Excellent article on the principles of nuclear deterrence and escalation that guide NATO policy.
Quote:
…basically everything that NATO is doing in Ukraine can be understood as having a dual purpose: both attempting to degrade Russian military capabilities (by sinking the Russian economy and arming Ukraine) but also as an exterior maneuver designed to alter the freedom of action of other players in the system. Unable to directly act against Russia due to the concerns of deterrence and escalation, NATO is seeking to close the window of freedom of action tight enough that wars of conquest sit outside of it. It is doing this by rallying world opinion to the imposition of massive economic costs, in an effort to signal that wars of conquest will have such tremendous negative repercussions (even if they don’t trigger direct intervention) as to never be worth the cost. The obvious audience for this flurry of exterior maneuvers is China; only time will tell if the performance was a success – though given that the scale of the response has shocked not only Russia but also NATO itself, one assumes it is likely to have surprised leaders in the People’s Republic of China as well.
At the same time, understanding deterrence explains why many of the proposed responses to Putin’s War in Ukraine impose unacceptable escalation risks. The logic of deterrence essentially demands avoiding direct confrontations between nuclear powers that could escalate uncontrollably (and escalation in war is always uncontrollable by either party): NATO still operates in the Beaufre framework where the window of freedom of action is finite. Russia putting its nuclear forces on alert very publicly can thus be seen as an effort to signal that the red line still very much exists and that NATO should think very hard before approaching it
…Thus – despite journalists who apparently do not know their deterrence theory very well continue to insist on talking about it – the chances of something like a ‘no fly zone’ are effectively zero. Enforcing a no fly zone would require engaging Russian air targets and also suppressing Russian air defenses (by bombing them), including targets in Russia; the escalation risk is wildly too high…
There is a lot of frustration in some quarters that NATO and the United States won’t take more direct action, but again when you are gambling with the lives of hundreds of millions if not billions of people, you do not take risky bets.
https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collec...eterrence-101/
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