to attack Russian troops, or the use of some other NATO-supplied weapons to launch attacks on Russian towns near the border will, it is feared, trigger an inescapable and automatic process of escalation which will lead to World War 3, the destruction of the planet and the end of human life. (We’ll come back to escalation in a moment.) So how to make sense of all of this? Are there risks, and if so what are they? What could, or possibly will, happen? The easiest way to understand the problem is to drop the word “war,” and look at, first what is actually going in Ukraine, and secondly how history suggests that things might develop. We have first to blow away the cobwebs of several decades of political thinking and stereotypes, which owe more to popular culture memes than they do to a serious study of history.
There’s no doubt, for a start, that an “armed conflict” is under way in Ukraine. Unlike a war, an armed conflict is a state of affairs which can be independently evaluated, not a speech act. The term largely replaced “war” in 1949, and incidentally generated an entire industry of debate about when and how International Humanitarian Law should be applied. Oddly enough, or perhaps not, nobody really thought to define what armed conflict was, until the Yugoslavia Tribunal had to do so to see whether it had jurisdiction over that sorry episode. It decided that “an armed conflict exists whenever there is a resort to armed force between States or protracted armed violence between governmental authorities and organized armed groups or between such groups within a State.” Now the second half of that formulation need not delay us here, but note that the definition describes a state of affairs which can be analysed: either there is an armed conflict or there is not.
Now, in an armed conflict, there are first of all “combatants.” These are people with the “right to participate in hostilities between states” and the include military personnel (except medical and religious) as well as militias and volunteers fighting with them provided they are clearly distinguished from non-combatants. Everyone else is a non-combatant (you’ll notice the word “civilian is not used) unless and until they take an active part in operations. This applies to western contractors and even military forces, so long as they do not play an active operational role.Thus, in an armed conflict by no means everyone is a combatant. However, if anyone, whether woman, child or foreign soldier, starts to participate actively in operations, then they lose their non-combatant status. (Note that “armed conflict” is a geographical and temporal term: it can apply to some parts of a country and not others.)
The trouble with all of this, fascinating as it is, is that these arguments are less about how to understand what’s going on, but more about whether IHL applies. This is why, after a few perfunctory paragraphs, most legal articles on war get straight into IHL. That’s not really what we are concerned with here, but how, if at all, does it help us understand what we are seeing, and the chances, or not, of “escalation.”?
Well, the first thing to say is that foreign military personnel in Ukraine are not necessarily (functionally) combatants. They may be liaison officers, intelligence gatherers, or responsible for the provision of aid. The mere presence of foreign troops on the soil of another country is not at all unusual in peacetime, and quite common during conflict. However, whatever their function, they lose protected status and may lawfully be attacked if they take part in operations. Moreover, they are not subject to any special protection: if a group of military contractors and military history researchers are in a building in Kiev which is hit by a missile, that’s their bad luck. But doesn’t the presence of foreign military personnel mean that the sending country is involved in the war? Not necessarily. There’s a whole complicated debate over what’s called co-belligerency, and whether it applies to western nations in Ukraine. (Short answer: nobody knows.) However, in the past, co-belligerency has generally meant explicit military support, taking part in the war as a full participant, and treating the other as a declared enemy. Clearly, none of that has happened in the case of Ukraine.
This is not as strange as it may appear. Countries provide military assistance, training and “advisers” all the time, and sometimes come onto conflict with each other. Iran seems to be helping the Houthis in the Gulf to target foreign ships, but is not at war with any of those countries, any more than it is at war with Israel because of its support to Hezbollah. After 1939, the US supported Britain by going to the absolute edge of what it could do without becoming a co-belligerent, including protecting British merchant shipping. (Hitler declared war on the US in 1941 largely because Germany would then be able to target the US directly, and all merchant ships under their Navy’s protection. After all, he reasoned, the US was basically in the war already). During the Cold War, minor military clashes were common, and could and did involve fatalities. The classic example is when Cuban and South African troops fought each other in Angola on a large scale in the 1980s, although neither country saw itself as at war with the other.
So the first useful thing we can say, is that if western forces are sent to Ukraine, and some are killed or wounded, this is not equivalent to war “breaking out” between the sending states and Russia. It would, of course, be possible for one or more of those countries to make a political decision to involve itself formally in the war, to identify Russia as an enemy, and send combat troops, but that is, indeed, purely a political choice. And since it would give the Russians the right to strike anywhere on the territory of the state concerned, it might not even be a very wise decision. The most likely outcome is wailing and gnashing of teeth, but that’s all.
But what about the famous Article V of the NATO treaty? Doesn’t that mean that the first NATO Ordnance clerk to be killed in Lvov will precipitate World War 3? No, it doesn’t. Let’s look for the umpteenth time at the wording of this Article, recalling that, as the official NATO website notes “The European participants wanted to ensure that the United States would automatically come to their assistance should one of the signatories come under attack; the United States did not want to make such a pledge and obtained that this be reflected in the wording of Article 5.” That Article says in part:
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
Now there a number of subtleties here. To begin with an “armed attack” against one of the signatory states, especially read together with the reference to Art 51 of the UN Charter, which acknowledges the right of states to self-defence, clearly has to be something substantial, aimed at the territory of the state itself. It can’t be a random petroleum platoon wandering around Kiev. And since the objective of any action taken must be to “restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area,” then, once more, casualties among western troops in Ukraine clearly don’t fall within the scope of the Article. It’s worth recalling—although this keeps being lost sight of—that there is nothing automatic about Art V. Whilst an attack on one is “considered” an attack on all, that does not impose any obligatory duties on the signatories.
Well, what about the area of application? Here, Art VI (rarely mentioned) is quite clear. It is “the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America,” including what were, at the time, overseas possessions such as Algeria, as well as “the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force [August 1949, ndlr] the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.” Now read that again carefully. It covers, for example, attacks against land, sea and air forces on the territory of the Parties, or in maritime areas close by. That’s all. These treaties are not drafted by amateurs (not in those days anyway), and the wording very clearly protected the US from any commitment to come to the aid of, say, British forces in Malaya attacked by the Chinese. Likewise, there was no invocation of Art V when the Argentinians attacked the Falkland Islands in 1982.
So, simply put, attacks against NATO members’ forces in Ukraine don’t come within the purview of Art V. And in any event, nations are not required to do anything concrete even if they believe the Article was triggered. (Art V did apply to Algeria, then part of France, but for years other NATO members refused to send assistance of any kind to fight the FLN.) Now of course the reverse is also true: nothing prevents NATO from sending troops, from considering casualties among those troops a pretext for war, and, of course, suffering the consequences. But these are political decisions, and there is nothing forced about them. They do not involve any process of automatic escalation.
Ah, escalation. So much has been written about that. Like many other subjects that have got out of control, it is based ultimately on some sensible and originally non-controversial ideas. At any level, from individual interactions up to relations between states, we have a choice about how we react to the behaviour of others. If we have a neighbour whose pets are destroying our garden, we have a choice of responses, from a complaint or a letter up to the engagement of a solicitor. At a certain point, also, one of us might decide to practice de-escalation, perhaps a quiet conversation over the garden fence. To an extent, nations act the same way: the United States has been raising the political temperature with countries like Vietnam and North Korea, which the Russian President has visited, and in turn Putin’s visit to these countries, especially North Korea, was deliberately politically escalatory. Likewise, military escalation—the use or threat of more numerous or more powerful forces—is well understood. Finally, in conflicts with understood rules in homogeneous communities, notably during civil wars, escalation and de-escalation do exist. Violence has its own logic, and escalation, from peaceful demonstrations to violent demonstrations to shootings, to car-bombings to assassinations of important figures, goes through a sequence that both sides understand, and both sides can decide, if they want to, to stop. All that is fine, but there are problems when we try to take this concept and over-systematise it.
For example, you may have heard of such things as “escalation ladders,” which are detailed schematics of small changes up and down, in reaction to, or anticipation of, behaviour by an adversary. Again, as a very broad and general description of attempts to manage crises, this is acceptable. But quite rapidly, “strategists” like Herman Khan and Bernard Brodie took over the idea, and produced elaborate models of escalation and de-escalation (Khan’s had forty-four steps.) The concept continues to attract a lot of interest, and a Google Scholar search will disgorge dozens of competing escalation models and variants. Which of course is interesting in itself, since if these models purport to describe reality, then only one of them can really be right (or a small number if we stretch the point and admit variants.)
But in reality these models never tried to describe reality: they were drawn explicitly from games theory and economic market models, and thus assumed perfect knowledge and perfect rationality. (Being a strategist fortunately absolves you from the need to know anything about history or current affairs.) They were also universal models, ie they applied to all societies and political systems, and a potential adversary (generally the Soviet Union) would essentially share the same model, and, more importantly, would understand the same thing by our actions as we did. (Perfect knowledge again.) Of course, western strategists would know that the Russians would take out initiatives at our valuation, and in turn, they knew that we knew.
Back on Earth, anyone with the faintest practical acquaintance with international politics knows that knowledge is never perfect, that such knowledge is anyway often the prisoner of a priori assumptions, that states do not always behave rationally, and that in most crises states have very different perceptions of each other, and each others’ actions. One result is that actions by one state may be seen as escalatory by others. Thus the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was a defensive move, as the documents of the time show, but was perceived by some in the West as an escalation in the struggle for control of the Middle East and South Asia, and expected to be followed by a further move into Iran or the Gulf.
In practice, for almost all of the Cold War, the two sides completely misunderstood each other. Worse, they thought that they actually understood each other quite well, and that the other side shared their intellectual models. Thus, the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was a western conceptual model, dreamed up by US strategists. But there is no reason to suppose that the Soviet Union ever independently developed the same model, or for that matter was convinced by the western one, or understands it now.
We can see this dynamic at work in the case of Ukraine, where definitions of “escalation” depend entirely on who you are and where you start from. So NATO expansion in the nineties and afterwards (not originally contemplated in 1990) was seen as defensive by small states worried about a revanchist Russia and by a West worried about the possibility of conflict and instability in a notoriously unstable region. But the Russians regarded this as escalation. The first overtures to Ukraine in the new millennium were again seen as stabilising by one side and escalatory by the other. The Russian integration of Crimea in 2014 was perceived in the West as a major escalation, whereas the western response was perceived as an escalation by the Russians. The resistance in the East of Ukraine was seen by the West as an escalation, masterminded from Moscow, though the Russians saw it as defensive. The Minsk agreements were seen by the West as discouraging further Russian escalation, and by the Russians as preventing the need for escalating further. The subsequent military aid to Ukraine was seen by the West as helping to discourage any further Russian escalation, in case the Minsk agreements failed, whereas the Russians saw it as escalation in itself. Historians will argue for generations about who was “right,” but that’s not the point. For all the how-can-they-possibly-believe-that on both sides, the fact is that one nation’s defensive move is another nation’s escalation, and this has been true throughout history.
And of course “escalation” is not just a technical concept. It is intended to achieve some political objective. The problem is that such political objectives are hard to pin down usefully, and that there !s no automatic way of relating the actions you take, to the effect you want to achieve. Mostly, escalation is intended to “send a message,” to “show determination,” to “discourage aggression,” or the like. Now, there are limited cases where this might work. The concept of “escalation dominance” in a politico-military crisis means that you can bring in levels of force that your opponent cannot, and this may help to resolve the crisis in your favour. But more normally, these effects are pious hopes, and, more importantly, are misinterpreted by the opposition as threats that have to be met with equal or greater escalation. So in 1914, states in Europe mobilised their forces to “discourage,” for example Russia supporting Serbia or Germany supporting Austria, and so prevent escalation. We know how that worked out.
So, much of the talk about, the fear of, or the delirious anticipation of “escalation” is in effect meaningless, or at best too vague to be of use. Phrases like “if X happens NATO will have no choice but to escalate” assume that there is a defined escalation process, whose steps are known to everybody, and whose effects can be predicted. But cultural stereotypes here are badly out of date. We no longer do these things: indeed, we no longer know how to do these things. Many of those who talk glibly about NATO “getting involved” do not have the remotest idea what that entails, assuming, as they do, that all is required is a brief display of military superiority on the battlefield in Ukraine.
In the Cold War, “escalation” was a thing to some extent. NATO and western nations had extensive military contingency plans, and we can assume the Warsaw Pact did as well. Nations themselves had highly detailed plans for what was called “Transition to War,” which were exercised frequently, both nationally and internationally. In Britain there was a document called the War Book, a highly classified document (I only ever saw extracts), which existed apparently in fewer than a hundred copies. It was essentially a compendium of decisions that the government or its representatives might be called on to make a during an international crisis, ranging from the extremely mundane to the absolutely terrifying. It was a blueprint for running an actual war, assuming the need for protection of the population, calling up and sending off military reservists, and putting the country on a genuine war footing.
For example, in the UK, Parliament would have met briefly to pass the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, and then dispersed, giving the government power to rule by decree. The government itself would have been dispersed around the country. All TV and Radio would have been closed down to be replaced by the Wartime Broadcasting Service, hospitals in major cities would have been closed and staff and facilities moved out of danger. Non-urgent patients would have been discharged. Military reservists would be recalled, all civil defence assets mobilised, transport assets commandeered, and rationing of food and other items introduced. Strategic food and fuel stocks would have been activated. Thousands of troops would be mobilised to protect what were known as Key Points, sites essential to keeping the country going. That was then.
Now “escalation” of the war against Russia would logically have to include dealing with the consequences of the Russians escalating in turn, and doing unsporting things like taking out the centres of government and military headquarters of western nations, as well, perhaps as transport hubs, air bases, naval bases, storage and maintenance facilities, major ports, and electricity generation and transmission facilities. (It’s doubtful, by the way, whether proponents of “getting involved” have the remotest idea of the potential consequences.) Back in the Cold War, the threat would have come from bomber aircraft against which there was at least a defence. Today the threat comes from hypersonic missiles, where there is no actual defence, because European states themselves have few if any anti-missile systems that might even theoretically protect vulnerable areas. And even early-warning radars, like that at Fylingdales in the UK, would at best only be able to give a few minutes warning. Moreover, the lethality of missiles is very largely a question of accuracy and to some extent speed, and a handful of Russian hypersonic missiles could reduce the government buildings of London, Paris or Berlin to rubble.
Such an attack, using no more perhaps than 30-40 missiles per country, probably in several waves, would effectively bring normal life to a halt, and it’s important to understand why. Up until the 1990s, governments had emergency legislation and practiced emergency procedures. Virtually all of this has gone. Governments have little experience and few assets for managing major emergencies, and no longer think much about them. Public sectors have shrunk and have been deskilled. Much of the business of keeping the country going is contracted out to private companies, often based abroad. Even if a government could work out what to do, it no longer has the facilities at its command to do it, nor the necessary legal powers. The military is a shadow of what it was, and the emergency services of most countries find it hard to cope even under normal conditions. Civil defence in the old sense scarcely exists, just like strategic stocks of food and fuel, and Europe is much more dependent on imports for everything than it was forty or fifty years ago. Finally, recent events have shown that governments these days are physically incapable of controlling widespread social unrest.
Let’s just give two examples of what “escalation” to “war” might lead to. In the Cold War, governments dispersed to pre-selected and protected accommodation outside the capitals. There were (for the day) highly sophisticated and redundant communications systems to enable government to continue. No such secure accommodation exists in any European country now, that I am aware of, and no planning for how and where dispersion might take place. Communication these days is by mobile telephones using vulnerable masts and the Internet, and requires a constant electrical supply. It is likely that such government and military resources as survived an attack would be out of touch with each other for a very long time. Of course, the deregulation of the broadcast media and the coming of the Internet now makes control over information impossible. It’s easy to imagine AI-facilitated fake broadcasts by national leaders, or massive SMS hoaxes telling people to report to their local Police station for conscription.
Second, governments would be overwhelmed with a flood of unanticipated and probably insoluble day-to-day problems. Take a really simple one. There are almost three quarters of a million foreign students studying in the United Kingdom (far more than was the case in the 1980s), around two thirds from outside the EU. (The last figures available suggest that around 150,000 of them are Chinese.) If you were a student in a continent whose leaders had gone insane and were declaring war on Russia, you’d almost certainly want to be somewhere else. But how are today’s luxuriant crop of highly-paid university administrators going to deal with that one? And what happens when tens of thousands of desperate students besiege Heathrow Airport and the Eurostar terminals seeking flights and trains? And of course some fraction of the 35 million visitors to the UK every year will be trying to get home as well, at a time when the government is intending to turn airports into dispersal bases for military aircraft. (The same thing will be happening all over Europe, of course.) Now I mention this deliberately trivial example because it is one of literally dozens for which no preparation will have been done and no plans exist, and about which governments will need to take quick decisions. Unfortunately, the mechanisms for putting these decisions into practice mostly no longer exist. It’s not impossible, indeed, that western governments would simply come apart under the strain of suddenly having to try to improvise measures to deal with the practical consequences of “escalating” and “getting involved.” Put simply, a “just in time” society cannot wage war in any relevant sense of that word.
The above, I hope, puts concepts of “escalation” into some sort of perspective. “Escalation” is just a word, representing the wish of weak governments to do some hazily defined things to look strong. But as I have pointed out endlessly, NATO has nothing to escalate with, and nowhere to escalate to. It will also be obvious from the foregoing, I think, that NATO has no organisational capability to escalate either, apart from making rude gestures. The staged political and bureaucratic decision-making structure of the Cold War is long gone, so the idea that “escalation” might in some sense “get out of control” makes no sense. Talk of “World War 3” therefore makes no sense either.
It’s very hard for western “strategists” to appreciate how limited western options actually are, which is why there is so much wild talk and so little informed analysis. It’s a curiosity of this whole dismal affair that “strategists” seem disconnected from reality in every sense. Just as they can’t decide whether Russia is ridiculously weak or terrifying powerful, so they can’t decide whether the United States, in particular, is an empire in the last stages of disintegration, or a hyper-powerful player dictating everything that happens in the world. The reaction to my observation that the West is weak and out of options is too often “they’ll think of something,” and “they’re crazy”, which are not answers but ways of avoiding reality.
Ah, but they have nuclear weapons and they’ll blow up the world! Actually, no. Back in the day, NATO strategy was based on the fact that it could not field anything like the conventional forces of the Soviet Union, for economic reasons. At a certain point in a future conflict, when NATO forces had been pushed back to what was called Line Omega, a decision would have to be taken whether to use tactical nuclear weapons on large Soviet troop concentrations. The hope was that this would persuade the enemy to end the war. No similar logic, no similar decision-making process and (almost) no similar weapons exist today. There are believed to be about one hundred US free-fall B61 nuclear bombs in Europe. Their movements are impossible to conceal and attempting to base them in Ukraine would be insanely dangerous. It would be possible to base them in Romania, for example: from an airfield in the East of the country you could probably reach Kherson with an F16, if you didn’t mind destroying a Ukrainian city and killing Ukrainian soldiers. Oh, and there’s the small matter of Russian air defence to worry about. So scrub that as an idea, and there aren’t any others.
Beyond this we are into strategic nuclear weapons, and that would take another essay as long as this one, so it will have to wait. I’d just observe in passing that (1) unless you understand the distinction between “first use” and “first strike” you understand nothing, and that (2) “first strike,” and nuclear sabre-rattling generally has been out of fashion since the late 1970s, with the widespread deployment of second-strike capabilities, notably in submarines.
Perhaps in the end this is just a language game. Perhaps a whole collection of ignorant and aggressive politicians are shouting about “war,” and “getting involved,” to keep their spirits up, without having the slightest idea of what they are talking about, or what war in practice would mean. NATO, after all, does not get to dictate the rules if it “gets involved.” The Russians, who do know what war is and how to fight one, will have ideas of their own about that. I’m not worried, as I’ve said before, about the use of nuclear weapons. I’m worried about irresponsible politicians, egged on by a hysterical media, stumbling into situations that will damage or even destroy their countries with scarcely the need for a shot to be fired.